Although institutional participation is in constant decline, Christian values and narratives remain influential on Australian politics and vital social matters. If Confucius were alive, he would probably not hesitate to call out this solitary root of triumph or disaster as being lazy, incorrect and unwise. Confucius wanted to restore good political order by persuading rulers to reestablish moral standards, exemplify appropriate social relations, perform time-honoured rituals and provide social welfare.
He worked hard to promote his ideas but won few supporters. Almost every ruler saw punishment and military force as shortcuts to greater power. Legalism argued efficient governance relies on impersonal laws and regulations — rather than moral principles and rites. Like most great thinkers of the Axial Age between the 8th and 3rd century BCE, Confucius did not believe everyone was created equal.
Similar to Plato born over years later , Confucius believed the ideal society followed a hierarchy. When asked by Duke Jing of Qi about government, Confucius famously replied:. However it would be a superficial reading of Confucius to believe he called for unconditional obedience to rulers or superiors.
Confucius believed the legitimacy of a regime fundamentally relies on the confidence of the people. Like in a family, a good son listens to his father, and a good father wins respect not by imposing force or seniority but by offering heartfelt love, support, guidance and care.
To Confucius, the appropriate relations between family members are not merely metaphors for ideal political orders, but the basic fabrics of a harmonious society. Confucius expected rulers to exemplify good family values. Confucius viewed moral and ethical principles not merely as personal matters, but as social assets.
During this time, Confucius schools were established to teach Confucian ethics. Confucianism existed alongside Buddhism and Taoism for several centuries as one of the most important Chinese religions. In the Song Dynasty — C. However, in the Qing dynasty — C. The audio, illustrations, photos, and videos are credited beneath the media asset, except for promotional images, which generally link to another page that contains the media credit.
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If no button appears, you cannot download or save the media. Text on this page is printable and can be used according to our Terms of Service. Any interactives on this page can only be played while you are visiting our website. You cannot download interactives. Ancient China is responsible for a rich culture, still evident in modern China.
From small farming communities rose dynasties such as the Zhou B. E , Qin B. E , and Ming C. Each had its own contribution to the region. The first commentaries to the Analects were written by tutors to the crown prince e. The authority of Confucius was such that during the late Han and the following period of disunity, his imprimatur was used to validate commentaries to the classics, encoded political prophecies, and esoteric doctrines.
The pre-modern Confucius was closely associated with good government, moral education, proper ritual performance, and the reciprocal obligations that people in different roles owed each other in such contexts. Back in Europe, intellectuals read missionary descriptions and translations of Chinese literature, and writers like Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz — and Nicolas-Gabriel Clerc — praised Confucius for his discovery of universal natural laws through reason.
Enlightenment writers celebrated the moral philosophy of Confucius for its independence from the dogmatic influence of the Church. While at times he was criticized as an atheist or an advocate of despotism, many Europeans viewed Confucius as a moral philosopher whose approach was in line with rationalism and humanism. In the eyes of some late nineteenth and twentieth century reformers who sought to fortify China against foreign influence, the moral teachings of Confucius had the potential to play the same role that they perceived Christianity had done in the modernization of Europe and America, or serve as the basis of a more secular spiritual renewal that would transform the population into citizens of a modern nation-state.
In the twentieth century, the pursuit of modernization also led to the rejection of Confucius by some reformers in the May Fourth and New Culture movements, as well as by many in the Communist Party, who identified the traditional hierarchies implicit in his social and political philosophy with the social and economic inequalities that they sought to eliminate.
In these modern debates, it is not just the status of Confucius in traditional China that made him such a potent symbol. As legacies of Confucius tied to traditional ritual roles and the pre-modern social structure were criticized by modernizers, a view of Confucius as a moral philosopher, already common in European readings, gained ascendancy in East Asia.
In it, Hu compared what he called the conservative aspect of the philosophy of Confucius to Socrates and Plato. Since at least that time, Confucius has been central to most histories of Chinese philosophy.
Tying particular elements of his philosophy to the life experiences of Confucius is a risky and potentially circular exercise, since many of the details of his biography were first recorded in instructive anecdotes linked to the expression of didactic messages. Confucius was born in the domain of Zou, in modern Shandong Province, south of the larger kingdom of Lu. His father died when Confucius was a small child, leaving the family poor but with some social status, and as a young man Confucius became known for expertise in the classical ritual and ceremonial forms of the Zhou.
In adulthood, Confucius travelled to Lu and began a career as an official in the employ of aristocratic families. Different sources identify Confucius as having held a large number of different offices in Lu.
Sima Qian crafted these stories into a serial narrative of rulers failing to appreciate the moral worth of Confucius, whose high standards forced him to continue to travel in search of an incorrupt ruler. Late in life, Confucius left service and turned to teaching.
Altogether, some students received some form of this training regimen. Looked at in a different way, the prodigious numbers of direct disciples and students of Confucius, and the inconsistent accounts of the offices in which he served, may also be due to a proliferation of texts associating the increasingly authoritative figure of Confucius with divergent regional or interpretive traditions during those intervening centuries.
The many sources of quotations and dialogues of Confucius, both transmitted and recently excavated, provide a wealth of materials about the philosophy of Confucius, but an incomplete sense of which materials are authoritative. Since then a number of historians, including Michael J.
Hunter, have systematically shown that writers started to demonstrate an acute interest in the Analects only in the late second and first centuries BCE, suggesting that other Confucius-related records from those centuries should also be considered as potentially authoritative sources.
Some have suggested this critical approach to sources is an attack on the historicity of Confucius, but a more reasonable description is that it is an attack on the authoritativeness of the Analects that broadens and diversifies the sources that may be used to reconstruct the historical Confucius.
Expanding the corpus of Confucius quotations and dialogues beyond the Analects , then, requires attention to three additional types of sources. Finally, a number of recently archaeologically recovered texts from the Han period and before have also expanded the corpus. Newly discovered sources include three recently excavated versions of texts with parallel to the transmitted Analects.
While the Haihun Analects has yet to be published, the content of the lost chapters overlaps with a handful of fragments dating to the late first century BCE that were found at the Jianshui Jinguan site in Jinta county in Gansu Province in All in all, these finds confirm the sudden wide circulation of the Analects in the middle of the first century BCE.
Previously unknown Confucius dialogues and quotations have also been unearthed. Transmitted materials also show some of the quotations attributed to Confucius in the Analects in the mouths of other historical figures.
The fluidity and diversity of Confucius-related materials in circulation prior to the fixing of the Analects text in the second century BCE, suggest that the Analects itself, with its keen interest in ritual, personal ethics, and politics, may well have been in part a topical selection from a larger and more diverse set of available Confucius-related materials. In other words, there were already multiple topical foci prior to any horizon by which we can definitively deem any single focus to be authoritative.
It is for this reason that the essential core of the teachings of Confucius is historically underdetermined, and the correct identification of the core teachings is still avidly debated. The following sections treat three key aspects of the philosophy of Confucius, each different but all interrelated, found throughout many of these diverse sets of sources: a theory of how ritual and musical performance functioned to promote unselfishness and train emotions, advice on how to inculcate a set of personal virtues to prepare people to behave morally in different domains of their lives, and a social and political philosophy that abstracted classical ideals of proper conduct in family and official contexts to apply to more general contexts.
The Records of Ritual , the Analects , and numerous Han collections portray Confucius as being deeply concerned with the proper performance of ritual and music.
In such works, the description of the attitudes and affect of the performer became the foundation of a ritual psychology in which proper performance was key to reforming desires and beginning to develop moral dispositions. Confucius sought to preserve the Zhou ritual system, and theorized about how ritual and music inculcated social roles, limited desires and transformed character. Many biographies begin their description of his life with a story of Confucius at an early age performing rituals, reflecting accounts and statements that demonstrate his prodigious mastery of ritual and music.
The archaeological record shows that one legacy of the Zhou period into which Confucius was born was a system of sumptuary regulations that encoded social status. He plays the stone chimes While he might alter a detail of a ritual out of frugality 9.
It was in large part this adherence to Zhou period cultural forms, or to what Confucius reconstructed them to be, that has led many in the modern period to label him a traditionalist. Where Confucius clearly innovated was in his rationale for performing the rites and music.
Early discussions of ritual in the Zhou classics often explained ritual in terms of a do ut des view of making offerings to receive benefits. By contrast, early discussions between Confucius and his disciples described benefits of ritual performance that went beyond the propitiation of spirits, rewards from the ancestors, or the maintenance of the social or cosmic order. Instead of emphasizing goods that were external to the performer, these works stressed the value of the associated interior psychological states of the practitioner.
In Analects 3. He also condemns views of ritual that focus only on the offerings, or views of music that focus only on the instruments This emphasis on the importance of an attitude of reverence became the salient distinction between performing ritual in a rote manner, and performing it in the proper affective state.
Analects 2. As Philip J. Ivanhoe has written, ritual and music are not just an indicator of values in the sense that these examples show, but also an inculcator of them. These are examples of the way that ritual fosters the development of particular emotional responses, part of a sophisticated understanding of affective states and the ways that performance channels them in particular directions.
Descriptions of the early community depict Confucius creating a subculture in which ritual provided an alternate source of value, effectively training his disciples to opt out of conventional modes of exchange. The Han period biographical materials in Records of the Historian describe how a high official of the state of Lu did not come to court for three days after the state of Qi made him a gift of female entertainers.
When, additionally, the high official failed to properly offer gifts of sacrificial meats, Confucius departed Lu for the state of Wei 47, cf. Analects Confucius repeatedly rejected conventional values of wealth and position, choosing instead to rely on ritual standards of value. However, here the standard that gives such objects currency is ritual importance rather than longevity, divorcing Confucius from conventional materialistic or hedonistic pursuits.
This is a second way that ritual allows one to direct more effort into character formation. Once, when speaking of cultivating benevolence, Confucius explained how ritual value was connected to the ideal way of the gentleman, which should always take precedence over the pursuit of conventional values:.
Wealth and high social status are what others covet.
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