The fourth point in Fang Yun's critique of the Sage was even more serious in nature than the third.
Fang Yun held that ritual and music could only be used for instruction, that ritual teaching could only target individuals, and that it could only serve as a reference for governing a state, never as an eternal philosophy of governance!
The way of governing a state had to keep changing and progressing.
Any state governed through backward methods and ideas would be destroyed by the combined force of pressures from within and without. History had repeated this over and over.
If rejecting benevolent governance merely meant rejecting Confucius's personal approach to governing a state, then rejecting the ideology of ritual and music meant rejecting not only Confucius's approach, but also that of the Zhou Dynasty, and even that of the entire Confucian School.
The political tradition of Zhou and Confucius was severed completely!
After reading this essay and comparing it with the contents of Political Science, many Confucian scholars experienced, at most, a slight tremor in their literary guts. Very few had their literary guts shatter.
In fact, after Fang Yun's Political Science appeared, nearly all scholars had already prepared themselves mentally. If their literary guts would shatter merely from criticism of Sage Kong, they would have shattered to pieces long ago.
Toward the end of his critique, Fang Yun changed tack. He said that although Sage Kong's Sacred Way had flaws, those arose from the limitations of history. In that era, benevolent governance and ritual and music were the Human Race's loftiest spiritual pursuits.
But blindly venerating antiquity even now was ignorance.
Fang Yun believed that Sage Kong's political thought had limitations, but his personal spirit of learning, innovation, and humility would endure for ten thousand years, possessing a power