Word: confucianism
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Many of his lessons were passed down in The Analects, selected sayings collected after his death. Mastery of these and other Confucian literature was essential to doing well on the Imperial Chinese equivalent of civil service testing, linking the Confucian tradition with authority itself. Portions of the analects slipped out to the west, occasionally capturing a philosophy in epigram, but more often adding flair to Charlie Chan scripts. Compared with all the politics and the bad jokes about "Confucius say this" or "Confucius say that," what The Master actually said seems relatively harmless...
...Imperial China, favor was with-drawn with a vengeance--China's greatest historian, Ssu-ma Ch'ien, was castrated for defending a general who had fallen into the disfavor of a Han emperor. Ssu's action had been morally correct, but he had violated another, more important Confucian precept--"First and foremost," The Master had said, "be faithful to your superiors." Confucians stood by parents, princes, and emperors, right or wrong...
This ethic of blind loyalty was the fatal flaw in the Confucian tradition. A young official served at the grace of the emperor, not China, because, for him, the emperor was the very essence of China. During the Opium War--China's disastrous contact with the naked force of Western imperialism--complete alteration of battle results was common. The deceptions protected individual officers in the eyes of the emperor at the expense of the entire people--but then "the people" was only a vague concept in the Confucian tradition. The ruling hierarchy could not handle conflicts greater than relations between...
Both Confucius and Mao place great stress on internalizing "correct" ideas and on the need for the ruler to act as a moral exemplar. Moreover, the party cadres, steeped in Marxism-Leninism, bear what must be to Mao some disconcerting resemblances to the old Confucian bureaucracy, steeped in the revered classics...
Looked at in the long run, the anti-Confucian diatribe is part of Mao's continuing effort to transform the nature of man. He wants to replace the Confucian habits of tranquillity, obedience and fatalism with a new Promethean man of struggle and combativeness. For him, Confucius continues to be a symbol of everything in China that represents hierarchy, stagnation and complacency. For that reason, the sage cannot be permitted to sleep in peace...