Confucius

• Confucius

94:6.9Con­fu­cius (Kung Fu-tze) was a younger con­tem­po­rary of Lao in sixth-cen­tury China. Con­fu­cius based his doc­trines upon the bet­ter moral tra­di­tions of the long his­tory of the yel­low race, and he was also some­what in­flu­enced by the lin­ger­ing tra­di­tions of the Salem mis­sion­ar­ies. His chief work con­sisted in the com­pi­la­tion of the wise say­ings of an­cient philoso­phers. He was a re­jected teacher dur­ing his life­time, but his writ­ings and teach­ings have ever since ex­erted a great in­flu­ence in China and Japan. Con­fu­cius set a new pace for the shamans in that he put moral­ity in the place of magic. But he built too well; he made a new fe­tish out of or­der and es­tab­lished a re­spect for an­ces­tral con­duct that is still ven­er­ated by the Chi­nese at the time of this writ­ing.

94:6.10The Con­fu­cian preach­ment of moral­ity was pred­i­cated on the the­ory that the earthly way is the dis­torted shadow of the heav­enly way; that the true pat­tern of tem­po­ral civ­i­liza­tion is the mir­ror re­flec­tion of the eter­nal or­der of heaven. The po­ten­tial God con­cept in Con­fu­cian­ism was al­most com­pletely sub­or­di­nated to the em­pha­sis placed upon the Way of Heaven, the pat­tern of the cos­mos.

94:6.11The teach­ings of Lao have been lost to all but a few in the Ori­ent, but the writ­ings of Con­fu­cius have ever since con­sti­tuted the ba­sis of the moral fab­ric of the cul­ture of al­most a third of Uran­tians. These Con­fu­cian pre­cepts, while per­pet­u­at­ing the best of the past, were some­what in­im­i­cal to the very Chi­nese spirit of in­ves­ti­ga­tion that had pro­duced those achieve­ments which were so ven­er­ated. The in­flu­ence of these doc­trines was un­suc­cess­fully com­bated both by the im­pe­rial ef­forts of Ch’in Shih Huang Ti and by the teach­ings of Mo Ti, who pro­claimed a broth­er­hood founded not on eth­i­cal duty but on the love of God. He sought to rekin­dle the an­cient quest for new truth, but his teach­ings failed be­fore the vig­or­ous op­po­si­tion of the dis­ci­ples of Con­fu­cius.

94:6.12Like many other spir­i­tual and moral teach­ers, both Con­fu­cius and Lao-tse were even­tu­ally de­i­fied by their fol­low­ers in those spir­i­tu­ally dark ages of China which in­ter­vened be­tween the de­cline and per­ver­sion of the Taoist faith and the com­ing of the Bud­dhist mis­sion­ar­ies from In­dia. Dur­ing these spir­i­tu­ally deca­dent cen­turies the re­li­gion of the yel­low race de­gen­er­ated into a piti­ful the­ol­ogy wherein swarmed dev­ils, drag­ons, and evil spir­its, all be­to­ken­ing the re­turn­ing fears of the un­en­light­ened mor­tal mind. And China, once at the head of hu­man so­ci­ety be­cause of an ad­vanced re­li­gion, then fell be­hind be­cause of tem­po­rary fail­ure to pro­gress in the true path of the de­vel­op­ment of that God-con­scious­ness which is in­dis­pens­able to the true prog­ress, not only of the in­di­vid­ual mor­tal, but also of the in­tri­cate and com­plex civ­i­liza­tions which char­ac­ter­ize the ad­vance of cul­ture and so­ci­ety on an evo­lu­tion­ary planet of time and space.

92:5.124. The sixth cen­tury be­fore Christ. Many men arose to pro­claim truth in this, one of the great­est cen­turies of re­li­gious awak­en­ing ever wit­nessed on Uran­tia. Among these should be re­corded Gau­tama, Con­fu­cius, Lao-tse, Zoroaster, and the Jain­ist teach­ers. The teach­ings of Gau­tama have be­come wide­spread in Asia, and he is revered as the Bud­dha by mil­lions. Con­fu­cius was to Chi­nese moral­ity what Plato was to Greek phi­los­o­phy, and while there were re­li­gious reper­cus­sions to the teach­ings of both, strictly speak­ing, nei­ther was a re­li­gious teacher; Lao-tse en­vi­sioned more of God in Tao than did Con­fu­cius in hu­man­ity or Plato in ide­al­ism. Zoroaster, while much af­fected by the preva­lent con­cept of dual spiritism, the good and the bad, at the same time def­i­nitely ex­alted the idea of one eter­nal De­ity and of the ul­ti­mate vic­tory of light over dark­ness.