James Legge

“ Confucius would not say. 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. ”

“ He does not promote a man simply because of his words, nor does he put good words aside because of the man.”
“A poor man who does not natter, and a rich man who is not proud, are passable characters; but they are not equal to the poor who yet are cheerful, and the rich who yet love the rules of propriety.”
“Education, undigested by thought, is labour lost; thought, unassisted by learning, is perilous.” ”

“ The Lun Yu, 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 K‘ing, 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. ”

“ 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. We miss the graces and consolations of faith; we have human efforts and ambitions, but they are unimpregnated with divine impulses and heavenly aspirings. ”

“ Another valuable contribution to ethical and social science was the way in which he inculcated the power of example, and the necessity of benevolence and righteousness in all who were in authority. 1200 years before he was born, an ancient hero and king had proclaimed in China: “The great God has conferred on the people a moral sense, compliance with which would show their nature invariably right. To cause them tranquilly to pursue the course which it indicates is the task of the sovereign.” Confucius knew the utterance well ”

“ We get a higher idea of the man from the accounts which his disciples have given us of his intercourse and conversations with them, and the attempts which they made to present his teachings in some systematic form. If he could not arrest the progress of disorder in his country, nor throw out principles which should be helpful in guiding it to a better state under some new constitutional system, he gave important lessons for the formation of individual character, and the manner in which the duties in the relations of society should be discharged. ”

“ 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.” ”

“ In the pages of Tso K‘iu-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” [3] 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. They were long in rejoining him, and had then to tell him that they had been detained by a heavy fall of rain, which threw down the first product of their labour. ”

“ Mencius held that the composition of the Ch‘un Ts‘iu was as great a work as Yu's regulation of the waters of the deluge with which the Shu King commences, and did for the face of society what the earlier labour did for the face of nature. ”

“ CONFUCIUS the famous sage of China (550 or 551–478 B.C.) They are very few among all the millions of the Chinese people who would not heartily repeat the lines with which the first paragraph in a popular history of the sage concludes:—
The man whose memory is thus cherished by a third portion of the human race, and the stamp of whose character and teachings is still impressed, after so long a time, on the institutions of his country, demands our careful study. ”

“ Ho-nan and Shan-si, with portions of Shen-si, Chih-li, Shan-tung, Gan-hwui, Kiang-su, and Hu-pih, were all which formed the dominions of Chow. For thirteen years of his life Confucius wandered about from state to state, seeking rest and patrons; but his journeyings were confined within the modern provinces of Ho-nan and Shan-tung, and the borders of Chih-li and Hu-pih. Many Europeans now living have travelled over much more of China than he did. ”

“ He taught emphatically that a bad man was not fit to rule. As a father or a magistrate, he might wield the instruments of authority, and punish the transgressors of his laws, but no forth-putting of force would countervail the influence of his example. ”

“ Several times he gave that rule in express words:—“What you do not like when done to yourself do not do to others.” The peculiar nature of the Chinese language enabled him to express this rule by one character, which for want of a better term we may translate in English by “reciprocity.” When the ideagram is looked at, it tells its meaning to the eye,—“a thing seen weightier than a thing heard.” ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 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 ”

“ Within this China of the Chow dynasty there might be a population, in Confucius's time, of from 10,000,000 to 15,000,000. We read frequently, in the classical books, of the “ten thousand states,” in which the people were distributed ”

“ The marquis was worsted in a struggle with his ministers, and fled to the neighbouring state of Ts‘i. 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 T‘ai 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. ”

“ 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 K‘ung cemetery, outside the city of K‘iuh-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: “The most sagely ancient Teacher ”

“ He tells us himself that at fifteen his mind was set on learning; and at nineteen, according to the ancient and modern practice in China, in regard to early unions, he was married,—his wife being from his ancestral state of Sung. A son, the only one, so far as we know, that he ever had, was born in the following year; but he had subsequently two daughters. Immediately after his marriage we find him employed under the chief of the Ki clan to whose jurisdiction the district of Tsow belonged, first as keeper of stores, and then as superintendent of parks and herds. ”

“ In this period were comprised his travels among the different states, when he hoped, and ever hoped in vain, to meet with some prince who would accept him as his counsellor, and initiate a government that should become the centre of an universal reformation. Several of the princes were willing to entertain and support him ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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 his views:—
“What the superior man seeks is in himself ”