The matter is not unimportant; since we are to talk of a member of this family. We shall understand him better for remembering the kind of heredity that lay behind him: some seventy generations of nobility, all historic. Only one royal house in the world now is as old as his was then: that of Japan.
Some generations before, the K'ung family had lost their duchy of Sung and emigrated to Lu; where, in the early part of the sixth century, its head, this Shuhliang Heih, had made a great name for himself as a soldier. He was now a widower, and seventy years old; and saw himself compelled to make a second marriage, or the seventy illustrious generations of his ancestors would be deprived of a posterity to offer them sacrifices. So he approached a gentlman of the Yen family, who had three eligible daughters. To these Yen put the case, leaving to them to decide which should marry K'ung.—"Though old and austere," said he, "he is of the high descent, and you need have no fear of him." Chingtsai, the youngest, answered that it was for their father to choose.—"Then you shall marry him," said Yen. She did; and when her son was to be born, she was warned in a dream to make pilgrimage to a cave on Mount Ne. There the spirits of the mountain attended; there were signs and portents in the heavens at the nativity. The k'e-lin, a beast out of the mythologies, appeared to her; and she tied a white ribbon about its single horn. It is a creature that appears only when things of splendid import are to happen.
Three years after, the father died, leaving his family on the borders of poverty. At six, Ch'iu, the child, a boy of serious earnest demeanor, was teaching his companions to play at arranging, according to the rites, toy sacrificial vessels on a toy altar. Beyond this, and that they were poor, and that he doted on his mother—who would have deserved it,—we know little of his boyhood. "At fifteen," he tells us himself, "his mind was bent on learning." Nothing in the way of studies, seems to have come amiss to him; of history, and ritual, and poetry, he came to know all that was to be known. He loved music, theory and practice; held it to be sacred: "not merely one of the refinements of life, but a part of life itself." It is as well to remember this; and that often, in after life, he turned dangerous situations by breaking into song; and that his lute was his constant companion. He used to say that a proper study of poetry—he was not himself a poet, though he compiled a great anthology of folk-poems later—would leave the mind without a single depraved thought. Once he said to his son: "If you do not learn the Odes, you will not be fit to talk to." "Poetry rouses us," said he, "courtesy upholds us; music is our crown." You are, then, to see in him no puritan abhorring beauty, but a man with artistic perceptions developed. At what you might call the other pole of knowledge, he was held to know more about the science of war than any man living; and I have no doubt he did. If he had consented to use or speak about or let others use that knowledge, he might have been a great man in his day; but he never would.
At nineteen, according to the custom, he married; and soon afterwards accepted minor official appointments: Keeper of the Granaries, then Superintendent of the Public Parks in his native district. He made a name for himself by the scrupulous discharge of his duties, that came even to the ears of the Marquis; who, when his son was born, sent the young father a complimentary present of a carp.—It would have been two or three years before the beginning of the last quarter of the century when he felt the time calling to him, and voices out of the Eternal; and threw up his superintendentship to open a school.
Not an ordinary school by any means. The Pupils were not children, but young men of promise and an inquiring mind; and what he had to teach them was not the ordinary curriculum, but right living, the right ordering of social life, and the right government of states. They were to pay; but to pay according to their means and wishes; and he demanded intelligence from them; —no swelling of the fees would serve instead.—"I do not open the truth," said he, "to one not eager after knowledge; nor do I teach those unanxious to explain themselves. When I have presented one corner of a subject, and the student cannot learn from it the other three for himself, I do not repeat the lesson." He lectured to them, we read, mainly on history and poetry, deducing his lessons in life from these.
His school was a great success. In five years he had acquired some two thousand pupils: seventy or eighty of them, as he said, "men of extraordinary ability." It was that the Doors of the Lodge had opened, and its force was flowing through him in Lu, as it was through the Old Philosopher in Honanfu.—By this time he had added archery to his own studies, and (like William Q. Judge) become proficient. Also he had taken a special course in music theory under a very famous teacher. "At thirty he stood firm."
Two of his disciples were members of the royal family; and Marquis Chao regarded him with favor, as the foremost educationist in the state. He had an ambition to visit the capital (of China); where, as no where else, ritual might be studied; where, too, was Laotse, with whom he longed to confer. Marquis Chao, hearing of this, provided him with the means; and he went up with a band of his pupils. There at Loyang, which is Honanfu, we see him wandering rapt through palaces and temples, examining the sacrificial vessels, marveling at the ancient art of Shang and Chow. But for a few vases, it is all lost.
He did interview Laotse; we cannot say whether only once or more often. Nor, I think, do we know what passed; the accounts we get are from the pen of honest Ben Trovato; Vero, the modest, had but little hand in them. We shall come to them later.
And now that he stands before the world a Teacher, we may drop his personal name, K'ung Ch'iu, and call him by the title to which paeans of praise have been swelling through all the ages since: K'ung Futse, K'ung the Master; latinized, Confucius. It is a name that conveys to you, perhaps, some associations of priggishness and pedantry: almost whereever you see him written of you find suggestions of the sort. Forgo them at once: they are false utterly. Missionaries have interpreted him to the West; who have worked hard to show him something less than the Nazarene. They have set him in a peculiar light; and others have followed them. Perhaps no writer except and until Dr. Lionel Giles (whose interpretation, both of the man and his doctrine, I shall try to give you), has shown him to us as he was, so that we can understand why he has stood the Naional Hero, the Savior and Ideal Man of all those millions through all these centuries.
We have been told again and again that his teaching was wholly unspiritual; that he knew nothing of the inner worlds; never mentions the Soul, or 'God'; says no word to lighten for you the "dusk within the Holy of holies." He was all for outwardness, they say: a thorough externalist; a ritualist cold and unmagnetic.—It is much what his enemies said in his own day; who, and not himself, provide the false-interpreters with their weapons. But think of the times, and you may understand. How would the missionaries feel, were Jesus translated to the Chinese as a fine man in some respects—considering—but, unfortunately! too fond of the pleasures of the table; "a gluttonous man and a winebibber "?