Why is confucius so important

Both Confucian and Daoist thinkers adopted it as part of their philosophy. Book of History Shu Jing contains official documents dating far back in Chinese history.

Book of Poetry Shi Jing. Confucius said: "In the Book of Poetry there are poems. Written in spare prose, it follows important events in the government. Confucius also studied a sixth classic, the Book of Music Yue Jing.

Confucius considered music essential to life. But this work has not survived. Controversy surrounds each of the other texts: Who wrote it? When was it written? Who wrote the commentaries on the text? Confucius claimed he merely "transmitted" the teachings of the classics. But his interpretations of the classics created a new school of thought in China. Other schools of thought created their own works. Confucius died in B. In English, this book is usually called the Analects.

It has hundreds of short passages. Most of what we know about Confucius comes from this source. Confucius highly valued the past. He wanted people to adopt ancient truths. By adopting them, he believed society would return to peace and harmony. Confucius emphasized several basic ideas. The most important one is ren. It is made up of the Chinese characters meaning "man" and "two," showing the connection of humans to one another.

Ren is what makes a person human and life worth living. It can be translated as "humaneness" or "goodness. Confucius calls a person who achieves ren a "superior person," "ideal person," or "sage. Confucius saw everyone as having a duty to everyone else.

Confucius talked about duties in unequal relationships: parents and children, elder child and younger child, husband and wife, brother and sister, older friend and younger friend, teacher and student, ruler and subjects. In each relationship, the higher-ranking person must take care of the lower-ranking person. In turn, the lower-ranking person must obey and honor the higher-ranking person. For example, parents should treat their children well and carefully raise them.

Children should obey and be loyal to their parents. Everyone should play his role properly: "Let the ruler be a ruler, the minister a minister, the father a father, and the son a son. Another part of the superior person is de , virtue or moral force. Confucius said: "The superior person cares about virtue de. The inferior person cares about things.

Ritual li was also important. Rituals were not meant to be empty gestures, but the means for expressing ren , yi , and de. Confucius said: "If a man be without humaneness ren , what value is ritual li? Ritual can mean ceremonies. It also includes the actions of everyday life: greeting people, talking, asking for favors, saying goodbye. Rituals are the correct forms for action, and they work magic. This may sound strange, but think about the magic words "please" and "excuse me" and their power.

For example, you can move someone much larger than yourself by simply saying, "Excuse me. Confucius believed that rulers did not need to use force to return harmony to society.

Confucius said: "If you govern them by means of virtue de and keep order among them by ritual li , people will gain their own sense of shame and correct themselves. Confucius sought to restore the harmony and order that he believed prevailed in the state of Zhou hundreds of years before.

Confucius taught that the ideal ruler during this time was the duke of Zhou, the brother of the king. According to Confucius, the duke thought of the needs of his people first and led the Zhou Dynasty into a period of peace and prosperity. When the wind blows, the grass bends. Confucius believed that the abandonment of virtue among rulers since that time had resulted in the lack of morality that he saw all around him.

Confucius taught that rulers had a sacred responsibility to rule virtuously. This meant ruling with self-discipline, attention to the ancient rituals, and putting the welfare and happiness of his subjects first. Ruling in this fashion, Confucius said, set an example of moral goodness for all others to follow. Based on his study of the Five Classics , Confucius believed that the people would naturally follow and support the virtuous ruler without the need for harsh laws and punishments.

Such a ruler would act like the duke of Zhou and the other "sage-kings" who first created the harmonious moral society that Confucius wanted to restore. Learn more about the history and rich culture of Ancient China with this curated resource collection. From the mythic origins of the Chinese dynasties to the eventual fall of the last imperial house, Chinese emperors have long fought to maintain control over one of the most enduring empires on Earth.

The rise and fall of various imperial families oversaw waves of innovation and cultural advancement. Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism were the three main philosophies and religions of ancient China, which have individually and collectively influenced ancient and modern Chinese society.

Taoism is an ancient Chinese philosophy and religion that instructs believers on how to exist in harmony with the universe. Join our community of educators and receive the latest information on National Geographic's resources for you and your students. Skip to content. Image Confucian Philosopher Mencius Confucianism is an ancient Chinese belief system, which focuses on the importance of personal ethics and morality.

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Related Resources. Ancient Civilization: China. 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. Positing a parallel between the nature of reciprocal responsibilities of individuals in different roles in two domains of social organization, in the Analects Confucius linked filial piety in the family to loyalty in the political realm:.

It is rare for a person who is filially pious to his parents and older siblings to be inclined to rebel against his superiors… Filial piety to parents and elder siblings may be considered the root of a person. 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.

This adaptation of filial piety to connote the proper way for a gentleman to behave both inside and outside the home was a generalization of a pattern of behavior that had once been specific to the family. As kinship groups were subordinated to larger political units, texts began to exhibit hybrid lists of ideal qualities that drew from both sets. What we do know is that he turned himself into an expert on the literature and history and poetry of an earlier age in China, and with that he created his own doctrine.

The purpose of the doctrine was to restore peace and order. The time in which he lived was a time of war and conflict in China between numerous feudal states, and he believed he had devised a doctrine of virtue that could bring prosperity back to China.

In his own life, unfortunately, he failed in that vision, because he could not find the dukes and kings to adhere to his ideas. But where he did succeed was as a very successful teacher.

But it is interesting that, even though he considered the family to be so important, we know so little about his own family. There are a few mentions in The Analects of a son and a daughter. Part of the reason may be the way the records were left. The Analects is really a collection of snippets of conversation that Confucius had with his disciples. But it is odd that a guy who thought the family was the foundation of society spent most of his time with his students, whom he was clearly very close with.

The most famous was the former president of South Korea, Kim Dae Jung , who spent decades as a democracy advocate in Korea and believed that Confucius gave people the right to choose their leadership and also overthrow a leader who was immoral or tyrannical. Today there are several societies that are highly influenced by Confucianism but are also democratic, like South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan.

So I think history is telling us that you can be both Confucian and democratic. Later, during the Tang dynasty, two female scholars created a text based on his ideas, which became known as the Analects for Women. It enshrined the idea that the roles of men and women should be highly separated. The outer realm of politics, business, and civic life was for men. The inner realm of caring for children and managing the home was for women. This became deeply entrenched in Chinese society, and unfortunately lingers to this day.

The International Monetary Fund did a study in that showed that only 9 percent of corporate management positions in Japan and South Korea were held by women, compared with 43 percent in the United States. This is demeaning for women and a national problem.

In an age where you want to make your economies as competitive as possible, these societies are marginalizing a lot of their best talent. I started by walking around with a copy of The Analects in my bag.

But I had an image of Confucius in my head that was quite negative, which I think many people in modern times hold: that he was arch-conservative, anti-women, and pro-autocracy. But in the course of doing this book and reading the Confucian writings, I had a change of heart.

If you go back and read The Analects and some of the early writings, you realize the way we see Confucius today is really not the Confucius who lived 2, years ago.