|
 Confucius, the Latin form given
by Jesuit missionaries to KUNG FU TSEW, was born near the town
of Yen-chow, in what is now the province of Shan-tung. His father,
Shuh Leang Heih, died when Confucius was three years old. He
had been an official of some rank and a soldier of distinguished
courage. It was long remembered that, at the siege of Peih Yang
in 562, having forced his way through the gate with a few followers
who were being overwhelmed by numbers, he held the portcullis
up by sheer strength till they made their escape good. At the
age of seventy he married his second wife, Ching-Tsae, the mother
of Confucius. To her wise counsels the son owed much; and at
her death he honoured her with three years of mourning, first
preparing a burial mound with revival of all ancient rites, under
which his father's remains were also entombed. He was now twenty-three
years old; but he had married four years previously, and his
public life had long since begun. At the age of nineteen he had
held the office of superintendent of the corn market, subsequently
that of public lands. At Twenty-two, we hear of him first as
a teacher. What he taught is uncertain; but attention and intelligence
were firmly exacted from his pupils. "When," he said,
"I have presented one side of a subject to a pupil, and
he cannot from it learn the other three, I do not repeat my lessons."
We may believe that the months of seclusion following his mother's
death were spent in preparation for his life's work.
China, in the time of Confucius, occupied less than a sixth
of its present area. Its inhabitants had established themselves
in the valley of the northern river in districts partly corresponding
to the provinces of Hanan, Shensi, and Shantung. Of the great
southern river as yet nothing was known. For two thousand years
some settled social State had existed here, interrupted occasionally
by long periods of decay and anarchy. One of these periods was
now prevailing. The dynasty of Chow, established near Honan five
centuries before the birth of Confucius, had long been enfeebled,
and the kingdom was parcelled out among contending feudatories.
But with political movements Confucius had little or nothing
to do. His purpose was to effect a moral change by reviving all
that was worth preserving in the ancient traditions of the nation;
to rekindle the sense of duty to man, and of reverence for the
higher powers that controlled man's life. A large part of his
work consisted in gathering these traditions together, and in
putting them into the shape in which they now stand. He said
of himself always that "he was a transmitter and not a maker,
believing in and loving the ancients."
Unlike the course of intellectual growth in other peoples,
the primitive Fetichism of China had never passed into Polytheism.
Supernatural agencies did not assume, as in Greece, India, and
elsewhere, a human shape, but remained in intimate untion with
the visible objects which they pervaded. There were spirits of
the hills and rivers, of the winds and forests, of the earth
and the sky. But of these unseen forces no visible images were
ever formed. The universal institution of ancestral worship was
more deeply rooted, and was carried further than by any other
people. And over all other powers was the vast controlling influence
of the revolving Heaven, supreme object of reverence. It was
the purpose of Confucius to mould these institutions and beliefs
to an ethical purpose; to show how, in the course of two thousand
years of national history, reverent obedience to moral law and
faithful performance of due rites had been followed by the favour
of these unseen powers of Heaven and Earth; disobedience and
transgression by signs of their wrath, and, these being neglected,
by decay and downfall. How far in all this he was the mere transcriber
of primæval wisdom, how far he read into the ancient records
which he compiled and arranged the highest inspirations of his
soul, cannot certainly be known. Enough that, but for him, the
Bible of the Chinese would have been unwritten.
Hardly second in importance to his chronicles of the kings,
was his collection of sacred poems. Many of these are of great
beauty, telling of ancestral sacrifice--of simple village feasts
in which thanks were offered to the spirits of the earth who
made the young corn grow, and ripened the harvest;--of the struggles
of a young ruler to follow the thorny path of duty. Simple words
like these are to be found in them:
- With reverence I will go
- Where duty's path is plain:
- Heaven will I clearly know;
- Its favour to retain
- Is hard. Let me not say,
- Heaven is remote on high
- Nor notices men's way:
- There in the starlit sky
- It round about us moves:
- Inspecting all we do,
- And daily disapproves
- What is not just and true.
Much of the life of Confucius was spent as a thinker, historian,
teacher, moralist, passing from one of the small feudal States
to another, and forming a school of disciples, penetrated like
himself with the desire to revive and perpetuate a higher ethical
standard. But he was no recluse; and was ready to pur principle
in practice when occasion offered. In the five years, 500-496
B.C., he held office as chief-magistrate of the town of Chung-foo,
in the dukedom of Loo. Under his administration stringent ordinances
were made as to sexual relations, as to public and private expenditure,
and as to burial rites. It is said that, before taking office,
he insisted on the execution of the unjust minister who had preceded
him. It is at least certain that a marvelous reformation of justice
and public order took place under his rule. Envy and court intrigue
drove him from power, and the next thirteen years were spent
in homeless wandering from one State to another, often in much
tribulation and with a deep sense of failure and unattained ideal.
In 483 B.C., he was recalled by his prince, and under his protection
the last five years of his life were spent in completing his
task of arranging ancient records. He died in 478 B.C., and the
Worship of his memory began forthwith.
The direct teaching of Confucius is to be found in the four
treatises compiled by his immediate disciples. From these we
gather how real and potent was the synthesis founded on the belief
in spiritual agencies hidden in the world and encompassing man's
life. "Vast and deep," he said, "are the subtle
powers of Heaven and Earth; they are one with the substance of
things and cannot be separated. There are oceans of subtle intelligence
above and about us on every side." In the work entitled
The Great Study, the object is defined as being "to
develop the luminous principle of Reason which we have received
from Heaven; to renew men; to set perfection before us as the
great purpose of life. The princes of old strove to govern their
kingdoms well; with this aim they endeavoured to order their
families rightly: and in order to do this, they sought first
to reform themselves, to render their souls upright, and their
purposes sincere. From the highest to the humblest, duty is the
same for all: self-reformation, self-improvement." "Men
who have reached soverign perfection can teach others how to
obey the law of Heaven: can understand the natures of all living
things, and lead them to fulfil the law of their being. Thus
they form as it were a third power between the Heaven and Earth."
Going into detail, he lays down five heads of mutual obligation
between men: nine rules for their wise government; all springing
from one great principle, the law of Heaven, of Perfection. In
plainer language, his principle disciple summed up the doctrine
of the Master thus: "Have an upright heart: love thy neighbor
as thyself," or again: "There is one word which is
in itself enough as the guide of life: What we would should not
be done to us, let us not do to others."
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| This biography is
reprinted from The New Calendar of Great Men. Ed. Frederic
Harrison. London: Macmillan and Co., 1920. |
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