Confucius

Chinese · 551 BCE to 479 BCE

Born around 551 BCE in the town of Zou, in the state of Lu, present-day Qufu in Shandong province, China, during the Spring and Autumn period, Kong Qiu came from a family of minor nobility fallen into poverty. His father, a soldier said to have been over seventy, died when the boy was three, and his mother raised him in straitened circumstances. He worked young as a clerk managing granaries and herds, and educated himself in ritual, music, history, and poetry, the disciplines he came to revere as the inheritance of an older, more ordered age. He served briefly as a magistrate and minister of crime in Lu, then left office and spent more than a decade wandering from state to state, seeking a ruler who would govern by virtue rather than force. None would. He returned to Lu in his late sixties and devoted his last years to teaching, gathering disciples said to number three thousand, seventy-two of whom mastered his way. He taught that moral cultivation begins at home, that the gentleman rules himself before he rules others, and that ritual and humaneness, ren, hold society together. He wrote no systematic treatise. The Analects, compiled by his followers after his death, records his sayings and exchanges, the closest thing we have to his voice. He is traditionally credited with editing the Book of Songs, the Book of Documents, and the Spring and Autumn Annals. He died in 479 BCE, around the age of seventy-two, lamenting that no ruler had taken up his teaching. Within centuries his thought became the foundation of the Chinese state, and his descendants are still recorded to the present day.