Confucianism

Confucianism is the political and ethical tradition founded on Confucius's teachings, recorded by his disciples in the Analects after his death. It holds that a ruler governs legitimately through moral virtue and the positive example he sets, the Mandate of Heaven, rather than through coercive law alone, and that this mandate can be lost by a ruler whose own conduct forfeits Heaven's favour, giving Confucianism a built-in, if rarely invoked, justification for the overthrow of an unjust ruler. It has comparatively little to say about property or economic organisation as such, concerning itself instead with the moral cultivation of rulers and officials and with filial piety within the family as the root of loyalty within the state, reproduced upward through a hierarchy of duties between ruler and subject, parent and child, husband and wife. Confucius lived from 551 to 479 BCE in the state of Lu during the Spring and Autumn period, and his teachings were later elaborated by successive Confucian scholars before becoming, under the Han dynasty, the official basis of the imperial examination system and statecraft across China, Korea, Vietnam and Japan for two millennia. Within the tradition itself, Mencius, in the fourth century BCE, held that human nature is innately good and needs only cultivation to flourish, while Xunzi, writing a century later, held that human nature is originally self-interested and requires deliberate ritual, education and law to become good, a disagreement about human nature that shaped how later Confucians understood a ruler's own duty of moral cultivation. Confucianism is generally contrasted with Legalism, the rival school of ancient Chinese statecraft that held strict law and punishment, not virtue, to be the only reliable basis of order, a rivalry that shaped Chinese political thought for centuries.