Great Souls Chapter 4 Confucius
stephen conlonK'ung Fu-tzu, or Confucius as we call him in English by Latinizing his name to suit our Eurocentric ear, is the earliest of the five teachers I am discussing in these talks. We think he lived from the second half of the sixth century to the third decade of the fifth century before Jesus. Like Socrates and Jesus, he appears not to have written down his thoughts for posterity, or even for his own students. This means that we have the same doubts about whether or not we are reading what he thought or what others say that he thought. All we can do in the face of these uncertainties is to accept them and turn them to our benefit. We can benefit from this absence of a set text because it gives us some flexibility to think for ourselves, personally, about what we have from him. We also should be thankful for the fact that what we have is a collection of anecdotes and aphorisms that are purportedly the records of his students. In other words, we are getting glimpses into the way of the teacher through the ears and minds of his students. How they recorded these conversations should in some way reflect or indicate the impact their teacher or master had on them.
