The wise words and doctrines attributed to Confucius and his followers informed the moral, social and political structure of Chinese life for two and a half thousand years, from some time in the sixth century BCE until the overthrow of the Ch’ing dynasty in 1911. Almost all the institutions of imperial China, its customs, purposes and aspirations, were founded on Confucius’ conceptions of the virtuous individual and the virtuous society. Until the early years of the twentieth century, almost every aspect of Chinese education was designed in accordance with Confucian principles. The Confucian writings known as the Four Books were required reading for the Chinese civil service examinations first set up in 1313 and not abolished until 1905.
Confucius’ thought did not become known to the western world until the Jesuit missionaries who established themselves at Peking in 1583 had absorbed Chinese culture and learning and conveyed their new knowledge to Europe. It was they who latinized the name K’ung Fu-tzu, so that the great Sage became known to much of the world as Confucius.1
Confucius was born in the state of Lu, now Shantung province, and lived during the Chou dynasty (1027–256 BCE) about five hundred years before the Christian era. He was brought up in humble circumstances by his mother, his elderly father having died when he was very young. He worked first as a keeper of granaries and director of public pastures but his ambition was to promulgate the moral virtues that characterized the earlier years of the Chou dynasty and to revive the ideals of the kings Wen and Wu who ruled during its founding era. But the times were difficult. The political unity and strength that had been notable features of Chou in former years had been greatly undermined by conflicts between its own constituent city states, by expansionist attacks from non-Chou states and by raids from nomadic groups coming from the mountains and wilder regions. Confucius’ own state of Lu had fallen under the control of usurpers and he was unable to obtain the kind of public office that would have given authority and influence to his teaching. Like others with similar aspirations and difficulties he therefore set out to teach peripatetically, offering his services to the courts and rulers he visited, accompanied by his small group of disciples and followers.
It is impossible to verify either the story of Confucius’ life and character or the details of the doctrines attributed to him. We have only the composite accounts that were developed after his death and that were worked over, enriched and no doubt rearranged in numerous ways by his followers. In spite of some internal inconsistencies and variations of emphasis in the material available, it is possible to discern a coherent picture of a man who believed passionately in the pursuit of knowledge and moral virtue and who retained his integrity and an unswerving dedication to teaching throughout his life. Similarly, it is impossible to establish the authenticity or inauthenticity of the written sayings attributed to Confucius. We have to accept a general and hybrid account of Confucian doctrine rather than the authenticated thought of the individual man. We have to study the movement he began, looking at the stages of its development in relation to what is known about Master K’ung himself, and in that way arrive at a critical understanding of the ideas that have been so profoundly influential in the lives of many millions of human beings.
Many of the words and thoughts attributed to Confucius are contained in a collection of writings known as the Analects. In 1687 four Jesuit missionaries published Confucius Sinarum Philosophus, sive Scientia Sinesis. This book included not only the Analects but also two shorter works, the Great Learning and the Doctrine of the Mean. These works, along with the writings of Mencius,2 constitute the Four Books that were the texts for the Chinese civil service examinations, already mentioned. The Four Books belonged to a larger body of writings known as the Thirteen Classics, which formed the enduring source literature not only for Confucianism but also for Taoism and Buddhism in China.
Confucius’ philosophy was predominantly a moral and political one. It was founded on the belief that heaven and earth coexist in harmony and balanced strength whilst maintaining a perpetual dynamism. Human beings, he taught, are sustained by these conditions and must strive to emulate the cosmic model. In the Doctrine of the Mean we read that ‘This equilibrium is the great root from which grow all the human actings in the world, and this harmony is the universal path which they all should pursue’.3
Confucius’ exhortation to live harmoniously did not mean that an individual’s passions and feelings were to be entirely repressed for the sake of maintaining a kind of bland and undisturbed tenor of life. He upholds an important distinction between equilibrium and harmony. Equilibrium, we are told, is to have ‘no emotion of pleasure and anger, sorrow and joy, surging up’, but harmony is ‘to have these emotions surging up, but all in due time’.4 The Doctrine of the Mean is the elaboration of the way of harmony; it furnishes the details of the kind of life that, in its recognition of due degree, will be in accordance with the principle of equilibrium, the root of all things. These ideas of harmony, justice and balance in both the cosmos and the individual provided a focus for political theory and practice. A belief that was well established long before Confucius’ lifetime was that an earthly ruler held a mandate from heaven, a mandate that would be forfeited if the ruler did not pursue the objectives of maintaining peace and harmony. The Chou dynasty so much admired by Confucius was established by men who, he believed, had gained the approval of Heaven and who therefore had a right to oust the tyrannical Shang dynasty that had preceded the Chou. Confucius regarded the early years of Chou, five hundred years before his own lifetime, as a golden age. He saw a revival of its ideals as the way to restore China’s unity in a time of conflict and schism and he thought of himself as the transmitter of those former values rather than the maker of new ones.
For Confucius, all social and political virtues were simply personal virtues writ large. Education was a matter of acquiring moral knowledge. But this was not simply knowledge that certain actions and attitudes were good; it was also knowledge acquired in practice and through experience; by being good and by doing good. One learned from the example of one’s teacher and then taught others by being an example for them. Such education, Confucius maintained, began in a person’s early years and continued throughout life. At the core of his concept of moral goodness is the notion of jen, that is, benevolence or love of humankind. The Chinese word jen is difficult to translate exactly. It is sometimes rendered as ‘benevolence’, sometimes as ‘humaneness’, in order to suggest the kind of relationship that ideally should obtain between human beings. Jen is a distinctively human capacity, the development of which depends on the individual’s own efforts towards self-cultivation rather than on the straightforward exercise of an innate ability. In the Analects Confucius says of jen, or benevolence, that ‘If we really wished for it, it would come’.5 It is the most important single attribute of what he called ‘the gentleman’ or ‘the superior man’. This is the person who loves learning so much that in eager pursuit of it he ‘forgets his food’ and ‘does not perceive that old age is coming on’.6 Benevolence demands that self-interest and self-gratification are overcome and the way to it is in observing rites, or li, a body of rules or principles governing every aspect of human conduct and designed to guide a person towards exemplary action. The details of the rites are copious. They relate to gesture, demeanour, dress, movement and facial expression as well as procedures, actions and whole ceremonies. The following is part of a description of the behaviour appropriate to the gentleman:
In bed he does not lie in the posture of a corpse . . . When he sees anyone in mourning, even if he knows him well, he must change countenance; and when he sees anyone in sacrificial garb, or a blind man, even if he is in informal dress, he must be sure to adopt the appropriate attitude. On meeting anyone in deep mourning he must bow across the bar of his carriage; he also bows in the same way to people carrying official tablets. When he is given a dish of delicacies, he must change countenance and rise to his feet. At a sudden clap of thunder or a violent gust of wind he must change countenance.7
It should not be thought that the Confucian rites were merely a behavioural façade or had only superficial importance. Confucius was a member of the ju, the class of teachers who specialized in the ceremonies taught in the households of rulers. Under his tutelage these rituals acquired profound moral significance. He insisted that true benevolence or humaneness requires an integrity of the person in which the heart and mind are at one with the outward conduct. The rites are never trivial. They show what the inner disposition should be like, just as a true inner disposition of benevolence finds expression in appropriate rites. The performing of rites can be a training for benevolence, a way of making all things propitious for the cultivation of right-mindedness. Confucius described the act resulting from a proper moral integrity as yi, that is, morally fitting and in accord with the complete benevolence that consists of the cultivation of a personal morality that always aims to benefit and teach others. Love of learning was an essential element in the acquisition of the kind of discernment needed here. Confucius remarks that ‘To love benevolence without loving learning is liable to lead to foolishness’:8 it is not enough to be well intentioned. For example, it is not enough to express one’s generous impulses by giving to others indiscriminately.
Knowledge and learning help to develop a moral acumen so that one can see how to deploy one’s generosity towards a true good. Knowledge, learning and experience help a person to recognize what is unalterable in life and to distinguish it from what may be changed by endeavour. At the end of the Analects we read: ‘Confucius said, “A man has no way of becoming benevolent unless he understands Destiny”.’9 Destiny, in Confucian doctrine, governed the unalterable and so had to do with such things as the length of human life, mortality, and so on. Reflection concerning these unalterable necessities made a person recognize the futility of trying to change them and realize that it is better to direct effort into working on what can be improved, namely, one’s moral capacities and understanding.
Confucius regarded the sage as the very best kind of person but he did not consider himself to be one and he thought that very few people managed to become sages. In the Analects he remarks: ‘I have no hopes of meeting a sage.’10 The gentleman is next in excellence to the sage and it is the gentleman who wields most influence in daily life. He is the man who, ‘in his dealings with the world . . . is on the side of what is moral’,11 and whose exemplary role is described in detail in the Analects. The gentleman is able to command and to receive obedience because of his own moral excellence which shows itself in a sincere concern for the welfare of others. Confucius believed that, as a ruler, ‘If you desire good the people will be good’.12 He also maintained that the people must remain as the people, that ‘the nature of the gentleman is like the wind and the nature of the small people is like the grass; when the wind blows over the grass it always bends’,13 so that government is always conducted by a ruling group that benevolently exerts its powers over a society in which there is a well-defined role for every member. This did not preclude promotion for those who merited it.
Confucius advocated and practised a system of education that was open to all and in which the actual practice of what a person had learned was the test of genuine ability. It did not suffice merely to adopt the ways of a gentleman; one must retain and practise them by ruling well, by guiding others and establishing correct rites by one’s own example. Those who diligently followed the exemplary ruler were participating fully in good government and also benefiting from it. Confucius believed that men are equal at birth and it was this conviction that underlay all his views on education and that influenced Chinese educational policies over subsequent centuries.
It is not difficult to see how Confucius’ ideas about personal morality cohere with his vision of the nature of reality: the moral activity of the individual who is seeking to achieve social harmony contributes to the cosmic shifts of balance which, through harmonious interaction, find equilibrium. Nor is it difficult to detect broad affinities between Confucian thought and some of the ideas of the pre-Socratic philosophers who flourished in the sixth and fifth centuries BCE in classical Greece. Among these latter, Anaximenes (585–528 BCE) taught that human souls and the natural world are sustained as a unity within one medium; Pythagoras (571–496 BCE) devised ritualized modes of conduct to maintain purity and held that there should be a consonance between a mathematically conceived heavenly harmony and the human soul; Heraclitus (fl. c. 504–501 BCE) propounded the idea of the Logos, a principle of balanced give and take which worked to preserve a kind of cosmic justice or equilibrium. Confucius’ own character, his modest wisdom and his dedication to teaching others, have been compared with similar characteristics in Socrates, and the Socratic Golden Rule of conduct which enjoins one ‘not to do to others what one does not want done to oneself’ is one that is ubiquitous among moralists.14
Confucius did not engage in elaborate metaphysical speculation; nor did he advance any theory about the nature or possibility of human knowledge. Yet he was sensitive to the limits of what the human intellect might claim to know and, concomitantly, was reluctant to make claims that were not securely grounded in what would commonly count as experiential knowledge. To a man who once spoke to him somewhat rashly he is reported to have said, ‘Where a gentleman is ignorant, one would expect him not to offer any opinion.’15 To his follower, Tzu-lu, he remarked: ‘Shall I tell you what it is to know? To say you know when you know, and to say you do not when you do not, that is knowledge.’16
A Confucian doctrine referred to in the Analects as ‘the rectification of names’ has interesting philosophical implications. Confucius was greatly concerned because those called ‘gentlemen’ in his own time were failing to behave in ways that had formerly warranted the description. He asks, ‘If a gentleman abandons humaneness, how can he fulfil the name?’17 and he declares that government is easy if it is in the hands of those who behave correctly so that ‘the prince is a prince, the minister a minister, the father a father, the son a son’.18 It was not, it seems, the names that Confucius wanted ‘rectified’ but the conduct of those who assumed the names. It is rather as if he saw names, or concepts, such as ‘gentleman’, ‘sage’, ‘prince’, and so on, as if they were absolutes; certainly as having been precisely defined and fixed by the golden age of Chou that he took for his model.
Reverence for the past and for ancestors, a profound concern with ritual and a strong emphasis on the importance of filial duty and of the father-son relationship, are aspects of Confucianism that have perhaps made it seem somewhat alien to the western tradition. Yet the West is familiar to some extent with all these concerns: with the bonds of family and respect for one’s elders; with the valuing of customs, conventions and ceremonies; with the moral importance of moderation, reserve and proper modesty. And so it is by no means impossible to understand the Confucian stance and to recognize a universality in many of its values and practices.
After Confucius’ death in 479 BCE, his disciples quietly continued his teaching. Two of his major followers, Mencius and Hsun Tzu, established themselves as teachers of eminence, contributing their own ideas and emphases to Confucian thought. This was a time when intellectual discussion about many moral and political matters flourished in the courts of rulers. Debates were arranged and the learned were invited to participate. All this was taking place in a setting of political turmoil and continual conflict between the Chinese states, so that the era became known as the Time of the Warring States. The strife culminated in the ascendancy of the Ch’in dynasty (221–206 BCE). Its ruler, Ch’in Shih Huang Ti, unified China. He declared himself its emperor and built the Great Wall to defend his empire from invaders from the north. In 213 BCE, in order to reinforce his totalitarian power, he ordered the ‘Burning of the Books’, a conflagration that destroyed not only much Confucian literature but numerous other classics as well. During the Han dynasty (206 BCE–9 CE) a revival of Confucian thought took place. The fragments of the old writings were gathered together and restored, and Confucian ideas became widely re-established in spite of the arrival of Buddhism in the early years of the Christian era. Thereafter Confucianism or, more precisely, various forms of Neo-Confucianism, continued to be part of the mainstream of Chinese culture, disseminated to people through the education in the classics.19 In this way Confucianism united millions of people spread over a vast and varied territory. It endured because it provided both personal and public ideals, and forged a clear link between the two. Its rites and ceremonies laid down exact practices that were meaningful to simple people yet capable, at the same time, of infinite refinement by the intelligentsia. It honoured the conception of the family, the social condition known to all levels of Chinese society, and it regarded the well-wrought family life as the model for a harmonious and unified society and the fulfilment of heavenly law. It saw the arts and the cultivation of the emotions not only as delightful in themselves but as valuable to the development of cultural and political cohesion and to the fostering of the profoundly moral civility that characterized the truly humane person.
The China of the mid-twentieth century rejected almost every aspect of Confucianism. Former criticisms of its rigidity, its backwardlooking ideals and its obsession with hierarchy and ceremony were revived as China began to measure itself against the western world. In his book about Confucius, Raymond Dawson has drawn attention to the way in which the revolutionary spirits of the 1960s made Confucius responsible for every aspect of the state of affairs they wished to repudiate:
It was Confucius who was to blame for the rigid and hierarchical society of the past: when the young wanted to assert themselves, they pointed the finger of scorn at the Confucian subordination of children to their parents; when women’s rights were at issue, reformers could blame Confucian Literature for the fact that the traditional female role was first and foremost to bear children . . . so as to ensure the continuity of ancestor worship . . . Those who marvelled at the wonders of Western science and technology saw that China was helpless against the military strength of Western nations . . . The ancient criticisms of Confucius as a pedlar of ritual and a trickster who duped rulers with his moralistic nonsense resurfaced in the work of leading twentieth-century writers.20
It is not easy to dispose of attitudes that are part of the cultural bloodstream. Although the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s intensified the anti-Confucian criticisms of the earlier People’s Republic, the innovations that were meant to oust Confucianism were nevertheless imbued with its flavour and style. It is often pointed out that the communist aim of remoulding one’s personality to conform with proper proletarian attitudes closely resembles the Confucian exhortation to cultivate oneself and that the veneration accorded to the words of Chairman Mao was akin to that previously felt for Confucius.
Ideas of harmony, unity and equilibrium have always been the instinctive presuppositions of Chinese thought. This has meant that although Taoism and Buddhism have been as much a part of Chinese culture as Confucianism has, there has been very little rivalry between these three powerful movements. Their mutual relationships are accurately described in the Chinese saying ‘Three religions, one religion’. Each seems to complement the other two and each is used in those situations to which it is deemed to be most appropriate. Taoism and Buddhism have supplied dimensions of mysticism and spirituality that Confucianism largely neglects. Confucianism has supplied inspiration for public life and the conduct of affairs of state.
1 During the Jesuits’ stay in China they pursued a policy of establishing cordial relations with the imperial government whilst steeping themselves in knowledge of the culture. Their resulting version of Confucianism, when disseminated to the West, was greatly admired.
2 See the essay on Mencius in this book, pp. 131–135.
3 Doctrine of the Mean, ch. 1.
4 ibid.
5 Analects 7:29 trans, by A. Waley in The Analects of Confucius, London, Allen & Unwin, 1938.
6 Confucius’ remarks about learning are scattered throughout the Analects but see especially ch. 7.
7 Analects 10:16.
8 op. cit., 17:8.
9 op. cit., the final sentence.
10 op. cit., 7:26.
11 op. cit., 4:10.
12 op. cit., 12:19.
13 ibid.
14 For accounts of these thinkers see Diané Collinson, Fifty Major Philosophers, London, Routledge, 1992 (reprint).
15 Analects 13:3.
16 op. cit., 2:17.
17 op. cit., 4:5.
18 op. cit., 12:11.
19 For accounts of later forms of Neo-Confucianism see the essays on Chu Hsi and Tai Chen in this book, pp. 144–147 and pp. 147–152.
20 Raymond Dawson, Confucius, Oxford, Oxford University Press, Past Masters series, Oxford University Press, 1986, pp. 85, 86.
The writings known as the Classics were in existence before Confucius’ lifetime. Nothing of certainty is known about how much he contributed to them. They are:
Confucius drew on the Classics for his teaching. His own ideas, and developments of them, are contained in the Four Books, the writings used as basis for the Chinese civil service examinations. The Four Books are:
Mencius, Lao Tzu, Chu Hsi, Tai Chen, Mao Tse-tung
Chan, Wing-tsit, A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1963
Dawson, Raymond, Confucius, Oxford, Oxford University Press, Past Masters series, 1986
Fung Yu-lan, A Short History of Chinese Philosophy, trans. D. Bodde, 2 vols, Vol. I, New York, Free Press; London, Collier Macmillan, 1968
Hughes, E.R., Chinese Philosophy in Classical Times, London, Dent, 1942
Legge, James, The Chinese Classics, Hong Kong, Hongkong University Press, 1961 (reprint)
Waley, A., The Analects of Confucius, London, Allen & Unwin, 1938