Online Lecture

Reith Lectures by Jonathan Spence

Chinese Vistas - Confucian Ways

- 1948 China's fate was still in doubt
- 1949 Chiang-Kai shek's armies force to leave to Taiwan
- best seller of the last few years "Analects of Confucius"
- 120 Confucius Institute in 20 different countries
- Confucius born 551 BC died 479 BC at the age of 72
- Lived most his life in the state of Lu know today as Shandong Province
- a mid-level bureaucrat
- the Analects is parts of his sayings (politics,morality,duty,deportament,ritual propriety, social and family responsability)
- 2400 years later remains the most important of Confucius' work
- he did not have leadership qualities
- passage of the Analects, very known in China:
"At fifteen, I set my heart on learning. At thirty, I found my balance through the rites. At forty, I was free from doubts about myself. At fifty, I understood what heaven intended me to do. At sixty, I was attuned to what I heard. At seventy, I followed with my heart what my heart desired without overstepping the line."
- Confucius lived in the Spring and Autumn Period
- The Qin (Ch'in) Dinasty strong moral arguments
- after the Emperor's death the Analects of Confucius became more and more popular
- Jesuits Catholics enter China in 1580 and learn the chinese language
- 1687 the Analects of Confucius first arrived in London brought by Shen-Fo Tsung
- Prostestant missionaries major translation
- Confucian books reject from China in 1911, when the dynasty came to end
- chaos of events, attacks on the Confucian belief, search for a new Western

Summary:

Confucius lived most of his life in the state of Lu. He was a very intellectual and respectable man.
Analects of Confucius, is a book with some of his sayings. However, it was not written by him.
Not only does it have a very strong reflection on Chineses society today but it had also been a fundamental course of study.
During the dynasty of Qin(Ch'in) Confucius' arguments became weak and inapplicable.
However, when this dynasty came to an end the Confucian books were rejected from China for the first time in 1911. From this time on the conflicts begun in China.