Confucius was the epitamy everything backward and wrong in china.

• today it is upheld as the epitamy of rational, virtue and royalty.
• Confucius was a real live person. was born in 551BC and died in 479. born during the zhou dynasty before the imperial period (approx.1000 BC)
• zhou dynasty is more interested in observing how the universe functions than the divine realm. heaven and nature has its own imperatives.
• zhou china is a feudal colony. has some power and descender. hereditary hierarchy of feudal lords.
• lords of the king tax revenue and military service if required.
• by the time confucius is born the zhou was starting to disintegrate.
• some of the states began to annoy one another and started fighting one another.
• Confucius is disturbed by the tendency he sees by state competition. he was correct in his fears. never lived to see china completely disintegrate.
• china enters into a period of the warring states after 200 years after Confucius died. war with itself. Confucius saw all of this coming and he didn’t like it. saw disintegration in moral in society. kids were not respectful towards elders. crime is on the increase. Confucius believed in the bones.
• Hundred Schools of thought, roughly the 6th,5th,4th century BC, there are many other tools of thought out there talking about how to fix china (Daoists, etc.) confucius is most known both outside and inside china. confucius’ thought was the best. made confucius thought the oficial ideaology of all of china.
• film refered to the “axial age” age where several different organizations were debating how to live and how the past is good and the present sucks. in India period of reform of religion, period where buddhism is born (which eventually conquered china), in Palestine period of going back to the pure form of religion of jehova. in greece it was a time for philosophers, period of plato and aristotle. for 300 years of religious and philosophical debate largely concerning of how human beings should live their lives.
• Confucius demand vs. Confucius thought
• Confucius is born in a state in china called Lu, today called shandong province. born in the cradle of the east where chinese civilization has its earliest beginnings. surname was Kong. Confucius comes from venerable master kong (from his name).
• who is Confucius? born into a family of minor aristocratic status, he has access to books and book learning, his family hires a tutor for him. from a very early age he was brilliant and idealistic. learned to venerate and idealize the past.
• Confucius gets a reputation for the idealistic type that his own state won’t be hired, he couldn’t accept orders, had to question everything and problems with authority (because he thinks everybody in authority is not good enough and the he needs to teach them, ancient sage kings,)
• he gets a picture of early zhou china, he begins to insist that any government that would listen to him and recreate it and morally instructed by him that they would become a good state in china and that state will become a model for other states in china.
• he never finds employment so he goes out to look for some government that will let him recreate the moral and instructive state for them. the government thought that he was impractical and idealistic.
• he has midlife crisis sometimes in his 30’s. so he settled down and became a teacher and hoped someday his students would apply his ideas.
• he has several dozen disciples, his students take long transcripts, in them there’s a picture that emerges of a man who is concerned in how society aught to act. he doesn’t dwell on what is a human being, etc. he thought that those questions were distracting and that they should concentrate on the problems in this world than the next (here and now rather than there and later).
• Qin dynasty hated the thought of Confucius. looked for disciples or anyone who believed in Confucius, if they didn’t renounce their loyalty, they were brutally executed. books lost, etc. Qin dynasty didn’t last long due to harshness. then there was a scramble to find men who still remember the Confucius thought, they put the fragments of the books that weren’t burned together with the thoughts of the men as Analects. little bits and pieces here and there. reading it becomes a frustration for some people. gradually a general picture of Confucius thoughts will arrive after taking time reading the Analects. how people do act and how they aught to act.
• Confucius insists that he is not coming up with anything new, he denies being a revolutionary. In antiquity there is a consciousness of one’s role in society. accepts role that fate handed them. sought to behave. no strife in antiquity. “let the ruler be a ruler, let the minister be a minister, let the father be a father and let the son be a son” regenerate moral and ethical excellence of antiquity. let there be no distinction between how a minister should act and how a minister acts. should bridge the gap.
• duke of zhou, great moral exemplars among rulers in china. Confucius eventually comes up with two concepts the importance of ritual and being benevolent.
• importance of ritual: ritual or ceremony, li, li has a broad and narrow sense, narrow sense, li means ritual or ceremony, identifies the major occasions in life, birth, marriage, and death.
• Confucius is big on hierarchy, rejects the idea that everybody is equal. he thinks that there aught to be a hierarchy. point of ritual is the performance of the ritual in and of itself. in funeral ritual you have a model of society. shouldn’t question those roles. to be chinese is to subscribe to ritual and to be farmers. the more frequently you repeat ritual, in the narrow sense, the more you will be trained in society, will work something of a transformative “magic” on you, it would discipline you and train you. he thinks that ritual has a whole lot to teach us. training and repetition.
• Confucius would’ve loved graduation at UofC due to hierarchy, division, expectation and is a ritual. opportunity to learn for him, due to assigned roles in the graduation.
• importance of being benevolent: however, there is a danger with ritual, it will become sterile and people will just mindlessly do the ritual without transforming them. ritual will be an empty formal performance for you and is worthless if it doesn’t transform you. there should be a quality of mind and heart in order to do a transformation in you. Ren is a quality of mind and frame of heart that you had to have. Ren is the label the you have to have in a certain performance. Ren is an individual quality which every individual in society must possess. They will be eager in doing well with their role in society. Ren is an individual quality that is then applied to other individuals in society. Ren means to be deeply human, human heartedness or consummate reality, evolved man or humanity. encourage people to develop or cultivate a sense of Ren. old british translation of Ren is benevolent. Confucius has no answer on how to get Ren. Ren might ultimately have been so profound that it was beyond words and definition. (because some textual are missing). what Ren means and how to get it, don’t know. but if you do get Ren then you will be an important person.
• Benjamin Schwartz: Ren is the capacity to act well and properly in all that one encounters in social life.
• filial piety: respect, love and honor of one’s parents. can be sincere or forced. if you have Ren your filial piety is sincere and if not then your filial piety is stressful for you and you resent them. you become a superior man if you have Ren. Son of a sovern, son of a prince, the nobility are expected to have qualities such as Ren. farmers can also have moral excellence of a prince.
• Confucius does not seem to think very much of women, he sees women as distractions, “I have never seen a man who is as fond of virtue as a beautiful face of a woman”, thinks women are hard to deal with. wants men to influence the moral behavior of women.
• Confucius thought is not very religious. It used to be, in the west, that Confucius is agnostic (you may or may not believe whether God may or may not exist).
• pay your respects to the spirits and deities but keep your distance. by paying your respects to spirits and deities you CAN keep them away from you. Confucius wants there to be a distance between spirits and deities. a gentleman should keep it at an arms length. “never understanding about life, no time to understand death”
• he does not question the existence about the divine realm, but just set them aside. Confucius might have been a believer, for him the answer is that it that exist but the most important question is what do you do about the afterlife and he answers not much. (he’s not concerned with afterlife.) heaven or nature functions as a well oiled machine and should seek our answers there. ritual is attempting to mimic and duplicate the functions of reverence. Confucius probably wasn’t an agnostic.
• The successors of Confucius, two men called Mencius and Hsun-tzu continued after Confucius died.
• Mencius asks why should we be good? that being good is natural, being good is being true to ourselves. every human being on this earth is originality born with a complete sense of Ren within him or herself. after each person is born, the everyday problems of life, obscure our innately good nature and we have to work hard to keep our good nature. either a barbarian or an animal if you don’t feel anything, a human being or a sage if you feel something good.
• Hsun-tzu: human beings are born innately bad, we have to teach human beings to overcome innately bad natures with education. li, is ritual, it is prescription and teaches us how to become good people and to overcome our innately bad nature. having Ren is possible but you gotta work on it.
• Chinese wrestle with this question: are human beings innately good or bad?
• they chose Mencius’ idea about humans.