Confusious biography

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The Records of Ritual illustrates desirable affective states, describing how the Zhou founder King Wen 文 was moved to joy when making offerings to his deceased parents, but then to grief once the ritual ended (“Jiyi” 祭義). Qualification to rule was demonstrated by proper behavior in the social roles defined by the “five relationships” (wulun 五倫), a formulation seen in the writings of Mencius that became a key feature of the interpretation of works associated with Confucius in the Han dynasty.

Passages from the Records of Ritual explain that Confucius would rather have an excess of reverence than an excess of ritual (“Tangong, shang” 檀弓上), and that reverence is the most important aspect of mourning rites (“Zaji, xia” 雜記下). (“Daming” 大明)

The Zhou political theory expressed in this passage is based on the idea of a limited moral universe that may not reward a virtuous person in isolation, but in which the High God (Shangdi 上帝, Di 帝) or Heaven will intercede to replace a bad ruler with a person of exceptional virtue.

The nature of the available source materials about Confucius, however, means that the diverse texts from early China lack the systematization of a work like Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics.

The five virtues described above are not the only ones of which Confucius spoke. When, additionally, the high official failed to properly offer gifts of sacrificial meats, Confucius departed Lu for the state of Wei (47, cf.

Five behaviors of the gentleman most central to the Analects are benevolence (ren 仁), righteousness (yi 義), ritual propriety (li 禮), wisdom (zhi 智), and trustworthiness (xin 信).

The virtue of benevolence entails interacting with others guided by a sense of what is good from their perspectives.

By the Han period, benevolence, righteousness, ritual propriety, wisdom and trustworthiness began to be considered as a complete set of human virtues, corresponding with other quintets of phenomena used to describe the natural world. Based on the analogy between the way of Confucius and character ethics systems deriving from Aristotle, these patterns of behavior are today often described using the Latinate term “virtue”.

The Analects describes the ritual mastery of Confucius in receiving guests at a noble’s home (10.3), and in carrying out sacrifices (10.8, 15.1). 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. Put slightly differently, Confucius read the traditional culture of the halcyon Zhou period in a particular way, but this reading was continuously reflected and refracted through different lenses during the Pre-Imperial period, prior to the results being fixed in diverse early Imperial period sources like the Analects, the Records of Ritual, and the Records of the Historian. What remains is the work of the hand of Confucius, but also of his “school”, and even sometimes of his opponents during the centuries that his philosophy underwent elaboration and drift.

Critical to a number of these lyrics is the celebration of King Wen of Zhou’s overthrow of the Shang, which is an example of a virtuous person seizing the “Mandate of Heaven”:

This King Wen of ours, his prudent heart was well-ordered. These are the 1973 excavation at the Dingzhou site in Hebei Province dating to 55 BCE; the 1990’s excavation of a partial parallel version at Jongbaekdong in Pyongyang, North Korea, dating to between 62 and 45 BCE; and most recently the 2011–2015 excavation of the tomb of the Marquis of Haihun in Jiangxi Province dating to 59 BCE.

The Haihun excavation is particularly important because it is thought to contain the two lost chapters of what Han period sources identify as a 22-chapter version of the Analects that circulated in the state of Qi, the titles of which appear to be “Understanding the Way” (Zhi dao 智道) and “Questions about Jade” (Wen yu 問玉).

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This section examines Confucius’s social and political philosophy, beginning with the central role of his analysis of the traditional norm of filial piety.

Just as Confucius analyzed the psychology of ritual performance and related it to individual moral development, his discussion of filial piety was another example of the development and adaptation of a particular classical cultural pattern to a wider philosophical context and set of concerns.

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.

His imperative, “Do not look or listen, speak or move, unless it is in accordance with the rites” (12.1), in answer to a question about benevolence, illustrates how the symbolic conventions of the ritual system played a role in the cultivation of the virtues. Confucianism deviates from the typical sought of world religions in the sense that it focuses more on morality and ethics than on the soul.

In the Analects, Confucius says he cannot tolerate “ritual without reverence, or mourning without grief,” (3.26). The American-educated historian Hu Shi 胡適 (1891–1962) wrote an early influential history of Chinese philosophy, beginning with Laozi 老子 and Confucius, explicitly on the model of existing histories of Western philosophy.

The governments that came after the Zhou dynasty adopted them as the official philosophy. Records of the Historian, written by Ssu-ma Chi’en (born 145 B.C.; died 86 B.C.) offers the most detailed account of Confucius’ life.