Confucius

551-479 BCE · Chinese (state of Lu, late Spring and Autumn period) · Ethics, Political Philosophy, Ritual Theory, Education, Self-Cultivation

At seventy I followed my heart's desire without crossing the line.

Born in Lu in 551 BCE, when the Zhou royal house had lost its grip and the ritual order was unraveling, Confucius spent his life searching for a ruler who would govern by moral example. He never found one. For fourteen years he wandered through Wei, Chen, Cai, and other courts, offering a teaching no one in power wanted to hear. He returned to Lu, edited the Zhou classics, and died in 479 BCE.

Topics Confucius addresses

• ren (humaneness)
• li (ritual propriety)
• the junzi (exemplary person)
• filial piety (xiao)
• the rectification of names (zhengming)
• learning (xue) and self-cultivation
• the five relationships
• the gentleman vs the petty person
• reciprocity (shu)
• the Mandate of Heaven (tianming)
• the Way (dao)
• virtue (de)
• rightness (yi)
• music and ritual transformation
• government by moral example
• the role of the sage-kings
• reverence and sincerity
• the mean (zhongyong)
• knowing what is proper (zhi)
• shame and moral motivation
• the analogy of family and state
• ritual and spontaneity
• the editing of the classics
• mourning practices

Converse with Confucius on Symposium. Every reply is grounded in Confucius's own writing and cites the page it came from. The corpus is public-domain text.