What is confucianism all about

Time has remedied that oversight. The devotion of subsequent Chinese rulers and people over the centuries has helped preserve his now hallowed ground. The Temple of Confucius was built shortly after the sage died in B.

Peasant farmers were the core of Chinese agricultural society. Their lives were brutally hard. No matter how hard they work, they can be ruined by floods or droughts, or cruel and arbitrary officials By Han times, peasants had plows with iron tips and were aided by oxen and donkeys. But taxes were grinding, and farmers also had to perform mandatory government labor. Their shrinking farms were divided among multiple heirs. Banditry and rebellion began to take hold, and peasant uprisings were a threat into the 20th century.

All rights reserved. Culture Reference. Who was Confucius? Confucius was a Chinese philosopher, politician, and teacher whose message of knowledge, benevolence, loyalty, and virtue were the main guiding philosophy of China for thousands of years. Love of learning Confucius showed a zeal for academics early on. Qufu, Confucius's hometown. Share Tweet Email. Read This Next Wild parakeets have taken a liking to London. Rituals in Confucianism were designed to bring about this respectful attitude and create a sense of community within a group.

The family was the most important group for Confucian ethics, and devotion to family could only strengthen the society surrounding it. While Confucius gave his name to Confucianism, he was not the first person to discuss many of the important concepts in Confucianism.

Rather, he can be understood as someone concerned with the preservation of traditional Chinese knowledge from earlier thinkers. The most famous of these disciples were Mencius and Xunzi, both of whom developed Confucian thought further. Confucianism remains one of the most influential philosophies in China. 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. The Rights Holder for media is the person or group credited.

Tyson Brown, National Geographic Society. National Geographic Society. For information on user permissions, please read our Terms of Service. If you have questions about how to cite anything on our website in your project or classroom presentation, please contact your teacher. Therefore, cleaning a ritually base peach with millet:.

While such stories may have been told to mock his fastidiousness, for Confucius the essence of righteousness was internalizing a system of value that he would breach for neither convenience nor profit.

In the Analects , portrayals of Confucius do not recognize a tension between benevolence and righteousness, perhaps because each is usually described as salient in a different set of contexts. In ritual contexts like courts or shrines, one ideally acts like one might act out of familial affection in a personal context, the paradigm that is key to benevolence.

In the performance of official duties, one ideally acts out of the responsibilities felt to inferiors and superiors, with a resistance to temptation by corrupt gain that is key to righteousness.

The Records of Ritual distinguishes between the domains of these two virtues:. Treating nobility in a noble way and the honorable in an honorable way, is the height of righteousness. While it is not the case that righteousness is benevolence by other means, this passage underlines how in different contexts, different virtues may push people toward participation in particular shared cultural practices constitutive of the good life. In the Analects, Confucius is depicted both teaching and conducting the rites in the manner that he believed they were conducted in antiquity.

We have seen how ritual shapes values by restricting desires, thereby allowing reflection and the cultivation of moral dispositions. Yet without the proper affective state, a person is not properly performing ritual. Knowing the details of ritual protocols is important, but is not a substitute for sincere affect in performing them.

Confucius summarized the different prongs of the education in ritual and music involved in the training of his followers:. Raise yourself up with the Classic of Odes.

Establish yourself with ritual. Complete yourself with music. That Confucius insists that his son master classical literature and practices underscores the values of these cultural products as a means of transmitting the way from one generation to the next.

He tells his disciples that the study of the Classic of Odes prepares them for different aspects of life, providing them with a capacity to:. In the ancient world, this kind of education also qualified Confucius and his disciples for employment on estates and at courts.

The fourth virtue, wisdom, is related to appraising people and situations. In the Analects, wisdom allows a gentleman to discern crooked and straight behavior in others One well-known passage often cited to imply Confucius is agnostic about the world of the spirits is more literally about how wisdom allows an outsider to present himself in a way appropriate to the people on whose behalf he is working:.

The context for this sort of appraisal is usually official service, and wisdom is often attributed to valued ministers or advisors to sage rulers. In certain dialogues, wisdom also connotes a moral discernment that allows the gentleman to be confident of the appropriateness of good actions.

In soliloquies about several virtues, Confucius describes a wise person as never confused 9. While comparative philosophers have noted that Chinese thought has nothing clearly analogous to the role of the will in pre-modern European philosophy, the moral discernment that is part of wisdom does provide actors with confidence that the moral actions they have taken are correct.

The virtue of trustworthiness qualifies a gentleman to give advice to a ruler, and a ruler or official to manage others. While trustworthiness may be rooted in the proper expression of friendship between those of the same status 1.

The implication is that a sincerely public-minded official would be ineffective without the trust that this quality inspires. 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.

Some texts described a level of moral perfection, as with the sages of antiquity, as unifying all these virtues. Prior to this, it is unclear whether the possession of a particular virtue entailed having all the others, although benevolence was sometimes used as a more general term for a combination of one or more of the other virtues e. At other times, Confucius presented individual virtues as expressions of goodness in particular domains of life.

Early Confucius dialogues are embedded in concrete situations, and so resist attempts to distill them into more abstract principles of morality. As a result, descriptions of the virtues are embedded in anecdotes about the exemplary individuals whose character traits the dialogues encourage their audience to develop.

The five virtues described above are not the only ones of which Confucius spoke. Yet going through a list of all the virtues in the early sources is not sufficient to describe the entirety of the moral universe associated with Confucius. Yet there is also a conundrum inherent in any attempt to derive abstract moral rules from the mostly dialogical form of the Analects , that is, the problem of whether the situational context and conversation partner is integral to evaluating the statements of Confucius.

Read as axiomatic moral imperatives, these passages differ from the kind of exemplar-based and situational conversations about morality usually found in the Analects. For this reason, some scholars, including E. Bruce Brooks, believe these passages to be interpolations. While they are not wholly inconsistent with the way that benevolence is described in early texts, their interpretation as abstract principles has been influenced by their perceived similarity to the Biblical examples.

In the Records of Ritual , a slightly different formulation of a rule about self and others is presented as not universal in its scope, but rather as descriptive of how the exemplary ruler influences the people. In common with other early texts, the Analects describes how the moral transformation of society relies on the positive example of the ruler, comparing the influence of the gentleman on the people to the way the wind blows on the grass, forcing it to bend In a similar vein, after discussing how the personal qualities of rulers of the past determined whether or not their subjects could morally transform, the Records of Ritual expresses its principle of reflexivity:.

That is why the gentleman only seeks things in others that he or she personally possesses. These canonical texts argued that political success or failure is a function of moral quality, evidenced by actions such as proper ritual performance, on the part of the ruler. Confucius drew on these classics and adapted the classical view of moral authority in important ways, connecting it to a normative picture of society.

Based on the Chinese model, the Confucian court examination system for entry into the civil service was introduced in Vietnam in and lasted until , when it was abolished by the French. Confucian ideals — as well as those of Taoism and Buddhism — remain strong in Vietnam, where deference and obedience to family is central to society. History Matters.

A short introduction to the Chinese ethical system.