Kong Fuzi Quotes

The Confucius we know today is not the creation of the Chinese alone. The modern Confucius is “a product fashioned over several centuries by many hands, ecclesiastical and lay, Western and Chinese,” said historian Lionel Jensen. By Jensen’s reckoning, Confucius is in part the creation of Jesuit missionaries who arrived in China in the sixteenth century. As they tried to make sense of this new and foreign civilization in a way they could understand, they manufactured a coherent “-ism,” with a great saint as its founder, in a form that the Chinese themselves had never envisioned. The name “Confucius” itself is a Jesuit invention, a strange transliteration of the Chinese Kong fuzi, a (rarely used) form of “Master Kong,” the “Kong” being his family name. The Confucius we know, Jensen asserted, is a “figment of the Western imagination.”4

Confucianism is not a religion but rather a system of moral philosophy that originated in China in the teachings of Kong Fuzi (558–471 BCE),

Man does not like to think his history is short, but so it is; so short that it is the merest instant in the Earth's history. To see this, to put man's life in context with the Earth's, imagine the whole history of the Earth compressed into the six-day week of the Biblical Creation; a scale that makes eight thousand years pass in a single second. The first day and a half of this week is too early for life, which does not appear until about Tuesday noon. During the rest of Tuesday, and also Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and well into Saturday, life expands and transforms the planet: life becomes more diverse, more stable, more beautiful; life makes a home for itself and adapts itself to live there. At four in the afternoon on Saturday, the age of reptiles comes onstage; at nine in the evening it goes offstage, but pelicans and redwoods are already here, lifeforms now threatened by man's wish to have the whole world to himself. Man does not appear on the Earth until three minutes before Saturday midnight. A second before midnight, man the hunter becomes man the farmer, and wandering tribesmen become villagers. Two-fifths of a second before midnight, Tutankhamon rules Egypt. A third of a second before midnight, Kong Fuzi and Gautama Buddha walk the Earth. A fortieth of a second before midnight, the Industrial Revolution begins. It is midnight now, and some people are saying we can go on at the rate that has worked for this fortieth of a second, because we know all the answers. Do we really know that much?