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Confucius and Confucianism

Confucius was introduced for the first time to the West as: Chinese philosopher, who flourished about five hundred years before the coming of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Confucius' teachings have exercised such a molding influence that if the Oriental way of life were to be characterized in one word it would be "Confucian" Confucius was human, all-too-human, and the sagest of the sages. He did not pretend to be a prophet, but dedicated his whole life to save the mankind as a heavenly missionary. Confucius promised those who followed him no great riches, no secrets for worldly power or fame. Instead of gold or glory, he spoke only of a dream. Confucius spoke and lived and dreamed of a world where happiness, good, and peace would replace misery, evil, and war. His dream was not merely of a world as it had been or might be; his was a dream of a world as it should be. Confucius was a man who never led an army, ruled a kingdom, or conquered a nation, but shaped the flow of human history and established a system of ideas that has lasted over twenty five hundred years.[Bennett Sims] When I began to read Confucius, I found him to be a prosaic and parochial moralizer; his collected sayings, the Analects, seemed to me an archaic irrelevance. Later, and with increasing force, I found him a thinker with profound insight and with an imaginative vision of man equal in its grandeur to any I know. Increasingly, I have become convinced that Confucius can be a teacher to us today--a major teacher, not one who merely gives us a slightly exotic perspective on the idea already current. He tells us things not being said elsewhere; things needing to be said. He has a new lesson to teach........