Confucianism
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47 free Confucianism trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Confucianism has no word for itself in Chinese. The tradition that shaped East Asia for two and a half millennia is simply ru, the school of the scholars, and it never needed a church: it ran through family ritual, the Five Classics, the imperial examinations and the idea that a ruler governs by moral example or loses the Mandate of Heaven. Confucius himself claimed to be a transmitter who invented nothing, which has not stopped his name being attached to almost everything. These 47 questions cover the system rather than just the man: ren, li and the Five Constants, the junzi, filial piety and the Twenty-four exemplars, the Five Classics and the lost Classic of Music, Zhu Xi's Four Books, Mencius's good human nature against Xunzi's bad one, the Han adoption and Qin suppression, the eight-legged essay, the 1905 abolition of the exams, and the Neo-Confucian schools of Cheng–Zhu and Lu–Wang. Qufu's temple and cemetery, the Jesuits who coined 'Confucius', the 2015 Confucian Church and the 2025 public holiday round it out. Every answer is cited to a page we checked and each explanation adds one more detail. Play it solo or print it for a philosophy class.
30 of 47 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which Chinese word, older than Confucius himself, names the tradition the West calls Confucianism?
Ru
Ru. It first meant specialists in ritual, and since the Chinese name never mentions Confucius at all, some scholars now write 'Ruism' instead.
Q 02Which Confucian virtue is usually translated 'benevolence' or 'humaneness'?
Ren
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.
Q 03The character for the Confucian virtue ren joins 'two' to the sign for what?
Person
Person. Two people side by side: the graph is commonly read as saying that this virtue exists only between people, never in one alone.
Q 04Which Confucian virtue means 'propriety' or 'rites'?
Li
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.
Q 05Han Confucians grouped ren, yi, li, zhi and xin under what collective name?
The Five Constants
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.
Q 06Which Chinese word names Heaven, the moral power that Confucius believed stood behind his mission?
Tian
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?
Q 07The Confucian ideal of the junzi literally means what?
Son of a lord
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.
Q 08The Confucian virtue called xiao is usually translated into English as what?
Filial piety
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.
Q 09How does legendary model son Wu Meng protect his parents?
Feeds the mosquitoes
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.
Q 10Which word does Confucius use for himself in the Analects, adding that he is no 'maker'?
Transmitter
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.
Q 11The name 'Confucius' is a Latinised form coined in the late 16th century by whom?
Jesuit missionaries
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.
Q 12According to the Analects, what did Confucius ask when told that his stables had burned down?
Whether anyone was hurt
Whether anyone was hurt. The text then adds pointedly, 'He did not ask about the horses', costly as a stable of them was.
Q 13Which favourite disciple's early death made Confucius cry out, 'Heaven is destroying me'?
Yan Hui
Q 21Mencius is traditionally honoured with which title relative to Confucius?
The Second Sage
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.
Q 22Mencius's mother is proverbial in China for doing what, again and again, for the sake of her son's education?
Moving house
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.
Q 23Which Confucian philosopher taught that human nature is bad and must be reshaped by teachers and ritual?
Xunzi
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?'
Q 14Confucius's 'Do not do unto others what you do not want done to yourself' is sometimes called what?
The Silver Rule
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.
Q 15Who put together the Analects, the main record of what Confucius said?
His followers, after his death
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.
Q 16The lost sixth classic of the Confucian canon dealt with what subject?
Music
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.
Q 17Which of the Five Classics began as a manual of divination?
I Ching
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.
Q 18The Spring and Autumn Annals chronicles its period from the perspective of which state?
Lu
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.
Q 19Which Song-dynasty scholar selected the Four Books as the entry to Confucian thought?
Zhu Xi
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.
Q 20The Great Learning and the Doctrine of the Mean were originally chapters of which classic?
Book of Rites
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.
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.
Q 24What did Mencius say could rightly be done to a ruler who had turned tyrant?
Overthrow or kill him
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.
Q 25In Mencius's most famous thought experiment, a small child is about to fall into what?
A well
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.
Q 26Under which dynasty was Confucianism suppressed by Legalist rulers?
Qin
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.
Q 27Which Han scholar persuaded Emperor Wu to make Confucianism the creed of the state?
Dong Zhongshu
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.
Q 28Asked what he would do first if given charge of a state, what did Confucius reply?
Rectify the names
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.
Q 29Neo-Confucians explained everything that exists as 'principle' joined to what?
Qi
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.
Q 30Which Korean dynasty made Neo-Confucianism its governing creed for some five hundred years?
Joseon
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.