Confucius

Key ideas

1. Ren: caring for others. Ren, translated as benevolence, humaneness or co-humanity, is the virtue of caring for others and seeing matters from their position. Together with ritual propriety it forms the ethical foundation of the Analects.
2. Li: ritual propriety. Li covers the forms of Zhou ritual, music and etiquette. Confucius held that ritual shapes feeling and orders relationships, and that ritual without reverence is empty.
3. The junzi. The junzi, the gentleman or “superior man”, is the person who has cultivated ren and rightness, in contrast with the small person. Self-cultivation is a work of decades, which Confucius sketched in his own life from setting his mind on learning at fifteen to following his heart’s desires at seventy.
4. Learning and transmission. Confucius made learning the path of self-cultivation and described himself as “a transmitter and not a maker”, a preserver of the ways of the early Zhou. Scholars note that his teaching nonetheless adapted those ways to new questions.
5. Filial piety. Xiao, respect for parents and elders, is the first school of virtue in the family. Confucius taught that parents should be served, buried and sacrificed to according to ritual, so that family feeling and ritual form one practice.
6. Government by virtue. A ruler governs best by moral force (de), like the North Star around which the other stars turn. Led by laws and punishments, Confucius said, people only try to avoid the punishment; led by virtue and ritual, they gain a sense of shame and become good. He also held that government begins by rectifying names, so that words fit the realities they name.
7. Reciprocity. Asked for one word to guide a whole life, Confucius answered with reciprocity: do not do to others what you do not want done to yourself. Stated negatively, the rule is often called the Silver Rule.

Confucius (Kongzi, “Master Kong”; born Kong Qiu; traditionally 551–479 BCE) was a Chinese teacher and thinker of the Spring and Autumn period. His sayings, gathered in the Analects, made the cultivation of virtue through learning, ritual and family obligation the core of Confucianism, one of the main traditions of Chinese philosophy. The Latinised name “Confucius” was coined by Jesuit missionaries in the late sixteenth century.

What do we know about his life?

Less than tradition suggests. He was born in the state of Lu, in what is now Shandong. His father, of noble descent, died while he was young, leaving the family poor but with standing, and he belonged to the shi class of retainers. He held office in Lu, left it, and travelled through Wei, Song, Chen, Cai and Chu looking for a ruler who would act on his advice. Late in life he gave up office to teach. The Han historian Sima Qian, writing centuries later, counts seventy-seven close disciples and about three thousand students, and these numbers rest on tradition.

Confucius gave his own outline in the Analects (II.4, in Legge’s translation): “At fifteen, I had my mind bent on learning … At fifty, I knew the decrees of Heaven … At seventy, I could follow what my heart desired, without transgressing what was right.”

What is the Analects?

It is a book of twenty chapters of short sayings and dialogues, compiled by disciples and later generations, gradually after his death. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy warns that the philosophy of Confucius is “historically underdetermined”: more than one coherent teaching can be traced to the early sources. Tradition also credits him with editing the Five Classics, which modern scholars treat with caution. In the Analects he calls himself “a transmitter and not a maker”.

What are the main ideas?

Ren, benevolence or co-humanity, is caring for others, and li, ritual propriety, is the form that care takes in family, court and ceremony. Confucius held that ritual without reverence will not do. The ideal person is the junzi, the gentleman or “superior man”, who is made by decades of study and practice: “Learning without thought is labour lost; thought without learning is perilous” (II.15).

Filial piety (xiao) begins this education. Asked what it was, Confucius said that parents, when alive, should be served according to propriety, buried according to propriety, and sacrificed to according to propriety. Ethics, for him, starts in the family and extends outwards.

His politics follows from the same view. The ruler who governs by his de, moral force, “may be compared to the north polar star, which keeps its place and all the stars turn towards it”. Asked what he would do first if the ruler of Wei gave him the government, he answered: “What is necessary is to rectify names”, because if names are not correct, language does not accord with the truth of things, and affairs cannot be carried on to success. The idea is called the rectification of names.

One word could guide a whole life, he told a disciple: reciprocity. “What you do not want done to yourself, do not do to others.” This is the Silver Rule.

What did he say about Heaven and the spirits?

Confucius spoke of Heaven (tian), as in the line about knowing its decrees at fifty, and of the Way, dao: “If a man in the morning hear the right way, he may die in the evening without regret.” But the Analects says that the subjects on which he did not talk were extraordinary things, feats of strength, disorder and spiritual beings, and that wisdom is “to give one’s self earnestly to the duties due to men, and, while respecting spiritual beings, to keep aloof from them” (Legge).

What came after him?

Two later thinkers, Mencius and Xunzi, claimed to transmit him faithfully and took opposite views on human nature: Mencius held that it is good and needs cultivating, Xunzi that it is bad and must be shaped by ritual. His ideas suffered a setback after the Qin conquest, and under Emperor Wu of the Han dynasty works associated with him became required reading for officials. The Song-dynasty thinker Zhu Xi established the Analects as one of the Four Books of the imperial examinations, which it remained until the early twentieth century. A movement known as New Confucianism has sought to apply his ideas in the modern world.

How should you start reading Confucius?

Begin with the Analects in Legge’s translation: I.1 on learning, II.4 on the stages of a life, and XV.23 on reciprocity. The sayings are short and often lack context, so read them in clusters, and compare translations when a word matters: Legge’s “superior man” is the junzi. For the next step, read Mencius on human nature, where Confucian ethics becomes a theory of the mind.