Environment Planet Possible India bets its energy future on solar—in ways both small and big Grassroots efforts are bringing solar panels to rural villages without electricity, while massive solar arrays are being built across the country. Go Further. Animals Climate change is shrinking many Amazonian birds.
Animals Wild Cities This wild African cat has adapted to life in a big city. Animals This frog mysteriously re-evolved a full set of teeth.
Animals Wild Cities Wild parakeets have taken a liking to London. Animals Wild Cities Morocco has 3 million stray dogs. Meet the people trying to help. Environment COP26 nears conclusion with mixed signals and frustration. Environment Planet Possible India bets its energy future on solar—in ways both small and big.
Environment As the EU targets emissions cuts, this country has a coal problem. Paid Content How Hong Kong protects its sea sanctuaries. History Magazine These 3,year-old giants watched over the cemeteries of Sardinia. Science Coronavirus Coverage What families can do now that kids are getting the vaccine.
Magazine How one image captures 21 hours of a volcanic eruption. Science Why it's so hard to treat pain in infants. Science The controversial sale of 'Big John,' the world's largest Triceratops. Science Coronavirus Coverage How antivirals may change the course of the pandemic. Travel A road trip in Burgundy reveals far more than fine wine.
Travel My Hometown In L. Subscriber Exclusive Content. Why are people so dang obsessed with Mars? How viruses shape our world. The era of greyhound racing in the U.
E , and Ming C. Each had its own contribution to the region. During the Zhou Dynasty, for example, writing was standardized, iron working refined, and famous thinkers like Confucius and Sun-Tzu lived and shared their philosophies. Learn more about the history and rich culture of Ancient China with this curated resource collection. From the mythic origins of the Chinese dynasties to the eventual fall of the last imperial house, Chinese emperors have long fought to maintain control over one of the most enduring empires on Earth.
The rise and fall of various imperial families oversaw waves of innovation and cultural advancement. Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism were the three main philosophies and religions of ancient China, which have individually and collectively influenced ancient and modern Chinese society.
Taoism is an ancient Chinese philosophy and religion that instructs believers on how to exist in harmony with the universe. Join our community of educators and receive the latest information on National Geographic's resources for you and your students. Skip to content. Image Confucian Philosopher Mencius Confucianism is an ancient Chinese belief system, which focuses on the importance of personal ethics and morality. Twitter Facebook Pinterest Google Classroom. Encyclopedic Entry Vocabulary.
Media Credits The audio, illustrations, photos, and videos are credited beneath the media asset, except for promotional images, which generally link to another page that contains the media credit. Media If a media asset is downloadable, a download button appears in the corner of the media viewer. Text Text on this page is printable and can be used according to our Terms of Service.
In certain dialogues, wisdom also connotes a moral discernment that allows the gentleman to be confident of the appropriateness of good actions. In soliloquies about several virtues, Confucius describes a wise person as never confused 9. While comparative philosophers have noted that Chinese thought has nothing clearly analogous to the role of the will in pre-modern European philosophy, the moral discernment that is part of wisdom does provide actors with confidence that the moral actions they have taken are correct.
The virtue of trustworthiness qualifies a gentleman to give advice to a ruler, and a ruler or official to manage others. While trustworthiness may be rooted in the proper expression of friendship between those of the same status 1.
The implication is that a sincerely public-minded official would be ineffective without the trust that this quality inspires. By the Han period, benevolence, righteousness, ritual propriety, wisdom and trustworthiness began to be considered as a complete set of human virtues, corresponding with other quintets of phenomena used to describe the natural world. Some texts described a level of moral perfection, as with the sages of antiquity, as unifying all these virtues.
Prior to this, it is unclear whether the possession of a particular virtue entailed having all the others, although benevolence was sometimes used as a more general term for a combination of one or more of the other virtues e. At other times, Confucius presented individual virtues as expressions of goodness in particular domains of life. Early Confucius dialogues are embedded in concrete situations, and so resist attempts to distill them into more abstract principles of morality.
As a result, descriptions of the virtues are embedded in anecdotes about the exemplary individuals whose character traits the dialogues encourage their audience to develop. The five virtues described above are not the only ones of which Confucius spoke. Yet going through a list of all the virtues in the early sources is not sufficient to describe the entirety of the moral universe associated with Confucius.
Yet there is also a conundrum inherent in any attempt to derive abstract moral rules from the mostly dialogical form of the Analects , that is, the problem of whether the situational context and conversation partner is integral to evaluating the statements of Confucius.
Read as axiomatic moral imperatives, these passages differ from the kind of exemplar-based and situational conversations about morality usually found in the Analects. For this reason, some scholars, including E. Bruce Brooks, believe these passages to be interpolations.
While they are not wholly inconsistent with the way that benevolence is described in early texts, their interpretation as abstract principles has been influenced by their perceived similarity to the Biblical examples. In the Records of Ritual , a slightly different formulation of a rule about self and others is presented as not universal in its scope, but rather as descriptive of how the exemplary ruler influences the people.
In common with other early texts, the Analects describes how the moral transformation of society relies on the positive example of the ruler, comparing the influence of the gentleman on the people to the way the wind blows on the grass, forcing it to bend In a similar vein, after discussing how the personal qualities of rulers of the past determined whether or not their subjects could morally transform, the Records of Ritual expresses its principle of reflexivity:.
That is why the gentleman only seeks things in others that he or she personally possesses. These canonical texts argued that political success or failure is a function of moral quality, evidenced by actions such as proper ritual performance, on the part of the ruler. Confucius drew on these classics and adapted the classical view of moral authority in important ways, connecting it to a normative picture of society.
Positing a parallel between the nature of reciprocal responsibilities of individuals in different roles in two domains of social organization, in the Analects Confucius linked filial piety in the family to loyalty in the political realm:. It is rare for a person who is filially pious to his parents and older siblings to be inclined to rebel against his superiors… Filial piety to parents and elder siblings may be considered the root of a person.
Just as Confucius analyzed the psychology of ritual performance and related it to individual moral development, his discussion of filial piety was another example of the development and adaptation of a particular classical cultural pattern to a wider philosophical context and set of concerns.
This adaptation of filial piety to connote the proper way for a gentleman to behave both inside and outside the home was a generalization of a pattern of behavior that had once been specific to the family.
As kinship groups were subordinated to larger political units, texts began to exhibit hybrid lists of ideal qualities that drew from both sets. He goes on to explain that a child has a dual set of duties, to both a father and ruler, the former filial piety and the other loyalty. This sort of qualification suggests that as filial piety moved further outside its original family context, it had to be qualified to be integrated into a view that valorized multiple character traits.
In my circle, being upright differs from this. A father would conceal such a thing on behalf of his son, and a son would conceal it on behalf of his father.
Uprightness is found in this. In this way, too, Confucius was adapting filial piety to a wider manifold of moral behaviors, honing his answer to the question of how a child balances responsibility to family and loyalty to the state. While these two traits may conflict with one and other, Sociologist Robert Bellah, in his study of Tokugawa and modern Japan, noted how the structural similarity between loyalty and filial piety led to their both being promoted by the state as interlinked ideals that located each person in dual networks of responsibility.
Confucius was making this claim when he connected filial piety to the propensity to be loyal to superiors 1. Of the classical sources from which Confucius drew, two were particularly influential in discussions of political legitimation. This King Wen of ours, his prudent heart was well-ordered. He shone in serving the High God, and thus enjoyed much good fortune.
Unswerving in his virtue, he came to hold the domains all around. The Classic of Documents is a collection that includes orations attributed to the sage rulers of the past and their ministers, and its arguments often concern moral authority with a focus on the methods and character of exemplary rulers of the past.
When it comes to the mandate inherited from King Wen, the chapter insists that the mandate is not unchanging, and so as ruler the son must always be mindful of it when deciding how to act. The Zhou political view that Confucius inherited was based on supernatural intercession to place a person with personal virtue in charge of the state, but over time the emphasis shifted to the way that the effects of good government could be viewed as proof of a continuing moral justification for that placement.
The Han period Records of the Historian biography of Confucius described him as possessing all the personal qualities needed to govern well, but wandering from state to state because those qualities had not been recognized.
The view that through his writings Confucius could prepare the world for the government of a future sage king became a central part of Confucius lore that has colored the reception of his writings since, especially in works related to the Spring and Autumn Annals and its Gongyang Commentary. The biography of Confucius reinforced the tragic cosmological picture that personal virtue did not always guarantee success.
It is a fitting memorial for a simple man, splendid in its understatement. Fergus M. Post a Comment.
0コメント