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1
Confucius Was Great
1.1 His Great Personality
Like the five other spiritual leaders in the world,
1 Confucius (
, 551 B.C.– 479 B.C.) still lives among us and is admired more than ever.
He absorbed China’s cultural traditions accumulated during the 25 centuries before his time. They were rich, but somewhat schematic. He co-ordinated them, re-organized them, evaluated them, and developed them into a profound new system of ethics and political philosophy for the benefit of posterity, thus providing a solid foundation for national existence during the 25 centuries after him.
His expertise as one of the top thinkers and educators that mankind has ever produced is fully shown in the
Analects (
,
Lun-yu, dialogues) recorded by his disciples. He appears there, to the surprise of some of us, as a plain man with plain words and plain deeds quite within the reach of anybody who has a desire to learn from his example, a fact which explains eloquently why his teachings constituted the main stream of Chinese thought for over 25 centuries till the present day.
He has actually personified the cultural characteristics, the aspirations, and the ideals of the average Chinese, so much so that to understand him is to understand China, Chinese, and Chinese history.
Every Chinese person can be proud to have had among his fellow-citizens a man with so monumentary an achievement, so magnificent and immortal a personality, and so much dedication to a self-imposed mission.2
I am, therefore, including in my
Five Thousand Years of Chinese History (
) a special study on
Confucianism: A Modern Interpretation (
) as one of the three volumes on Middle Zhou Dynasty (770 B.C.– 479 B.C.), the other two being a
Biography of Confucius and a general history of that period. I hope my young readers in China and elsewhere will hereby acquire a thorough comprehension of the origins and trends of our culture as well as its far-reaching, but often hidden, significance.
I am performing, in the meantime, my homage to this most outstanding man whose place in the history of China and Chinese thought is so focal, so unique, and, may I say, so absolutely prominent, for having continued the lineage of hundreds of kings and sages, synthesized their accomplishments, and passed on to us a Dao (
) all his own, consistent with itself, impressive in scope, serious in substance, and splendid in style.
1.2 His Humanism
Confucianism, from its roots to its branches and leaves, is dedicated to the study of man. Man is its ultimate, highest, and most direct aim. It tries to find truth through man’s daily activities, and apply its findings to build up man’s character, uphold man’s rights, develop man’s potentials, and unfold man’s nature. It is a kind of humanism and has this in common with humanism in the West: it sees in the fulfillment of the individual the hope for civilization.
Confucius affirmed at the very beginning of his career that man was the noblest being in the universe, the only being with a consciousness of himself, hence capacity for self-improvement and perfection.
His philosopy may be summed up in one word:
ren. Ren, in his opinion, was the basis for all human relationships. It is written with two components, the symbol for “man” on the left and a symbol for “seeds” on the right (
). Put together, the two components mean “the essence of man”. “To be
ren,” said Zi-si (
), social name of Kong Ji (
, 483 B.C.−402 B.C.) “is to be
man.”
3This word ren had been used by some moralists before Confucius to denote “kindness” as one of the many virtues. Confucius decided to use it as the highest of all the virtues, while retaining its time-honored meaning of “kindness”.
As the highest of all the virtues,
ren requires a man to be 100% of a man, a complete man, a true man, a real man; in other words, a perfect man. No more than six persons in the past were mentioned in the
Analects as deserving to be called
ren man. Among the students of Confucius, only one made the grade for a period of three months. He was Yan Hui (
). Another one, Zhong-gong (
), was considered quite
ren by an observer. Confucius did not express his agreement or disagreement to the observer’s conclusion.
4As to “kindness”, one of the many virtues, Confucius, when asked by Fan Xu (
), defined it as “A
ren man loves people.”
5In most cases, Confucius would use the word
ren to mean 100% of a man. He had a humanist reason, which was revealed to us by Zi-si in
The Doctrine of the Mean (
): Man ought to behave according to his own nature, because this nature of his has been bestowed by Heaven and it partakes the Dao of Heaven: “That which Heaven has ordained is called (man’s) nature. To follow nature is to conform to the Dao. To get back to the Dao after straying away from it, is what we call education.”
Confucius was, more than anyone else, a great educator. The purpose he had when he was urging people to try to be ren, was simply to get them back to the Dao.
Dr. John C. H. Wu (
) made an excellent comment on this passage written by Kong Ji. “It suggests to us the picture of a big tree,” Dr. Wu said, “with Heaven’s commands as its roots, with the Dao as its trunk, with culture and education as its branches, leaves, and flowers. The fruits of this tree are: a beautiful personality for the individual, a good government for the state, peace for the world, and happiness for all mankind. Society is going to evolve into the stages of
xiao-kang (
, Limited Bliss) and
da-tong (
, Great Harmony).”
61.3 First Democratic Educator
A firm believer in the perfectibility of man, of all men, Confucius took it upon himself to give the common people a chance to share the knowledge which, until then, had been a monopoly of the nobility. The schools where the “six arts” were taught were open to the sons of the nobles only. Confucius started a school of his own for everybody, whatever the social class was.7
The six ...
