Confucianism

• The Analects (Lunyu) compiled c. 4th-3rd century BCE

  Short recorded exchanges between Confucius and his students, assembled after his death. Deliberately unsystematic: it teaches by showing a person responding well to specific situations rather than by stating rules.

• The Mencius c. 3rd century BCE

  Long argumentative dialogues, including the famous thought experiment about the child at the well — anyone would lurch to save it, which Mencius takes as proof that moral feeling is native to us.

• The Four Books assembled by Zhu Xi, 12th century CE

  The Analects and Mencius plus the Great Learning and the Doctrine of the Mean, packaged as the core curriculum. Memorising them was the price of entry to the Chinese civil service until 1905.

• c. 1300–1046 BCEShang dynasty religion maturesPolytheistic religion of Shang China — ancestor veneration, oracle-bone divination, and the high god Di — reaches its mature form.
• 551 BCEConfucius bornConfucius (551–479 BCE) teaches ritual propriety (li), humaneness (ren), and the Mandate of Heaven as an ethical cosmic force, founding Confucianism.
• c. 372–369 BCEMencius and Zhuang Zhou bornBirth of Mencius, Confucianism's great systematizer, and Zhuang Zhou, foundational Daoist thinker.
• c. 300 BCETao Te Ching written downEarliest known manuscripts of the Daodejing (bamboo texts, late 4th century BCE) codify the Dao, yin-yang complementarity, and wu wei; Laozi himself is regarded by modern scholars as largely legendary.
• 712 CEKojiki compiledJapan's oldest chronicle records Shinto myth and ritual, giving the kami tradition its first written form.
• 1130–1200 CEZhu Xi's Neo-Confucian orthodoxyZhu Xi systematizes Neo-Confucianism around li (principle) and qi (material force); his Four Books commentaries become the imperial examination curriculum, dominating East Asian state ideology for centuries.
• 1850–1864 CETaiping RebellionHong Xiuquan, proclaiming himself Jesus's younger brother, builds a syncretic Christian-Confucian theocracy that mobilizes millions; its suppression costs 20–30 million lives.
• 1945 CEState Shinto disestablishedAfter Japan's surrender, the Shinto Directive dismantles State Shinto's fusion of emperor worship and militarism.

Learn to become a good person by doing your actual roles well.

1. Module 1

   Ren and Reciprocity

   You understand humaneness as a trained capacity, and the negative golden rule that anchors it: do not do to others what you would not want done to you.

   Do: Name one thing you routinely do to others that you would resent having done to you.

2. Module 2

   The Five Relationships

   You understand that Confucian ethics runs through specific bonds rather than universal principles, and that every duty has a return duty.

   Do: Map your five most important relationships and write what each person is owed by you and you by them.

3. Module 3

   Li: Ritual as Technology

   You understand why small formalities — greetings, meals, funerals, thank-yous — are treated as the machinery that makes decent behaviour automatic.

   Do: Reinstate one dropped courtesy this week and notice its effect on the other person.

4. Module 4

   The Rectification of Names

   You understand the claim that social breakdown starts with words losing their meaning — a manager who does not manage, a parent who does not parent.

   Do: Pick one title you hold and list where your behaviour does not match the word.

5. Module 5

   The Cannibal Question

   You understand the strongest charge against Confucianism — that it sacrifices individuals to hierarchy — and can state both the accusation and the defence.

   Do: Write the case for and against one obligation you carry purely because of your role.

• Confucius's birthday 28 September

  Marked by the Shidian ceremony with ancient music and dance at Confucius temples, and observed as Teachers' Day in Taiwan.

• Qingming (Tomb-Sweeping Day) early April

  Families clean ancestral graves and make offerings — the most widely practised piece of Confucian ritual culture.

• Jesa / ancestral memorial rites death anniversaries and major holidays

  Korean and Chinese household ceremonies honouring named ancestors, still performed in millions of homes.

Lu Xun called Confucianism socially cannibalistic — a system that eats individuals to feed the family and the state. Is a duty-first ethics the reason East Asia held together for millennia, or the reason it produced very few people willing to break anything?