Confucianism

Confucianism Definition

Confucianism is an ethical and spiritual system founded on the teachings of Confucius (551–479 BCE), a teacher rather than a prophet, in sixth-century BCE China. Aimed at harmony with the world and with nature — the ideal of the cultivated “gentleman” — it is a religion of ethics rather than of belief in gods, and its influence has been paramount not only in China but also in Korea, Japan, Vietnam, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan, as a source of learning and a shared ethical code.

Core Teachings

Teaching amid political violence and social disorder, Confucius set out the actions necessary for harmony and order. His sayings, compiled by his disciples in the Analects, became state orthodoxy under the Han dynasty (206 BCE–220 CE) and remained so until 1911. Nobility, he taught, is attained not through inheritance but through correct ritual and acts of filial piety, reciprocity, and righteousness: juniors — subjects, sons — owe loyalty to seniors, while seniors — rulers, fathers — owe benevolence in return. The central Confucian value is ren, “humanity,” which Confucius glossed simply as “to love men.” Its practice rests on shu, reciprocity — “Do not do to others what you do not want them to do to you” — and begins with xiao, filial piety: respect and honour towards parents, elders, and ancestors. For Mencius (c. 371–289 BCE), the “second sage,” filial affection is humanity itself; by extending the respect and tenderness shown within one’s family to the elders and young of other families, the superior person (junzi) travels a spiritual path towards universal humaneness. Mencius also taught that humans are essentially good (original virtue) and that subjects may rightly rebel against unjust rulers — an idea pointedly never adopted in Japan, where loyalty to the Emperor remained paramount. The classic texts are the Four Books (Sishu): the Great Learning, the Doctrine of the Mean, the Analects, and the Book of Mencius.

Is Confucianism a Religion?

Chinese scholars generally treat Confucianism (ruxue or rujia thought) as a school of philosophy, and the question of its religious status scarcely arises: Chinese tradition draws no sharp line between moral and religious teaching, grouping Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism as the sanjiao — better rendered “three teachings” than “three religions.” Western scholars, by contrast, have often classed it as a religion; Weber’s study is titled The Religion of China: Confucianism and Taoism (1951). New Confucian thinkers such as Liang Shuming (1893–1988) insisted it is not a religion, arguing that in China moral teaching took religion’s place, while others, such as Lao Siguang, concede that it performs religious functions; Ren Jiyu placed the thought of the great Song synthesiser Zhu Xi (1130–1200) — whose doctrine of the Supreme Ultimate (taiji) is profoundly transcendental — within the realm of religion. Neo-Confucianism (lixue) of the Song and Ming dynasties absorbed elements of Taoist and Buddhist thought, and although Confucius and Mencius did not promote belief in the supernatural, the ancient idea of Heaven persisted as the moral absolute: “He who exerts his mind to the utmost knows his nature. He who knows his nature knows Heaven.”

Confucianism and the Chinese State

For many centuries Confucianism was the creed of the Chinese bureaucratic class — the mandarins or literati, recruited through competitive examinations in classical learning — and it played a decisive role in legitimating Chinese society and sustaining a unified culture, surviving even conquest by “barbarian” outsiders. This official Confucianism, which served the state and its bureaucracy, must be distinguished from Confucianism as an ethical and spiritual system. At the end of the Qing dynasty, Kang Youwei (1858–1927) led a failed attempt to make Confucianism a state religion comparable to Christianity in the West, undone partly by its close association with the imperial system overthrown in 1911. After the May Fourth Movement of 1919 Confucianism was attacked as feudal and blamed for China’s backwardness, while Western-educated thinkers developed “New Confucianism” (xin ruxue); its best-known third-generation representative, the Harvard scholar Tu Wei-ming, has been prominent in presenting Confucianism to the West and in interreligious dialogue.

Confucianism as Lived Religion

Confucianism today is actively practised as an organised religion mainly outside mainland China. In the popular Chinese pantheon Confucius figures as a minor god who blesses educational achievement — parents in Malaysia and Taiwan still bring children starting school to worship at his temples — and memorial rites are held in Confucian temples and associations, especially on his birthday. Confucian associations (Kongjiao Hui) promoted the worship of Confucius in Malaya and, above all, Indonesia, where organisational consolidation from 1918 onward, official recognition in 1965 as one of the country’s six religions, and the supreme council MATAKIN produced an institutional “Confucian Religion” complete with Sunday services, the Four Books as scripture, Confucius as nabi (prophet), and Heaven as Almighty God. Confucian teaching also anchors syncretic Chinese religious organisations such as the Sanyi Jiao (“Three-in-One Doctrine”) and Dejiao.

Sociological Significance

Confucianism functions for the Chinese much like a “civil religion” in Robert Bellah’s sense — a collection of beliefs, symbols, and rituals institutionalised in a collectivity — diffused through social life even among those unaware of its origins. Bellah argued in Tokugawa Religion (1957) that Confucianism may have played a role in Japan’s modernisation comparable to the Protestant ethic in northern Europe, contradicting Weber’s more sceptical assessment, and others have credited its emphasis on harmony, respect for authority, loyalty, benevolence, meritocracy, literacy, and scholarship with underpinning the economic rise of Japan and the East Asian newly industrialising countries — though attributing economic success to a single ideological system is simplistic. Its influence persists in the Confucian doctrine of fate (“exert your utmost in moral endeavour and leave what is beyond control to fate”), which sustains striving and hope, and in social relations — between parents and children, teachers and students, elders and juniors, officials and people — even in mainland China, where it survived Maoist condemnation. Against the Western assumption that Chinese society subordinates the individual to the group, Fei Xiaotong’s Earthbound China (1947) described Chinese relationships as self-centred within a web of relations, and de Bary notes that Confucianism does not sacrifice the individual to the community. With communism’s ideological decline leaving a spiritual vacuum, and globalisation increasing the need for interreligious dialogue, it is Spiritual Confucianism — not the feudal official variety — to which Chinese at home and in the diaspora continue to turn. As the rhetorical question has it: how Chinese can Chinese culture be without Confucianism?