Relation to Others, Community

A Confucian relates to other people first through the prism of their family.  A person's family, both alive and in Heaven, comprise a special set of relationships and cultivating those relationships is the beginning of all relationships.  Often when reading Confucian Sages one gets a sense of logic applied to human relationships.  They want to know the very beginning of humaneness, and then what is the next step, and then the next.  Where does it all begin?  Well, it begins with the family.

Ancestor worship both honors the family but also connects the Chinese to place and to clans; it is the nature of ancestors that a large number of people will share a common ancestor.

The next level of importance, analogous to relations in a family, is relation to authority.  Kings and government officials deserve special respect.  Relations with authority builds from the filial bond.  Those in authority are like parents and its important to give them the respect you would give a parent.  They, in turn, respect you by receiving the gift of your regard and providing ethical leadership.

A Confucian is always aware of hierarchy and supports it.  Consequently, as society changes, especially with the change in women's status at work and in the family, Confucianism will need to change. 

Being a good supporter of a hierarchy is not the same as loving your neighbor.  Although Confucius made the connection between the special relationships (the five: parent to child, husband and wife, older sibling and younger sibling, friend to friend, and householder to official) and society as a whole, there has always been discussion in China about this area of ethics.

Chinese Sages that came after Confucius all addressed this issue slightly differently. Mozi, a Sage from a different class than Confucius, preached non-violence and ren for all. Armstrong writes:

As with Confucius, the single thread that held his philosophy together was ren, but he believed that Confucius had distorted this compassionate ethic by limiting it to the family.  In his view, the clan spirit of the aristocracy was at the root of many of the current problems: family chauvinism, competitions for prestige, vendettas, and sumptuary expenses.  He wanted to replace the egotism of kinship with a generalized altruism. Everybody must feel toward all others exactly what he felt for his own people."others must be regarded like the self," he said; this love must be "all -embracing and exclude nobody"(270).

A hundred years later, Mencius, as he is known in the West, defined ren as benevolence, and claimed that it flowed naturally from all people.  Ren needed cultivation and one began with family but needed to generalize from those relationships.  That generalized feeling would create more feeling. Armstrong writes:

The Golden Rule was crucial.  This was the virtue that made the junzi (mature person) truly humane and brought the individual into a mystical relationship with the entire universe. "All the ten thousand things are there in me," Mencius said in one of his most important instructions. "There is no greater joy for me than to find, on self-examination, that I am true to myself.  Try  your best to treat others as you would wish to be treated yourself, and you will find that this is the shortest way to benevolence [ren]" (305-306).