Page 80 - Encyclopedia Of World History

430 berkshire encyclopedia of world history

Confucius

(551–479 bce)
Chinese teacher and philosopher

onfucius, or Kongzi as he is called in Chinese, was
Can itinerant scholar, teacher, and sometime minor
official in his home state of Lu during the latter part of the
Zhou dynasty (1045–221 BCE), when the Chinese cul-
ture area was divided into a large number of competing
states.
The very limited success he had as a political and
moral reformer in his own lifetime contrasts sharply A highly stylized portait of Confucius that
with the enormous influence his teachings had in future often appeared in Western publications.
centuries, not only as the philosophical basis for official
government doctrine and basic social morality in the uni-
fied Chinese empire after the second century BCE, but also the Lunyu, or Analects. Less reliably, his thought may also
in the surrounding area of Chinese cultural influence, be reflected in a history of his home state of Lu, the Chun-
notably in Korea,Vietnam, and Japan. qiu, or Spring and Autumn Annals, which he allegedly
After the establishment of systematic contact with authored, and in several early Zhou dynasty texts which,
Europe in the seventeenth century, he became a world fig- because of his supposed editorship, became known as the
ure under the Latinized version of one of his honorific Five (Confucian) Classics.
names in China, Kong Fuzi. Europeans saw in Confucius Certainly these earlier texts, five centuries old in Con-
a distant inspiration and corroboration for the rational fucius’s time, influenced his thought. He was a self-
humanism of the Enlightenment. More recently, with a professed traditionalist, holding up the supposed unity
new wave of Confucianism carrying the sage to acade- and virtue of the early Zhou dynasty and its de facto
mies, classrooms, and business schools in the West, he founder, the Duke of Zhou, as models for Confucius’s
has become both an Eastern contributor to global cul- own dissolute time of constant interstate warfare and a
tural synthesis and the presumed root cause for the cul- disintegrating social order. On that point, it is important
tural dynamic behind the so-called East Asian economic to note that Confucius came from a social stratum that
miracle of the late twentieth century. had fallen from its original position as a warrior aristoc-
Clearly these later reincarnations relate more to Con- racy to become scribelike functionaries for the increas-
fucianism than to the historical person, but however ingly powerful independent states of the later Zhou
much they partake of the spirit and historical needs of period. As ritual specialists based on their knowledge of
later times, Confucius, the very human, nonmessianic the early Zhou texts, men of Confucius’s class preserved
man of the fifth century BCE, is the starting point. and cultivated the cultural unity of China in a time of
There is an enormous amount of lore and legend political disintegration. For Confucius, li (social ritual)
about Confucius’s life, but most of it is historically unre- was the essential civilizing basis for the social and polit-
liable. The contemporary textual evidence is limited to ical order; only through li could the individuals realize
quotes from the Master and anecdotes about his life that their basic humanity.The patriarchal nature of the social
were compiled by his students into a fairly short book, order embodied in li was taken for granted.