We have spent the previous units to talk about the name, the entering text, and several pre-Confucian exemplary figures of the Ru tradition. Now, we finally get to Confucius, which the English name of the Ru tradition, Confucianism, refers to. It was the Jesuits who gave us this name “Confucius” in around the 16th century. When they did so, they tried to pronounce how Confucius was honored by Chinese people at that time. Kong is the surname, and Fuzi, means “honored master”; so Confucius sounds like Kong Fuzi, and it was not the original name of Confucius. The original name of Confucius is Kong Qiu, and he has a style name called Zhong Ni. Qiu means a hill, referring to what the forehead of Confucius looked like; Zhong means that Kong Qiu is the second son in the family, and Ni refers to the place where Confucius was born, a hill called Ni in the state of Lu, the state that we have discussed as the place where the offspring of the Duke of Zhou were enfeoffed, and thus, it preserved many ancient rituals and cultures of Zhou Dynasty. I get into these fair details of Confucius’s birthplace and his name because I want to express my general feeling towards Confucius’s life: Confucius is such a real figure that his down-to-earth humanity stands very prominently among the leaders or founders of major world philosophies and religions. Firstly, this very human profile of Confucius is different from founding figures in the Abrahamic religious traditions such as Christianity, Judaism and Islam. From varying scriptures, we read a number of miraculous, nearly or fully divine deeds of these religious founding figures such as Jesus, Moses and Muhammad, which we barely find any resemblance in the case of Confucius. Secondly, the number of historical evidences we can gather about Confucius’s life and thought surpasses other legendary thinkers, the reality of whose life we can normally just guess and speculate. For instance, many scholars doubt whether we can know anything sure about the life of the Gautama Buddha, or the life of Laozi, the founder of philosophical Daoism. However, this down-to-earth human face of Confucius does not mean that his life is merely human, secular, and thus deficient of all transcendent or spiritual commitment. As I will analyze in more details, the concept of “mandate of heaven” (天命) plays a significant role in Confucius’s life, and he indeed tried to live a meaningful and powerful human life with a cosmic consciousness towards what humans can and should do within the entire universe. In this sense, the person of Confucius indicates a lifestyle which we can name as “this worldly spirituality,” and for me, because the lifestyle seems naturally fit into many aspects of human consciousness in modern society, I find it very appealing. The significance of Confucius to the Ru tradition is that he established the first private school in ancient China, and started to systematically study, teach and propagate ancient wisdom with an ultimate purpose of improving the society where he lived in. In other words, before Confucius, although legendary sages such as Yao, Shun and Duke of Zhou had furnished great wisdom for later generations to follow, all educational resources were monopolized by the government, and therefore, no commoner, which referred to people with no noble pedigree, could become an educated person. However, in the time of Confucius, the central authority of Zhou Dynasty was collapsing, and the official school system was crumbling. This situation furnished a historic opportunity for such a highly intelligent and dedicated human being, Confucius, to democratize the educational enterprise so that he could help his society through making education more accessible. This was unprecedented in ancient China, and in this regard, we can compare Confucius to Plato and Aristotle who opened the earliest schools of liberal arts in ancient Greece. This is also the reason why, comparatively speaking, we can have more historical evidences of Confucius’s sayings and deeds, since he had a large group of students and followers, and his main social activities took place within or in connection to his school. Because of the huge impact of Confucius upon the Ru tradition which he helped to continue and incubate, he was almost universally respected by whomsoever pursued their education in any school system in the context of ancient China. So, without any surprise, Protestant missionaries named the Ru tradition as “Confucianism” in the 19th century partly because of the universal respect to Confucius that these missionaries have witnessed among ancient Chinese people, although as I explained before, the name “Confucianism” is a misnomer. Since the last topic to avoid in a course about “Confucianism” is Confucius, we will use two units to talk about Confucius. One is about his life and another is on his thought. There is no better way to decipher Confucius’s life than his own autobiography. My teacher back at Boston, Prof. John H. Berthrong, once told me that this is perhaps the shortest, and also the most famous autobiography ever written by a human being, and it reads like this: The Master said, “At fifteen, I set my mind upon learning (or, establish my will on learning); at thirty, I took my stand in society; at forty, I became free of doubts; at fifty, I understood the Mandate of Heaven; at sixty, my ears were attuned to it [or, I obeyed it (the Mandate of Heaven) ]; and at seventy, I could follow my heart’s desires without overstepping the bounds of propriety (or, without overstepping the due measures).” (Analects 2.4 – Translation based on Slingerland.) Here, I will try my best to explain what Confucius looked like at each of these self-described stages of life. But I also highly recommend you to do the required reading, and watch the required video, so that you can get more details about how scholars have tried to confirm the details of Confucius’s life. So, let’s do it one stage after another: Stage One: “At fifteen, I set my mind upon learning (or, establish my will on learning).” Many books on self-care or success share a truism about human life: unless you want to be successful, you cannot be a successful person. The same goes to Confucius’s life. He said he established his will on learning, and after 60 years of ceaseless learning (Confucius died at the age of 73, the year of 479 B.C.E), Confucius became the most learned person in his time. There are several factors to stimulate Confucius’s will of learning. Firstly, he was born in a declined noble family, and as the youngest son of a concubine to his father, he definitely harbored a will to recover his family’s honor. This will was best represented by one story in his earlier life. It was told by Si Maqian that when Confucius was a teenager, he tried to approach the noble family of Ji Sun, a man that held a great power in the state of Lu, to find needed connections to strengthen Confucius’s own career. However, because Confucius was merely a son of a concubine, and hence, not noble enough, he was rejected. To his great dismay, Confucius realized that he could not rely upon his pedigree to get a stand in the society, and thus, he set his mind upon learning so that he can become a successful man through his own endeavor and hard-working. Secondly, the city where Confucius was raised in was the capital of the state of Lu, where many ancient rituals and cultures were preserved since the offspring of the Duke of Zhou were all enfeoffed in the state. However, Confucius was not allowed into official schools which at that time admitted students exclusively from noble families. Scholars guessed that Confucius’s single-mother, the great woman of Yan Zhengzai, must have played a great role to nurture Confucius’s interest in ancient culture. However, we do know that Confucius was mostly self-taught, and he just sought and tried to grasp any opportunity that he could learn from somebody or somewhere certain knowledge of the past of his country and culture. During the process, he also earned his livelihood while doing ordinary jobs such as being a bookkeeper of a granary and a shepherd. Stage Two: “at thirty, I took my stand in society.” Confucius once described part of the curriculum of his teaching as “Be inspired by poetry, stand on the rituals, and be consummate in music.” (Analects 8.8). Hence, when Confucius said he could stand in society when he was around his thirties, it means he commanded a sufficient amount of knowledge on the ritual system of the time so that he can earn his livelihood, raise his family, and thus, find a position in the society. In a more concrete term, this means that after at least 15 years of self-learning, Confucius was learned enough to open his school. He taught ancient classics, and six arts (ritual, music, archery, charioteering, calligraphy and arithmetic) to people from all backgrounds, and thus, prepared them to get hired by varying governments and noble families. During the process, Confucius could definitely charge his tuition, and became economically independent. To be a teacher, an independent thinker and scholar, and to be economically independent because of teaching and thinking, these were all entirely new phenomena in ancient Chinese history, and the accomplishment of Confucius in this regard cannot be underestimated. Because Confucius took education as his major job, there were many verses in the Analects to indicate his wisdom on education. For instance, the following three principles of Confucius’s philosophy of education are my favorite. First, “learning without a constant teacher” (學無常師), which means you cannot blindly follow any teacher, but instead, you need to learn from anyone who may benefit your learning. Second, “teaching without discrimination,” (有教無類), which means education should be universally access
