How to Live
the ethic — what it asks of a life
The five constants.
Humaneness, rightness, ritual propriety, wisdom and trustworthiness. Ren is the one that carries the weight — the character is a person and the number two, and it means whatever it is that makes a human being count as one. Confucius refused to define it and answered differently every time he was asked.
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Tend the five relationships.
Ruler and minister, parent and child, husband and wife, elder and younger, friend and friend: goodness is not abstract — it is these five, done well, rippling outward.
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Filial piety.
Serve them living, bury them by the rites, sacrifice to them after — and do not damage the body they gave you, which is why Chinese men historically did not cut their hair. It outranks the state: asked about an upright son who reported his father for stealing a sheep, Confucius said that in his village uprightness meant the father covering for the son and the son for the father.
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Shu — do not impose.
Offered as the single word to practise for a lifetime. Stated negatively, which its defenders regard as the whole point: it forbids without prescribing, so it cannot be used to justify doing things to people for their own good. Its critics say a rule you can satisfy by staying in bed is not much of a rule.
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The junzi.
The word meant a ruler's son. Confucius took it and made it a moral rank achievable by anyone: the junzi seeks it in himself, the small man seeks it in others; the junzi understands what is right, the small man what pays. The redefinition worked so completely that it now sounds like an ordinary word.
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Remonstrate.
The duty to tell power it is wrong — a minister to a ruler, a son to a father. The Classic of Filial Piety says a father who has a son who will argue with him will not fall into wrong, and that obeying a father's every command is not filial. Chinese officials submitted memorials knowing what it would cost, and the tradition counts them among its saints.
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What was asked of women.
Follow the father, then the husband, then the son; cultivate conduct, speech, appearance and work. None of it is from Confucius, who barely mentions women at all. It was assembled in the Han and hardened over the next fifteen hundred years into footbinding, widow chastity arches and the exclusion of daughters from the genealogy.
⚖ contested within
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