Chapter
1
Confucius
Man of Many Sayings
Lived: Sixth century BCE, China
Occupation: The Great Teacher
Way More Popular than Bieber
Today, Confucius would rule the Twitter-sphere with all his pithy sayings, just as he ruled ancient China’s word game. Instead of “Do not do to others what you do not want done to yourself,” today, Confucius’s quips would be more like: B4 U EMBARK ON A JOURNEY OF REVNGE, DIG 2 GRAVZ. But hey, the message is still there.
Confucius lived at the same time as other great thinkers, such as Thales in Miletus and Buddha in India. Maybe it was something in the water. In any case, the sixth century BCE churned out more great thinkers than Harvard has churned out presidents.
After people in China realized the potential of the great stuff coming out of Confucius’s mouth, they started flocking to him. Some say that over three thousand disciples followed him around the country. Many scholars believe it was probably closer to seventy-two (although that’s even suspicious). Still, that’s an impressive number before things like Twitter and Facebook could help get the word out about the new guy in town.
Confucius’s sayings were gathered together in a book called the Analects.
The Analects: just don’t call them an autobiography.
The Analects brims with useful aphorisms—short blurbs about the best ways to live, work, and learn. At least, that’s what the history books tell us. But in reality, most of these sayings weren’t written down until a century after Confucius lived. Not only that, but much of what we know about Confucius’s life was compiled decades, and even centuries, after his death.
Who’s to say this guy wasn’t some old fraud?
Well, if he was, it wasn’t his fault. After Confucius died in 479 BCE, his followers started “remembering” all the great things he did: Thought up hundreds of brilliant sayings; invented a new philosophy; stood over nine feet tall; slayed a fire-breathing dragon while wearing fuzzy, pink bunny slippers. Done, done, and done.
Okay, maybe not that last one, but you can see how easily his reputation snowballed. Everyone wanted to turn this man into a legend. Maybe they just felt bad for ignoring him during his lifetime.
It isn’t easy being awesome.
Confucius Who?
So, what’s the story behind the most influential man in Chinese history? With thousands of followers, or at least a few dozen, he was probably handsome and well-spoken, right? Not really. History tells us that he was ugly and grotesquely tall, which sounds like a troll. Even his future biographers didn’t try to sugarcoat the truth about his appearance—but they also had no problem bending the facts to make Confucius seem better than he probably was.
Take his birth, for instance. Legend says his birth was divine, an answer to a prayer his mother made every night before bed. If she had a son, Confucius’s father promised to marry her. Hence his name, Kong, which means “an utterance of thankfulness when prayers have been answered.”
Kong:
Confucius is the Westernized version of Kong Fuzi, which means Master Kong, and is only one of the many ways to say his name in Chinese.
Lengthy in English, but it works in Chinese. Legend also says he was over nine feet tall. Sure, he was probably a giant for his time—around six feet—but that’s likely it. As for being ugly? His biographers say his head was so disfigured it could make kids cry. Okay, there’s no documentation of any kids actually crying when they saw him, but they might have.
We do know that Confucius’s dad had at least two wives, which would be frowned upon today but was all good back then. However, neither one of those women was Confucius’s mother. Even though her prayers had been answered, Confucius’s dad still hadn’t married his mom, who was, in fact, a fifteen-year-old girl. It gets worse. A few years after Confucius’s birth, his dad died, and his wives kicked the girl and baby Confucius to the street without much more than a “don’t let the door smack you on your way out.”
As a result, Confucius grew up poor and illegitimate. To get by, he did menial jobs like watching livestock. But he was smart—too smart for the other kids in his town. Even worse, they all knew it, too. While the other children played war games, Confucius hung out by himself or with other old souls, A.K.A. old men.
Finally, a local duke noticed him. How could he not notice a six-foot-tall kid with a weird head? After he got over Confucius’s odd looks, the duke noticed something else—Confucius was sort of smart, unlike his peers. The duke put him in charge of some granaries, which was actually a pretty impressive gig since grain was used as money in sixth-century BCE China. What wasn’t so impressive was having to count out tiny beads of grain all day. What Confucius really wanted—and what he spent his whole life trying to get—was a government position.
Confucius eventually settled down, married, and had some kids, all while wishing he could get into politics. He had this grand idea for China that he wanted to see come to life. Confucius lived during the Spring and Autumn Period—a precursor to the Warring States Period, whose name pretty much sums up the time—and for most of his life, the country was embroiled in chaos between the various warring lords.
Confucius wanted a peaceful, stable, and fair China. So he did the noble thing. He abandoned his wife and children and set out to teach people to honor their ancestors and to live humbly and righteously.
Confucius and his followers—all four of them (Japan).
World Peace through World Domination
For the rest of his life, Confucius traveled the country looking for rulers to promote him to a government position. Unfortunately, very few of them listened to him, probably because Confucius always shot himself in the foot by saying stupid things. Instead of the benign, jolly sage that legend teaches us about, the actual Confucius didn’t seem to understand people at all. When he met a new ruler, his first question would be: “Can I be your master?” Most princes and dukes threw him out right then and there.
But that didn’t discourage Confucius from asking more leaders to follow him. He even found a few who would listen and let him teach them, but then he messed up those opportunities, too. As soon as he got a prince’s or duke’s ear, he had a bad tendency to say things like, “An oppressive government is worse than a man-eating tiger.” And man-eating tigers were no joke in his day. His new students usually exiled him after that.
So Confucius roamed all over China, collecting followers but no royal students. He didn’t take rejection well, either. When asked to comment on men higher up in the government food chain, he replied, “Pah! These puny creatures aren’t even worth mentioning.”
It takes one to know one.
Luckily for Confucius, the lords refrained from removing his head, but they also didn’t give his misshapen head a job. So when he wasn’t insulting dukes, he enjoyed hitting poor people with his cane and telling them to just die already. Maybe it made him feel better. His disciples, who were supposed to convert others to Confucius’s way of thinking, weren’t exempt from his anger, either. After his disciple Ran Qiu failed to convince his own ruler to act more ethically, Confucius got harsh with Ran Qiu. “He is my disciple no more,” he supposedly said. “Beat the drum, my little ones, and attack him: you have my permission.” Which almost sounds like the Wicked Witch of the West ordering her flying monkeys to attack the unsuspecting Dorothy and her friends.
governor:
Much debated. Maybe he did hold public office as the Minister of Crime, saw how ineffective it was, and developed the idea of ruling with virtue to set an example for everyone to follow.
As a result of his nasty personality, the actual Confucius had very little influence over others during his lifetime. But that just wouldn’t do for his followers, so they decided to jazz things up after Confucius’s death. His followers claimed that he was a governor and that crime virtually disappeared during his tenure. Being a governor would’ve been the perfect gig for Confucius to prove the truth of his ideas. Although, it probably never happened.
Sure, he was bitter. It’d be hard not to be after spending your whole life trying to teach people the best way to live while they refused to be taught. But he tried to make the best of a bad situation. He insisted to others “not to be upset when one’s merits are ignored: is this not the mark of a wise man?”
Confucius died at the age of seventy-two (there’s that suspicious number again), and even on his death bed, he was still asking people if they would let him rule over them. He knew China would never be peaceful and stable with blockheads in charge, and in his opinion, they were all blockheads. He considered his life a total failure. It’d just be one more kick in the pants if he’d known that by the fourth century BCE people thought he should have been king.
His followers knew it, though, and they kept traveling and writing, trying to spread the word about Confucius. That’s when the embellishments to his life story started. It was as if they were trying to use a Bedazzler on Confucius to make him way cooler (and sparklier) than he was. They also glossed over the nasty bits about him, which helped him rise in esteem throughout the country. There are three different versions of Confucius, and you can take your pick: the humble sage, the politically motivated sage, or the warrior sage, but each one was constructed centuries after his death.
But just when Confucianism began to take root, the Qin dynasty took control of China. The leader ordered all books on Confucius burned. He also ordered that Confucius’s followers be burned, too.
It turned out okay, though. The Qin’s were soon overthrown, since, well, they were kind of brutal, and the Han dynasty took their place. The Hans happened to be big fans of Confucius and put all of his principles into the government. They even made Confucianism the main philosophy of China.
The Han set the stage for how all subsequent dynasties would rule. Turns out, Confucius had the last laugh after all.
junzi:
A superior person; an individual who is morally noble and an example to others, typically a male. Sorry, ladies. Women usually got the short stick when it came to equality in the sixth century BCE.
Study Confucius, Live Long Life
So what were Confucius’s principles? Mostly, he taught how to live as a junzi in order to create a good and peaceful China. If people (including rulers) lived virtuously, then their subjects would follow their example—so the thinking goes.
If Confucius saw all the temples and statues to him today, he’d probably faint. Or whack people with his cane. Either way, he’d be excited.
And no, the principles are not just punch lines used in bad Chinese parodies starting with “Confucius says . . .”.
In order to rule, emperors had to have the Mandate of Heaven. Tian gave emperors their authority to rule, meaning their power and legitimacy came directly from above—unless they didn’t follow Confucius’s principles or behave like the early sage emperors (like Huangdi!—see chapter 11).
Then, Tian took the Mandate away, and the emperor could then be justifiably overthrown. It was exactly what Confucius always wanted in life: emperors following everything he said, exactly as he said it. He would’ve been so excited.
Tian:
Heaven.
Some of the ideas of Confucianism were rather progressive, like how positions should be given based on merit and not birth. Others weren’t as forward thinking. For example, women didn’t really matter until they became someone’s wife, and then, Confucius tells them to obey their husbands and to walk on the opposite side of the street from men. Unfortunately for many Chinese women, this type of thinking defined their role in the world for hundreds of years to come.
At the heart of Confucianism are five core values—Rén, Li, Yi, Zhi, and Xin—and these dictated the way the Chinese ruled for centuries. They’re that important. Confucianism is a very complicated system involving loyalty, kindness, and respect. But at the core of Confucianism lie Rén and Li.
Like a nineteenth-century Victorian gentleman, Rén is about propriety—always the right behavior in the right situation, especially when it comes to interacting with other people. Rén is sometimes translated as “benevolence,” because it requires trying to see things from another person’s point-of-view and then doing what’s best for them. Picture Confucius beating poor people who never contributed to society—they needed to know their place; that’s what was best for them. In all seriousness, though, Rén is the recognition that we need to be kind to others because we all live in a community and are connected to those around us by important relationships.
The Five Basic Relationships of Confucianism
Confucianism is big on our relationships to others. Here are his top five relationships, with the most important person mentioned first, of course:
1. Ruler to Ruled
2. Father to Son
3. Husband to Wife
4. Elder Brother to Younger Brother
5. Friend to Friend
The trick was to know your place in this ruling system. A son always respects the father, and hopefully, the father will be deserving of that respect. But in Confucianism, the father doesn’t have to be nice or kind to his son. He can even abandon his son, like Confucius did, and that son must still respect him. As you can see, it’s good to be an old man in this scheme. Kind of like Confucius.
Li is about rituals—and boy was Confucius big on rituals. If you want to be a junzi, you have to respect social rituals in the proper way. These customs determine how one should drink tea, honor one’s ancestors, and even govern a country. By practicing rituals down to the tiniest detail, you discipline your mind and your body to think and act in the right way. Pretty deep, huh?
Top Five Confucius Sayings (That Would Totally Rule Twitter)
Confucius has so many great sayings it’s hard to choose the best ones, but here are a few:
1. Man with one chopstick always goes hungry.
2. He who laughs last thinks slowest.
3. He who lives in glass house, dress in basement.
4. Man who farts in church sits in his own pew.
Just kidding. Those are bad “Confucius says” jokes. Here are some real Confucian sayings directly from the Analects:
1. To see the right and not do it is to lack courage.
2. When anger rises, think of the consequences.
3. When one rules by means of virtue it is like the North Star—it dwells in its place and all others turn towards it.
4. Do not be concerned that no one may recognize your merits. Be concerned that you may not recognize others’.
5. If you study but don’t think, you’ll be lost. If you think but don’t study, you’ll get into trouble.
Making a Legend
Yes, a man named Confucius lived and breathed fresh Chinese air in the sixth century BCE. But he certainly wasn’t the sweet, wise teacher who had a pithy saying in his back pocket for every situation. That phony version of Confucius can only be attributed to his followers. After Confucius died, they raced for their pens and wrote down as many of his sayings as they could remember. They probably also invented a lot of new ones along the way. Then, they got walking. They traveled across China, spreading their form of Confucianism until it started trending.
As a result of his followers’ efforts, Confucius’s legacy is as important as any of the other great world teachers. You can’t discuss what it means to be Chinese without discussing Confucianism. For over two thousand years, Confucianism was the official philosophy of China, meaning millions and millions followed his teaching. Until the twentieth century, any student who wanted even a basic government position had to pass an exam on Confucian principles—to make sure they knew how to govern properly.
It took a while, but a wise man once (supposedly) said, “It does not matter how slowly you go, so long as you do not stop.” Fortunately for Confucius, his followers listened carefully to his words—even if they made some of them up in the first place.
