Confucius

Confucius the Chinese teacher, thinker and political moralist of the sixth and fifth centuries BC (551-479 BC), whose sayings collected in the Analects founded the tradition of Confucianism and shaped the culture, education and government of East Asia for more than two thousand years.

Life and Times

Confucius, whose name in Chinese is Kong Qiu and whose honorific title is Kongzi or Master Kong, was born in 551 BC in the small state of Lu, in what is now the province of Shandong. His family claimed descent from the rulers of the earlier state of Song, though it had long since fallen into modest circumstances. His father died when he was young, and he was raised in straitened conditions by his mother.

He lived during the later Spring and Autumn period, an age of weakening royal authority and growing strife among the feudal states. He served for a time in minor offices in Lu, and according to tradition he was appointed minister of crime in about 500 BC and worked for a few years to reform the government of the state. The hostility of powerful families forced him to withdraw.

For some thirteen years he travelled from one state to another with a group of disciples, seeking a ruler who would put his ideas of government into practice. He found none willing to follow his advice consistently, and he returned to Lu in his old age to teach and to edit the ancient texts. He died in 479 BC, disappointed in his hopes for reform but surrounded by devoted followers.

The Analects and the Teaching

The Analects, or Lunyu, is a collection of brief sayings and dialogues recorded by his disciples and their successors. It is not a systematic treatise but a portrait, showing a master who teaches by aphorism, example, question and the correction of individual students according to their needs. It became the central text of the Confucian tradition.

The core of his teaching was the cultivation of the noble person, the junzi, the person of character and moral attainment. He emphasised ren, the quality of humaneness or benevolence that consists in loving others and in treating them as one would wish to be treated. A famous negative formulation of the golden rule appears in the Analects: not to impose on others what one does not desire for oneself.

Closely allied was li, ritual propriety, the performance of ancestral and social ceremonies with sincerity and due form. Confucius taught that outward ritual, performed with true feeling, trains the character and orders human relationships. He also stressed filial piety, loyalty, learning and the honest acknowledgment of what one does not know.

Education and Self-Cultivation

Confucius was one of the first teachers in China to accept students from humble backgrounds, asking only a modest gift as a sign of willingness to learn. He is said to have taught some three thousand disciples, of whom seventy were reckoned masters. His school was a community of learning in which the teacher accompanied his pupils through years of study and reflection.

He insisted that learning without thought is useless and thought without learning is dangerous. The student must both absorb the ancient texts and reflect upon them, making them his own. The goal was not information but transformation, the formation of a person who could act rightly in any circumstance.

His method recognised the differences among students. When asked about humaneness, he gave different answers to different disciples, suiting the reply to the deficiency of the particular man. This attention to the individual, and to the practical situation, distinguishes his teaching from a mere code of rules.

He described his own life as a progress in learning, from a youth set on study to a maturity in which he could follow his heart without transgressing what was right. This autobiographical remark became one of the most quoted passages in the tradition and a model of the examined life.

Government and the Moral Order

Confucius held that good government depends above all on the character of the ruler and his officials. A ruler who governs by force may be obeyed for a time, but only one who governs by virtue wins the willing allegiance of the people. He used the image of the north star, which stays in place while the other stars turn around it, to describe the influence of a virtuous ruler.

He believed in the rectification of names: a ruler should be a true ruler, a father a true father, a minister a true minister. When names and realities correspond, and when each person performs the duties of his station honestly, the state is well ordered. Disorder in politics begins in confusion about words and roles.

He opposed harsh punishments as the chief instrument of rule, arguing that if the people are kept in order only by law and penalties they will evade them and lose all sense of shame. Encouraged by virtue and restraint, they will order themselves. This did not mean that he thought law unnecessary, but that it could not replace moral formation.

He also insisted that public office should be open to the worthy, and that the duty of the official was to serve the good of the people and to remonstrate with an erring ruler rather than flatter him. This ideal of official conduct guided the examination-based bureaucracy of later China.

Influence and Legacy

After his death the disciples divided and developed his teaching in different directions. Mencius later argued that human nature is good and that its innate moral seeds can be cultivated, while Xunzi held that nature is bad and must be corrected by ritual and education. Both claimed the authority of the master, and their debate shaped the tradition.

During the Han dynasty in the second century BC the state adopted Confucian learning as the basis of education and official recruitment. The study of the Confucian classics became the path to office, and a system of examinations eventually made the tradition the central institution of government through the imperial age.

His influence extended far beyond China to Korea, Japan and Vietnam, which adopted his texts, his emphasis on the family and education, and his ideal of the scholarly official. Modern Chinese and East Asian societies still bear the impress of his teaching about duty, family, learning and the moral basis of authority.

He is remembered as the teacher who, without founding a religion or writing a single book of his own, gave a civilisation its vocabulary for thinking about right conduct. Few lives have left so deep a mark on so many people over so long a time.

See also

• Analects
• Ren
• Li
• Mencius