the Latinized form given originally by the Jesuits to the name of the great Chinese philosopher, Khoung-fou-tseu. As a sage and a religious lawgiver, Confucius is regarded by his countrymen as the greatest man China has produced. He was unquestionably an extraordinary man, remarkable in the influence he exerc- Confucius cised over his countrymen when alive, and the still greater influence he has ever since exercised by his writings. Confucius was born about 550 years before Christ, in the kingdom of Loo, a portion of north-eastern China, nearly corresponding with the modern province of Shan-tung. At that time China was divided into nine independent states; and it was not till three centuries later that it was united into one kingdom. From his earliest years Confucius was distinguished by an eager pursuit of knowledge. From his father, who was prime minister of the state in which he lived, he inherited a taste for political studies; but being left an orphan when still but a child, he was educated for the most part in retirement by his mother Ching and his grandfather Coum-tse. The anecdotes which are related of his boyhood tend to show that he was distinguished by those qualities most highly esteemed by his countrymen, and afterwards most strictly enforced by himself—a profound reverence for his parents and ancestors, and for the teaching of the ancient sages. "Coum-tse, his grandfather," says one of his biographers, "was one day sitting absorbed in a melancholy reverie, in the course of which he fetched several deep sighs. The child observing him, after some time approached, and, with many bows and formal reverences, spoke thus—'If I may presume, without violating the respect I owe you, sir, to inquire into the cause of your grief, I would gladly do so. Perhaps you fear that I who am descended from you may reflect discredit on your memory by failing to imitate your virtues.' His grandfather, surprised, asked him where he had learned to speak so wisely. 'From yourself, sir,' he replied; 'I listen attentively to your words, and I have often heard you say that a son who does not imitate the virtues of his ancestors deserves not to hear their name.'"—Meng-isea, i. 4.

It may be well to remark here that the accounts given of his life are credible enough. There seems no good reason to doubt the facts related of him by his biographers; and a full and authentic life of the sage might easily be compiled by collating the various biographies, and expunging the few wonderful incidents which may readily be distinguished as the interpolation of some marvel-loving admirer. In this respect the accounts we have of Confucius differ materially and strikingly from those of Gotama Buddha, and Zoroaster, the contemporaneous sages of Northern India and Persia, whose biographies are almost entirely composed of the legendary and miraculous, from which their genuine history can hardly be disentangled.

The position which his father had held in the state seems to have inspired Confucius at an early age with a desire to distinguish himself in moral and political studies, and prompted him to investigate the early history of his country. He laboured zealously to fit himself for filling offices of high political trust; and in his endeavours to master the learning of the early sages he was ably assisted by his grandfather. He married at nineteen years of age, and is said to have divorced his wife a few years afterwards, when she had given birth to a son, that he might devote himself without interruption to study; but owing to the general contempt of women in the East the subject is only slightly alluded to by his biographers.

He entered upon political employment at twenty years of age, as "superintendent of cattle," an office probably established that the revenue might not be defrauded, and necessary where much of it was paid in kind. In this situation his reverence for antiquity and the ancients did not prevent Confucius from attempting reforms and checking long-established abuses. Under his administration men who were dishonest were dismissed, and a general inquiry was set on foot with a view to the reformation of all that was unworthy or pernicious. The activity of Confucius brought him into favour with his sovereign, and he was promoted to the "distribution of grain," an office of which it is not easy to discover the nature. Whatever were his Confucian duties, however, the energy that Confucius displayed was extremely distasteful to his colleagues. He was now in the vigorous manhood of 35, and the eyes of the nation were turned to him as their future prime minister, when a revolution occurred in the state which drove him from power.

Deprived of his office, he wandered for eight years through the various provinces of China, teaching as he went, but without as yet making any great impression upon the mass of the people. He returned to Loo in his forty-third year. His enemies, during those eight years, had gradually lost their authority; and he was again employed in political offices of trust and responsibility. Immorality prevailed at this time to a frightful extent. Confucius set himself up fearlessly as a teacher of virtue. His admonitions were not thrown away; and having gained the approbation of the king a few years after his return from exile, he was appointed prime minister with almost absolute authority. The enemies of order and virtue excited troubles on his elevation; but Confucius sternly repressed the symptoms of dissatisfaction, and though of compassionate disposition, he did not hesitate to resort to capital punishment when necessary to rid himself of his enemies.

Reformation made rapid strides in the territories of Loo; the nobles became more just and equitable; the poor were not oppressed as before; roads, bridges, and canals were formed, "The food of the people," says his biographer, "was the first care; it was not until that had been secured in abundance that the revenues of the state were directed to the advancement of commerce, the improvement of the bridges and highways, the impartial administration of justice, and the repression of the bands of robbers that infested the mountains." For four years he steadily persevered in his endeavours, until Loo began to be regarded as a model state by the surrounding kingdoms. It was not the interest of the neighbouring princes to permit this state of things to continue. One of them, more crafty than the others, knowing the weakness of the sovereign of Loo, trained some fascinating courtezans after his own views, and sent them as a present to the voluptuous prince. They were greedily received, for the king had long tired of Confucius and his stern morality. The courtezans roused him and his nobility to action. A strong party rose against the sage; and at the age of 67, he was driven once more from his native state to wander as a teacher through the different provinces of China.

It was only by concealment and disguise that the life of the exiled prime minister was preserved. For twelve years he wandered from province to province, at first harassed, persecuted, hunted, but after a while allowed to travel unmolested. A faithful little band of disciples collected around him in his wanderings, and their numbers, as time advanced, might soon be counted by thousands. Seventy-two of these, we are told, were particularly attached to him, but only ten of them were "truly wise." With these ten he finally retired at the age of 69 to a peaceful valley in his native province, where, in the midst of his disciples, he passed a happy literary period of five years, in collating and annotating the works of the ancients. These sacred books have been for twenty-three centuries the fountains of wisdom and goodness to all the educated of China. They are the works in which every student must be a proficient ere he can hope to advance in the political arena, and for twenty-three centuries have had an incalculable influence on a third of the human race.

His life was peacefully concluded in the midst of his friends at the age of 73, in the valley to which he had retired five years previously. It has been for all succeeding ages a sacred spot—a place of pilgrimage for the learned and the superstitious; and the Chinese of 1854, amid conflicting Buddhism and Christianity, still point with reve- In his manner of teaching, Confucius was strikingly contrasted with the other great religious teachers of Asia—Gotama Buddha, Zoroaster, and Mohammed. He made no pretensions to universal knowledge or external inspiration. "I was not born," said he to his disciples, "endowed with all knowledge. I am merely a man who loves the ancients, and who do all I can to arrive at truth." (Lun-yu, vii. 19.)

On particular points of religious and other knowledge he was equally frank in his confessions of ignorance. Having been asked, for instance, by his disciples, how superior spirits might be acceptably worshipped, he candidly answered that he did not know; although with strange inconsistency, when asked of military matters, his reply was, "If you had asked me of ceremonies or sacrifices, I might have been able to reply to you, but with regard to the military science I never studied it." (Lun-yu, xv. 1.) On another occasion, when asked what death was, he gave the memorable answer, "When I know not the nature of life, how shall I inform you what death is?" (Lun-yu, xi. 11.) "He was entirely without self-love," says Meng-tesu, one of his most enthusiastic disciples, "he was entirely without self-love, prejudice, obstinacy, and egotism; when he saw any one in mourning, or in the garb of a magistrate, or blind, or older than himself, if seated, he rose at his approach." His disciples, however, were not satisfied with this simplicity and unaffected abnegation of mystery. They came to him on one occasion in a body, demanding that he should teach them the recondite subtleties of his doctrine, the esoteric dogmas, which should be theirs and theirs only, but which should be hid from the world. "O my disciples," he exclaimed, as they thus importuned him, "do you believe then that I have for you hidden doctrines? I have not. What I have done and what I have thought I have duly communicated to you, for such has ever been my method of instruction." (Lun-yu, vii. 23.) The disciple who records this transaction adds, that the subjects he taught were four, "literature, the practice of virtue, rectitude, and fidelity."

In his precepts, as his disciples have handed them down to us, there is nothing austere or repulsive; no attempt whatever made to bind down the minds of his followers to any rigidly ascetic rule of his own. On the contrary, he desired them to be open to every enlivening and ennobling idea, to practise singing and music, to cultivate and reverence the sublime, to open their hearts to the influence of joy—in short, by every means consistent with virtue to render their existence happy.

Simple and natural as he was, however, in his manner of life and method of teaching, he himself informs us, in a saying recorded by one of his disciples that he was not understood by his age. (Lun-yu, xiv. 37.)

But although he saw all men in arms against him often, he met their assaults with all the calmness of a Socrates. "When I examine myself," he says boldly, "and find my heart right, although I should have for adversaries a thousand or ten thousand men, I will march without fear against my enemies." (Meng-tesu, i. 2.)

The literary labours of Confucius consisted, for the most part, of a revision of the sacred books, which had been from time immemorial regarded by the Chinese as the sources of all true wisdom and knowledge. These he pruned of many extravagancies; and, in the text as well as in the notes, stated his own opinions, and added much to the original value of the works. Of the sacred books thus edited there are two classes—the first, the most highly esteemed, and generally called by Europeans the classical works of the first order, consist of five works or hsiang, (king or kung, meaning sacred book); the Y, the Chou, the Chi, the Li, Confucius, and the Tchun-tsiou. The classical books of the second order are four in number. The Chinese call them the See-chou: two of them are treatises by Confucius, one on the art of government, and the other on the golden mean; the other two are the Lun-yu, a collection of his sayings, and Meng-tesu, a philosophical treatise bearing the name of its author or disciple, Latinized by the Jesuits into Mencius.

The Y-king, or "sacred book of changes," called also Ye-king and Uk-king by European writers, is the first and the most esteemed of "the classical works of the first order." The foundation of the treatise, as it has come down to the present day, consisted of what are generally called "the trigrams or enigmatical lines of Fohi." This Fohi, who must not be confounded with Fo the Chinese Buddha, is reported to have been the first king of China, the first lawgiver and sage; and the date of his reign is thrown back by the Chinese historians to twenty-five centuries before our era. These trigrams consist of three lines varied by one or more of them being broken in the midst; two of these trigrams are in each variation placed together, and out of the six lines thus combined, sixty-four variations are formed. These serve as the divisions of the work. "It was not at first, properly speaking, a book," says M. Visdelou, "nor anything approaching to it; it was but a very obscure enigma, and more difficult a hundred times to explain than that of the Sphinx." Twelve centuries before our era, according to Chinese tradition, another monarch (Ouen-ouang or Ven-vang) undertook, like another Edipus, to solve the enigma; adding, for that purpose, to each hexagram a short sentence scarcely less obscure than the lines themselves. The successor of Ven-vang added a concise interpretation to each of these enigmatical sentences, and in this crude state the work remained until the time of Confucius. Confucius, by giving full explanations to these hexagrams, at once unintelligible and highly revered, annexing in fact a dissertation to each, procured for his own opinions the sanction of antiquity. The praises lavished upon the Y-king by enthusiastic disciples of Confucius are unbounded—"it so comprehends the heaven and the earth," exclaims one—"that there is nothing good which it does not contain," "Not only is it the origin of the other canonical books," asserts a second, "but it is as it were the elucidator of all things visible and invisible." "To know the other books and not to know the Y-king," cries a third, "would be to examine a river and neglect its source; to take the branches and leave the root."

The origin of these mystical trigrams is thus accounted for by Chinese tradition. As Fohi was one day walking on the banks of the Hoang-ho, there came towards him on a sudden from the stream a great dragon, or tortoise, or turtle. Fohi was not a whit appalled by this apparition; watching the animal attentively, he discovered the trigrams on its back. Fohi copied them immediately. The transaction was of course miraculous.

Through the watchful jealousy of his disciples, the Y-king has reached our time exactly as it was left by Confucius. Of its contents, M. Visdelou, one of its translators, gives the following account:—"It embraces a great variety of subjects; it is in fact the Encyclopaedia of the Chinese. Its contents may, however, be reduced to three heads, to wit, metaphysics, physics, and morals." "These subjects are not treated of methodically and in order. They are merely treated of in detached passages. It may be said to contain a fourth head—the explanation of destiny. From the earliest antiquity it has served for predictions, of which, like all rude nations, the Chinese are particularly fond."

The Chou-king (also written Chu-king, Seu-king, and Chang-chou by European writers) is the second of the five Confucius' first-class canonical books. It consists of a plain historical narrative of the events which occurred during the first dynasties of Chinese kings. Like the Y-king, the Chou appears to have received its present form from Confucius, and it abounds in moral reflections and appropriate inculcations as to the pursuit and practice of virtue.

The Chi-king, the third of these works (written Seeing by Marshman), consists of 311 popular odes, some selected, and others composed by Confucius—all of a patriotic and moral character. These poems are usually committed to memory by Chinese students and sung on public occasions, as well as in the festivities of private life. "The verses of the Chi-king," said Confucius to his disciples, "are as a spectrum, offering to us the contemplation of good and evil: they teach us to serve our parents at home and our king abroad." (Lun-yu, 17.) "It is evident," says M. Biot, "that this collection of pieces, all perfectly authentic, and of a form generally simple and naive, represents the manners of the ancient Chinese in all their unsophisticated simplicity, and that it offers to any one who wishes to make a study of these manners a mine more easy to explore than the historical works such as the Chou-king, in which the facts relating to the manners and social constitution of the ancient Chinese are combined with long moral discourses."

The Li-king (called also Li-ki and Ly-khee) or book of ceremonies, is the fourth of the great canonical works. It appears, from the imperfect accounts of those who have investigated the subject, to have been a collection by Confucius of the various customs inculcated by former sages. Some maintain, however, that it is entirely his own work. Whether quite original, or only a compilation, it is certain that it went through his hands, and that he inculcated the greatest reverence for it upon his disciples. "My son," said he to a young man, "unless you have studied the book of rites, you cannot thoroughly understand how to act in conformity with established usage and with virtue." In the Li-king all the minutiae of daily life are dwelt upon, and the proper mode of action inculcated, under almost all possible contingencies. It is of course by far the most voluminous of the kings, being nearly equal in bulk to all the others put together. "One has but to read the Li-king," says a student of Chinese philosophy, "to understand the fixedness and immobility of Chinese customs."

The fifth and last of these canonical books is the Tchun-tsiou (the Chun-chou of Marshman). Tchun means spring, and tsio autumn; and the work was so called because Confucius commenced it in the former season, and ended it in the latter. It was the work of the philosopher's extreme old age, and consists, for the most part, of a continuation of the Chou-king, particularly containing a history of his native state, Loo, for two hundred and forty years. It contains a fuller account of the political system inculcated by Confucius than any of the other sacred hooks.

The physical system inculcated by the Chinese philosopher somewhat resembled that of the early Grecian sages, and was undoubtedly in advance of the opinions of the age. The five king or elements stand at its base—water, fire, wood, metals, and earth. Of these, says the Chou-king, water flows and is ever in motion; fire burns and ascends; wood is crooked and straightens itself; the metals are earthy and susceptible of change; the earth is humid and descends. Each of these so-called elements is symbolized by one or more mystical lines placed in various positions. The universe, according to this fanciful theory, has been generated by the union of two material principles—a heavenly and an earthly, Yang and Yn. The heaven and the earth represent the corporeal substance of these principles; their intellectual manifestations pervade all things. In consequence of its origin and nature, the universe is destined to be destroyed and reproduced constantly after countless ages in never-ending successions. The proper office of the material and heavenly Yang is to produce, to make strong and to sustain. Its nature is firmness, inflexibility, and perseverance. What rises, what appears, what produces or contains motion, exists from it. The nature of Yn is to give place to, to fall to decay, to be weak, opaque, slow, inert, save when receiving vigour and motion from Yang, to obey and to be obsequious.

The heavens and the earth being thus mystically united as Yang and Yn, the origin of man appears to be intimately connected with their union. "The heaven and the earth," says the Y-king, "had a beginning; and if that can be said of them, how much more truly of man?" "After there was a heaven and an earth, all material things were formed; male and female appeared, man and woman." We seek, however, in vain, for a Creator in the system. True, there is a Tai-y, a "Grand Unity," a mysterious "heaven," whose existence is declared to have been prior to all other existences, and particularly to the material developments of Yang and Yn; but although this Tai-y has many of the characteristics of the Godhead, he or it is not represented as creating.

The system of Confucius agrees with the universal traditions of our race, that man was originally happy and pure, and that, by his own act, he fell from that happiness and purity. So far Confucius agrees with our Christian teaching; but he goes on to inculcate that, by his own act, man can recover the happiness and purity he has lost. The object of one of his small treatises, entitled Ta Hia, is expressly declared to be, "to bring back fallen man to the sovereign good—to what is perfect." "All people are naturally good," he asserts, "but a desire of pleasure changes them." With an earnest wish to develop "the inward light," pure and sincere intentions, fixed determination, a calm spirit, and much meditation, the Chinese teacher believed it quite possible for man to attain to this "sovereign good." Virtue he divides into two great parts; first, the reverence for Heaven and superior beings, for parents and those in authority, with the worship due to the former class; and, secondly, that justice or equity which consists in rendering to every one his due.

The tutelary spirits, to whom Confucius teaches that worship is due, are divided into two classes—the spirits of mountains, rivers, and other natural objects, and the disembodied spirits of our ancestors—to both of which propitiatory sacrifices are due. "There is a Chinese book," says M. De Guignes, "compiled from the writings of Confucius, which gives figures of the two orders of spirits, informs us where they reside, and the particular object for which they should be invoked." The duty of filial obedience and reverence is inculcated by the Chinese sage with an earnestness unknown in any other system. Indeed his entire political system is based solely on this foundation. Of all crimes, filial disobedience is the greatest and least expiable. Even truth may be sacrificed by the son to hide the faults of the father.

His political system, founded on the idea he entertained of the parental relationship, is one of absolute unmitigated despotism. The sovereign stands in a purely paternal relation to his subjects, and revolt or disobedience is under any circumstances a crime. He enumerates clearly and distinctly the duties both of the sovereign and of the people; but if the sovereign choose to be a tyrant, his lieges, so far as Confucius teaches, have no redress.

Of the extraordinary estimation in which Confucius has been always held by his countrymen, we scarcely require any proofs. Although he was allowed to end his days... Confusion in comparative obscurity, his descendants have ever since enjoyed, during seventy generations, the highest honours and privileges. They are indeed the only hereditary nobility in the empire. They are found principally in the neighbourhood of the district in which Confucius lived; and it was computed 150 years ago, that they numbered 11,000 males. Through every revolution in Chinese history their privileges and honours have hitherto remained intact.

In every city of the empire, of the first, second, and third class, there is one temple at least dedicated to Confucius. The civil and political rulers, nay, the emperor himself, are all equally bound to worship there. The service appointed for this worship is similar to that which each family performs in honour of its ancestors in their "hall of the ancients." A plain tablet is erected above an altar, on which there is a suitable inscription. Sweet-smelling gums are burned in the chamber with frankincense and tapers of sandal wood; fruit, wine, and flowers are placed upon the altar; and appropriate verses are chanted from the Chi-king in praise of deceased worth and wisdom. The ceremony concludes with an address resembling a prayer, delivered by the highest dignitary present. (Les livres sacrés de l'Orient, par M. Pauthier, Paris, 1840; Y-king antiquissimus Sinarum liber, editio J. Mohl, Stuttgartiae 1834; The Works of Confucius, Marshman, Serampore, 1809; Le Chou-king, traduit et enrichi de notes, &c., Paris, 1770; China, by S. Kidd, London, 1841; The Calcutta Review, vol. vii.)

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