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Confucius

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A statue of ConfuciusAccording to traditional belief, Confucius was born in 551 BCE (during the Spring and Autumn Period, at the beginning of the Hundred Schools of Thought philosophical movement) in the city of Qufu in the Chinese State of Lu (now part of present-day Shandong Province and culturally and geographically close to the royal mansion of Zhou). He was born into a once noble family who had recently fled from the State of Song. His father was seventy and his mother only fifteen at his birth. His father died when he was three and he was brought up in poverty by his mother. His social ascendancy links him to the growing class of Shi (X), between old nobility and common people, which later became the prominent class of literati because of the cultural and intellectual skills they shared.

As a child, he is said to have enjoyed putting ritual vases on the sacrifice table. As a young man he was a minor administrative manager in the State of Lu and rose to the position of Justice Minister. After several years, disapproving of the politics of his Prince, he resigned. At about age fifty, seeing no way to improve the government, he gave up his political career in Lu, and began a twelve-year journey around China, seeking the "Way" and trying unsuccessfully to convince many different rulers of his political beliefs and to push them into reality. When he was about sixty, he returned home and spent the last years of his life teaching an increasing number of disciples, trying to share his experiences with them and transmit the old wisdom via a set of books called the Five Classics.

In the Analects, where one can find the most intimate descriptions of him, Confucius presents himself as a transmitter who invented nothing and his greatest emphasis may be on study, the Chinese character that opens the book. In this respect, he is seen by Chinese people as the Greatest Master. Far from trying to build a systematic theory of life and society, he wanted his disciples to think deeply for themselves and relentlessly study the outside world, mostly through the old scriptures relating past political events (like the Annals) or past feelings of common people (like the Book of Odes).

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