to Chou tradition was that Chinese thought was recentered, but nevertheless with indirect reference to the mythical component.
In any event, the concept of li, promulgated during the Chou and adumbrated by Confucius, is decisive. The significance of li in the early Chou dynasty from which Confucius took his cue was that it described or was more exactly a driving force of ritual. This can be placed in the context of the Bronze Age by way of archaeological evidence. The Bronze Age (12th-4th cents. B.C.) was under way when the Chou dynasty was established and closed roughly contemporary with Confucius's life (Chang, 1980). Bronze Age artifacts support the view that "Chinese civilization of the Bronze Age depended on the way that the material wealth of that time was distributed, and power was used to insure that wealth be so distributed. Chinese bronzes were a part of that political power" (Chang, 1980, p. 53). Elsewhere, Chang says that bronzes "were associated with rituals of ancestor worship, which sanctified the kinship-based aristocracy [and] . . . were suitable as symbols for sumptuary rule." (1980, pp. 58-9).
Ritual and symbology, ritual and power, ritual and order: These appear to have been fundamental to li in the early Chou period. It is not too much to say that li defined the sociological character of early Chou environment, for bronze artifacts anchor that definition in their ubiquity (Chang, 1980). Mote (1989, p. 42) refers to li as "the sense of ritual correctness," and as something unique to Chinese civilization as a positive moral good. The relevant point is that the unique character was concretized earlier rather than later in the history of Chinese civilization.
The development of the Confucian school in the fifth century B.C. represented not only a vital codification and condensation of Chinese thought but perhaps even more important, an approach to codification of a prevailing culture. In his emphas...