Confucius

About this figure

Confucius (551-479 BC, the dates given by the historian Sima Qian, though some ancient sources put his birth a year earlier) was born in the small state of Lu, in what is now Shandong province, the son of a minor military officer. Much of what is told about his early life comes from traditions recorded generations after his death, so precise details are hard to confirm, but the broad shape of his career is well attested. He married at nineteen and had a son and a daughter. He held minor government posts in Lu, first as keeper of a granary and then as overseer of public lands, before withdrawing from office to observe the mourning owed his mother. When the mourning period ended he did not return to office, turning instead to study and to teaching, and a circle of students gathered around him.

Lu, like the rest of the fading Zhou-dynasty world, had fallen into chronic disorder: a ruling duke who could not govern, and powerful ministerial clans - chiefly the Chi family - who held the real power and fought each other for more of it. Confucius, unlike contemporaries such as Laozi who counseled withdrawal from a broken world, argued that public disorder had public remedies, rooted in a return to ritual propriety and the family-based virtues of an earlier age. In his forties and fifties he briefly held real authority in Lu, rising through the offices of Superintendent of Works and then Chief Criminal Judge, and is credited with strengthening the duke's hand against the clans - until the neighboring state of Qi sent the duke a gift of dancing girls that absorbed his attention for days on end, and Confucius, his influence spent, left Lu around 497 BC.

For roughly the next thirteen years Confucius traveled from state to state with a circle of disciples, seeking a ruler willing to put his ideas into practice; none did, though he was mostly treated with courtesy along the way. He returned to Lu in his mid-sixties and spent his final years teaching and, by long tradition, working on classical texts including the Book of Poetry and the historical chronicle known as the Spring and Autumn Annals. His last years were marked by grief: the deaths of his son, of his most promising disciple Yan Hui, and of the disciple Zilu, killed in battle. Confucius himself died in 479 BC.

He wrote no philosophical treatise of his own. What survives under his name - above all the Analects - is a collection of short, often terse sayings and exchanges preserved by his students and, in turn, their own students, probably reaching something like its present form a generation or two after his death; scholars have long noted that some material inside the text describes events after his lifetime. Its recurring themes are nonetheless consistent: the cultivation of ren (benevolence) and li (ritual propriety), the ideal of the "superior man" who governs himself before he presumes to govern others, and a version of the Golden Rule - not to do to others what one would not want done to oneself. Confucius insisted he was transmitting old wisdom rather than inventing new doctrine, but it was his particular formulation of it, carried forward by generations of disciples, that later dynasties built their civil examinations and moral order upon for the better part of two thousand years.

Written by Epoch Voices. Not the figure’s own words.