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Home >> Culture >> Article
Bao Pengshan talks about the misunderstood Confucius
By:Yichuan Ma  |  From:english.eastday.com  |  2018-07-16 13:07

On the afternoon of June 14, a lecture called “the misunderstood Confucius”, given by Professor Bao Pengshan of the Shanghai Open University, was held at a reading party in Pudong Library. He posits that as a “saint”, Confucius should be given more attention. The lecture was well received by the audience who poured into the lecture hall despite the bright sunshine outside.

[Photo/eastday.com]

At the beginning of the lecture, Bao Pengshan pointed out that those who say Confucius is a stranger that we are most familiar with, is a correct statement. We all know of Confucius but few truly understand him. Who is Confucius? He is the most representative figure of Chinese traditional culture. He is also a great prophet of the human race. German philosopher Jaspers named him among four of the most outstanding thinkers from history in his book “Die grossen Philosophen: Erster Band”, alongside Socrates, Jesus and Sakyamuni.


Confucius is not against official positions but does not crave it


There is a reason why so many people misunderstand Confucius. Bao Pengshan suggests that there were several irrational criticisms of Confucius that distorted many people’s perception.


A few years ago a young reporter said in his interview of Bao that,“everybody knows that Confucius was enthusiastic about becoming an official.” Bao rejected that right away saying that “There are two mistakes in that statement: not everybody believes in Confucius’s passion about official jobs and that the judgment is not a fact.”


Was Confucius crazy about officialdom? Bao suggests that anyone who has read the analects knows that Confucius has declared his ambition by the age of 15:“At fifteen, I had my mind bent on learning”. The only time that Confucius was appointed in the government of Lu lasted just three years. He resigned to pursue his own education when he had a bright future being an official. Bao stated that,“Confucius gave up his status and salary to devote himself to private education, thus he is definitely not a fan of the bureaucracy. He told his student Zi Lu that it is important to practice one’s beliefs and principles, which, in today’s words, means to serve the people.” Confucius, in his conversation with other disciples, Yang Huo and Lord Weiling, also clarified his point that he is not against official positions but insisted that to be an official one must have principles.


Confucius terminated the tradition of intellectuals taking up official positions


There is also a prevailing idea that Confucius started the tradition of intellectuals becoming officials and the statement that “Officialdom is the natural outlet for good scholars” is proof that Confucius craved officialdom. According to Bao, however, this is a ridiculous idea since the tradition actually began 500 years before Confucius.
In the past, the Son of Heaven had the world, a vassal had a state, a literati had a house and they all inherited them. Those without heritage were scholars whose goal was to become a scholar-bureaucrat. A scholar was just an intellectual without officialdom and carried an inferior social status before Confucius’s time. In his own school of thought, Confucius transcended the six arts of rites, music, archery, driving a chariot, learning and mathematics, and included six higher arts that cultivate the sentiments and broaden the horizon: The Book of Songs, Book of Documents, Book of Rites, Book of Changes, Classics of Music and The Spring and Autumn Annals. Confucius infused the identity of scholars with distinctively new meanings.


The education promoted by Confucius is firstly the education of being a human and secondly the habit of lifelong learning. The statement that “An officer, having completed his duties, should devote himself to study; the student, having completed his studies, should devote himself to duties as an officer 仕而优则学,学而优则仕” has been misunderstood because “优” means free instead of outstanding. Confucius was saying that spare time in officialdom should be used to study and then one can put that knowledge in use as an official. In this way Confucius terminated the tradition of intellectuals taking up official positions.


What was the ambition of Confucius? Bao Pengshan posits that it was the devotion to learn the highest knowledge, to establish a mind for heaven-and-earth, to establish the correct way of living for the people of today, to carry on the lost learning of the rages of yesterday, and to find the “Great Peace” for ten thousand generations.Bao said that,“We contemporaries should set the standards that Confucius had on ourselves and our time to understand this figure and to elevate the culture of China.”

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