Confucianism

What it is

The tradition descending from Kongzi — Confucius, 551–479 BCE — concerned with how human beings should conduct themselves, how society should be ordered, and how character is formed.

Whether it is a religion is a real and unresolved question. It has no creator god, no soteriology, and little interest in an afterlife; Confucius, asked about serving the spirits, replied that one cannot yet serve people, and asked about death, said one does not yet understand life. Yet it has ritual at its centre, venerates ancestors, appeals to tiān — heaven — as a normative order, and has functioned for most of Chinese history as something people organised their lives by. Scholars have argued the point for a century without settling it, and the Chinese term rú does not map onto "religion" at all.

Its central concepts:

Rén — humaneness, benevolence, the disposition to treat others as fully human. The word is built from the characters for person and two.

Lǐ — ritual propriety. Not empty formality but the whole repertoire of correct conduct, from state ceremony to how one greets an elder. Confucius's claim is that character is formed by practising forms, not merely expressed through them.

Xiào — filial piety, obligation to parents and ancestors, the relationship from which all others are learned.

Jūnzǐ — the exemplary person, originally meaning a nobleman by birth and redefined by Confucius to mean noble by conduct. That redefinition is one of his most consequential moves.

Where it came from

Confucius lived during the disintegration of the Zhou order and presented himself not as an innovator but as a transmitter — recovering the practices of an earlier and better-ordered age. He held minor office, travelled seeking a ruler who would employ his ideas, and largely failed. His sayings were collected by students as the Analects.

The tradition then argued with itself. Mencius (4th c. BCE) held that human nature is fundamentally good and requires cultivation, like a sprout. Xunzi held it is crooked and requires straightening, like warped wood under a press. Both are canonical; the tradition never resolved it.

Neo-Confucianism from the Song dynasty produced the great synthesis. Zhu Xi (1130–1200) built a metaphysics of lǐ (pattern, principle) and qì (matter-energy) that absorbed Buddhist and Daoist insight while rejecting their conclusions, and fixed the Four Books as the core curriculum. Wang Yangming (1472–1529) dissented, arguing for innate moral knowing and the unity of knowledge and action — that to know the good and not do it is not to know it.

And then there is the examination system. From the Sui and Tang dynasties until 1905 — something like thirteen hundred years — entry into the Chinese civil service was by competitive written examination on the Confucian classics. It is the longest-running meritocratic recruitment system in history, it made a literary and ethical curriculum the gateway to power, and it shaped Chinese society more thoroughly than any doctrine.

How it is practised

Through study, ritual observance, ancestor veneration and the cultivation of the five relationships — ruler and subject, parent and child, husband and wife, elder and younger sibling, friend and friend — of which only the last is between equals.

Its negative formulation of the ethical rule predates the Christian version: what you do not want done to yourself, do not do to others.

What we can and cannot say

We can say the influence on East Asia is comprehensive — on China, Korea, Japan and Vietnam, in family structure, education, bureaucracy and social expectation, including among people who would not call themselves Confucian.

We can say the tradition's modern trajectory is unusually turbulent. It was attacked by Chinese reformers in the May Fourth Movement of 1919 as the source of national backwardness; assaulted again in the Cultural Revolution's campaign to smash the four olds, with Confucius's temple and grave at Qufu vandalised; and is now actively promoted by the same state, which has named its overseas cultural institutes after him.

We can say the critique of hierarchy is serious and is made from inside. Four of the five relationships are asymmetrical, filial piety has been used to justify considerable domestic oppression, and the position of women in the tradition as practised was poor. Chinese feminists have made this case for a century, and modern Confucian scholars respond that the tradition contains resources for reform — reciprocal obligation, the duty to remonstrate with an erring superior — that were suppressed rather than absent.

We can say Confucius is more interesting than his reputation. The Analects is a short, fragmentary, frequently funny book about a man who failed at his political ambitions and was uncertain about almost everything except how people ought to treat each other.

We cannot settle whether it is a religion, and the question may be a bad one — an artefact of a Western category applied to a tradition that never needed it.

Further reading

• The Analects, in Edward Slingerland's translation with commentary (2003).
• Mencius and Xunzi, read as a pair for the argument about human nature.
• Benjamin Elman, A Cultural History of Civil Examinations in Late Imperial China (2000).