The way of Confucius: humaneness and ritual propriety, ordered family and state, and the cultivation of the exemplary person.
Confucianism began as one school among the contenders of the late Zhou and became the ordering tradition of imperial China, then a philosophy argued over by the scholars of every later age. This tree models its classical, imperial, and later forms as first-class entities.
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Classical Confucianism
The teaching of Confucius, Mencius, and Xunzi in the age of the contending states, before any state made it its own.
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Imperial Confucianism
The state doctrine of Han and empire: the classics as the charter of rule, the examinations, and the scholar-official class.
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Neo-Confucianism
The Song and Ming revival that answered Buddhism on its own ground: principle and material force, and Zhu Xi's canon of the Four Books.
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New Confucianism
The modern movement, from Xiong Shili to the 1958 manifesto, which argues the tradition carries the seeds of science and democracy.
Confucianism across the site
History of Worldviews (16) · Religious Art Entries (1)
Sources
Primary
- The Analects of Confucius.
Secondary
- Daniel K. Gardner, Confucianism: A Very Short Introduction (2014).