Introduction: Classical Confucianism in Historical and Comparative Context

Abstract

We use the term “classical Confucianism,” or “early Confucianism,” or “pre-Qin Confucianism,” to cover the thoughts, doctrines and practical wisdoms developed in the first stage of Confucianism. Confucianism began with the founder Confucius (551–479BCE), and developed through Confucius’ disciples and his grandson Zisi子思 (483–402BCE) to Mencius (372–289BCE), and finally Xunzi荀子 (325–238BCE). Not long after the death of Xunzi, the warring states were all conquered and unified by the Qin Empire (221–206 BCE), in the process of which Confucian books were infamously burned and scholars were buried, most of them Confucian, by the first emperor of the Qin-Empire, and so ended this first period of Confucianism. It is thus distinguished from the later Confucianism of the Han Dynasty (202BCE–220CE), which became a state ideology with the canonization of the early Confucian founding texts, and the Neo-Confucianism that developed from the eleventh to eighteenth Century in Song, Ming and Qing Dynasties, as the revival of Confucianism after its silence for almost eight centuries under the challenges of Neo-Daoism and Buddhism.