Confucius
Chinese Literature
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Table of contents
THE ANALECTS OF CONFUCIUS
THE SAYINGS OF MENICUS
THE SHI-KING
PART I—LESSONS FROM THE STATES
PART II.—MINOR ODES TO THE KINGDOM
PART III.—GREATER ODES OF THE KINGDOM
PART IV.—ODES OF THE TEMPLE AND ALTAR
THE TRAVELS OF FÂ-HIEN
THE SORROWS OF HAN
THE ANALECTS OF CONFUCIUS
Translated
into English by William JenningsPRONUNCIATION
OF PROPER NAMESj,
as in French. ng,
commencing a word, like the same letters terminating one.
ai or
ei, as in
aisle or
eider.
au, as in German,
or like ow
in cow.
é, as in
fęte.
i (not followed by
a consonant), as ee
in see.
u (followed by a
consonant), as in
bull.
iu, as
ew in
new.
ui, as
ooi in
cooing.
h at the end of a
name makes the preceding vowel short.
i in the middle of
a word denotes an aspirate (h),
as K'ung=Khung.INTRODUCTIONThe
strangest figure that meets us in the annals of Oriental thought is
that of Confucius. To the popular mind he is the founder of a
religion, and yet he has nothing in common with the great religious
teachers of the East. We think of Siddartha, the founder of Buddhism,
as the very impersonation of romantic asceticism, enthusiastic
self-sacrifice, and faith in the things that are invisible. Zoroaster
is the friend of God, talking face to face with the Almighty, and
drinking wisdom and knowledge from the lips of Omniscience. Mohammed
is represented as snatched up into heaven, where he receives the
Divine communication which he is bidden to propagate with fire and
sword throughout the world. These great teachers lived in an
atmosphere of the supernatural. They spoke with the authority of
inspired prophets. They brought the unseen world close to the minds
of their disciples. They spoke positively of immortality, of reward
or punishment beyond the grave. The present life they despised, the
future was to them everything in its promised satisfaction. The
teachings of Confucius were of a very different sort. Throughout his
whole writings he has not even mentioned the name of God. He declined
to discuss the question of immortality. When he was asked about
spiritual beings, he remarked, "If we cannot even know men, how
can we know 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.
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!