CONFUCI. — Italianized form, from the Chinese Ccomfuze [K'ung Fu-tzu], meaning “The Master (or the Philosopher) Ccom,” subsequently adopted by almost all Western languages, under which the Jesuit Matteo Ricci (v.) around 1600 made the Chinese sage known to Europe. Born in 551 B.C. in the ancient city of Tsou, approximately 25 km southeast of the district of Szushui in the vicinity of Yenchow, in what was formerly the principality of Lu and corresponds in part to the present province of Shantung. His father, at the age of more than 70, had married a fifteen-year-old girl, and from their union C. was born. He, though not his father, had the surname Ccom [K'ung], the personal name Cchieu [Ch'iu], that is, hill, and the agnomen Ciomni [Chung-ni], meaning second-born hill with a crater, from the shape of his skull, which was said vaguely to resemble a hill with steep slopes and a concavity at the summit. Very little is known about his childhood and youth. Orphaned of his father at the age of three and of his mother after the age of twenty, he lived constantly in poverty, although his family traced its lineage back to the ancient kings of the second dynasty (1558–1049 B.C.). Like his father, he was tall, exceeding two metres in height, which caused him to be called “the giant.” From the marriage he contracted at about the age of twenty, he had a son who lived for half a century, from 532 to 483 B.C.
He soon found himself surrounded by numerous and ardent disciples, the so-called “disciples of the gate,” named after the gate leading to the private apartments at the far end of the courtyard where the master held his lessons. He sat with his face turned toward the south and was raised several steps above the assembly of disciples. They paid as a very modest fee a bundle of ten slices of salted meat, an expression that later came to mean “honorarium.” There has been talk of 3,000 disciples, a figure probably exaggerated; among them, 72 were the favorites, and of these 10 were the flower of the school. He demanded much reflection and used to say: “I teach nothing to one who makes no effort to understand; I do not help to express himself one who does not strive to speak; if, after I have explained one corner of the matter, someone is unable to find the other three corners, I do not repeat the matter” (Discourses of C., VIII, 8). Of the six liberal arts that Chinese youths studied from the ages of ten to twenty—namely, dancing, target shooting, chariot driving, writing, calculation, and music—C. taught only the last three. He took pride in inventing nothing new, but only transmitting the pure doctrine of antiquity. “I transmit and do not invent; I have faith in antiquity and consecrate my love to it” (Discourses of C., II, 14), he declared, content to transmit to posterity the exact interpretation of the true thought of the ancients.
The China of C.’s time was a feudal China, divided into a great number of small states, at least a hundred of which lay in the basin of the Yellow River. Over them reigned a king of the already declining Ceu [Chou] dynasty, whose sovereignty in practice was merely nominal. The king resided in the capital of Loyang, present-day Honan, in the province of the same name. Not before the year 517 B.C. did C. go to the court of the Ceu in order to study antiquity there more thoroughly. Indeed, from this visit he gained a great and profound admiration for the ancient sages, especially for the duke of Ceu (11th century B.C.), brother of the first king
of the third dynasty. According to the suspicious accounts of Taoist authors, whose purpose was to humiliate the sage and his school, during this stay in the capital C. is said to have met Laoze [Lao Tzu] and to have received a severe rebuke from him. Returning to his homeland, C. continued to teach the disciples who now flocked to him even from the most distant regions. From 513 to 501 he studied deeply the poetry, history, ceremonies, and music of the country.
Between 501 and 499 he first accepted the office of governor of a city, then that of superintendent of public works, and finally that of minister of justice. It is said that while he was minister, everything proceeded excellently: in men, sincerity and fidelity were admired, and in women, chastity and submissiveness; not even the merchants would have dared to deceive people about prices. Thus, in a short time, C. became the idol of the people and the subject of popular songs. But the neighboring states were alarmed by this. With a government directed by such a minister, it was said, the principality of Lu would easily gain supremacy over the other states and could therefore threaten to annex them. To avert this threat, care was taken to distract the prince of Lu and his ministers from the concerns of government. For this purpose, 80 beautiful dancers and 40 four-horse chariots of excellent horses were sent to the prince. The prince fell into the trap and C., seeing the futility of his efforts to bring him back to better sentiments, preferred to leave his homeland and travel through various other states in the hope of encountering someone who would heed his counsels of sound politics: he wanted to be the bell that calls people together to hear the truth. The bell did indeed ring, but unfortunately very few listened to him. He said: “If someone wished to make use of me, after one year there would already be good results, and after three I would be capable of establishing a perfect government” (Discourses of C., XIII, 10).
After 14 years of voluntary and ultimately fruitless exile, C. was recalled to his homeland in 483, at the age of 69. The other five years of life that remained to him were no happier than those already past. Since no public office was entrusted to him, he set about carefully revising the ancient classical books to which his name would be forever linked.
In the first days of the fourth moon of 479, C., already ill and aware that the end was near, leaning on a cane, walked slowly before the door of his house and hummed through his tears: “The highest mountain is about to fall; — The main beam is about to fall; — The sage is about to wither!”
Indeed, seven days later he was dead. He was buried in a place now called the “forest of C.,” 1 km north of the city of Küfow, still in Shantung; an enclosing wall several kilometres long surrounds the ground containing the tomb. A writer of the 3rd century A.D. says that it was surrounded by a hundred trees, each different from the others, trees said to have been planted by the disciples, who had brought the saplings from their native lands.
The fullest moral portrait of C. is given to us by his disciples in the Discourses of C., especially in chapter 10. In public, in the temple, and at court, he was constantly a man of propriety, although in private he was very simple. Full of veneration and respect for the prince, he spoke with complete freedom to the higher officials and with great firmness to those below them. He used to say: “I am content even if I must feed on coarse food, if I have only water to drink, and if my arm must serve me as a pillow; but riches and honors acquired by unjust means are for me like drifting clouds” (Discourses of C., VII, 15). These and other similar natural virtues led certain Christian writers, or writers friendly to Christianity, of the 17th century to think that, had he known the Gospel message, C. would have been the first to ask for Baptism; this is reported by the Sicilian Jesuit Prospero Intorcetta in his Confucius Sinarum philosophus, Paris 1687, p. cxix.
The fortune of C., almost insignificant during his lifetime, began with his death. The prince of Lu, who had nevertheless been unable to make use of him while he was alive, was the one who...
alive, was the first to sing his praises immediately after his death and to erect a temple to him, where an offering was presented to him each season. At the beginning, the cult did not cross the frontiers of the principality of Lu, but in 57 A.D. it was decreed that sacrifices should be offered to him in the Imperial College and in the principal colleges of the Empire. For some time the cult had as its inseparable object C. and the duke of Ceu; only in 609 A.D. did people begin to erect halls solely in honor of C. There then arose the practice, which continued until the beginning of the twentieth century, of erecting these monuments, improperly called temples, in honor of C. beside colleges and examination halls. In them there are no statues of idols, but only tablets on which the names of the sage’s disciples and of the foremost representatives of his doctrine are inscribed. Before 1912, twice a year, in spring and autumn, the emperor offered a solemn sacrifice in his honor. Throughout the centuries the emperors bestowed on C. an abundance of titles extolling his learning and virtue. The civil or religious character of the honors rendered by the Chinese to C., and consequently whether such honors were licit or not for converted Catholics, was much debated during the famous Chinese rites controversy (v.). The fact remains, however, that since the Chinese government, in recent years no less than in past centuries, has often and explicitly proclaimed the civil character of such honors, they were declared licit, within certain limits, by Pius XII on 8 December 1939 (cf. AAS, 32 [1940], p. 25). To emphasize their civil character, today in China one pays to enter the temples of C., whereas admission to all other temples is free and unrestricted. A temple of C. is therefore practically regarded as a museum.
Never has a mere mortal exercised such influence over so great a number of men as C. For nearly two millennia, in order to attain any public office in China it was absolutely indispensable to possess a thorough knowledge of the Chinese classics, with which the name of C. was indissolubly linked. The magistrates of ancient China, until the beginning of the twentieth century, were all doctors of Confucian sciences, and of these alone. In the eyes of every good old-style Chinese, C. had the incontestable merit of having preserved for us the literary monuments of antiquity and of having lived a temperate life, so as to be a model for future generations and to be regarded as the ideal of human perfection and learning in China. Mencius and other disciples placed C. far above the ancient emperors Iao [Yao] and Scioen [Shun], who nevertheless, throughout Chinese literature, are held to be the unrivaled models of every virtue; indeed, they went so far as to maintain that since the beginning of the human race no man had ever attained C.’s perfection and learning. The first Chinese historian in chronological order and importance, Semazzen [Szu-ma Ch'ien] (ca. 145–80 B.C.), fully aware of the enormous influence C. had exercised over the entire intellectual world of his country, devoted to him, as early as ca. 99 B.C., one of the most important and longest chapters of his Historical Memoirs. This chapter is not found among the biographies of famous men, as is the case with Laoze, but in the section dealing with the various houses of the feudal lords; the historian thus regarded him as an uncrowned king, the king of thought. His account, which is the most complete monograph of the great sage and the one most worthy of consideration, the source on which all other Chinese and non-Chinese authors drew until the modern period, concludes with this eulogy: «Numerous in the world are those who, like sovereigns and sages, were honored during their lifetime and fell into oblivion after their death. But C., although merely a private individual, has transmitted his fame for more than ten generations (in fact, in the years 91–87 B.C., when this historian was writing, it was the eleventh generation after C.). Those who devote themselves to study regard him as a model to imitate. And all those who, from the Son of Heaven to princes and lords, speak in China of the six liberal arts, take him as their model. He may therefore be called the wisest of all».
Such C. has always remained in the eyes of the Chinese,
until 1905, when the ancient system of literary examinations, which had lasted for approximately two millennia, was abolished; thus disappeared the education so intimately bound up with C.’s doctrine. As European sciences and languages penetrated Chinese schools, Confucian doctrines were abandoned; and the “Master” was thereby removed from his two-thousand-year-old pedestal. The final blow came with the fall of the Empire and the establishment of the Republic in 1912, when C. was relegated among obsolete things. Young Chinese who had learned the art of literary criticism at the universities of Europe and America immediately wished to apply it to the classics of China and to C.’s texts: doubt was cast upon the ancient books, supposed later interpolations were sought out, and not a few monuments until then believed to be ancient were demolished. Today C. is not only little or not at all studied, but is frequently reviled and repudiated, especially by young students, who see in him the representative of antiquity and the patron of the monarchy that has passed away. A certain reaction is nevertheless already apparent among well-minded men of letters. Indeed, it is impossible to disregard one who for century after century shaped the minds and customs of so great a nation. - Vedi tav. XII.