James Legge

“ The Lun-Yii, or Analects, “Discourses and Dialogues,” is a compilation in which many of his disciples must have taken part, and has great value as a record of his ways and utterances; but its chapters are mostly disjecta membra, affording faint traces of any guiding method or mind. Mencius, Hsiin Kʽing and writers of the Han dynasty, whose works, however, are more or less apocryphal, tell us much about him and his opinions, but all in a loose and unconnected way. No Chinese writer has ever seriously undertaken to compare him with the philosophers and sages of other nations. ”

“ There was no need, in his opinion, to trouble the mind about it. “While you cannot serve men,” he replied to the inquiry of Tze-lu, “how can you serve spirits?” And what becomes of a man’s own self, when he has passed from the stage of life? The oracle of Confucius was equally dumb on this question. “While you do not know life,” he said to the same inquirer, “what can you know about death?” Doubts as to the continued existence of the departed were manifested by many leading men in China before the era of Confucius. ”

“ With his own lessons and those patterns, any ruler of his day, who would listen to him, might reform and renovate his own state, and his influence would break forth beyond its limits till the face of the whole kingdom should be filled with a multitudinous relation-keeping, well-fed, happy people. ”

“ Good and evil would be recompensed by the natural issues of conduct within the sphere of time,—if not in the person of the actor, yet in the persons of his descendants. If there were any joys of heaven to reward virtue, or terrors of future retribution to punish vice, the sage took no heed of the one or the other. ”

“ But Confucius had confidence in the preponderating goodness of human nature, and in the power of example in superiors. “Not more surely,” he said, “does the grass bend before the wind than the masses yield to the will of those above them.” Given the model ruler, and the model people would forthwith appear. And he himself could make the model ruler. He could tell the princes of the states what they ought to be; and he could point them to examples of perfect virtue in former times, - to the sage founders of their own dynasty; to the sage Tang, who had founded the previous dynasty of Shang ”

“ In the King the references to the Supreme Being are abundant; there is an exulting awful recognition of Him as the almighty personal Ruler, who orders the course of nature and providence. With Confucius the vague, impersonal term, Heaven, took the place of the divine name. There is no glow of piety in any of his sentiments. He thought that it was better that men should not occupy themselves with anything but themselves.
There were, we are told in the Analects, four things of which he seldom spoke—extraordinary things, feats of strength, rebellious disorder and spiritual beings. ”

“ A feudal kingdom was sure to be a prey to disorder unless there were energy and ability in the character and administration of the sovereign; and Confucius has sketched, in the work referred to above, the Annals of Lu, his native state, for 242 years, from 722 to 481 B.C., which might almost be summed up in the words: “In those days there was no king in China, and every prince did what was right in his own eyes.” ”

“ Between friends the mutual promotion of virtue should be the guiding principle. It was true that the duties of the several relations were being continually violated by the passions of men, and the social state had become an anarchy. ”

“ It is better to be mean than insubordinate.”
“A man can enlarge his principles; principles do not enlarge the man.” That is, man is greater than any system of thought.
“The cautious seldom err.”
Sententious sayings like these have gone far to form the ordinary Chinese character. Hundreds of thousands of the literati can repeat every sentence in the classical books; the masses of the people have scores of the Confucian maxims, and little else of an ethical nature in their memories,—and with a beneficial result.
Confucius laid no claim, it has been seen, to divine revelations. ”

“ In the pages of Tso Kʽiu-ming, when men are swearing in the heat of passion, they sometimes pause and rest the validity of their oaths on the proviso that the dead to whom they appeal really exist. The “expressive silence” of Confucius has gone to confirm this scepticism.
His teaching was thus hardly more than a pure secularism. He had faith in man, man made for society, but he did not care to follow him out of society, nor to present to him motives of conduct derived from the consideration of a future state. ”

“ We miss the graces and consolations of faith; we have human efforts and ambitions, but they are unimpregnated with divine impulses and heavenly aspirings.
Confucius appeared, according to Mencius, one of his most distinguished followers (371–288 B.C.) , at a crisis in the nation’s history. “The world,” he says, “had fallen into decay, and right principles had disappeared. Perverse discourses and oppressive deeds were waxen rife. History
of his life.Ministers murdered their rulers and sons their fathers. Confucius was frightened by what he saw,—and he undertook the work of reformation.” ”

“ The man who had been neglected when alive seemed to become all at once an object of unbounded admiration. The tide began to flow which has hardly ever ebbed during three-and-twenty centuries.
The grave of Confucius is in a large rectangle separated from the rest of the Kʽung cemetery, outside the city of Kʽiuh-fow. A magnificent gate gives admission to a fine avenue, lined with cypress trees and conducting to the tomb, a large and lofty mound, with a marble statue in front, bearing the inscription of the title given to Confucius under the Sung dynasty:—“The most sagely ancient Teacher ”

“ Twice or thrice he did vaguely intimate that he had a mission from heaven, and that until it was accomplished he was safe against all attempts to injure him; but his teachings were singularly devoid of reference to anything His religion and philosophy.but what was seen and temporal. Man as he is, and the duties belonging to him in society, were all that he concerned himself about. Man’s nature was from God ”

“ All over the place are imperial tablets of different dynasties, with glowing tributes to the one man whom China delights to honour; and on the right of the grandson’s mound is a small house said to mark the place of the hut where Tze-kung passed his nearly five years of loving vigil. ”

“ For about five centuries state was left to contend with state, and clan with clan in the several states. The result was chronic misrule, and misery to the masses of the people, with frequent famines. Secondly, we must take into account the institution of polygamy, with the low status assigned to woman and the many restraints put upon her. In the ancient poems, indeed, there are a few pieces which are true love songs, and express a high appreciation of the virtue of their subjects ”

“ Thirdly, we must take into account the absence of strong and definite religious beliefs, properly so called, which has always been a characteristic of the Chinese people. We are little troubled, of course, with heresies, and are not shocked by the outbreaks of theological zeal; but where thought as well as action does not reach beyond the limits of earth and time, we do not find man in his best estate. ”

“ Two years after, his mother died, and he buried her in the same grave with his father. Some idea of what his future life was likely to be was already present to his mind. It was not the custom of antiquity to raise any tumulus over graves, but Confucius resolved to innovate in the matter. He would be travelling, he said, to all quarters of the kingdom, and must therefore have a mound by which to recognize his parents' resting-place. He returned home from the interment alone, having left his disciples to complete this work. ”

“ Men are charged with murder who were not guilty of it, and base murders are related as if they had been natural deaths. Villains, over whose fate the reader rejoices, are put down as victims of vile treason, and those who dealt with them as he would have been glad to do are subjected to horrible executions without one word of sympathy. ”

“ But they did not understand the sage, and felt a contempt for him struggling on against the tide, and always hoping against hope. We get a fine idea of him from his encounters with them. Once he was looking about for a ford, and sent Tze-lu to ask a man who was at work in a neighbouring field where it was. The man was a recluse, and having found that his questioner was a disciple of Confucius, he said to him: “Disorder in a swelling flood spreads over the kingdom, and no one is able to repress it. ”

“ The marquis was worsted in a struggle with his ministers, and fled to the neighbouring state of Tsʽi. Thither also went Confucius, for he would not countenance by his presence the men who had driven their ruler away. He was accompanied by many of his disciples; and as they passed by the Tʽai Mountain, an incident occurred which may be narrated as a specimen of the way in which he communicated to them his lessons. The attention of the travellers was arrested by a woman weeping and wailing at a grave. The sage stopped, and sent one of his followers to ask the reason of her grief. ”

“ They were obliged, however, to retrace their way to Wei, and he had there to appear before the marchioness, who wished to see how a sage looked. There was a screen between them at the interview, such as the present regent-empresses of China use in giving audience to their ministers; but Tze-lu, one of his principal disciples, was indignant that the master should have demeaned himself to be near such a woman, and to pacify him Confucius swore an oath appealing to Heaven to reject him if he had acted improperly. ”

“ This latter side of his teaching is far from being complete and correct, but the former has, no doubt, been a check on the “powers that be,” both in the family and the state, ever since Confucius became the acknowledged sage of his country. It has operated both as a restraint upon evil and a stimulus to good.
A few of his more characteristic sayings may here be given, the pith and point of which attest his discrimination of character, and show the tendencies of hisWise Sayings. views:—
“What the superior man seeks is in himself; what the small man seeks is in others.” ”

“ In 1770 B.C. a northern horde had plundered the capital, which was then in the present department of Si-gan, Shen-si, and killed the king, whose son withdrew across the Ho and established himself in a new centre, near the present city of Lo-yang in Ho-nan; but from that time the prestige of Chow was gone. Its representatives continued for four centuries and a half with the title of king, but they were less powerful than several of their feudatories. ”