The Wisdom of Confucius with Critical and Biographical Sketches. Confucius
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rel="nofollow" href="#ulink_aef21599-f43b-5020-954f-0f1f97bcaf15">BOOK VI
THE REJOICINGS OF A BRIDEGROOM
AGAINST LISTENING TO SLANDERERS
IN PRAISE OF BY-GONE SIMPLICITY
A WIFE BEMOANS HER HUSBAND'S ABSENCE
THE PLAINT OF KING YEW'S FORSAKEN WIFE
PART III.—GREATER ODES OF THE KINGDOM
[ Selections from Book II are omitted. ]
KING SEUEN ON THE OCCASION OF A GREAT DROUGHT
PART IV.—ODES OF THE TEMPLE AND ALTAR
APPROPRIATE TO A SACRIFICE TO KING WAN
ON SACRIFICING TO THE KINGS WOO, CHING, AND K‘ANG
THE WISDOM
OF CONFUCIUS
[Translated into English by William Jennings]
PRONUNCIATION OF PROPER NAMES
j, as in French.
ng, commencing a word, like the same letters terminating one.
ai or ei, as in aisle or eider.
au, as in German, or like ow in cow.
é, as in fête.
i (not followed by a consonant), as ee in see.
u (followed by a consonant), as in bull.
iu, as ew in new.
úi, as ooi in cooing.
h at the end of a name makes the preceding vowel short.
‘ in the middle of a word denotes an aspirate (h), as K‘ung = Khung.
INTRODUCTION
The strangest figure that meets us in the annals of Oriental thought is that of Confucius. To the popular mind he is the founder of a religion, and yet he has nothing in common with the great religious teachers of the East. We think of Siddartha, the founder of Buddhism, as the very impersonation of romantic asceticism, enthusiastic self-sacrifice, and faith in the things that are invisible. Zoroaster is the friend of God, talking face to face with the Almighty, and drinking wisdom and knowledge from the lips of Omniscience. Mohammed is represented as snatched up into heaven, where he receives the Divine communication which he is bidden to propagate with fire and sword throughout the world. These great teachers lived in an atmosphere of the supernatural. They spoke with the authority of inspired prophets. They brought the unseen world close to the minds of their disciples. They spoke positively of immortality, of reward or punishment beyond the grave. The present life they despised, the future was to them everything in its promised satisfaction. The teachings of Confucius were of a very different sort. Throughout his whole writings he has not even mentioned the name of God. He declined to discuss the question of immortality. When he was asked about spiritual beings, he remarked, "If we cannot even know men, how can we know spirits?"
Yet this was the man the impress of whose teaching has formed the national character of five hundred millions of people. A temple to Confucius stands to this day in every town and village of China. His precepts are committed to memory by every child from the tenderest age, and each year at the royal university at Pekin the Emperor holds a festival in honor of the illustrious teacher.
The influence of Confucius springs, first of all, from the narrowness and definiteness of his doctrine. He was no transcendentalist, and never meddled with supramundane things. His teaching was of the earth, earthy; it dealt entirely with the common relations of life, and the Golden Rule he must necessarily have stumbled upon, as the most obvious canon of his system. He strikes us as being the great Stoic of the East, for he believed that virtue was based on knowledge, knowledge of a man's own heart, and knowledge of human-kind. There is a pathetic resemblance between the accounts given of the death of Confucius and the death of Zeno. Both died almost without