Chinese Wise Man

MASTER KUNG -- Carl Crow -- Harper

($3.50).

When they read 400 Million Customers, Carl Crow's engaging best-seller about life among Chinese businessmen, skeptics may have suspected that his Chinese sympathies had been inspired by his profitable Shanghai advertising business. When they learned that he had long been a Confucian, even skeptics had to admit it looked as though he had written from a well-informed heart.

Why Author Crow became a Confucian becomes clearer after reading Master Kung, his biography of Confucius. What attracted him to Confucius was not the official perfectionist version of China's greatest historical figure. He became a convert because Confucius seemed the perfect personification of the Golden Mean--a moralist without asceticism, a reformer without fanaticism, a conservative without bigotry, a scholar without pedantry, a rugged individualist with a social conscience--but for all that, a man with such human foibles as touchiness and misogyny.

To orthodox Confucians Author Crow's Confucius may sometimes seem confusing. But they will have to admit that he succeeds in peeling off a lot of the 24-century coating of official lacquer. In fact, as Author Crow portrays him, the huge, ugly wise man emerges with a look as human as Benjamin Franklin's.

What Author Crow particularly liked about Confucius was that he attempted to found no religion, on the contrary disliked nothing more than.mystics and professional philosophers. He was really, says Author Crow, a brilliant scholar in search of an honest political job. With Chinese politics what they are, and Confucius the cautious kibitzer he was, he was 50 years old before he found one, as governor of a province. Besides giving the province the best government it had ever had, he also astonished his disciples as a master of realpolitik. His good-government policy was simple. He merely designated the following as capital crimes: robbery, an ugly disposition, stubbornness, stupidity, lying. But even the cause of good government could not triumph over his grudge against women. When his lord took to giving more attention to a harem of 80 dancing girls than he did to him, Confucius resigned in disgust. The next 17 years, followed by 100 disciples, he spent looking for another job. He did not find one, mainly because Chinese lords mistrusted his honesty, once because he refused to play up to a smart mistress behind the throne. Typical of the topical way Confucius coined his maxims was the crack he delivered on this occasion. "I have never known anyone," declared the sage, "who will work so hard on behalf of virtue as for a beautiful face."

With this candid, sympathetic portrait it becomes clearer why Chinese chopsticks have so long been at home in Confucianism's dish: No other ethical system has ever permitted so much moral, mental and worldly comfort under one head.

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