What Is Confucianism? Ritual, Respect and the Order of a Good Society
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A minor official from a small state in eastern China, who never held high office, whose advice no ruler took, and who died in 479 BC believing he had failed, became the most influential teacher in the history of the world's most populous civilisation. Confucius wrote nothing down; his students compiled his sayings into the Analects, and for two thousand years those sayings and the commentaries on them were the curriculum of Chinese education, the qualification for government office, and the code of family life from Korea to Vietnam. Whether the result is a religion, a philosophy or a way of running a society has been argued since, and it is all three.
The man
Kong Qiu, known as Kongzi, Master Kong, and Latinised by Jesuit missionaries as Confucius, was born in 551 BC in the state of Lu during the long collapse of the Zhou dynasty into warring states. He was a scholar of the old rites and texts, a teacher who took pupils regardless of rank, and a would-be adviser who travelled for fourteen years looking for a ruler who would put his ideas into practice and found none. His achievement was his students, and the school they founded. He claimed to be a transmitter, not a creator, restoring the ways of the early Zhou kings, and he was, in fact, both.
What he taught
The teaching is about how to be a good person and how good people make a good society, and it rests on a few ideas that recur through the Analects:
- •Ren, humaneness or benevolence: the central virtue, the care for others that makes a person fully human, summed up in the rule not to do to others what you would not want done to yourself
- •Li, ritual and propriety: the rites, ceremonies and forms of conduct, from ancestral sacrifice to how to greet a guest, through which respect is expressed and character is formed by practice
- •Xiao, filial piety: reverence for parents and ancestors, the root from which all other virtue grows, and the model for the relation of subject to ruler
- •The junzi, the gentleman or exemplary person: defined by character rather than birth, the man who cultivates himself through study and ritual and leads by example rather than force
- •The five relationships: ruler and subject, father and son, husband and wife, elder and younger brother, friend and friend, each with duties on both sides
- •Government by virtue: a ruler who is good will be followed as the grass bends before the wind, and laws and punishments are the resort of the ruler who has failed at that
From teaching to state
The school competed for three centuries with Daoists, who thought its rituals artificial, Mohists, who thought its family loyalties partial, and Legalists, who thought virtue no substitute for law and punishment, and the first emperor, a Legalist, burned Confucian books in 213 BC. The Han dynasty that followed made it the state doctrine in 136 BC, establishing an academy to teach the classics and, eventually, the examination system that selected officials by their mastery of them; from the seventh century to 1905 the path to power in China ran through examinations on the Confucian canon, and a village boy who could pass them could govern a province. The philosophy was reworked in the Song dynasty by Zhu Xi and others into Neo-Confucianism, which gave it a metaphysics of principle and material force to answer Buddhism, and that version spread to Korea, Japan and Vietnam and shaped their states and families as thoroughly as China's.
Religion or not
Confucius was reticent about the gods and the afterlife, telling a pupil who asked about serving the spirits that he could not yet serve men, and about death that he did not yet understand life. The tradition has no clergy, no creed and no theology, and Confucians have been Buddhists, Daoists and Christians without contradiction. It also has temples, in which the Master and his disciples are honoured with sacrifices, a cosmology in which Heaven mandates rulers and withdraws the mandate from bad ones, and an ancestral cult that is the heart of family religion across East Asia. The Western category does not fit, and the Chinese one, jiao, teaching, was applied equally to Buddhism and Daoism, the three teachings that a person could hold at once.
The twentieth century and after
The reformers of 1919 blamed Confucianism for China's weakness and called for smashing the Confucian shop, and Mao's campaign against Confucius in 1973 and 1974 was the last great assault; temples were wrecked and the tradition declared feudal. It came back. The economic rise of Japan, Korea, Taiwan and Singapore was credited by some to Confucian values of education, discipline and family, the Chinese government since the 2000s has rebuilt the temples, named its cultural institutes abroad after Confucius, and quoted the Analects in speeches, and the tradition's critics point out that respect for hierarchy is convenient for those at the top. The fairest reading is the old one: a teaching about how people become good through practice and how the good govern by example, which has been used to justify both the scholar who remonstrates with a tyrant and the tyrant who demands obedience, and which a quarter of humanity still lives inside without necessarily calling it anything.
The takeaway
Confucianism is the tradition descended from the teaching of Confucius, a scholar of the sixth century BC who held that people become good through humaneness, ritual practice and reverence for parents, and that a society is ordered by rulers who lead by virtue rather than force. Made state doctrine under the Han and the basis of the examinations that chose China's officials for thirteen centuries, spread through Korea, Japan and Vietnam, attacked in the twentieth century and revived in the twenty-first, it is a philosophy, a social code and a family religion at once.