Exercise: Perfect Rituals
The activity helps motivate the Confucian focus on the relationship between ritual activity (li) and ethics.
Exercise: Individuality (Confucian Philosophy)
This activity helps students question widespread beliefs (in western cultures) about individuality and independence. It helps illustrate the Confucian emphasis on community and the importance of our relations to others.
Lesson: Understanding the Literary Style of the Analects
On a first reading – and a second and third – Analects does not always seem to Western readers like a philosophical work. In place of crisp definitions, arguments, and replies to criticisms, one finds anecdotes, snippets of conversations, and descriptions of what might seem trivialities – like how Confucius liked to straighten his mat! Many therefore find Analects dull, puzzling, strange, cryptic, frustrating or – worse – as a pseudo-philosophical text empty of any genuine moral insight. Such attitudes are encouraged by a history of racist and distorting stereotypes of aged sages spouting cryptic lines of ‘Oriental wisdom’.
Lesson: Virtues and Moral Rules
Can a morally great / virtuous person choose the right thing to do in every situation all by herself, or does she need to follow moral rules as guides?
Lesson: Criminal Parents
What should a person do if her parents commit a crime? Should she immediately turn them into the authorities?
Unit: Care of the Dead
The early Chinese philosophers argued heatedly about how to care for the dead. In this unit, three of the most distinctive views of the period are presented. These can be treated together but also easily break apart for smaller lessons or units with other materials.
Primer: Early Confucianism
Early Confucianism is typically identified with the Confucian philosophers active during the period leading up to and during the Warring States era in China (6th – 3rd century BCE). The most familiar and discussed figures in this period are Confucius himself, Mengzi, and Xunzi. The period in which these philosophers lived was extraordinarily violent, chaotic, and troubling. Philosophical inquiry thus betrays an atmosphere of crisis, reflecting concerns about what had gone wrong, both politically and morally, and how it might be repaired.