The Master said: “Can you love anyone without making him work hard? Can you do your best for anyone without educating him?” (Analects, 14.7, Lau 125)

To bury 460 bodies, you need a large pit. To bury 460 bodies while still alive, you need crowd control: soldiers with spears, ropes, and a willingness to follow any order. Li Si could obtain all this and more. As chancellor of the great Emperor Qin Shi Huang, Li Si had been endowed with incredible power. Through his career, Li Si had acted to do culturally what his master had achieved militarily: to forge the warring states of China into a unified nation.

He had systematized the written language, purging it of regional character variations. He had  created standard weights and measures, specified a uniform axel width for chariots and carts, and minted a single currency. He even had complied a primer of the acceptable form of the Chinese language. In newly subdued towns and cities across China, Li Si had ordered men to seize the metal weapons of those who had opposed the Emperor, then had them melted down into more useful items, like bells. Great bells that rang with one voice, instead of the discordant clash of many blades.

Now, in the year 213 BCE, Li Si would eliminate another kind of discord: intellectual dissent. With the Emperor’s blessing, Li Si had seized and burned books which contained ideas or facts that could undermine the unification of China under the Qin. Histories of the former feudal state his master had conquered were on the proscribed list, as were many works of literature and poetry.

Two that were specifically singled out for destruction were the Book of Odes and the Annals. These books were revered by members of a particularly meddlesome school of philosophy: a backward-looking, impractical approach to governance that put its faith in familial ties, strict forms of etiquette, and ancient rituals rather than the rule of law.

It was not enough for Li Si to seize the books, however. The scholars had to go, too. He had 460 of them – the ones who had been the most vocal, who had written the most critical works about the Emperor – captured, beaten, and dragged into deep pits, where they screamed as the soldiers piled rubble and soil over them.

Li Si may not have witnessed the fruits of his labor, but he surely hoped that as the earth closed over these thought criminals – these followers of Confucius – that Confucianism itself was being laid in its grave, too. He could not have been more wrong.

I’m Rose Judson. Welcome to Books of All Time.

Books of All Time is a podcast that’s tackling classic literature in chronological order. This is episode 21: The Analects of Confucius: The Confucian World. As always, if you want to read the transcript of this episode or see the references I used to write it, you can visit our website, www.booksofalltime.co.uk. There’s a link in the show notes if you need it. Let’s begin.

So this is episode two of our exploration of the Analects of Confucius. Last episode we talked about some of the key themes of that book – which, again, was compiled by disciples of Confucius around 550 BCE – and we also discussed a little of what’s known about Confucius’s life. This week, we’re going to look at how Confucianism emerged from the tumultuous period in which it was born to become the dominant philosophical system not just of China, but of most of East Asia. It’s a remarkable story, even when you just take a flying survey of it like we’re about to do. There are three main sources I’m relying on for this episode: one is Daniel Gardner’s Confucianism: A Very Short Introduction, which also informed last week’s episode. The next is Confucius: And the World He Created, by Michael Schuman, and finally The Oxford Handbook of Confucianism, edited by Jennifer Oldstone-Moore.

Finally, before we start, there’s a point I wanted to work into the last episode, but I couldn’t find a good place to fit it, so I’ll just wedge it in here: Chinese does not have a term analogous to our “Confucianism”. “Confucius” is a westernization, it’s the best approximation of the name “Kong Qiu” that Jesuit missionaries could come up with. “Confucianism” was not coined until the 19^th century by American scholars. The philosophical ideas that descend from Confucius are known in Chinese as “Ru”.

Right, housekeeping done. Let’s start with Confucius’s death in 479 BCE. Confucius died old and full of years, as they say of the Biblical patriarchs in the King James version of Genesis. However, he did not die surrounded by family, as the patriarchs did. He had a family, of course – what kind of good traditional Chinese man would he be without one? – but he and his wife seem to have separated not long after he gave up pursuing a political position to become a teacher. His son pre-deceased him. His daughter was sort of absorbed into her husband’s family, as was typical for a married woman in that time.

He also did not die with a glittering professional career to look back on. “What makes Confucius so fascinating a historical figure,” Michael Schuman writes, “is just how little impact he had on China during his own lifetime.” (Schuman 5) Indeed, a contemporary politician slagged Confucius off to his boss, saying that “a beggar who roams the land talking is not a man to entrust with affairs of state.” (Schuman 12) Confucius’s philosophy was just one of a vast array of competing ideas in this time, known as the era of the Hundred Schools of Thought – you had Daoism and Buddhism circulating in China along with lesser-known philosophical systems like Legalism and Mohism. (There are actually stories that Laozi, the founder of Daoism, actually crossed paths with Confucius at one point, but scholars deem these to be fabrications.)

When Confucius did die, it was in the town of Qufu in the province of Lu, in his modest house, attended only by a single disciple. This disciple was called Zigong, and he had taken a leave of absence from his ministerial role in a neighbouring province to care for his old master. (Even before his passing, Confucius found himself professionally eclipsed in politics by his former pupils.)

As his health sank, Confucius recited a poem to Zigong, which Schuman gives as:

“Mount Tai crumbles

The great beam breaks

The wise man withers away.” (Confucius, quoted in Schuman 31)

Confucius died soon after this, at the age of 73. There was a smattering of polite distress from the ruler of Lu when the news spread about Confucius’s death: tradition has it that the duke put up a temple to honour his erstwhile minister, though Zigong would grumble that it was too little too late: Confucius ought to have been employed better while he was alive. Indeed, Confucius seems to have died while wracked with despair at how little he had been able to achieve in politics his life. But his disciples, dispersing back to their homes after burying their master in Qufu, were set to give him an afterlife beyond his wildest dreams.

The growth of Confucianism over the next several generations was not simply a numbers game: disciples gathering their own disciples until some kind of critical mass was reached, and you had a movement with momentum. Part of Confucianism’s success was down to the fact that its proponents were specifically focused on seeking public service roles: there’s a better chance of a  philosophy taking root when it’s constantly being promoted to the elites of a society.

Plus, while the Confucian approach to public life wasn’t very practical, it did have the nostalgia factor going for it. Confucianism’s emphasis on “traditional” values and everyone knowing their place must have seemed very appealing during the chaotic Warring States period which followed just after Confucius’s death.

Pardon the perhaps unhappy comparison here, but the early Confucian movement reminds me of the Federalist Society. If you don’t know, that’s a conservative organization in the U.S. that began as a social group at law schools in the 1980s, dedicated to then-unpopular ideas like Constitutional originalism. From those scrappy roots, it has now become the quasi-official source of new federal judges and Supreme Court justices nominated by Republican presidents. One hopes it doesn’t also last 2,000 years.

Anyway. Every now and then a new Confucian thinker would come along and revitalize the movement with a new idea, or a new gloss on an old one. By far the leading light of the early Confucian movement was Mencius. He was a fourth-generation Confucian, according to Daniel Gardner, who lived from 372 to 289 BCE. Like Confucius, Mencius spent his life wandering courts looking for a teachable tyrant, and like Confucius, his sayings were gathered into a book.

Unlike Confucius, Mencius strayed a little into the realm of metaphysics. He had ideas about the nature of man. You’ll be pleased to hear that man, according to Mencius, is “inclined toward goodness,” at least at the start of life. (Gardner 50) Mencius identified four main virtues in which this good nature makes itself manifest, and which must be cultivated throughout life: righteousness, wisdom, compassion, and (of course) ritual propriety. (Gardner 51) Mencius is considered the second sage of Confucianism, and his work is also considered a Confucian classic. His commentaries on the Analects often featured in curricula for the imperial state exams and other educational programs.

Another Confucian who came along not long after Mencius – they may even have been contemporaries – was Xunzi. He begged to differ about the nature of man: mankind, Xunzi argued, was naturally depraved, actually, and deliberate self-cultivation was the only way for him to conquer that nature. (Gardner 58) Envy, hatred, greed, lusts – all these were driving forces in man’s psyche, and righteous living was a constant struggle. Learning and rituals made that struggle manageable. In fact, learning could be seen as a kind of crucible which breaks down man’s evil nature. Xunzi says:

“Learning should never cease. If wood is pressed against a straightening board, it can be made straight; if metal is put to the grindstone, it can be sharpened; and if the gentleman studies widely and each day examines himself, his wisdom will become clear and his conduct without fault.” (Xunzi, quoted in Gardner 59)

For a long time, according to the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, Xunzi was “a bête noire who was an example of a Confucian who went astray.” This is due to his rejection of Mencius, but I have to imagine it’s also due to the fact that Xunzi reputedly had a particularly infamous disciple. This was Li Si, the Chancellor of Qing who oversaw the suppression and execution of Confucian scholars in 213 BCE, which I described at the top of the show. Obviously, Li Si’s efforts to stamp out Confucianism failed, Li Si himself would be gruesomely executed for treason after his patron’s death – chopped in half at the waist in a public marketplace, and all his immediate relations exterminated into the bargain.

The Qing dynasty was a brittle thing – it lasted barely a generation. It was quickly supplanted by the Han dynasty, which began in 202 BCE when the Emperor Gaozu ascended to the throne. The Han dynasty was when Confucianism took a firm grip on the reins of Chinese culture and political life – a grip it would not completely relinquish until the 20^th century.

Gaozu was initially disdainful of the Confucians. The historian Sima Qian, writing a century later, claimed that “Whenever a visitor wearing a Confucian hat comes to see [the emperor], he immediately snatches the hat from the visitor’s head and pisses in it.” (Sima Qian, quoted in Gardner 5) But the Confucians persisted. One of them, Lu Jia, eventually became chief advisor to Gaozu (one wonders how much of Lu Jia’s salary went to hat-cleaning services). When, one fine day, the emperor cried out in exasperation at Lu Jia, “All I possess I have won on horseback! Why should I bother with The Book of Odes and the Book of History?” (Gardner 6)

Lu Jia deftly replied that while his majesty had won the empire on a horse, he couldn’t reign from there. After all, the Qin, whom his majesty had just crushed, had ruled through harsh laws and harsher punishment – in addition to the waist chop, castration and enslavement were also on the Qin menu of retribution. Their brutal, aggressive ruling style had ended in revolt and failure.

Gaozu saw the sense in this and began to take the teachings of Confucius seriously at last. His successors would work with Confucian advisors, further hard-coding the philosophy into the legal, educational, and cultural structures of China. In 136 BCE, one such advisor, called Dong Zhongshu, established the five-book Confucian canon known as the “Five Classics”. This includes the Book of Odes, the Book of History, the Spring and Autumn Annals, the I Ching, or the Book of Changes, and the Book of Rites (The Analects would be added to the canon a little later.) Dong Zhongshu also initiated the first civil service exams, though they would not be permanently established until after 1000 CE.

Dong Zhongshu seems to have been somewhat of an eccentric teacher. Michael Schuman describes him standing behind a curtain and speaking in a low voice to his students, with an assistant passing on his wisdom to the gathered disciples. Some of his students never saw his face for years. (Schuman 47)

By the end of the Han dynasty in 220 CE, Confucianism was here to stay. For most of the rulers who would follow over the next two thousand years, some form of observation of Confucianism would be needed to lend their authority legitimacy.

The next major step in the development of Confucianism in China doesn’t happen until the Middle Ages. However, before we jump there, we should note that by the end of the Han period, Confucianism was already becoming one of China’s most popular exports. Let’s take a little tour, shall we?

[Music]

Confucianism was initially just one of many belief systems washing around East Asia in the first few centuries of the Common Era. It had to compete with Daoism and Buddhism along with indigenous belief systems outside of China – various forms of animism, mostly, or different flavours of ancestor worship.

One of the first places where Confucianism began to establish itself outside China was what is now Vietnam. It arrived, like Gaozu, on horseback. Han Chinese invasions and raids into Vietnam led to Chinese settlement there, and chapter 24 of the Oxford Handbook of Confucianism states that Confucian belief first arrived in Vietnam as a private belief system practiced within families. These families were either Han colonizers or local Viet families looking to ingratiate themselves with their new rulers.

It wasn’t until the early Middle Ages (618 CE onward) that Confucianism began to be integrated into Vietnamese government. Classically trained Confucianists, valued for their political and administrative skills, readily found employment with lords and kings. As China’s influence over (and intermingling with) Vietnam increased, so did Confucianism’s presence. In the 1460s, Confucianism was officially enshrined within Vietnamese state ideology, and reigned supreme until a new invader, France, arrived in the 19^th century.

Confucianism arrived in Korea about the same time as it arrived in Vietnam, but was embraced by the native elites much more quickly. According to Michael J. Pettid, who wrote the chapter on Confucianism in Korea for the Oxford Handbook of Confucianism, “The presence of Confucianism in Korea is still palpable in almost every aspect of society, ranging from social interactions to gender relations.”

When Confucianism arrived in Korea, the people in power there quickly realized its utility as an educational system. They established a national academy based on Confucian principles in 372 CE, though they didn’t get around to adopting Chinese-style civil service exams until 788 CE. The academy was mainly designed to take sons of elite families and fit them out for administrative roles in politics. Confucianism during the early part of its existence in Korea really didn’t penetrate down into the lower strata of Korean society, except as a general reinforcement of the idea that people ought to know their place.

The Confucian emphasis on the value of the study of history also affected Korean culture in another way: it spurred them to start writing their own histories. Even Korean Buddhists made use of Confucian values when it suited them. Buddhism and Confucianism were often in conflict with one another. Buddhism was spiritual and metaphysical; Confucianism was practical and worldly. Buddhism recommended withdrawal from the world; Confucianism demanded active engagement with it. But for a little while in Korea, at least, they were able to coexist: Buddhists handled the spiritual realm, while the Confucians handled the administrative state.

However, this was short-lived: Confucians gradually gained enough power to criticise, and then to suppress, Buddhist beliefs and native Korean practices. For example, Korean society prior to Confucianism had some matrilineal aspects: women had a certain degree of power, authority, and agency. Confucianism demanded they be restricted to the realm of the household.

It’s probably worth mentioning what Confucius thought of women: he really didn’t think of them. About the only role women have within Confucianism is to support men and nurture offspring to prepare them to be good little Confucians in their turn. The etiquette sounds suffocating: unrelated men and women must not touch each other at all (though Mencius makes an exception in one case: you may touch an unrelated woman if it is the only way to save her from drowning).

There is, it goes without saying, no place for women in public life, and the notion of self-development through education was only applicable in a very limited way: women were educated to demonstrate parents’ largesse (why bother educating a girl, who just leaves the family in her teens, unless you had cash to burn?) and to make them a bit more valuable on the marriage market: a literate girl could provide practical support in household financial management as well as help her young children get a head start on their educations.

Confucianism today has a very mixed reputation in Korea. It is a philosophy of Chinese origin, and the Chinese, along with the Japanese, have brutally oppressed and exploited Korea at times throughout its history. While the Confucian emphasis on the value of education is acknowledge as having played a role in South Korea’s economic and technological prowess, on the whole, Confucianism there is seen as a feudal ideology that privileges Chinese cultural values at the expense of native Korean ones. Which is fair enough.

Next, Japan. Confucianism came to Japan in the early centuries CE along with Daoism, Buddhism, and other imported philosophies. According to the scholar Kira Paramore, “On the one hand, Confucian ideas were used to provide frameworks for mediation and consensus-building . . . between Japanese and foreign peoples. On the other hand, Confucian ideas were used to assist in recognizing a hierarchy between different societies, which justified Japanese state violence against so-called ‘barbarians.’”

This dual nature aside, Confucianism’s ideas are woven into Japan’s first written constitution, which was created in the year 604 CE. Shotoku’s Seventeen-Article Constitution (created, appropriately enough, by a Prince Shotoku), directly quotes the Analects in its opening lines: “Harmony is to be valued, and contentiousness avoided.”

Later, in medieval Japan, Confucianism found itself integrated into, and often at odds with, Zen Buddhist culture. The samurai and Shoguns, like the Vietnamese, valued Confucians for their administrative talents and their mastery of history and poetry. Confucianism didn’t really become a Japanese state ideology, however, until the 19^th century, when it was promoted as a more culturally appropriate worldview than European Christianity – one which originated in the east, if not in Japan, and one which promoted family ties and morality without contradicting natural science. Confucian clubs and societies sprang up in Japan in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries. At first the Confucian revival was about education and traditional values. But gradually, it began to be used to justify Imperial Japan’s turn toward fascism in the 1930s and 40s.

The Confucian associations of Japan, writes Paramore, “came to see their project, just like that of Japan, no longer only as one of national redemption but of civilizational and perhaps even global redemption.” When the Japanese established their puppet state of Manchuria in northeastern China in 1931, they explicitly described it as Confucian in their founding documents. Manchuria was “to set an example of model government to the world.”

Of all Confucianism’s manifestations in China, this had to be one of the strangest. Confucianism had gone abroad; it had been appropriated by another country. There it had been inflated into a quasi-religious ideology, and then brutally brought home to them, the Chinese, by an invading army. Confucius emphasizes the importance of humaneness throughout the Analects. You don’t really see it here, do you?

This brings me to the final question I want to look at: is Confucianism a religion?

[music]

There’s no indication that Confucius was starting a religion. In fact, there is plenty to indicate he was avoiding doing that. In The Analects, we are told that “The topics the Master did not speak of were prodigies, force, disorder, and gods.” (7.21, Lau 88) Basically, Confucius was not interested in the supernatural, at least not in terms of what he wanted to teach.

After his death, Confucius’s disciples largely held to this, although many of them began to ascribe to him a rather saintly reputation, while some even began to tell fantastical stories – for instance, that he had semi-divine parentage, or that his appearance was superhuman. Michael Schuman reports that one late Han-era text claimed Confucius was more than ten feet in height, with “a dragon-like forehead, lips like the Big Dipper, a bright face, an even chin, a supportive throat, joined teeth, a dragon frame, a tortoise’s spine, and tiger paws.” (Schuman 53)

That’s… a lot. Regardless, for the first few centuries of Confucius’s afterlife, his philosophy remained just that – a philosophy, an approach to morality and conduct  that could be bolted on to other spiritual practices.

Gradually, however, Confucians began to feel threatened by religion. Or rather, they began to feel threatened by rising civil disorder and decided to blame a religion for that. Specifically, Buddhism. Buddhism had originated in India and arrived in China during the first century CE. By the year 1000 or so, Buddhism had become incredibly popular among the Chinese, particularly among the middling and lower classes. According to Daniel Gardner, people were “attracted by [Buddhism’s] philosophical exploration of human nature, the mind, ways of knowing, self-realization, and man’s relation to the cosmos. Confucians viewed this popularity with dismay.” (Gardner 71)

People focused on their own personal enlightenment weren’t going to seek out education, learn the odes, and commit themselves to lives of public service in politics. They were going to become monks and sit quietly while unqualified men took over the nation’s affairs. This was not the way to a virtuous state. Confucian scholars began to return to the classics, looking for interpretations that would win back followers from what they saw as this new-fangled Buddhist self-absorption.

A scholar named Zhu Xi (born 1130, died 1200) hit upon the right formula. Blending traditional Confucian values with a very complicated metaphysics which cribs heavily from Buddhism, Daoism, and other traditions, he brought forth Neo-Confucianism. Neo-Confucianism does not merely encourage self-realization through education, ritual practice, and filial piety, but actually creates a systematic, step-by-step guide to achieving the state of “sagehood”.

So far, so suspiciously Buddhist. But the morally perfect Confucian sage is not escaping the cycle of rebirth and death – instead, he has forged himself into the ideal instrument for engaging in the important work of promoting harmony among all people through service to the state. (Gardner 71-72) Zhu Xi builds on Mencius’s idea that man is capable of moral perfection by tackling the question of how there can be evil in a world full of people naturally inclined toward goodness.

The answer, according to Zhu Xi, is qi. Qi is a primordial energy, a vital force binding the entire universe together (I told you this was metaphysical). Each human being receives a certain quality and quantity of qi at birth, and this qi can be more or less clear, more or less dense, and more or less refined. Obviously, clear, light, refined qi is a good thing: it lets your personal nature (which is good, remember) shine through.

Cloudy, heavy, coarse qi is what causes evil. Following the Confucian practices which lead toward sagehood will help you refine your qi. Straying from the path will cause it to become murky and dense. (Gardner 73-76) Searching for the truth through education – sort of Truth with a capital T, there, a universal principle of truth – is the primary route toward high-quality qi. Zhu Xi cautions that learning about just anything isn’t the right way to seek truth, however. Instead, one should (obviously), study the writing of the Confucian sages, and Zhu Xi handily sets out a specific curriculum for aspiring sages to follow.

He directs students to start refining their qi by studying a series of four books, beginning with the Analects and including Mencius, as well as a work called The Great Learning, and another called Maintaining Perfect Balance. These four books cover, according to Daniel Gardner, “the nature of man, the inner source of his morality, and his relation to the larger cosmos,” (Gardner 82) as well as proper conduct. Then the aspiring sage can move on to the Five Classics, which use ancient history to teach Confucian morals and practices for one’s public roles and relationships with others: being a good public servant and devoted son.

Zhu Xi also tells students how to approach their reading appropriately, so they can really absorb the wisdom of the sages and get all that grit filtered out of their qi. “In reading,” Zhu Xi wrote, “you want both body and mind to enter into the passage. Don’t concern yourself with what’s going on elsewhere, and you’ll see the [truth] in the passage.” (Zhu Xi, quoted in Gardner 82) The best preparation for reading was sitting quietly to calm and clear the mind – which, again, sounds an awful lot like the Buddhist practice of meditation.

Zhu Xi seems to have cherry-picked the most popular aspects of the rival ideology and found justifications for grafting them onto Confucianism. This tendency toward overcomplication when adapting a belief system seems to be a very human trait – one day you’re telling entertaining stories about a lightning god; a few generations later, you’re murdering people for believing the wrong sort of stories about that lightning god. Confucianism wasn’t a religion, but in order to compete with them, it had to make itself look religion-adjacent to survive.

Beyond the new metaphysics, Confucianism also required people to practice specific rites carried down from the Iron Age Zhou dynasty. These included sacrifices to one’s family, sacrifices by ministers to a god called Shangdi, and sacrifices by the emperor designed to obtain for him the Mandate of Heaven. It seems that by the 17^th and 18^th centuries, these sacrifices began to include elements of worshiping Confucius himself (along with Mencius and other important sages). When the Catholics rocked up to China around this same time, they absolutely saw these practices as worship of a god.

The collision between China and the west shook Confucianism to its very roots. By the late 19^th century, Chinese intellectuals were again trying to update Confucianism to fend off a rival ideology: this time, Christianity. Christianity was widely viewed in China as the engine behind the West’s military and technological advances (the missionaries who visited China were also happy to promote this view).

In a 2013 article for the history journal Past and Present, academic Yai-pe Kuo says that rather than recommend conversion to Christianity, “those who seized on missionary writings for religious knowledge started to see an operational model in Christianity’s spread around the world. From what they knew about the Western religion, they tried to extrapolate a template of ‘tricks’ that could stimulate a religious revival in China.” (Kuo 237) The linchpin of this religious revival was, naturally, Confucius.

Kang Youwei, an advisor to the final emperor of China, proposed building Confucian Churches throughout China where people could congregate and do Christian-looking things, like hold prayers and sing songs, in the service of Confucian values. Kang seems to have vacillated, as far as I can make out from Kuo’s article, between making this Confucianist church the state religion or enshrining a separation of the Church from the state within China – this became a particularly live question after the Chinese Revolution of 1911, which ended the imperial system and resulted in the establishment of the Republic of China. Now there was a new nation to shape, and it was one that, for the first time in centuries, had no official place for Confucianism. Would a Confucian Church along Kang’s proposed lines allow Confucianism to evolve and survive in the 20^th century?

The short answer is no, obviously: anti-religious and pro-reform sentiment followed the revolution; the Confucian church in China, which was barely getting off the ground, was dissolved in the 1920s, and the arrival of Communism in China meant there would be no state religion going forward. There are some Confucian churches outside of China, in places like Hong Kong, Indonesia, Taiwan, and even the United States, but these are few and far between.

Confucianism has never taken off as a religion, and it currently has no state-endorsed position within China or any of the surrounding countries where it once dictated who served in government. But it’s still there, with its ideas about education and family loyalty shaping the thinking of East Asian people as surely as Christian ideas of sin and redemption shape the thinking of those of us in the West. There is a modern Confucian revival quietly happening within China – one that is critical of the authoritarianism, male chauvinism, and bureaucratism Confucius’s teachings have often been used to justify.

But the humanistic aspect of Confucius’s philosophy and its emphasis on learning have not yet lost their relevance. Harvard professor Tu Weiming, writing for the Encyclopaedia Britannica, notes that “the modern Chinese intelligentsia . . . [maintain] unacknowledged, sometimes unconscious, continuities with the Confucian tradition at every level of life—behaviour, attitude, belief, and commitment. Indeed, Confucianism remains an integral part of the psychocultural construct of the contemporary Chinese intellectual as well as of the Chinese farmer.”

Confucius was never ten feet tall in life, but his legacy has covered half the world.

That’s it for this week’s episode. We’ll be circling back to Confucian ideas as we progress through the next year of the show – the Tao Te Ching is coming up pretty quickly, and we’ll look at how Daoism and Confucianism clashed and fed off each other. We’ll also discuss how Sun Tzu’s The Art of War compares and contrasts with Confucius’s ideas about how to rule a country, too.

In the immediate term, however, we will be heading back to Greece. Lions and mice, ants and grasshoppers, tortoises and hares: it’s time to reacquaint ourselves with stories many of us won’t have read since childhood: Aesop’s Fables. Join me on December 19^th for Episode 22: Aesop’s Fables, Part 1 – Slow and Steady.

Books of All Time is written and produced by me, Rose Judson. The Disclaimer Voice of Doom is Ed Brown. Lluvia Arras designed our cover art and logo. Special thanks to Yelena Shapiro, Cathy Merli, Matt Brough, John Cole and the Books of All Time Advisory Council: Ed Brown, Beck Collins, Neil Dowling, Caitlin McMullin, Hugh Parker, and Jonathan Skipp. You can support the show by subscribing and leaving a rating or review at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also follow us on social media: we’re on Bluesky, Instagram and Facebook. Thanks for listening! I’ll be back in two weeks.

References and Works Cited:

Confucius, and D. C. Lau. The Analects. Penguin, 2003.

Confucius. Analects. Translated by Annping Chin, Penguin Books Ltd, 2014.

Gardner, Daniel K. Confucianism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press, 2014.

Goldin, Paul R. “Xunzi.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Stanford University, 6 July 2018, plato.stanford.edu/entries/xunzi/.

Kuo, Ya-pei. “‘Christian Civilization’ and the Confucian Church: The Origin of Secularist Politics in Modern China.” Past & Present, no. 218, 2013, pp. 235–264, http://www.jstor.org/stable/23360260.

Paramore, Kiri. “Confucianism in Japan.” Edited by Jennifer Oldstone-Moore, The Oxford Handbook of Confucianism (Online Edition), University of Oxford Press, 23 Jan. 2023, doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190906184.013.10.

Pettid, Michael J. “‘Confucianism in Korea.’” Edited by Jennifer Oldstone-Moore, The Oxford Handbook of Confucianism (Online Edition), Oxford University Press, doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190906184.013.11. Accessed 4 Dec. 2024.

Schuman, Michael. Confucius: And the World He Created. Basic Books, 2015.

Whitmore, John K. “Confucianism in Vietnam.” Edited by Jennifer Oldstone-Moore, The Oxford Handbook of Confucianism (Online Edition), Oxford University Press, 26 Jan. 2023, doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190906184.013.29.