Tests of the good ruler were social stability, population growth a reflection of ancient statecraft where the good ruler was one who could attract people from other states , and ability to create conditions that fostered the people's welfare. The Mandate of Heaven was understood as justifying the right to rule, with the corollary right to rebel against a ruler who did not fulfill his duties to the people. The state played a major role in determining water rights, famine control and relief, and insuring social stability.
The state encouraged people to grow rice and other grains rather than commercial crops in order to insure and adequate food supply; it held reserves in state granaries, in part to lessen the effects of drought and floods, particularly common in northern China. For fear of losing the Mandate of Heaven governments levied very low taxes which often meant that the government could not provide all the services expected of it, and that officials ended up extorting money from the people.
The dominant strain of Confucian thought stressed the perfectibility of man. Confucius a political philosopher who lived c. Mencius and Hsun Tzu, two of his prominent successors, held different views on human nature, Mencius arguing that it contained the seeds of goodness, and Hsun Tzu that, in its uncultivated state, human nature tended to evil.
Both, however, believed that human beings were perfectible through self-cultivation and the practice of ritual. Confucianism is best understood as an ethical guide to life and living with strong character. Yet, Confucianism also began as a revival of an earlier religious tradition. There are no Confucian gods, and Confucius himself is worshipped as a spirit rather than a god.
However, there are temples of Confucianism, which are places where important community and civic rituals happen. 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.
The many sources of quotations and dialogues of Confucius, both transmitted and recently excavated, provide a wealth of materials about the philosophy of Confucius, but an incomplete sense of which materials are authoritative. Since then a number of historians, including Michael J.
Hunter, have systematically shown that writers started to demonstrate an acute interest in the Analects only in the late second and first centuries BCE, suggesting that other Confucius-related records from those centuries should also be considered as potentially authoritative sources. Some have suggested this critical approach to sources is an attack on the historicity of Confucius, but a more reasonable description is that it is an attack on the authoritativeness of the Analects that broadens and diversifies the sources that may be used to reconstruct the historical Confucius.
Expanding the corpus of Confucius quotations and dialogues beyond the Analects , then, requires attention to three additional types of sources. Finally, a number of recently archaeologically recovered texts from the Han period and before have also expanded the corpus. Newly discovered sources include three recently excavated versions of texts with parallel to the transmitted Analects.
While the Haihun Analects has yet to be published, the content of the lost chapters overlaps with a handful of fragments dating to the late first century BCE that were found at the Jianshui Jinguan site in Jinta county in Gansu Province in All in all, these finds confirm the sudden wide circulation of the Analects in the middle of the first century BCE. Previously unknown Confucius dialogues and quotations have also been unearthed.
Transmitted materials also show some of the quotations attributed to Confucius in the Analects in the mouths of other historical figures. The fluidity and diversity of Confucius-related materials in circulation prior to the fixing of the Analects text in the second century BCE, suggest that the Analects itself, with its keen interest in ritual, personal ethics, and politics, may well have been in part a topical selection from a larger and more diverse set of available Confucius-related materials.
In other words, there were already multiple topical foci prior to any horizon by which we can definitively deem any single focus to be authoritative.
It is for this reason that the essential core of the teachings of Confucius is historically underdetermined, and the correct identification of the core teachings is still avidly debated. The following sections treat three key aspects of the philosophy of Confucius, each different but all interrelated, found throughout many of these diverse sets of sources: a theory of how ritual and musical performance functioned to promote unselfishness and train emotions, advice on how to inculcate a set of personal virtues to prepare people to behave morally in different domains of their lives, and a social and political philosophy that abstracted classical ideals of proper conduct in family and official contexts to apply to more general contexts.
The Records of Ritual , the Analects , and numerous Han collections portray Confucius as being deeply concerned with the proper performance of ritual and music. In such works, the description of the attitudes and affect of the performer became the foundation of a ritual psychology in which proper performance was key to reforming desires and beginning to develop moral dispositions. Confucius sought to preserve the Zhou ritual system, and theorized about how ritual and music inculcated social roles, limited desires and transformed character.
Many biographies begin their description of his life with a story of Confucius at an early age performing rituals, reflecting accounts and statements that demonstrate his prodigious mastery of ritual and music. The archaeological record shows that one legacy of the Zhou period into which Confucius was born was a system of sumptuary regulations that encoded social status.
He plays the stone chimes While he might alter a detail of a ritual out of frugality 9. It was in large part this adherence to Zhou period cultural forms, or to what Confucius reconstructed them to be, that has led many in the modern period to label him a traditionalist. Where Confucius clearly innovated was in his rationale for performing the rites and music. Early discussions of ritual in the Zhou classics often explained ritual in terms of a do ut des view of making offerings to receive benefits.
By contrast, early discussions between Confucius and his disciples described benefits of ritual performance that went beyond the propitiation of spirits, rewards from the ancestors, or the maintenance of the social or cosmic order.
Instead of emphasizing goods that were external to the performer, these works stressed the value of the associated interior psychological states of the practitioner. In Analects 3. He also condemns views of ritual that focus only on the offerings, or views of music that focus only on the instruments This emphasis on the importance of an attitude of reverence became the salient distinction between performing ritual in a rote manner, and performing it in the proper affective state.
Analects 2. As Philip J. Ivanhoe has written, ritual and music are not just an indicator of values in the sense that these examples show, but also an inculcator of them. These are examples of the way that ritual fosters the development of particular emotional responses, part of a sophisticated understanding of affective states and the ways that performance channels them in particular directions.
Descriptions of the early community depict Confucius creating a subculture in which ritual provided an alternate source of value, effectively training his disciples to opt out of conventional modes of exchange. The Han period biographical materials in Records of the Historian describe how a high official of the state of Lu did not come to court for three days after the state of Qi made him a gift of female entertainers.
When, additionally, the high official failed to properly offer gifts of sacrificial meats, Confucius departed Lu for the state of Wei 47, cf. Analects Confucius repeatedly rejected conventional values of wealth and position, choosing instead to rely on ritual standards of value.
However, here the standard that gives such objects currency is ritual importance rather than longevity, divorcing Confucius from conventional materialistic or hedonistic pursuits. This is a second way that ritual allows one to direct more effort into character formation. Once, when speaking of cultivating benevolence, Confucius explained how ritual value was connected to the ideal way of the gentleman, which should always take precedence over the pursuit of conventional values:. Wealth and high social status are what others covet.
If I cannot prosper by following the way, I will not dwell in them. Poverty and low social status are what others shun.
If I cannot prosper by following the way, I will not avoid them. The argument that ritual performance has internal benefits underlies the ritual psychology laid out by Confucius, one that explains how performing ritual and music controls desires and sets the stage for further moral development. In this way, the virtues that Confucius taught were not original to him, but represented his adaptations of existing cultural ideals, to which he continually returned in order to clarify their proper expressions in different situations.
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