Chinese Literature | Page 3

spirits?"
Yet this was the man the impress of whose teaching has formed the
national character of five hundred millions of people. A temple to
Confucius stands to this day in every town and village of China. His
precepts are committed to memory by every child from the tenderest
age, and each year at the royal university at Pekin the Emperor holds a
festival in honor of the illustrious teacher.
The influence of Confucius springs, first of all, from the narrowness
and definiteness of his doctrine. He was no transcendentalist, and never
meddled with supramundane things. His teaching was of the earth,

earthy; it dealt entirely with the common relations of life, and the
Golden Rule he must necessarily have stumbled upon, as the most
obvious canon of his system. He strikes us as being the great Stoic of
the East, for he believed that virtue was based on knowledge,
knowledge of a man's own heart, and knowledge of human-kind. There
is a pathetic resemblance between the accounts given of the death of
Confucius and the death of Zeno. Both died almost without warning in
dreary hopelessness, without the ministrations of either love or religion.
This may be a mere coincidence, but the lives and teachings of both
men must have led them to look with indifference upon such an end.
For Confucius in his teaching treated only of man's life on earth, and
seems to have had no ideas with regard to the human lot after death; if
he had any ideas he preserved an inscrutable silence about them. As a
moralist he prescribed the duties of the king and of the father, and
advocated the cultivation by the individual man of that rest or apathy of
mind which resembles so much the disposition aimed at by the Greek
and Roman Stoic. Even as a moralist, he seems to have sacrificed the
ideal to the practical, and his loose notions about marriage, his
tolerance of concubinage, the slight emphasis which he lays on the
virtue of veracity--of which indeed he does not seem himself to have
been particularly studious in his historic writings--place him low down
in the rank of moralists. Yet he taught what he felt the people could
receive, and the flat mediocrity of his character and his teachings has
been stamped forever upon a people who, while they are kindly, gentle,
forbearing, and full of family piety, are palpably lacking not only in the
exaltation of Mysticism, but in any religious feeling, generally
so-called.
The second reason that made the teaching of Confucius so influential is
based on the circumstances of the time. When this thoughtful, earnest
youth awoke to the consciousness of life about him, he saw that the
abuses under which the people groaned sprang from the feudal system,
which cut up the country into separate territories, over which the power
of the king had no control. China was in the position of France in the
years preceding Philippe-Auguste, excepting that there were no places
of sanctuary and no Truce of God. The great doctrine of Confucius was
the unlimited despotism of the Emperor, and his moral precepts were

intended to teach the Emperor how to use his power aright. But the
Emperor was only typical of all those in authority--the feudal duke, the
judge on the bench, and the father of the family. Each could discharge
his duties aright only by submitting to the moral discipline which
Confucius prescribed. A vital element in this system is its conservatism,
its adherence to the imperial idea. As James I said, "No bishop, no
king," so the imperialists of China have found in Confucianism the
strongest basis for the throne, and have supported its dissemination
accordingly.
The Analects of Confucius contain the gist of his teachings, and is
worthy of study. We find in this work most of the precepts which his
disciples have preserved and recorded. They form a code remarkable
for simplicity, even crudity, and we are compelled to admire the force
of character, the practical sagacity, the insight into the needs of the
hour, which enabled Confucius, without claiming any Divine sanction,
to impose this system upon his countrymen.
The name Confucius is only the Latinized form of two words which
mean "Master K'ung." He was born 551 B.C., his father being governor
of Shantung. He was married at nineteen, and seems to have occupied
some minor position under the government. In his twenty-fourth year
he entered upon the three years' mourning for the death of his mother.
His seclusion gave him time for deep thought and the study of history,
and he resolved upon the regeneration of his unhappy country. By the
time he was thirty he became known as a great teacher, and disciples
flocked to him. But he was yet occupied in