Confucius Teachings And Their Significance Literature Reading Summary Please follow the instructions No plagiarism please Apa style Read the pictures only. Do not use any other readings Read chapter3
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Image 3.1 Statue of Confucius in Nanjing, China
SECTION 2
– Confucius –
His Teachings & their Significance
Kong Fu zi was a Chinese philosopher of the late Zhou Dynasty
(551-479 BCE) and a younger contemporary of Lao Tze (640-531 BCE),
author of the Tao de Jing. Kong Fu zi was born in Shandong Province in
heavily populated eastern China. He was descended from royalty; his an-
cestors had been members of the preceding Shang Dynasty Imperial
House. The Kong family lost their inherited status in political battle be-
fore Kong Fu zi was born. He was, at best, lower middle class at birth.
He entered government service in Shandong as a bureaucrat and rose to
fairly high administrative rank. But then, due once more to political infight-
ing, he lost his position and was forced into exile.
His story is not uncommon in the later years of the Zhou Dynasty;
the government had begun to break up and many of the nobles and
high-ranking bureaucrats were forced out of office. It is not clear in the
case of Zhou, but this type of decline of a late Bronze Age Civilization is
usually due to the introduction of iron implements and weapons. They
are much sharper and more durable but require a higher temperature for
smelting, forging and annealing than bronze. The Zhou nobles were par-
ticularly bound to, and identified with, bronze metallurgy and its imple-
ments and weapons. Therefore, due to either an internal realignment of
power following the development and/or introduction of iron metallurgy,
or to outright invasion from outside by iron-bearing and manufacturing
peoples, there was a collapse of known political connections as Confu-
cius knew them.
In any case, he and many other former aristocrats, if not actual aris-
tocrats anymore, were turned out of the government and its healthy sala-
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ries to fend for themselves as best they could. This same fate befell a
well-known contemporary of Confucius, Lao Tze. Lao Tze tended to
“head for the hills” and move about, teaching his innovative philosophy
of “the Tao” in smaller territories in the less populated mountain outback.
In contract, Confucius chose to wander from county to county, from
state to state, in the relatively-civilized large farming country of east-
central China, teaching a band of disciples/students who he had picked,
or who had picked him.
Also unlike Lao Tze, Confucius was very skilled in, and a good
teacher of, rites and rituals that had traditionally been handled by govern-
ment functionaries, as he had been. But, with the political instability, they
would no longer be doing that for free in the seats of various levels of
government. So, teaching and/or performing rites and rituals for a price
became part of the package that Kong Fu zi offered; he kept close to the
ancient rituals and rites for the betterment and health of the clans, and
propitiation of the ancestors’ spirits. Eventually, his wanderings would
bring him to various towns – with his disciples in tow. Yet another distinc-
tion from Lao Tze, but similar to Socrates 150 years later in classical
Greece, is that Confucius never wrote down any of the now-famous
“Confucius Say…” sayings; they were preserved in writing by various dis-
ciples, much as Plato wrote all of the dialogues of Socrates. The five vol-
ume body of work preserved by the disciples of Kong Fu zi is called “The
Annalects of Confucius” or “Lun Yu” in Chinese.
Confucius paid much closer attention to teaching the ancient clas-
sics, known as “the six classics,” or “Liu Yi” in Chinese, than did Lao
Tze, perhaps because he, Confucius, was of an aristocratic blood line
and felt more of a kinship with the ancient authors and arts than would a
commoner like Lao Tze. Kong Fu zi was very conservative and spoke
about, and wrote about, ways to make the government, family and coun-
try better and stronger. He had no interest in possibly abandoning the
state to become more like a hermit, as did Lao Tze.
He was the first teacher to have large numbers of students as a pri-
vate instructor. All of the learned bureaucrats before this, including Confu-
cius himself, had been teaching on the side. Lao Tze, in the wilderness,
could support only a few disciples/students, but Confucius was credited,
with typical Chinese hyperbole, to have several thousand students. In
any case, he had a noticeably large number of followers, and was consid-
ered to be the founder of the “Ju” School of Philosophy, or “the literati.”
As such, Confucius used the written word, the lessons as de-
scribed by ancient authors, as the measure of how a person should act
Image 3.2 Confucius meets Lao Tze
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to be “righteous”, or “Yi” in Chinese. It was this elite “bookishness,” us-
ing memorization of the classics as a measure or model for how a stu-
dent was doing in apprehending the proper behavior in the world, that
eventually put Kong Fu zi in conflict with the Chinese revolution, even
though in many respects, they embraced his overall message.
As a ritual specialist as well as a book scholar, Kong Fu zi insisted
on the proper performance of rites and rituals, “li,” as an outward and
visible sign of the individual’s inner grace “ren,” or “human heartedness.”
People perform the rites in recognition of the ancestors, the parents, etc.
because they love them. Rituals are what one ought to do because you
love others. The calculus for length of time for, say, mourning the death
of a parent is 3 years because in our first 3 years of life we can do noth-
ing for ourselves, and only the parent’s love keeps us alive. That is what
they ought to do and our sacrifice to them after death is what we ought
to do.
Confucius also recognized a version of the Golden Mean, that is,
do to others as you would want to receive from them. This “mean,” the
“Zhong Yung,” makes the self the measure of success in fulfilling it. The
father should treat the children as he would like to have been treated by
his father; the ruler should treat the people as he would like to be treated
by someone ruling him/her.
Kong Fu zi is consumed with propriety, ritual and etiquette. He
lived in the crowded, teaming cities of Eastern China where practical so-
lutions to human conduct were of primary interest. He never looked be-
yond the practical application of morality to search for a mystical or di-
vine source of it. He considered that mysticism (like in the Tao) occurs
when the individual in the mountainous wilderness confronts the uni-
verse alone; interesting, but not very practical. Ritual is important only as
a symbol of the orderly interaction between heaven and earth. When he
was old and dying, his disciples came to him and said that prayers had
been offered for him to both earth and sky spirits. Confucius said: : “My
prayers have been offered long ago,” meaning that his life had been his
prayer, and that if heaven was not impressed with that, no ritual prayers
would help the situation.
The analogous relationship between human and human is eti-
quette. Attention to ritual and etiquette is only an outward sign of inner
goodness. A moral character is the root of civilization. Preoccupation
with the way of living and governing was foremost for Confucius. His
elaborate codes of etiquette and propriety resulted in some 3,300 rules
of conduct for people in society to observe. For example, Filial Piety was
very important because the family is a microcosm of the relationship be-
tween heaven and earth, governor and governed. The symbolic relation-
ship between parent and child, child and parent was ritually controlled
because that is the way it is within the universe or the state as well. Con-
fucius tried to show how people could be better and do better by follow-
ing patterns that guaranteed peace and order. Chinese people always
have been very practical and very communitarian. Individual rights and
liberties are always subjected to, and subsumed by, the collective will
and the good of the larger society.
There is, finally, the Confucian concept of “Ming” that is probably
best translated as “Fate” or “Destiny.” Kong Fu zi said that we can only
do what we ought to do, carry out the prescribed ritual, love one another,
and do as we would have done to us. The concept of Ming is that, even
doing the right things, forces of the world and universe are beyond our
control; all we can do is to do our best in honoring the Confucian pre-
scription, without regard to success or failure. In this way, the distinction
between Confucius and Lao Tze is summed up as this: Taoists, through
“Wu Wei” (inaction) can be right by “doing nothing,” but Confucius can
be right by “doing for nothing,” that is, without regard to the success or
failure of the doing.
In more recent times, Confucius has been battered and revived,
then attacked again. He was attacked heavily in 1915 by forces loyal to
Dr. Sun Yat Sen at the end of the Qing Dynasty. Again, in 1945, he was
blamed for his moderation (The Golden Mean) and faith and loyalty to
family, for standing in the way of the development of true patriotism. His
ideas did not fully comport with the democracy movement of 1989 (recall
the Tiananmen Square protests) because his concept of the individual
had the individual necessarily nested in the Chinese extended family and
clan. And, in any case, Confucianism placed no limit on any form of
authority because of individuality. In general, since the cultural revolution
in the 1960’s and 1970’s, and the democracy movement of the late
1980’s, the intellectuals have been feeling that there is no moral com-
pass in China anymore. In such circumstances, who do they turn to, but
the great teacher himself, Kong Fu zi?
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