We know very little for certain about the life of the Chinese philosopher Confucius. He is said to have been born in 551 BC in China. He may have been a student of the Taoist master Lao Tzu. According to tradition, he began government service and served many roles, including Minister of Crime under Zhao Zishu. Duke Ding in the state of Lu.
However, Confucius and the Duke fell out after the Duke received a present from a neighbouring ruler, 80 beautiful women and 124 horses. The Duke spent all his time riding horses and being entertained by the women, which Confucius found deeply improper for a ruler. So, he left the court and wandered for years.
Around between the third and fifth century BC, Confucius'works were collected into the Analects, a collection of sayings written down by his followers. Some of the morals Confucius taught are easily recognisable, most notably his version of the Golden Rule, do not do unto others what you don't want done to yourself. But some of them also sound very strange or old-fashioned to modern ears, especially to western ones. But we need his advice all the more for this. It serves as an antidote to the troubles we currently face.
Here are a few examples of the words he used to describe Confucius. of what Confucius helps us to remember. 1. Ceremony is important The Analects are filled with strange conversations between Confucius and his disciples like this one. Tse-kung wished to do away with the offering of a sheep. Confucius said, Tse, you love the sheep, I love the ceremony.
At first this is baffling, if not also humorous. Why not save the sheep? But Confucius is reminding Tse and us about the importance of ceremony. In the modern world, we tend to shun ceremony and see this as a good thing, a sign of intimacy or lack of pretension.
But Confucius believed in the value of ceremonies over sheep because he valued what he called ritual propriety. This might seem a very outdated and conservative idea, but in fact many of us long for particular rituals that meal mum cooked for us whenever we were sick, or the yearly birthday outing, or our wedding vows. We understand that certain premeditated, deliberate and precise gestures stir our emotions deeply. Rituals make our intentions clear and they help us to understand how to behave. We should treat our parents with reverence.
In particular, Confucius had a very strict idea about how we should behave towards our parents. He believed that we should obey them when we're young, care for them when they're old, mourn at length when they die, and make huge sacrifices in their memory thereafter. He even said that we shouldn't travel far away while our parents are alive, and should cover for them if they steal a sheep. This attitude is known as filial piety. This sounds strange now, when many of us leave our parents home as teenagers and rarely return to visit.
We may even see them as strangers, arbitrarily thrust upon us by fate. After all, we're not strangers. After all, our parents are so out of touch, so pitifully human in their shortcomings, so difficult, so judgmental, and they have such bad taste in music. Yet Confucius recognised that in many ways, moral life begins in the family.
We cannot truly be caring, wise, grateful and conscientious unless we remember mum's birthday and meet dad for lunch. 3. We should be obedient to honourable people. Modern society is very egalitarian.
We believe that we're all born equal and should ultimately be able to say and do whatever we like. We reject many rigid hierarchical... roles. Yet Confucius told his followers, let the ruler be a ruler, the subject a subject, a father a father, and the son a son.
This might sound jarring, but it is in fact important to realise that there are people worthy of our deep veneration, even our simple and humble obedience. We need to be modest enough to recognise the people whose experience or accomplishments outweigh our own. We should also practice peaceably doing what these people need, ask or command. Confucius explained, the relation between superiors and inferiors is like that between the wind and the grass. grass, the grass must bend when the wind blows across it.
Bending gracefully is in fact not a sign of weakness but a gesture of humility and respect. 4. Cultivated knowledge can be more important than creativity. Modern culture places a lot of emphasis on creativity, unique insights that come to us suddenly, but Confucius was adamant about the importance of the universal wisdom that comes from years of hard work. work and reflection. He listed benevolence, ritual propriety, righteousness, wisdom, integrity as the five constant virtues.
While Confucius believed that people were inherently good, he also saw that virtues like these must be constantly cultivated, just like plants in a garden. He spoke about moral character and wisdom as the work of a lifetime. We can see now why he had such reverence for his elders. Of course, a burst of inspiration may well be what we need to start our business or redo our rough draft or reinvent our life. But if we're being very honest with ourselves, we'll have to admit that we also need to devote more energy to slowly changing our habits.
This, more than anything else, is what prevents us from becoming truly intelligent, accomplished and wise. Confucius died without reforming the decadent duke and his officials. But on the other hand, he was a man of great wisdom. But after his death, his followers created schools and temples in his honour across East Asia, passing his teachings along for over 2,000 years.
Today, millions of people still follow Confucius'teachings as a spiritual or religious discipline, and his thought has been a huge influence on Eastern political ideas about morality, obedience and good leadership. We might find Confucian virtues a bit strange or old-fashioned, but this is what ultimately makes them all the more important. We need them as a corrective to our own excesses.
The modern world is almost surprisingly totally un-Confucian. In fact, it is a very different formal, egalitarian and full of innovation. So we are conversely at risk of becoming impulsive, irreverent and thoughtless without a little advice from Confucius about good behaviour and cheap.