Here on History-Makers, we’re focused on the figures behind the history books.
And though they weren’t the ones ruling the kingdoms or technically doing anything,
their storytelling ends up having the heftiest influence on how we interact with the past.
Granted, some of them wouldn’t call themselves Historians, and a couple didn’t even write
books.
Well today we’re gonna follow this edge-case to its logical conclusion by discussing a
guy who isn’t even slightly a historian, and as a matter of fact, did not write anything.
At all.
And just to put the icing on the Challenge-Mode-Cake, our reliable sources for this boy-o tally-up
to a big fat zilch…
AAAA—But it’s okay!
Because what we lack in, anything about our pal Confucius we make up for in the incalculably
huge impact he had on Chinese philosophy, culture, and the entire canon of Chinese history.
So, by god, I will make this work, now Let’s do some History.
This video is brought to you by our Patrons, who voted for this topic.
I’ll make you proud if it kills me.
To understand why this Confucius guy is so difficult to pin down, let’s zoom out and
talk about why China in General is so hard to pin down, because it oscillates wildly
between shattering apart and reassembling itself, and Confucius lived right in the middle
of one of these episodes.
After the Zhou dynasty collapsed in the 8th century BC, China split into dozens of tiny
states.
Joke’s on China, at this point they don’t even realize this is gonna be a trend.
Anyway, some states built up armies to steamroll each other, and some just tried to keep their
heads down and avoid the aforementioned pain-train.
During this Spring and Autumn Period, which gets its name from a history-book written
about it, daily life was deeply stressful and uncertain, and good government was in
dubious supply.
Gee I wonder what that feels like.
So when every year had even odds of your kingdom getting stomped, it paid to be strategic,
and that meant having good advisors, so the Spring and Autumn was a great time to be in
the Philosophy business.
See, when the Zhou dynasty shattered into tiny shards of geopolitical glass, all these
new kingdoms needed to set up their own governments, so all of the freshly unemployed Zhou bureaucrats
went out to get them jobs, and teach their skills to any paying students.
Over the centuries, these legions of Mercenary Philosophers developed an array of informal
schools that specialized in one of multiple different topics.
These Hundred Schools of Thought fit on a sliding scale between the most spiritual and
the most practical, with ethical philosophy (where Confucius operates) being somewhere
in the middle.
We’ve got okay documentation on roughly a dozen of these, but for reasons including
and not limited to Arson, a lot of our sources (and all the scholars) conspicuously stopped
existing after the Qin unification.
So while Chinese history is famous for keeping star charts that can pinpoint events to the
year, we’re left with painfully few primary sources about the Hundred Schools or the works
they produced.
What we do have on Confucius comes from his disciples, all of whom were writing after
his death, and none of whom can actually seem to agree on the details of his life.
And that’s what really hurts me as a historian, because with someone like Laozi who wrote
the Daodejing we’re entirely in the dark, so we can treat him as a purely legendary
figure and it’s honestly fine.
While for Confucius, we’ve got bucketloads about his disciples, and we’re so close
to knowing a lot about the man himself, but… mnyehhh.
SO, in the History-Makers Mysteriousness tier-list, Confucius fits firmly into the Frustration
and Flailing Arms tier.
Now, with a gigantic asterisk that I’m gonna leave in the corner of the screen, let’s
take a look at what we have been told about Confucius’ life, and try to figure out how
he achieved Big Deal status from his humble beginnings.
Confucius began his career as a scholar and political advisor in the state of Lu, doing
his best to keep things running and implementing some reforms for spice.
But the neighboring state of Qi wanted to get a leg up, so they sabotaged the Duke of
Lu with a 200-IQ play: they sent him a convoy-full of horses and dancing girls as a “gift”,
and the duke became so distracted by horse-riding and “dancing” that he completely abandoned
his responsibilities to the state.
Confucius figured that Lu was a lost cause so he ran far away from the sounds of neighing
and moaning and looked for work in more virtuous pastures.
But nowhere he went seemed to care for what he was selling, so after 13 unproductive years
he went home and taught some of the local kiddos.
While the various dukes of China dismissed Confucius on the basis of him being a “Mondo
Nerd”, his 72 students were extremely dedicated to their master, and after his death, they
collected a series of his teachings and discussions into a book we now call The Analects.
From there it was go-time, and the disciples went to work writing more Confucian philosophy
and training future generations of disciples.
The most notable of them is a 4th gen Confucian named Mengzi, whose career-path followed a
similar trajectory of Wander Around China Getting Constantly Ignored, And Then Have
Your Disciples Write A Book About The Stuff You Said.
Mengzi’s elaboration on some finer points of Confucianism did a lot to develop the philosophy,
but he was way shiftier with his biographics.
Mengzi said that Confucius wrote the Spring and Autumn Annals, and all of China just shrugged
and went along with it.
It was only some 2000 years later that anybody realized this claim had exactly zero supporting
evidence.
Who could have guessed that a Biased source with a century of lag-time could possibly
be untrustworthy?
Truly, I’m shocked.
But this is just the weird kind of limbo state Confucianism was in during its first 300 years
— spreading like wildfire among the growing band of devotees, but still not finding a
place in the courts of Warring States-era China.
The dukes had no time for ethics when thousands of soldiers were spilling over the hills to
come set the palace on fire.
SO, with enough historical context to sink a mid-size battleship, let’s talk about
the philosophy these disciples were so jazzed about.
In the Analects, Confucius is always addressing one of two questions: What makes a good man,
and What makes a good government.
Confucius believed that all people have the capacity for virtue, even if most of us are
a little undisciplined.
So by the help of a great teacher or through some honest self-reflection, we can all better
ourselves in order to become Junzi — Gentlemen.
In a world where everything was topsy-turvy and slicy-stabby, Confucius sought comfort
in the practice of ritual and the cultivation of family-centric values like respect, discipline,
and piety.
And this focus on good family morals ties his ideas about individual virtue to his broader
concerns about society.
The family unit was basically a tiny replica of government, so if virtuous behavior made
people better family members, Confucius figured it would make them better citizens or rulers
as well.
Now, it’s tempting to file this somewhere between Oversimplicity and Wishful Thinking,
but his point makes a little more sense in context when we actually take the inverse.
Confucius argues that a government which relies on harsh laws and punishments is doomed because
it’s acting in opposition to the people, whereas a government drinking that Good Morals
juice is more likely to earn and maintain the divine thumbs-up known as the Mandate
of Heaven.
And this very idea explains how Confucianism would come to be so omnipresent in Chinese
culture.
So at the end of the Warring States Period, the Qin kingdom pulled off the ultimate dynasty-implosion
speed-run by unifying all of China and then collapsing a brisk 15 years later.
This partly owes to Qin brutality and a pesky habit of setting scholars and their books
on fire, which explains why the 100 Schools of Thought came to a near crashing halt after
unification.
Following them came the Han dynasty, which at first acted much like their predecessors,
cozying up with the Legalist philosophy and giving other groups like Confucians the cold
shoulder.
To be more precise and slightly more juvenile, Emperor Gaozu had a habit of de-hatting any
visiting Confucians so that he could pee on their hats…
Even at the age of 50, the emperor was a 5 year old.
To his credit, he once asked an advisor why he should bother with scholars when he had
conquered his empire on horseback, and his advisor replied that an empire cannot be ruled
on horseback, so maybe his highness should quit using the hats of Confucians as a portapotty
and start listening to what they have to say.
So Emperor Gaozu watched a few TED Talks on Confucianism and became a fan.
Half a century later, Emperor Wu promoted it to the state philosophy and created a school
to instruct his court in the Five Confucian classics.
This became the philosophical and political backbone of the Han dynasty and the primary
focus of Chinese scholarship, and so Confucianism in its various forms remained a fixture of
Chinese culture for the next 2000 years.
One effect of the All-Confucius-All-The-Time syllabus was in the writing of history, where
court historian Sima Qian developed his Shiji from the model of the Spring and Autumn Annals,
which, again, everybody just kinda assumed Confucius wrote.
In any case, this mode of history saw kingdoms as rely on Heaven’s Mandate to rule, and
that required virtuous governance, which, in Sima Qian’s eyes, meant being Confucian.
So in effect, the fortunes of a state all came down to How Confucian The Emperor Was
Being That Day.
I’m not gonna dig through the retroactive justifications and circular logic all this
entails, but for our purposes, Sima Qian becoming the model for subsequent Chinese historians
reflects how Confucian thought became ingrained within the way China told its history.
So where does that leave us?
Well, Confucius is an object lesson in working with incomplete information and puzzling out
an understanding from sparse and problematic records, but we’re not quite as out-in-the-wind
as I first made it seem.
True, we’re blind to his backstory, but as far as Chinese culture is concerned, the
most important thing Confucius did was teach, and that naturally manifests through his disciples
rather than himself.
Whoever Kong Qiu might have been in person is secondary to his legacy as the Master Kong-Fuzi.
From the Analects to the writings of disciples like Mengzi, Confucius is inseparable from
his role as a teacher and the work of his students.
As far as lecture halls go, All Of China is one heck of a classroom.
Thank you for watching, and thank you to the patrons who voted on this topic.
This is definitely the farthest we’ve stretched the label of History Maker, but it opens up
a lot of options for other important thinkers in world history.
So let me know who you might like to see in a future episode, I’ll see you all in the
next video!