Ritual, Benevolence, and the Ordering of a Life

Confucius' concern was practical and ethical rather than metaphysical: how a person should live and how society should be ordered. His central virtue is ren, usually translated benevolence or humaneness, the disposition to treat others rightly, disciplined and expressed through li, ritual propriety, the whole fabric of ceremony, courtesy, and role that binds a community. He taught that social harmony rests on the five relationships and on the rectification of names, the principle that a ruler must actually be a ruler and a father a father for words and reality to align. He claimed to transmit rather than create, looking back to the sages of the early Zhou as his model.

Canonized as the exemplary teacher, he became the object of state cult through the long dynastic centuries, and the Confucian classics the foundation of the imperial examinations that selected China's officials for two thousand years, an influence over East Asian ethics, education, and statecraft that few other individuals have matched.