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Response Paper 1: Confucius

Book Response Papers Assignment

This should be a one-half page (approximately 250 word) response. It should not be a summary, but an essay on your intellectual and emotional reactions to the book. This essay should be submitted before you continue on in the course in order to receive feedback that will help improve your future essays. For more detailed instructions on this assignment, see the Book Response Papers section in the Course Organizationsection of the syllabus.

Topic: Confucius

Confucius the Person

Confucius lived from 551 to 479 B.C., as China was beginning to fall into chaos. He was born in 551 B.C., a generation before the Buddha in India, and died in 479 B.C., a decade before the birth of Socrates in Greece. He was born in the state of Lu in modern Shantung. We should note that Confucius did not live during the period of the Hundred Schools, but earlier, during the later Spring and Autumn period of the Eastern Chou. He was born into a minor aristocratic family that provided technological and administrative expertise for the feudal lord who ruled over the small state of Lu.

As a young man, Confucius had considerable political ambition. He originally sought a career in the bureaucracy of his own state. In this he was not selfish or opportunistic; he sincerely believed that he knew how to improve the government. All he needed was a chance to get his foot in the door. But no government would have him. His native state of Lu saw him as too idealistic or as a theoretician with his head in the clouds, utterly unsuited to the real world atmosphere of rough-and-tumble, nitty-gritty administrative politics.

This did not discourage Confucius, however. He wandered from state to state in search of a feudal lord who would employ him and use his talents; but, failing to find such employment, he resigned himself to a career in teaching. He gathered students and groupies around himself. Fragments of his dialogues and discussions with them were written down and survive today in a work known as the Analects, or the Sayings of Confucius. Until A.D. 1949 and the communist takeover of mainland China, every learned Chinese government and gentleman knew the Analects well, the way a devout Christian knows the Gospels and a Muslim knows the Koran.

From the fragmentary accounts in the Analects emerges a picture of Confucius as a man who is concerned first and foremost with morality and good government. His conviction was that good government is based fundamentally in ethics and morals. Thus, he focused on how men ought to act. He did not think that the rulers and subjects of his own age were acting the way they should. For him, there was a gap between what was and what ought to be. In other words, there was a gap between reality and ideal that had to be bridged.

The Religious Thought of Confucius

By now I hope it’s clear that Confucius was above all a philosopher. He knew about but did not dwell on the paradoxical and perplexing questions of our existence. He thought and spoke little about death, the afterlife, or the gods and our relationships with them. For him, this life had enough problems of its own for us to worry about the afterlife or the gods. A famous line in the Analects sums this up: “Pay your respects to the spirits and gods, but keep them at a distance.” Depending on the translation, you can also have this: “By paying your respects to the spirits and gods, you can keep them at a distance.” Regardless of how you translate, one thing is clear: the gods and spirits were not supremely important to Confucius. He had more important and urgent matters to attend to in the here and now than to worry about the realm of the dead and the supernatural. Here is another famous line in the Analects: “Never having understood life, how is it possible to understand death?” (I had this line thrown at me in Taiwan as a missionary.) The question for Confucius is not whether the spirits and gods existed—he probably thought they did; the question for him was what to do with this belief. “Not much,” he seemingly answers.

Confucius was a very practical man with little patience for mysticism. He might have heard of the Upanishads in India and the emphasis there on meditation to fuse your individual self with the Great Self of the universe. He tried it, but he didn’t like it. He said, “I have at times spent a whole day without taking food and a whole night without sleep, occupied with thinking [meditation]. It was of no use. I have found it better to study.”

Confucius would have rather read a good book, especially if it were on the history of the early Western Chou, when all was well in society. Confucius did have a great reverence for Heaven. He saw Heaven more or less as nature, or the way the universe ran itself. For him, Heaven was trying to speak to us. It had something to teach us. Heaven, or the natural universe, was an inspiring model of well-ordered constancy. The seasons came and went according to their pattern, the birds came and went, and crops grew in accordance with their seasons. Human beings should be inspired by this, he believed, and order their society after the pattern indicated to them by nature. Heaven was to be analyzed and then duplicated in the world of man. On one occasion, Confucius seems to have been frustrated with his pupils, who were learning imperfectly. He announced to them he would rather not speak at all. He said:

“I would rather not speak at all.”

“But if you do not speak, sir,” asked Tzu-kung, “what shall we, your disciples, learn from you to be taught to others?”

“Look at the Heaven there,” answered Confucius. “Does it speak? And yet the seasons run their appointed courses and all things in nature grow up in their time. Look at the Heaven there: does it speak?”

Confucius looked back into antiquity and the early days of the Eastern Chou, immediately after the Shang kings were overthrown. For him, the Western Chou, about 1027–770 B.C, was the ideal age. It was the lost paradise when no gap between political reality and ideal could be found, rulers and subjects all knew their proper places and roles, and all was well in the world. Confucius claimed that he was not an innovator or a revolutionary; he merely wanted to restore the present to the good old days of the past. As he said in the Analects, “I transmit the old truth and do not originate anything new. I believe in and love the study of Antiquity.” Confucius thought that Eastern Chou society had lost its way and that people no longer knew or cared about their proper roles in society. He wanted to remedy this. A famous statement of his in the Analects reflected this: “Let the ruler be a ruler, the subject be a subject, the father be a father, and the son be a son.” He made this statement because he believed that the rulers, ministers, fathers, and sons of his own day no longer fulfilled their proper roles. Human government, relations, and roles were, he believed, out of kilter during the Eastern Chou, and Confucius wanted to do something about it.

Response Paper 2: Lao Tzu

Book Response Papers Assignment

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Response Paper 3: Luo

Book Response Papers Assignment

This should be a one-half page (approximately 250-word) response. It should not be a summary, but an essay on your intellectual and emotional reactions to the book. This essay should be submitted before you continue on in the course in order to receive feedback that will help improve your future essays. For more detailed instructions on this assignment, see the Book Response Papers section in the Course Organizationsection of the syllabus.

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The Religious Thought of Confucius

Response Paper 2: Lao Tzu

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