Filsafat China.pdf

THE HUMANISM OF CONFUCIUS
ness and altruism, which is the "one thread" running through Confucius'
teachings, and which is in essence the golden mean as well as the golden
rule. It was the extension of this idea of jen that became the Neo-Confucian
doctrine of man's forming one body with Heaven, or the unity of
man and Nature, and it was because of the character of jen in man that
later Confucianists have adhered to the theory of the original good nature
of man.
It is clear, therefore, that Confucius was a creator as well as a transmitter.
He was not a philosopher in a technical sense, but Chinese philosophy
would be quite different if he had not lived. He was born in 551
(or 552) B.C. in the state of Lu in modern Shantung. His family name
was K'ung, private name Ch'iu, and he has been traditionally honored as
Grand Master K'ung (K'ung Fu-tzu, hence the Latinized form Confucius).
He was a descendant of a noble but fairly poor family. His
father died when Confucius was probably three years old. Evidently a
self-made man, he studied under no particular teacher but became perhaps
the most learned man of his time.
He began his career in his twenties or thirties. He was the first person
in Chinese history to devote his whole life, almost exclusively, to teaching.
He sought to inaugurate private education, to open the door of education
to all, to offer education for training character instead of for vocation,
and to gather around him a group of gentlemen-scholars (thus
starting the institution of the literati who have dominated Chinese history
and society).
In his younger years Confucius had served in minor posts in Lu. At
fifty-one he was made a magistrate, and became minister of justice the
same year, perhaps serving as an assistant minister of public works in between.
At fifty-six, finding his superiors uninterested in his policies, he
set out to travel (for almost thirteen years) in a desperate attempt at
political and social reform. He took some of his pupils along with him.
Eventually disappointed, he returned, at the age of sixty-eight, to his own
state to teach and perhaps to write and edit the Classics. According to the
Shih chi (Records of the Historian), 9 he had three thousand pupils,
seventy-two of whom mastered the "six arts." 10 He died at the age of
seventy-three.
9 These accounts are found in the first-and still the standard-biography of
Confucius, ch. 47 of the Shih chi. See French translation by Chavannes, Les
mémoires historiques, vol. 5, pp. 299-300, 391-403, 420; or English translation by
Lin Yutang, The Wisdom of Confucius, pp. 57, 88-91, 95.
10 Traditionally believed to refer to the Six Classics, i.e., the Books of History,
Odes, Changes, Rites, and Music, and the Spring and Autumn Annals. The Book
of Music is now lost. For three of the others, see above, ch. 1, nn.4-6. The "six
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