Free A Thousand Pieces of Gold by Adeline Yen Mah Page A

after returning to Qin, Li Si grievously slandered his fellow student by saying to the king, “Han Feizi is one of the princes of the ruling House of Haan. His heart will always be with Haan and not with Qin. Such is the nature of man. If Your Majesty ignores his advice and sends him home after having detained him for such a long time, he will use what he has learned here against us and bring disaster upon us. The wisest course of action is to punish him for breaking the laws.”
    King Zheng agreed and put Han Feizi in prison. Shocked and depressed, Han Feizi requested that he be allowed to see the king and plead his case in person. This was denied. At this critical juncture, Li Si sent a messenger, who brought the jailed Han Feizi poisonous wine and induced him to commit suicide.
    Later the king regretted his actions and sent a special envoy to pardon the scholar. Unfortunately, it was too late, for Han Feizi was already dead.
    Han Feizi died at the age of forty-seven as a result of his classmate’s envy and treachery, but his thinking was to exert an enormous influence on the future policies of King Zheng and Li Si himself. There was a prevalent belief then that a mythical golden age had existed in the past during an indeterminate period of history. Although nobody had evidence that there ever really was such a Garden of Eden, all the great philosophers were in agreement that society had degenerated since that time. Confucius himself was always quoting the ancient sage rulers and exhorting his followers to turn back and learn from that bygone era of ideal government.
    Instead of following the Confucian philosophy of using the past to criticize the present, Han Feizi believed in discounting the past, emphasizing the present, and adapting to change. He opposed feudalism and promulgated the unification of China under a single supreme ruler. Though he believed in the rule of law and taught that the law must be constant and obeyed by everyone, he made one fatal exception: he did not include the supreme ruler himself.
    Because the supreme ruler wrote the laws and could arbitrarily change them, the laws were therefore designed to serve, not the people, but the supreme ruler himself. Because of this crucial omission, Han Feizi’s “rule of law” became his deeply flawed “rule of the emperor.” The welfare of the ruler would take precedence over the welfare of the people.
    Eventually, the people came to regard the emperor’s laws as an instrument of terror to keep them in subjugation for the sole benefit of the ruler. The rule of law was perceived as being established by the ruler for himself and not by the people for the people. As such, the system was destined to fail.
    There was no doubt that Han Feizi was a brilliant thinker. Why, then, was he not aware that in order for the rule of law to succeed there could be no exceptions? Perhaps he was aware but could not say so. In a total dictatorship such as the state of Qin during the third century B.C.E. , advocating that the king be placed under the same rule of law as everyone else would probably have resulted in punishment by death. Nevertheless, it is interesting to note that 2200 years ago, Han Feizi had already suggested that the law should be universal and be obeyed by everyone alike. It would be the highest method of conduct for “all under Heaven.”
    Although Han Feizi proposed the “rule of law” for “all under Heaven,” everyone in China knew that this “rule of law” did not include the king. Since ancient times, an alternate name for a Chinese monarch was tian zi, “son of Heaven.” As such, a special pronoun, zhen, was created and used only by the king for self-designation, in place of the common pronoun wo (I). The implication was that the king was not like everyone else. Both his title and name indicated that he was special and different, even supernatural.
    In the West, there has been a long-standing conviction that “laws make the king; the king