Post date: Oct 11, 2016 3:12:57 PM
This is the second post in a series for those who:
1- desire to read or teach Confucius' Analects as philosophy, but
2- lack knowledge about classical Chinese language, culture, history, philosophy.
(The translations from Chinese are my own; bear in mind, I'm still learning and practicing.)
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On Confucius
Confucius is probably the most revered person in East Asian history. He lived roughly 551 to 479 BCE, and people celebrate his birthday annually on September 28. His surname is Kǒng 孔, just as mine is Jones. It means utterance of thankfulness upon the answering of prayers. Because of a small indent on his head, resembling a small hill, and because his mother had prayed to Mount Ni (尼山 Níshān) for a son, his personal name was Qiū 丘, which means mound. Given the Chinese convention of listing surnames first, he would have been born as Kǒng Qiū, and this is how he would have been known as a child. When he turned 20, he received a “style” name (zì 字), marking respect for the transition to adulthood. By virtue of being his father’s second son, his was Zhòngní 仲尼, meaning second son. So his contemporaries would have known him as Kǒng Zhòngní.
"Zǐ " 子 is an honorific title for teachers. It means "Master," similar to our "Professor." So his students would have known him as Kǒngzǐ 孔丘, Master Kong. Rulers of the Han Dynasty (221-206 BCE) wanted to single out Confucius as the super-great master teacher, so they gave him an additional made-up title, "fū" 夫. Whence Kǒng Fūzǐ 孔夫子, which 16th-century Jesuit missionaries Latinized as Confucius. In 1 CE he was given the posthumous title "Supreme Teacher;” in 581 CE, "Grand Master;" in 739 CE, "Prince of Culture."
In 1530 CE, the Ming Emperor Jiā Jìng 嘉靖 revoked all of these titles (and more besides), under the advice to restore honorifics to their historical simplicity for the sake of better following ancient practices. He declared that Confucius be known only as Master Kong, Perfectly Holy Teacher of Antiquity (至聖先師 Kǒngzǐ zhì shèng xiān shī).
Confucius retained his cultural prominence until the 1960s and the Cultural Revolution (文化大革命 wén huà dà gé mìng). Máo Zédōng 毛泽东 and the Communist Party of China (中国共产党Zhōngguó Gòngchǎndǎng) declared Confucian thought oppressive and heretical to social order and prosperity. The Publisher’s Note for Workers, Peasants, and Soldiers Criticize Lin Piao and Confucius (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1976) well represents this revisionary attitude:
Confucius was a reactionary who doggedly defended slavery and whose doctrines have been used by all reactionaries, whether ancient or contemporary, Chinese or foreign, throughout the more than 2,000 years since his time.
Confucius, so interpreted, stands for the oppression of workers by rulers, for the exploitation of the many by the few, and for the subservience of women to men. Far from offering a worthy conception of living well, then, Confucian classics such as Analects transmit poisonous and regressive complacency with injustice.
More recently, however, Confucius’ star is rising among the Chinese once more. In September 2014, while commemorating Confucius’ 2,565th birthday with the International Confucian Association (国际儒学网 Guójì Rúxué Wǎng) in Beijing, Xí Jìnpíng 习近平, President of the People’s Republic of China and leader of the Communist Party of China, said,
Studying Confucius and Confucianism is an important approach to understanding the national characteristics of the Chinese as well as the historical roots of the spiritual world of the present-day Chinese.
Scholars and common folk are renewing their attention toward Confucius, as well. Here, for example, is how Yú Dān 于丹, a professor of media studies, begins Insights into the Analects (《论语》心得, translated into English in 2010 as Confuciusfrom the Heart: Ancient Wisdom for Today’s World):
You should not think that the wisdom of Confucius is lofty and out of reach, or something that people today can only look up to with reverence…. The truths that Confucius gives us are always the easiest of truths.They tell us all how we can live the kind of happy life that our spirit needs.
Her book sold 10,000 copies on its release day and roughly 4 million copies within a year. It continues as a best-seller. Confucius’ stature in contemporary China, similarly, continues to grow. (Google’s Ngram Viewer provides visual confirmation, for the technologically inclined: searching for “Kongzi” yields a graph that increases nearly continuously from 1972.)