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Eighteen accounts of what is real, each set out in its own terms and each with its own page.
All World Views Does God Exist?The Confucianism timeline in the History of Worldviews.
Streams: All of Confucianism Classical Confucianism Imperial Confucianism Neo-Confucianism New Confucianism
Confucius, Kong Qiu of Lu, taught that a disordered age is healed by ritual propriety, filial devotion, and rulers who govern by virtue rather than force. A minor official and then a wandering teacher, he gathered the disciples whose recorded conversations became the Analects. He died without office and without honor in his own state, and his school, the Ru, carried his teaching into every later century of Chinese life.
Mencius, Meng Ke, defended Confucius's teaching a century after the master's death and gave it its doctrine of the heart: human nature is good, and its four sprouts, compassion, shame, deference, and approval, grow into the virtues as a seed grows. He taught kings that a ruler who starves his people forfeits the Mandate of Heaven, and his book became the second pillar of the classical tradition.
Xunzi, the last great classical master, answered Mencius directly: human nature is bad, and goodness is the product of conscious activity, of ritual training imposed as a carpenter's square corrects warped wood. His essays are the most systematic of the early school, and his students included Han Fei and Li Si, who carried his realism into the Legalist state that unified China against his teaching.
In 221 BCE the king of Qin conquered the last rival state and took the title First Emperor, and in 213 BCE his chancellor Li Si persuaded him to burn the privately held copies of the classics and the histories of the defeated states, keeping only the imperial library's set. Tradition adds the burying of scholars to the burning of books. The Confucian texts survived in hiding and in memory, and the dynasty that tried to erase them fell within fifteen years.
Emperor Wu of Han, acting on the counsel associated with Dong Zhongshu, set Confucian learning above the other schools at court and founded an imperial academy with erudites for each of the Five Classics and fifty disciples. The academy made classical study the road to office, and the road widened for two thousand years: the examinations abolished in 1905 descend from this foundation.
Dong Zhongshu, the Han dynasty's great Confucian statesman, wove the master's ethics into a cosmology of Heaven, Earth, and humanity answering one another, and taught that Heaven warns a failing emperor through portents and disasters. His memorials urged the throne to dismiss the hundred schools and honor Confucian learning alone, and the imperial academy rose on his argument.
Under the Song, scholar-officials remade Confucian teaching in answer to the centuries of Buddhist and Daoist ascendancy. The Cheng brothers, Zhou Dunyi, Zhang Zai, and their circle built a metaphysics of principle and material force and a discipline of self-cultivation meant to recover the Way of the ancient sages. Their renewal, carried to its sum by Zhu Xi, is the movement the West calls Neo-Confucianism.
Zhu Xi gathered the Song renewal into a complete system: principle and material force in all things, the investigation of things as the road to knowledge, and a curriculum of study for every student of the Way. His commentaries on the Four Books became the most influential reading of Confucius ever written, and for six centuries the examination system tested candidates on his words. No teacher after Confucius himself shaped the tradition more.
Zhu Xi lifted four texts above the older Five Classics: the Analects, the Mencius, and two chapters of the Book of Rites, the Great Learning and the Doctrine of the Mean, and published them with his commentaries as the Four Books. The set became the tradition's core curriculum, the first books a student read and the ground of the civil examinations from the Yuan adoption onward.
The Mongol Yuan dynasty, restoring the civil examinations in 1313, decreed that candidates be tested on the Four Books in Zhu Xi's commentaries. The decree fixed one man's reading of the classics as the empire's standard for the next six hundred years, and it made Neo-Confucian orthodoxy the official teaching of China through the Ming and Qing.
The Ming ruled China through the examination orthodoxy Zhu Xi had defined, and inside that order Wang Yangming raised the tradition's last great challenge, teaching that principle is found in the heart itself and that knowledge and action are one. His school split the late Ming world between the Cheng-Zhu orthodoxy of the examiners and the intuition of the heart, a division the Qing inherited.
The Manchu Qing kept the Confucian state whole: the examinations, the imperial cult of Confucius, and the sacred edicts read to every village. Within the order, evidential scholars turned philology against Song metaphysics, and Dai Zhen charged that principle, as the examiners used it, had become an instrument of oppression. The dynasty was the Confucian empire's last and longest late form.
In 1905 the Qing court, pressed by reformers who held the old curriculum responsible for China's weakness before the West, abolished the civil examinations outright. The decree ended the thirteen-hundred-year system that had joined Confucian learning to state power since the Sui and Tang, and it severed the classics from the road to office in a single year.
The revolution of 1911 ended the imperial system itself, and with it the political order Confucian teaching had served and shaped for two thousand years. The republic that followed blamed the tradition for China's humiliations, and the May Fourth generation raised the cry to smash the Confucian shop. The teaching survived the empire, as books, as family ethics, and as a question China's thinkers kept returning to.
In 1958 four scholars in exile from the mainland, Tang Junyi, Mou Zongsan, Xu Fuguan, and Zhang Junmai, published a manifesto for the reappraisal of Chinese culture, declaring that the Confucian tradition carried living resources for democracy and science rather than obstacles to them. The document founded the movement called New Confucianism, which carried the teaching through the twentieth century's anti-Confucian decades.
In the two-thousands the tradition the republic and the revolution had condemned returned to public honor: classics reading for children, Confucius Institutes carrying the master's name abroad, state ceremony at Qufu, and scholars debating political Confucianism in the universities. The revival is contested, between state sponsorship and independent scholarship, and it is still unfolding.
