47 Fun Facts About Confucianism

Which Chinese word, older than Confucius himself, names the tradition the West calls Confucianism?

Ru. It first meant specialists in ritual, and since the Chinese name never mentions Confucius at all, some scholars now write 'Ruism' instead.

Which Confucian virtue is usually translated 'benevolence' or 'humaneness'?

Ren. Asked by a student what it meant, Confucius once answered simply 'love all men', but he gave other students other answers, so the Analects never settles on one definition.

The character for the Confucian virtue ren joins 'two' to the sign for what?

Person. Two people side by side: the graph is commonly read as saying that this virtue exists only between people, never in one alone.

Which Confucian virtue means 'propriety' or 'rites'?

Li. The word began with formal ceremonies such as offerings of food and wine to ancestors, then stretched to cover etiquette and ethics in general, down to how a host greets a guest.

Han Confucians grouped ren, yi, li, zhi and xin under what collective name?

The Five Constants. Mencius had named four cardinal virtues and Han scholars made it five; the list is a different thing from the Five Relations, the bonds such as ruler and subject or father and son.

Which Chinese word names Heaven, the moral power that Confucius believed stood behind his mission?

Tian. Confucius spoke of it less as a god than as a moral power on his side: warned that an enemy meant to ambush him, he said it had given him his virtue, so what could the man do?

The Confucian ideal of the junzi literally means what?

Son of a lord. Confucius turned a word for men of noble birth into a standard of conduct, so that a commoner who cultivated himself could be a junzi and a born aristocrat could fail to be one.

The Confucian virtue called xiao is usually translated into English as what?

Filial piety. Feeding one's parents was not enough for Confucius: 'even dogs and horses are provided with food', he said, so without reverence there was nothing filial about it.

How does legendary model son Wu Meng protect his parents?

Feeds the mosquitoes. With no bed curtains at home, the eight-year-old never brushes them away, for fear they would go and bite his parents instead; tales like this one taught children their duties for centuries.

Which word does Confucius use for himself in the Analects, adding that he is no 'maker'?

Transmitter. He claimed only to pass on the ways of the ancient sage-kings he loved, yet later tradition credited him with writing or editing every one of the Five Classics.

The name 'Confucius' is a Latinised form coined in the late 16th century by whom?

Jesuit missionaries. They ran his surname and the honorific 'Master' together into one Latin-sounding name, and their Latin translations of his sayings, printed in Paris in 1687, reached the thinkers of the Enlightenment.

According to the Analects, what did Confucius ask when told that his stables had burned down?

Whether anyone was hurt. The text then adds pointedly, 'He did not ask about the horses', costly as a stable of them was.

Which favourite disciple's early death made Confucius cry out, 'Heaven is destroying me'?

Yan Hui. The Master mourned him so bitterly that the other disciples told him his grief was excessive; 'if not for this man,' he answered, 'for whom should I mourn?'

Confucius's 'Do not do unto others what you do not want done to yourself' is sometimes called what?

The Silver Rule. It is the Golden Rule turned into a prohibition: asked for one word to live by, Confucius chose 'reciprocity' and gave this sentence as its meaning.

Who put together the Analects, the main record of what Confucius said?

His followers, after his death. Disciples and their own students gathered the sayings over generations, and the book did not settle into its final form until some three centuries after he died.

The lost sixth classic of the Confucian canon dealt with what subject?

Music. Confucians paired it with ritual, rites ordering conduct from outside and music harmonising feeling from within, and Confucius himself called it the culmination of culture.

Which of the Five Classics began as a manual of divination?

I Ching. Its 64 hexagrams were read as oracles, an odd fit for a master who avoided talk of the occult, yet later Confucians made the book a pillar of their philosophy.

The Spring and Autumn Annals chronicles its period from the perspective of which state?

Lu. It was Confucius's home state, and tradition says he revised its court chronicle himself; the title is short for the four seasons, by which each entry was dated.

Which Song-dynasty scholar selected the Four Books as the entry to Confucian thought?

Zhu Xi. A century after his death the Yuan court made his edition the basis of the civil service examinations, and it stayed the set text until the exams themselves were abolished.

The Great Learning and the Doctrine of the Mean were originally chapters of which classic?

Book of Rites. A Song-dynasty editor lifted the two chapters out to stand beside the Analects and the Mencius as the Four Books; one of them is traditionally credited to the grandson of Confucius.

Mencius is traditionally honoured with which title relative to Confucius?

The Second Sage. The rank came late: more than a thousand years after his death, the Neo-Confucians of the Song dynasty lifted his book into the core canon beside the Analects.

Mencius's mother is proverbial in China for doing what, again and again, for the sake of her son's education?

Moving house. The story has her leave a home beside a cemetery, then one beside a market, and settle at last next to a school, where the boy began to copy the scholars.

Which Confucian philosopher taught that human nature is bad and must be reshaped by teachers and ritual?

Xunzi. He compared moral education to straightening warped wood in a press or shaping a pot from clay: goodness, for him, was something made by effort, never something we are born with.

What did Mencius say could rightly be done to a ruler who had turned tyrant?

Overthrow or kill him. Asked whether the killing of the tyrant Zhou of Shang had been regicide, Mencius answered that he had heard of the execution of a villain called Zhou, never of the murder of a king.

In Mencius's most famous thought experiment, a small child is about to fall into what?

A well. Anyone watching, he argued, would feel a pang of alarm before any thought of reward or reputation, and from that reflex he concluded that human nature is good.

Under which dynasty was Confucianism suppressed by Legalist rulers?

Qin. Its chief minister ordered the 'burning of the books' in 213 BC to stamp out rival teachings, yet within eighty years Confucianism had become the state creed of the dynasty that followed.

Which Han scholar persuaded Emperor Wu to make Confucianism the creed of the state?

Dong Zhongshu. He taught that floods and droughts were Heaven's warnings to a ruler who governed badly, which left Confucian scholars, as readers of the omens, with a check on the throne.

Asked what he would do first if given charge of a state, what did Confucius reply?

Rectify the names. His disciple called the answer wide of the mark, but Confucius held that unless words fit realities nothing can be carried through: a prince must be a prince, a father a father.

Neo-Confucians explained everything that exists as 'principle' joined to what?

Qi. Principle, they held, is pure in itself but always comes sheathed in qi, the vital stuff of the world, which can be clear or clouded, so the work of moral training was to refine one's qi.

Which Korean dynasty made Neo-Confucianism its governing creed for some five hundred years?

Joseon. Founded in 1392, it followed Ming China in making the creed its official teaching, and its scholar-officials governed by it until the dynasty ended in 1910.

Neo-Confucianism arose partly as a response to the influence of which two traditions?

Buddhism and Taoism. Neo-Confucians attacked both as otherworldly, yet borrowed their terms and ideas along the way, down to a form of meditation they called 'quiet sitting'.

Which Ming general and philosopher taught the 'unity of knowledge and action'?

Wang Yangming. To know the good and not act on it, he held, is not yet to know it; he reached the idea in exile after a public beating at court, and later put down a rebellion himself.

The first earnest use of written exams to recruit officials came under which dynasty?

Sui. The short-lived dynasty wanted officials who owed their posts to the throne, not to local aristocrats, and the examinations it began went on for some thirteen centuries.

Which dynasty abolished China's imperial examinations in 1905?

Qing. It scrapped the exams in a late bid to modernise, cutting the link between classical learning and office that had kept Confucianism the creed of the state; the dynasty itself was gone by 1912.

What was the highest degree in the imperial examinations?

Jinshi. Those who won it had their names carved in stone, and 198 tablets listing more than 50,000 of them still stand in a temple courtyard in Beijing.

Examination answers in late imperial China had to follow a rigid form known as what?

The eight-legged essay. It had eight set headings and a limit of 700 characters, and it was often attacked for prizing command of style above thought.

Which vast 19th-century rebellion was led by a man who had repeatedly failed the imperial examinations?

Taiping. After his failures Hong Xiuquan had visions and turned on the creed he had studied, and his movement's fierce anti-Confucianism drove the scholar-gentry to raise the armies that crushed it.

Where did the final round of China's imperial examinations take place?

In the emperor's palace. Winners of the local and capital rounds sat a last test before the throne, so the men who went on to run the empire began as the emperor's own examinees.

In which Shandong city, his home town, does the great temple of Confucius stand on the site of his house?

Qufu. The shrine was founded within two years of his death, and from the first Han emperor onward rulers came to sacrifice there and kept rebuilding it for two thousand years.

During which Mao-era campaign were the statues in Confucius's home-town temple smashed in 1966?

The Cultural Revolution. The temple's statues were wrecked, and that November a team of Red Guards from Beijing broke into the cemetery and dug up one of the Sage's ducal descendants.

Which 1898 reformer first proposed a national Confucian Church?

Kang Youwei. He wanted Confucianism organised as a state religion on the model of Europe's churches; the Confucian Church set up in 1912 was later dissolved, and a national body was founded again only in 2015.

Which government made Confucius's birthday, 28 September, a national holiday again under a law passed in 2025?

Taiwan. The date was already its Teachers' Day; as a day off it had been scrapped in 2016 to help pay for a two-day weekend, and the legislature brought it back nine years later.

Which French Enlightenment writer praised Confucian ethics as a rational alternative to Christian dogma?

Voltaire. He claimed the Chinese had 'perfected moral science' and held up their system of government as a model for Europe.

Which Chinese movement of the 1910s attacked Confucian tradition and championed 'science and democracy' instead?

The New Culture Movement. Writers around Chen Duxiu's magazine New Youth wanted Chinese society remade, and they mocked the whole tradition as 'Confucius's family business'.

Which Italian, who entered Beijing in 1601, was among the first Europeans to report on the thought of Confucius?

Matteo Ricci. He first went about dressed as a Buddhist monk, then on a friend's advice changed into the robes of a Chinese scholar, and once in the capital he stayed until his death nine years later.

Which Japanese shogunate gave Neo-Confucianism official backing as the creed of its samurai government?

Tokugawa. The shoguns patronised the scholar Hayashi Razan and the academy he founded, and a later edict made Neo-Confucianism the regime's official ideology.

Which Zhou concept replaced the Shang claim of descent from Shangdi as a basis for rule?

The Mandate of Heaven. Unlike descent, it could be lost: a ruler who governed badly forfeited it, so famines, floods and successful rebellions were read as signs that Heaven had passed its favour to another house.