Confucianism / Kait Scharringhausen

What is the human condition? What is the solution to this condition? How do we move from problem to solution? And how is it best to live the solution in our own lives?

The core of Confucianism is the belief that human beings are teachable, improvable and perfectible through personal and communal endeavor especially including self-cultivation and self-creation. Confucianism focuses on the cultivation of virtue and maintenance of ethics, the most basic of which are jen, chun tzu, li, te, and wen. Jen is an obligation to altruism and humaneness for other individuals within a community. Chun tzu is the upholding of righteousness and the moral disposition to do well. Li is a system of norms and propriety that determines how a person should properly act within a community. Te surrounds power within positively in all circumstances so oppression has no room to overrule. Wen is the concept of “the arts of peace.” Confucianism holds that one should give up one's life, if necessary, either passively or actively, for the sake of upholding the cardinal moral values of jen and chun tzu. Confucianism is humanistic and non-theistic.

Confucianism holds to believing that you are doing your job in this life if you are upholding moral and ethical code in your work with school, family, and career. So my question to the Confucian scholar would be what then? After all the hard work in this life, what then? What am I investing my moral and ethical in code in my life for? What is the goal? Why would I work in this life for nothing in the next?

Confucius saw the self as always growing and changing for the benefit of social roles of becoming fully human. His repeated calls to self-examination and introspection generally show that he not only recognized an interior side to the self but considered it important. As long as all are working for the sake of humanity together inside the five constant relationships of jen, chun tzu, li, te, and wen then the inner world deepens and grows more satisfying. “In the course of one’s training, one finds that mastering a role in one of the five sheds light on the other roles. To improve as a parent throws light on what being a good child entails. The nuances of the other roles likewise illuminate one another.”(Smith, 183). This seems relative to this life and this life only. What is the core ethics striving for? Moment after moment of temporary enlightenment of being a child on their best behavior?

One would have to be curious as to where they are going to end up after living this works based lifestyle unless the teaching of the entire religion is distracting enough to have one not care about where their soul is going to end up when they die in this life. Confucianism seems to live in the present with depending on oneself to perform a life pleasing to what we really want which is righteousness, morality, and peace instead of not working at all for a life of eternal worth in the eyes of God.