Confucianism

Confucianism began as the teaching of Confucius and his disciples in the fifth century BCE, competing with Mohists, Daoists, Legalists and others in the “Hundred Schools of Thought” of the Warring States period. It became the official ideology of the Han dynasty in the second century BCE and, through its classics and the civil-service examinations, shaped the government, family life and education of China — and of Korea, Japan and Vietnam — for two thousand years.

The classical phase

• Confucius (551–479 BCE): humaneness (rén), ritual (lǐ), filial piety (xiào), the noble person (jūnzǐ), the rectification of names. See The Analects.
• Mencius (c. 372–289 BCE): human nature is good; all humans have the “four sprouts” — compassion, shame, deference, and the sense of right and wrong — which must be nurtured like plants. The child at the well: anyone seeing a child about to fall in would feel alarm and compassion, not from calculation. Mencius also taught that a ruler who oppresses the people loses the Mandate of Heaven and may be overthrown — a doctrine of legitimate rebellion.
• Xunzi (c. 310–235 BCE): human nature is bad — born selfish, envious and greedy — and goodness is the product of conscious effort, ritual and teachers. “Human nature is bad; goodness is the result of conscious activity.” His students included the Legalists Han Feizi and Li Si, architects of the harsh Qin dynasty.

The Four Books and the Five Classics

The Confucian canon took shape in the Han dynasty as the Five Classics: the Book of Odes (poetry), the Book of Documents (history), the Book of Rites, the Book of Changes (Yijing, the divination manual), and the Spring and Autumn Annals. In the Song dynasty, Zhu Xi elevated the Four Books — the Analects, the Mencius, the Great Learning and the Doctrine of the Mean — which became the core of education and the examinations from 1313 to 1905.

Neo-Confucianism

Responding to the challenge of Buddhism and Daoism, Song and Ming thinkers built a metaphysics for Confucian ethics:

• Zhu Xi (1130–1200): everything is composed of lǐ 理 (principle, pattern) and qì 氣 (vital energy). Human nature is principle and therefore good; selfish desires come from turbid qì. Cultivation proceeds by “the investigation of things” (géwù).
• Wang Yangming (1472–1529): principle is not in things but in the mind; we have innate knowledge of the good (liángzhī); knowledge and action are one — to know filial piety truly is already to be filial.

The “Five Relationships”

Confucian social ethics organizes society around five relationships, each with reciprocal obligations: ruler–subject (righteousness), father–son (affection), husband–wife (distinction), elder–younger brother (precedence), friend–friend (trust). Critics, especially in the twentieth century, attacked the hierarchy and patriarchy these encoded; defenders stress reciprocity and the moral demands on superiors.

Modern Confucianism

After the May Fourth Movement (1919) and Maoist campaigns attacked it, Confucianism revived in the late twentieth century: “New Confucians” (Mou Zongsan, Tu Weiming) reinterpreted it for modernity; “Asian values” debates invoked it; the Chinese state now promotes it. Philosophers in the West study “Confucian role ethics” (Roger Ames, Henry Rosemont) and compare Confucian and Aristotelian virtue ethics.

Confucianism and Daoism

The two great native Chinese traditions are often contrasted: Confucianism social, ritual, active, concerned with order and duty; Daoism natural, spontaneous, receptive, suspicious of convention. A traditional saying holds that the Chinese gentleman is “a Confucian in office and a Daoist in retirement”.