When is confucianism practiced

Premodern Chinese society and politics were heavily guided by Confucian principles. Prior to the thirteenth century, civil service examination candidates were expected to demonstrate mastery of the Five Classics. In , with the growing influence of the Zhu Xi school, the government decreed the Four Books would now serve as the basis of the examinations. Despite undergoing frequent change and reform, the system remained intact for nearly fifteen hundred years and was a powerful force in shaping and sustaining China's cultural and social norms.

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Confucianism: A Very Short Introduction. This debate remains unresolved and many people refer to Confucianism as both a religion and a philosophy. Natural disasters and conflict are the result of straying from the ancient teachings. Confucius believed in the importance of education in order to create this virtuous character. He thought that people are essentially good yet may have strayed from the appropriate forms of conduct.

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.

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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. He goes on to explain that a child has a dual set of duties, to both a father and ruler, the former filial piety and the other loyalty.

This sort of qualification suggests that as filial piety moved further outside its original family context, it had to be qualified to be integrated into a view that valorized multiple character traits. In my circle, being upright differs from this.

A father would conceal such a thing on behalf of his son, and a son would conceal it on behalf of his father. Uprightness is found in this. In this way, too, Confucius was adapting filial piety to a wider manifold of moral behaviors, honing his answer to the question of how a child balances responsibility to family and loyalty to the state.

While these two traits may conflict with one and other, Sociologist Robert Bellah, in his study of Tokugawa and modern Japan, noted how the structural similarity between loyalty and filial piety led to their both being promoted by the state as interlinked ideals that located each person in dual networks of responsibility. Confucius was making this claim when he connected filial piety to the propensity to be loyal to superiors 1. Of the classical sources from which Confucius drew, two were particularly influential in discussions of political legitimation.

This King Wen of ours, his prudent heart was well-ordered. He shone in serving the High God, and thus enjoyed much good fortune. Unswerving in his virtue, he came to hold the domains all around.

The Classic of Documents is a collection that includes orations attributed to the sage rulers of the past and their ministers, and its arguments often concern moral authority with a focus on the methods and character of exemplary rulers of the past.

When it comes to the mandate inherited from King Wen, the chapter insists that the mandate is not unchanging, and so as ruler the son must always be mindful of it when deciding how to act. The Zhou political view that Confucius inherited was based on supernatural intercession to place a person with personal virtue in charge of the state, but over time the emphasis shifted to the way that the effects of good government could be viewed as proof of a continuing moral justification for that placement.

The Han period Records of the Historian biography of Confucius described him as possessing all the personal qualities needed to govern well, but wandering from state to state because those qualities had not been recognized.

The view that through his writings Confucius could prepare the world for the government of a future sage king became a central part of Confucius lore that has colored the reception of his writings since, especially in works related to the Spring and Autumn Annals and its Gongyang Commentary. The biography of Confucius reinforced the tragic cosmological picture that personal virtue did not always guarantee success.

Most often, in dialogues with the rulers of his time, references to Heaven were occasions for Confucius to encourage rulers to remain attentive to their personal moral development and treat their subjects fairly. In the Analects and writings like those attributed to Mencius, descriptions of virtue were often adapted to contexts such as the conduct of lesser officials and the navigation of everyday life.

Kwong-Loi Shun notes that in such contexts, the influence of Heaven remained as an explanation of both what happened outside of human control, like political success or lifespan, and of the source of the ethical ideal.

In this way, personal qualities of modesty, filial piety or respect for the elders were seen as proof of fitness to serve in an official capacity. Just as the five virtues were placed at the center of later theories of moral development, once social roles became systematized in this way, selected situational teachings of Confucius consistent with them could become the basis of more abstract, systematic moral theories.

As with the rituals and the virtues, filial piety and the mandate of Heaven were transformed as they were integrated with the classics through the voices of Confucius and the rulers and disciples of his era.

By that time, the teachings of Confucius had gone through several centuries of gestation, and dialogues and quotations fashioned at different points over that time circulated and mixed. 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.

This process of accretion and elaboration is not uncommon for pre-modern writings, and the resulting breadth and depth explains, at least in part, why the voice of Confucius retained primacy in pre-modern Chinese philosophical conversations as well as in many modern debates about the role of traditional East Asian culture. Confucius First published Tue Mar 31,