welcome to one day university i'm professor brian van norden of vassar college and today we're going to be talking about who was confucius and what did he really say in order to understand the continuing relevance of confucius as a historical and cultural figure i'm going to skip a few years back to 2011. in january of 2011 a 30-foot tall bronze statue of confucius was unveiled in tiananmen square in beijing now tiananmen square is politically and historically very important it's right in front of the forbidden city it's also the place where the mausoleum of mao zedong is where people can visit uh the remains of mao and so it's very significant that this figure of confucius was put up there but then something funny happened in about a month scaffolding went up around the statue of confucius and then just a couple months later when the scaffolding came down the statue was gone what had happened this peekaboo involving the statue of confucius represents the tension in the chinese government over the pro-confucius factions and the anti-confucius factions because confucius is such a controversial figure even today that he can stir controversy like this in china how so let's ask ourselves what we think of when we think of confucius now i think if you're honest with yourself you'll admit that you have one of two images of confucius perhaps you think of him as a great sage who said many wise things you may not know what he said but you know that he supposedly said many wise things and you feel that he ought to be revered but if we're honest with ourselves we have to admit that oftentimes we think of confucius rather differently as the butt of jokes some of these jokes are harmless nothing wrong with laughing at this if you feel like it but honestly some other jokes about confucius are racist or offensive but it's worth noting that even today there are people who don't like confucius this is a clip from a cultural revolution era poster entitled the evil life of confucius and that small figure in the foreground there that's supposed to be confucius and look at the farmer the peasant farmers in the background you know they're muscular and tall and powerful looking and they're staring daggers at confucius that's because this cultural revolution era poster from china is about what an evil cowardly backward thinking figure confucius is now if you know something about recent chinese history it might not surprise you to find out that confucius was criticized during the ultra left-wing cultural revolution but many people don't know that the controversy over confucius stretches back to ancient times confucius has in fact been the object of veneration since ancient times one of his later followers said of confucius the unicorn among animals the phoenix among birds mount tai among mounds and hills the yellow river and the seas among flowing waters among things of the same kind some stand out a sage is also of the same kind as other humans but since humans were first born there's never been one who has reached a greater summit than confucius that's from mangza 4th century bc follower of the confucian tradition so that doesn't surprise us but a near contemporary of confucius's end of monzas said something very different about confucians this by the way this image is from another part of that cultural revolution poster the evil life of confucius but even in ancient times one philosopher said the typical confusion is indolent and arrogant self-indulgent in eating and drinking and too lazy to work he behaves like a beggar grasps food like a hamster stares blankly like a he goat and rises up like a pig that's from mwaza who lives in the 5th century bce which is just around the very soon after the time of confucius himself so who is this figure who can produce such strong reactions among people over thousands of years well to get an idea let's look first at the life of confucius and i'm going to say a little bit about the life of confucius under the headings of his youth his political career his years of wandering his time as a teacher and then finally the work by which we know most of what we know about confucius the analytes so this is a map of the political situation in china around the time of confucius as you can see during this time china was divided into a number of states that were vying for supremacy so there was a king during this period the reigning joe dynasty king but the reigning joe dynasty king didn't have any real power real power was in the hands of the rulers of these little states and the rulers of the states were vying for supremacy they were fighting wars against each other trying to capture territory or wealth from other states and within states people were fighting so a duke might be murdered by his eldest son or the eldest son who was about to succeed to the dukedom might be murdered by his younger brother people were taxed almost to exhaustion by the government which was trying to fund huge governments or luxuries for aristocratic people as a result one contemporary work and this is what i'm about to quote is from the tao da jing the classic of the way and virtue which is usually attributed to lauza the founder of taoism uh traditionally said to be a contemporary of confucius this work described the the political and social situation in this era like this the court is resplendent yet the fields are overgrown the granaries are empty yet some wear elegant clothes fine swords dangle at their sides they're stuffed with food and drink and possess wealth and abundance this is known as taking pride in robbery far is this from the way and by the way here what they mean is the right way the way to organize society and the right way to live so everyone was suffering in this society poor people were suffering because they could barely get by and the government couldn't always control bandits even aristocrats although they're content condemned in this passage they had bad lives too because they might be killed in battle uh their own relatives might assassinate them uh so everyone was living in a state of utter chaos into this situation was born this figure kungsa or as we know him confucius he was of an aristocratic background but his father died when he was very young which in the patriarchal society that he lived in left him and his mother near destitute nonetheless confucius worked very hard when he was young he took jobs as a herder of sheep and another time he was an accountant at a granary and supposedly he did all these jobs very well but what he really wanted to do was to study and to learn the best of china's traditions which were already ancient by the time confucius was born in around 551 bc so with the help of a friend uh who was wealthy and whose father was essentially gave confucius a scholarship confucius was able to study at the joe dynasty archives later confucius said of himself in my youth i was of humble status so i became proficient in many menial tasks and he didn't think there was anything wrong with performing these menial tasks but his aspiration was to become a scholar and an intellectual so with the education he got confucius was able to aspire to a political career and eventually he took office in his home state of lieu which was one of those tiny states one of the smaller states in fact that was fighting for supremacy or even just survival in ancient china and he gave advice to the ruler of the state but then eventually what happened was that the ruler of the state received a gift of a group of dancing girls from another state and the ruler disappeared for from court for about a week and enjoyed the services of the dancing girls in private for about a week confucius was disgusted and realized that this ruler was not taking his job seriously and was not interested in listening to good advice about how to govern and so he resigned in discussed so we can see why confucius once said i have yet to meet a man who loves virtue as much as he loves sex so after confucius resigned he didn't give up trying to make the world a better place he just tried to find a ruler in a different state who would put his ideas into practice and as he traveled from state to state he accumulated followers or disciples people who were impressed with confucius's character and also with his air addition and learning but traveling in this chaotic period was very dangerous and more than once confucius his life was endangered someone tried to murder him at one point at another point he and his disciples ran out of money and food and were reduced to the edge of starvation now one of confucius's early followers was a young man named zulu and zulu like confucius had an aristocratic background but unlike confucius zulu was actually raised in luxury so when confucius and his disciples were on the edge of starvation traveling from state to state trying to find a ruler who would put confucius's ideas into practice zulu because he was hungry and he wasn't used to this as an aristocrat went to confucius and clint and complained does does a gentleman have to endure something like this and confucius put zulu in his place by saying of course the gentleman encounters hardship the difference is that the petty man encountering hardship is overwhelmed by it so what is confucius saying here what he's saying is look zulu you think you're a gentleman a noble a better person because of your aristocratic birth and background but in reality being a true gentleman being a true noble person isn't about accidents of birth or how wealthy your parents were it's about your character and if you've got a good character you're willing to endure hardship in order to pursue a good goal like bringing the way of good government back to china so confucius took a class term gentlemen which is contrasted with the social class of the petty person and said we should use these terms in a different way the gentleman the noble person is the person of good character regardless of their family background the petty person the little person is the person who's contemptible because of their bad character whether or not they're rich or poor so confucius visited many states and he had many interesting conversations but he never had a ruler who was willing to put his ideas into practice fully so he eventually returned to his home state of lou and became a teacher and he attracted a number of students because of his great learning uh and also his charismatic virtuous personality impressed people but confucius never forgot his roots he never forgot that he had been born poor and that he and his mother had had to struggle to survive so he famously said i have never denied instruction to anyone who of their own accord offered up as little as a bundle of silk or a bit of cured meat in other words if you couldn't afford tuition confucius would take you on as a student if you just gave him a piece of beef jerky as a symbol of following him or just like a little piece of cloth as a symbolic bit of tuition because he never forgot that he was lucky to study only because of the kindness of others so he taught for many years when he passed away in 479 bce so 551 to 479 bce is the life of confucius after he passed away his disciples wrote down his sayings and the collected sayings of confucius and his immediate disciples are known in english as the analects and the analytics is divided into books and chapters and so you cite a passage in the analect by book and chapter number like 1.2 or 4.15 right and so this is just a sample from the analytics from the first book of the analects and the books in the analects are really the size of chapters and here you see chapters 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 and so on the chapters and the analects are really the size of just sayings the longest ones are a few paragraphs long the shortest ones are just one sentence but this is what the analects would look like if you looked inside of it and you can see in the original chinese here it's mostly you know pretty brief passages although there are a few longer ones as well and this is one of our best sources for information about confucius the analects these sayings of confucius and his immediate disciples so that's who this figure is what do we find if we read the analects the analects is the kind of book that you need to read over and over again and you need to digest it slowly i have an exercise with my students where i make them read one book of the analytics which is really just a few pages long and i make them read it repeatedly just to focus on just the sayings in those few pages so the analects repays that kind of careful reading but to give you a sense of the overall content and the themes that you're going to find in the analects and the themes that you'll find in confucianism as a whole i think that there are six major themes that we can talk about in the analytics achieving happiness in the everyday world guiding others by virtue rather than by force ritual as a model for all human interactions ethical transformation through learning reforming the present by reviving the best of our traditions and the family as a source of ethics and i'm going to say a little bit about each of these things now in order to understand what confucians think it is to live well it's helpful to have a contrast so what is it to live well this is a famous painting this is the death of socrates by jacques louis david it's a famous painting as you probably know socrates was a famous ancient western philosopher who was forced to drink hemlock as a form of capital punishment to punish him for corrupting the youth of athens and how was he corrupting the youth of athens he was making them ask questions and think for themselves and the athenians didn't take very kindly to that but the story of socrates death is recorded in a dialogue by his follower plato and in this work there's a very interesting saying attributed to socrates socrates says the true philosopher makes dying his profession the true philosopher makes dying his profession and that was as shocking to socrates and plato's contemporaries as it is to us today what does it mean what it means is that the true philosopher according to plato and according to plato also what socrates thought the true philosopher tries to die to the everyday world of the senses and sensual desires in order to transcend the prison of the body so that their soul can be freed to appreciate reality in itself which transcends the physical world now this notion that the the only way to really live well is to transcend the physical body has been immensely influential in the western tradition but it's very different from the ideal we get from confucius so what was the confucian ideal of happiness very different from the one that we get from plato and socrates and to understand it i want to talk about one of my favorite passages in the analytics it's in in book 11. and in this passage confucius asks his disciples to be honest with him and just say hey if you achieved your goal in life what would that be like so what would you get if you people appreciated your abilities and they gave you the kind of task that you think you're suited for and you remember zelu the guy who uh was like oh does a gentleman have to go hungry i'm a gentleman that guy well he's the first to speak up in this passage too and what does he say he says if i were given control of a state even if it were small and hemmed in on all sides by powerful enemies within a few years the people would be raised to a higher standard of living and their virtue would be renewed and we would defeat all of our enemies and confucius doesn't say anything but he kind of smirks because that's a very grandiose aspiration that zulu has and the other disciples who are present they see that you know confucius has smirked at the arrogance of zulu in his aspiration so they try to outdo each other and be more humble and the next disciple says well i have a a much lower aspiration i just like to be a minor functionary in government and i would try to do my best at that and the next disciple says well i would just try to be like a minor functionary in charge of rituals or diplomatic gatherings things like that you know nothing very important but they're all political aspirations of a different of one kind or another which makes sense since after all confucius himself had political aspirations but then the the last disciple who's present this is an older disciple somebody who's kind of a like a non-traditional student in a certain way maybe like many people in our audience they've already had a career in some other area and they're going back now to to get a more classical education and confucius says to this disciple zhang shi he says what's your aspiration and zangxi says well it's kind of different from that of the other disciples and she says that's okay just be honest with me about what your aspiration is and so then zangxi says in the third month of spring once the spring garments have been completed i should like to assemble a company of five or six young men and six or seven boys to go bathe in the e river and enjoy the breeze upon the rain dance altar and then return singing to the master's house confucius sighed deeply and said i'm with samshi so in contrast to the platonic ideal that the best kind of life is one where you transcend your body and you transcend your attachment to things in this world what confucius thinks is really important and what the goal of political participation is is to bring the way back to society but what is the way it's just a world in which people can enjoy everyday pleasures like going out for a nice walk and going for a swim in the river and coming home singing with your friends and kids that is the ultimate confusion conception of living well just happiness in the everyday world now how are we going to get the way back in society how are we going to lead people to this idyllic existence confucius stresses the importance of guiding people by virtue as opposed to guiding people by brute force and one of my favorite lines about this from the analytics is confucius says if you try to guide the people with coercive regulations and keep them in line with punishments the people will become evasive and have no sense of shame if however you guide them with virtue and keep them in line by means of ritual the people will have a sense of shame and in fact will rectify themselves so confucius says big great punishments painful punishments severe punishments and a bunch of laws they won't keep people from misbehaving people will just find ways to evade the laws and evade the punishments but if you can ethically transform people if you can get people to be virtuous they will gladly do what is right by themselves and confucius has a lovely metaphor for talking about this this is a time lapse photograph of the motion of the stars around the celestial pole the pole star and confucius famously said that governing by means of virtue may be compared to the pole star which sits in its place while the myriad other stars pay at homage by circling around it and so likewise confucius says if you lead by virtue and the charisma that comes of virtue people will want to follow you you can't effectively lead just with the use of force so it's a significant contrast with some other political philosophies both in confucius's own time and some ways of viewing politics today now in that passage confucius uh the the one that we had up on the screen before he mentioned virtue but also mentioned ritual now and this is a scene by the way from the beijing olympics of 2008 uh you know people dressed up as confucian scholars holding what that's what books looked like in ancient times they were you know they rolled up like that uh so but ritual includes public ceremonies just like this one at the beijing olympics it also includes matters of etiquette like how you greet a guest or rituals like weddings or funerals but in a certain way confucius wanted to suggest that ritual can become all-encompassing one of confucius's disciples said how can i be a good person and confucius replied do not look unless it is in accordance with ritual do not listen unless it is in accordance with ritual do not speak unless is in accordance with ritual do not move unless it is in accordance with ritual now one level that might sound really constraining but what confucius is getting at is that you can imbue everything you do in life with the dignity and power of a sacred ritual if you take it seriously whatever your job is take it seriously whatever you do in life take it as seriously as you would a ritual like a wedding or a funeral or an inauguration another way the confucius puts this is he says in public act as if you are greeting an important guest direct others as if you are performing a great ritual sacrifice and do not inflict on others what you yourself do not desire so ritual is is a way of viewing everything you do as having a kind of sacrality one of the classic books uh about confucius has the subtitle the secular as sacred because confucius says you can imbue everything you do with a kind of sacrality well if we're gonna become virtuous and we're gonna acquire these rituals we're gonna ritualize everyday life how are we going to do that because we don't start out being virtuous people right well the key is learning so what is learning for confucius learning involves things like studying the classics as confucius did you can also learn from other people of course from wise teachers or from the examples of others but learning for confucius is not a passive process it's not just a matter of memorizing things so confucius stresses and this is one of my favorite lines in the analytics i always tell my students this if you learn without thinking about what you have learned you will be lost but if you think without learning you will be in danger so you have to both learn and think what does that mean well confucius is saying if you learn if you study things you memorize things but you never think about what you've learned you're just going to have a head full of meaningless facts and quotations and you'll never think about what they really mean or what they mean for you and your life on the other hand confucius says well look if you think without learning you're going to be in danger why well my own perspective on this is i know so many people who say i like to think outside the box but i know a lot of people who think they like to think outside the box but it turns out that they are thinking right inside the box they couldn't get any more inside the box than they are why because they're thinking without learning they've never bothered to learn where the outlines of the box are they've never learned the best that has been thought and said in their own tradition so their ideas are not original and they're in danger because they think they're saying original things when they're really not now as a result confucius asked a lot of his disciples he expected them to do a lot of thinking on their own and that's why when you read the analytics it is challenging because you have all these quotations and you have to think for yourself about what they mean and how they apply to your life you can't just passively absorb them and confucius expressed this by saying i will not open the door for a mind that is not already striving to understand nor will i provide words to a tongue that is not already struggling to speak if i hold up one corner of a problem and the student cannot come back to me with the other three i will not attempt to instruct him again and the dedication you see in a lot of chinese students even today reflects this confucian spirit that you have to ask a lot of your students well what is it that we're learning when we learn and then think and what is it that's transforming us ethically a lot of it is tradition so unsurprisingly confucius emphasized the importance of tradition he even said at one point i transmit rather than innovate i trust in and love the ancient ways i think confucius certainly did trust in and love the ancient ways but i think he's uh in saying that he transmits rather than innovate i think he means that but no great thinker transmits without innovating at least a little bit because confucius saw things in his tradition that other people had missed and often confucius would be willing to go along with a change in tradition if he could see the point to it so he said a ceremonial cap of linen is prescribed by the rights but these days people use silk this is frugal and i follow the majority so confucius was willing to accept changes in ritual if there was a point to them or changes in tradition so for example in this case he said people are changed to a more frugal way of doing things there's no need to waste a lot of money on this so we're just going to go along with this change in general confucius said if you keep fresh the old while appreciating the new then you are fit to be a teacher and this brings out the two aspects of confucianism that yes you're learning from tradition yes you're trying to take the best of the past and use that to positively transform the present but in order to do that you have to understand what the present is and you have to think for yourself about what the significance of the tradition is in our present context another of the deep insights that confucianism has that's only recently been rediscovered by western developmental psychology is the importance of the family in nurturing virtue so confucius thought and his later followers thought that it's in the family by loving and being loved by others that you develop compassion it's in the family by respecting the boundaries of others and having others respect your boundaries that you learn virtues like integrity and righteousness and the way one of confucius's disciples put this in the analects is he said a young person who is filial and respectful of his elders rarely becomes the kind of person who is inclined to defy his superiors and there's never been a case of one who was disinclined to defy his superiors stirring up rebellion the gentleman applies himself to the roots once the roots are firmly established the way will grow might we not say that filial piety and respect for elders constitute the root of goodness so if you want to make a person with good character confucius says the best way to do that is through good families now confucians knew that sometimes you have people who have bad families who turn out to be great like sage king shun had a really dysfunctional family but he turned out to be a sage but confucius says the key to a good society is good families and because families are so important in nurturing virtue we have special obligations to family members that sometimes can trump our obligations to others and i remember i said that confucius went from state to state trying to find a ruler who would put into effect his ideas about government and family and ritual and things like that well he visited the state of shah and the duke of shah bragged to confucius saying among my people there's one we call upright gone when his father stole his sheep he reported him to the authorities so the duke is bragging about how upright people are that a guy would even turn in his own father for stealing confucius will have none of it confucius replied among my people those whom we consider upright are different from this fathers cover up for their sons and sons cover up for their fathers uprightness is to be found in this now this is a famous but also controversial passage in the analytics some people look at this including some people in china and they say we'll see confucianism just encourages nepotism and favoritism we need an ethic that is more universal more impartial other people like me think this is pretty wise i mean i had you know very uh upright parents but if i found out that my father say we're cheating on his income tax i wouldn't turn him in why not well he's my father and i think because of i try to dissuade him from doing that and confucius says you can try to dissuade your parents when they do wrong but you have special obligations to friends and family that you don't have to others so to review the six themes of confucianism that you find not just in the analects the sayings of confucius but also in later confucianism happiness in the everyday world as opposed to transcending the everyday world virtue as a way of not just cultivating your character but virtue as a way of governing others rather than rule by force learning as a way of ethically transforming the individual not just a way of getting a career or not just a way of learning a bunch of random facts but learning to ethically transform yourself ritual as a model for all human actions learning to treat everything you do with the sacrality that you would treat any religious ritual tradition as a potential source of insights about how to deal with problems in the modern world and the family as both the nursery of virtue and a place that gives you special obligations that you don't have to complete strangers and these themes continue to be important in confucianism for all the thousands of years since confucius passed away now what do people think about confucius particularly in china now now we're going to say a little bit about some modern attitudes towards confucius to understand contemporary attitudes towards confucius we need to get a little bit of a running start so i'm going to start in the qing dynasty which is the last imperial dynasty before the the end of the imperial system in the beginning of really modern 20th century china and this is a portrait of the kang shi emperor and he was one of the early emperors in the dynasty he lived from 1661 to 1722 and during his reign china was at a height culturally and politically the boundaries of china were as wide as they'd ever been taiwan became part of china tibet became part of china mongolia was part of china during this era korea was largely under chinese control during this period but less than two centuries after the death of this kangshi emperor there was a complete collapse of the imperial system as it existed for thousands of years and it never returned what happened well that's a whole story in its own right but one of the key things was the opium wars so british merchants were making a killing both literally and metaphorically in china by selling opium to people in china they were growing it in india exporting it to china and creating a market for opium products by addicting people in china and when china tried to cut off the opium trade what happened was that the british declared war on china and forced china to allow the opium trade now as it turned out for complicated historical reasons the west was more technologically advanced and militarily advanced at this point than china was so this is a contemporary uh painting of the hms nemesis which if you're a naval history buff is the first steam-powered ocean-going warship and it easily destroyed the the chinese navy's wars junks and the british military army on land also easily defeated the chinese in both the first and the second opium war with the result among other things that hong kong was ceded to the united kingdom for more than a century and once the comparative weakness of china militarily was exposed western powers came in and started literally carving up china into spheres of influence where these foreign powers effectively controlled parts of china the phrase diplomats used openly was they said we're cutting up the chinese melon and so this map shows you by color coding how different countries control different parts of china well there's a long bloody process in a civil war that occurs after this but eventually the communists won on the mainland uh foreigners uh had been expelled and here we see mao announcing the founding of the people's republic of china from the gate of heavenly peace the tiananmen in 1949. eventually though mao's rule led to violent suppression of anything that was considered to be capitalistic or futile and nobody was considered more futile than confucius so this is a memorial tablet from the temple to confucius in his supposed hometown of chufu and if you look on it you can see some graffiti and what the graffiti was put on it by red guards radical students during the cultural revolution and if we translate it it says revolution is not a crime and they've left the graffiti there as a reminder of the excesses of the cultural revolution this radical left-wing movement in china from 66 to 76. this is a propaganda poster of mao during the cultural revolution and those are copies of the so-called little red book the quotations of chairman mao millions of these were distributed in china during the cultural revolution and the students were encouraged to go out and uh you know root out the last vestiges of capitalism and feudalism from chinese society interesting thing about the the little red book it's literally the recorded sayings of chairman mao and here on the right we have the analects of confucius which is literally the categorized sayings of master khan well isn't that a coincidence so mao although he was nominally anti-confucian in distributing a collection of his sayings which were typically short pithy utterances was actually putting himself in the position of confucius and trying to replace him but there are important differences between the political philosophies of confucius and maoism for example confucius said the virtue of a gentleman is like the wind and the virtue of the petty person is like the grass when the wind moves over the grass the grass is sure to bend in other words the transformative effect of virtue is subtle and it's persuasive rather than coercive whereas mao says every communist must grasp the truth political power grows out of the barrel of a gun well mao passed away in 1976 and he was replaced by deng xiaoping who was a much more moderate ruler and china opened up to the west and also instituted some capitalist reforms this is an image of the puudong district of shanghai and this photograph is from the 1980s and then about 25 years later that's what the same district looks like after 25 years of more moderate rule after the fall of mao well so mao was anti-confusion what is the chinese government's attitude been now in chinese society's attitude been this is professor yudhan and she published first she gave some public lectures and then she published a book in chinese insights into the analects which has now been translated into english as confucius from the heart and udon's book was a surprise bestseller when it came out in the early 2000s in china and this reflected the fact that as china has moved away from the excesses of the cultural revolution there's a real hunger on the part of the average chinese person for positive portrayals of confucianism the chinese government is getting in on the act this is a stamp i actually have this stamp at home it's from a series ancient thinkers and it's a chinese government stamp honoring confucius of course there are confucius institutes around the world they don't primarily teach confucian thought but just the fact that they use the name of confucius is a real change and the current paramount ruler of china xi jinping has repeatedly praised confucianism and said that even communists can learn from it in fact he says that the communist party is really the protector of the genuine chinese tradition which includes confucius so the current leader of china is very pro-confucianism so where does this leave us more than two thousand uh 500 years after the death of confucius himself is confucius the figure of confucius and is confucianism as a movement is it going to continue to be something that inspires great minds that will gain the attention of the greatest thinkers and have a positive influence on the world or is it as people suggested during the cultural revolution an outmoded old-fashioned feudalistic idea that justin encourages worship of the past feudalism and a lack of innovation well personally as a historian i've seen confucianism flourish and thrive in multiple economic and social contexts over 2500 years so i'm inclined to think that confucianism probably still has another 2 500 years in it thank you for listening this is professor brian van norton of vassar college and this has been one day university with who was confucius and what did he really say i look forward to hearing your questions in just a few moments thank you well thank you all for your wonderful questions i'm going to answer as many of them as i can uh one great question i got was at what point in history did the analects become known to those outside of china or east asia great question jesuit missionaries came to china uh in the early 17th century and they want they were fascinated by the indigenous religious traditions of china and at first they were especially interested in buddhism and in fact early jesuit missionaries dressed like buddhist monks at first because they wanted to fit in but then eventually they became they discovered that the leading people in chinese society took confucianism very seriously so they started to learn about confucianism and they wanted to write about kunsa uh if the this figure back to people in europe and at that time everyone wrote in latin so they came up with a latinization of kungsa's name which was confucius and that's the name that we often know this figure by now in the west and uh so they that's when the first knowledge of confucius came back to europe jesuit missionaries writing in the 17th century at first in latin but everybody read latin and people were fascinated when they first read about confucius and the first translation of the analects the sayings of confucius into a european language was in fact by jesuit missionaries who translated the analects of confucius into latin under the title confucius sanaram philosophist confucius the chinese philosopher and that's really significant because today very few philosophy departments in america or in europe teach confucianism or taoism or buddhism in philosophy departments they don't treat it as philosophy and that's unfortunate because early european philosophers recognized confucius as a genuine philosophical thinker and they treated him as a serious philosophical thinker leiden who's one of the most important early modern western philosophers was a great admirer of confucian philosophy a figure you might not have heard of named christian wolf also was but he was a very influential figure in the german enlightenment he got a lot of notoriety by writing a lecture on the philosophy of the chinese and he said that we could learn from confucius that it was possible to have an ethics without a belief in god and this caused a lot of controversy at the time and then finally a figure again you might not know this name francois kennedy but he was one of the founders of laissez faire economics and he was sometimes referred to as the french or european confucius because of his admiration for chinese thought and he was inspired by the chinese philosophical concept of uwa or non-action to develop the idea of laissez-faire economics so that's when people first found out about confucius in the west in the early modern era particularly in the 17th and 18th centuries there was a real fad of interest in confucianism people immediately recognized chinese thought is philosophical unfortunately their contemporary uh descendants in academia today often don't do so vassar college where i teach is one of the few places in the united states where you can study chinese philosophy in an actual philosophy department great question another question uh is uh did confucius believe in an afterlife did confucius believe in life after death well confucius's comments on this are ambiguous confucius certainly thinks that burial ceremonies and ritual sacrifices to our ancestors are very important but when a disciple asked him about how you could best serve the dead confucius rebuked him by saying you're not even able to serve the living how would you know how to serve the dead so he's redirecting the focus of the disciple away from concerns about the dead and the afterlife to the concerns of the living now one of confucius's later followers a very interesting philosopher named shunza that's x-u-n-z-i shunza he didn't meet confucius he lived a few generations later but he followed confucius's ideas and he this later philosopher schunza said explicitly that the dead are not conscious the reason we perform funerals is to help the emotions of the people who've been left behind and to help them to express their grief the reason that we perform ritual sacrifices to ancestors again it doesn't do anything for any deceased people it's really about expressing the feelings and the emotions of the people who are still living so that became one of the most common views among later confucian philosophers but i'd say confucius at the very least was agnostic about whether there was a there was life after death uh he thought there was still a point to the rituals that we performed though so for example um my parents remains are in arlington national cemetery and when i'm in washington um i visit them and i report to them about the uh you know the good news about things that are happening in our family and events in our family uh and i think confucius would approve of that very much and he'd say well look the really important thing is that in doing this you're reminding yourself of all the sacrifices that your parents made for you and you're committing yourself to being the best father and the best son uh in continuing the the traditions of your family that you can and whether or not there's spirits who are listening and enjoying it well maybe there are but the important thing is that you're reminding yourself the debt you owe to your ancestors for all they did to you another great question someone asked how would you compare confucius's tenants to the buddhas terrific question now there's some dispute about the the era in which the buddha lived one plausible yes would be the sixth century bce for the buddha which makes them a slightly older uh contemporary of confucius but the teachings of the buddha and the teachings of confucius are really very different so for example um you know one way of understanding buddhism is it's about letting go of your attachments to this world now there are a lot of different ways to interpret the buddhist tradition but certainly one of the most influential ways has been the buddhism is about letting go of attachments to your physical body letting go of your attachments to individual other people letting go of attachments to even physical pleasure now buddhism came to china centuries after confucius died and during this later period uh confucius tended to be sorry that's my dog diego who has decided to kick right now to be a bad dog diego would you please come here please come here sorry about this uh this is my naughty french bulldog um so what the buddhists said uh what the confucian said about the buddhists is they said well the buddhists are trying to escape from this world whereas we confucians are trying to make this world the best we can so we're trying to live the best we can in this world as opposed to buddhists we're trying to escape now maybe that's unfair to buddhists but you know that was the confucian critique and in particular confucians were very upset about the fact that buddhist monks practice celibacy because confucians are big believers in the family and keeping the family line going and so for confucians the buddhist practice of celibacy was almost a heresy another great question uh was oh this is a very learned question is confucius a part of the axial age the phrase axial age as the questioner is referring to uh refers is a concept from philosopher carly jospers and carl jaspers was an influential 20th century german philosopher and carl josper's pointed out that there's something really interesting about the group of philosophers confucius socrates the buddha and jesus in that we have these four figures each of whom starts a major world historical tradition and at the same time we don't have any writings that are directly from each of these people jesus didn't write down the new testament confucius didn't write down the analytics the buddha didn't write down his own sutras socrates we only know him from things like the dialogues of plato and some other early works so each of them is really important but none of them wrote down their own philosophy so we only know them through the lens of their later followers and jasper said that there was an axial age in history when major traditions across different geographical eras all at about the same time develop these major foundational text the foundational text of christianity the foundational texts of the western and chinese and buddhist philosophical traditions so yes and you could count confucius as a part of that and in each of these cases a really profound tradition develops of the very different ways people interpret these seminal thinkers so people interpret jesus in different ways people interpret confucius in different ways i have my own line on confucius people have their own interpretations of the buddha so excellent question very true confucius was a part of carl josper's axial age where the major trends across different areas of the world at about the same time were established someone else asks would life in the west have changed if more of us have been exposed to confucius and other eastern philosophers it's a great question it's it's hard to know what the effect would have been in a way we have been changed by exposure to thought like confucius as i was saying earlier when people in the west heard about confucianism confucius became kind of a hero of the european enlightenment because people saw in confucius what they saw as a secular philosopher who nonetheless gave a powerful vision of guiding the world by wise people people because the confucian vision was after all to cultivate virtue in people and then to put those virtuous people into positions of authority and the way you cultivated that virtue was through education and discussion and so philosophers understandably in the the west really enjoyed this and so that did kind of influence the philosophical ideas in the early enlightenment in the west so in a way we have would we be better in some ways if confucius had a greater influence well confucius teaches us that we should not inflict on others that which we ourselves do not like i think if we all lived up to that more it'd be a better place but then if we all lived up to the deepest highest teachings of buddhism or christianity or islam or judaism i think we'd be better people too i think the deepest teachings of all these traditions if you sincerely follow them are really very powerful and very moving um someone asks a very nice detailed question how many years did confucius wander after he resigned his position in the state of lou um that's a great question there's a little bit of uncertainty in dating but we think about 13 years so he was wandering for a very long time and of course we wish we had even more details about his travels as i was saying during my talk we know that uh he his life was threatened at a certain point we know that he and the disciples almost starved the analytics includes many interesting conversations between confucius and the rulers of various states so we do have a sense of what this was like but i'm sure there was a lot of rich detail that we just don't know about anymore a delightful question someone asked is your dog's name confucius no my dog's name is diego francis xavier van norden he's a french bulldog and as we're seeing here he's a real attention hog um and whenever i'm on zoom he wants to get into part of the action he starts barking until i bring him up so unfortunately my wife had to run an errand so she couldn't run in her farms for me on diego um we had a previous french bulldog whose name was marcus aurelius norton after the famous stoic philosopher um let's see what other i think might have time for one or two more excellent questions i wish i had time for all of them wasn't it unusual to live over 70 years in confucius this time yes it was but uh one thing we know about early civilizations is childhood mortality was extremely high and so that's why interestingly in a lot of early texts like the analytics confucius doesn't talk too much himself about how you raise small children and one possible reason for this is that most small children sadly didn't survive as infant mortality rates decline in later chinese tradition you actually get a lot of interesting discussion about how to raise children and my colleague aaron klein at georgetown university has written a a really a wonderful book about confucian and western views about how to raise children called families of virtue that i'd recommend if you're interested in that but the the upshot here is if you the average life expectancy in ancient times was fairly low but if you made it out of childhood you you might have a reasonable chance especially uh if you know like confucius um you know you were fortunate enough to gain a position in government for at least part of his career you might live to be to be quite old you might have enough food um and housing and clothing to live to be quite old um it's kind of a nice reminder of the benefits we get from things like vaccination that childhood mortality is so low now because most people you know get vaccinated um so let's see might have time for one more question oh they're also good i don't know which ones to uh to pick um but here's one last great question could you compare and contrast the analytics with ecclesiastes from the bible i love the book of ecclesiastes from the bible it seems to me like ecclesiastes is a more somber uh picture than i get from the analects i didn't have much time to talk about it today but confucius was the kind of figure who would make jokes even about uh himself um you know he uh you know once one of his disciples said that was citing a very pretentious important text in a particular context and confucius thought it was a bit extreme and confucius said you know you're kind of using a hatchet to kill a chicken here because the disciples being a little pretentious and the disciple defended himself as if confucius had you know personally attacked him very deeply if you just said i was only joking i was just teasing you so i kind of the impression i get at confucius is a guy who's he's very aware of the suffering in the world and cares about the suffering in the world and he feels like we have an obligation if we're lucky enough to be well educated to work to make the world a better place but at the same time he's a person who can crack a joke and you know he can laugh at his own mistakes um and someone once said you know one of the disciples said people asked me to describe you master what should i say and he said i'll just say that i'm a person who has so much fun reading and teaching that he doesn't notice the onset of old age and to me that's a that's a nice kind of example of what confucius is like and also i think some good advice for us in general i'm afraid we're about out of time again i'm brian van norton of vassar college this has been one day university with a lecture on who was confucius and what did he really say and my special guest lecturer today is diego francis xavier van norden my french bulldog i hope you enjoyed his unexpected visit thank you very much for your time and also for your great questions