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Según Confucio, todos los seres humanos pueden aprender, todos pueden perfeccionarse moralmente, y aquellos que se perfeccionen más moralmente puden llegar a ser hombres superiores. Esto significa que todos tienen el derecho para poder estudiar y ser mejores moralmente, sin importar su nacimiento o condición social.
Minuto 11:14

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1. Según Confucio, las personas que gobiernen deben de ser las mejores, tanto intelectualmente, como moralmente, es decir debe de haber un gobierno Meritocrático, donde los líderes son personas moralmente correctas que influyen a una cultura de paz.  Minuto 15:00-16:00
2. Según Confucio, los gobernantes deben de gobernar velando por los intereses del pueblo, y si fallan en este deber, el pueblo tiene el derecho de rebelarse. Esto se asemeja a lo que conocemos hoy por democracia. Minuto 16:25

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Does Confucianism have a god?

Where does Confucianism come from?

How did Confucianism spread?

Confucianism, the way of life propagated by Confucius in the 6th-5th century bce and followed by the Chinese people for more than two millennia. Although transformed over time, it is still the substance of learning, the source of values, and the social code of the Chinese. Its influence has also extended to other countries, particularly Korea, Japan, and Vietnam.

Confucianism, a Western term that has no counterpart in Chinese, is a worldview, a social ethic, a political ideology, a scholarly tradition, and a way of life. Sometimes viewed as a philosophy and sometimes as a religion, Confucianism may be understood as an all-encompassing way of thinking and living that entails ancestor reverence and a profound human-centred religiousness. East Asians may profess themselves to be Shintōists, Daoists, Buddhists, Muslims, or Christians, but, by announcing their religious affiliations, seldom do they cease to be Confucians.

Although often grouped with the major historical religions, Confucianism differs from them by not being an organized religion. Nonetheless, it spread to other East Asian countries under the influence of Chinese literate culture and has exerted a profound influence on spiritual and political life. Both the theory and practice of Confucianism have indelibly marked the patterns of government, society, education, and family of East Asia. Although it is an exaggeration to characterize traditional Chinese life and culture as Confucian, Confucian ethical values have for well over 2,000 years served as the source of inspiration as well as the court of appeal for human interaction between individuals, communities, and nations in the Sinitic world.

The thought of Confucius

The story of Confucianism does not begin with Confucius. Nor was Confucius the founder of Confucianism in the sense that the Buddha was the founder of Buddhism and Jesus Christ the founder of Christianity. Rather, Confucius considered himself a transmitter who consciously tried to reanimate the old in order to attain the new. He proposed revitalizing the meaning of the past by advocating a ritualized life. Confucius's love of antiquity was motivated by his strong desire to understand why certain life forms and institutions, such as reverence for ancestors, human-centred religious practices, and mourning ceremonies, had survived for centuries. His journey into the past was a search for roots, which he perceived as grounded in humanity's deepest needs for belonging and communicating. He had faith in the cumulative power of culture. The fact that traditional ways had lost vitality did not, for him, diminish their potential for regeneration in the future. In fact, Confucius's sense of history was so strong that he saw himself as a conservationist responsible for the continuity of the cultural values and the social norms that had worked so well for the idealized civilization of the Western Zhou dynasty.

The historical context

The scholarly tradition envisioned by Confucius can be traced to the sage-kings of antiquity. Although the earliest dynasty confirmed by archaeology is the Shang dynasty (18th-12th century bce), the historical period that Confucius claimed as relevant was much earlier. Confucius may have initiated a cultural process known in the West as Confucianism, but he and those who followed him considered themselves part of a tradition, later identified by Chinese historians as the rujia, "scholarly tradition," that had its origins two millennia previously, when the legendary sages Yao and Shun created a civilized world through moral persuasion.

Confucius's hero was Zhougong, or the duke of Zhou (fl. 11th century bce), who was said to have helped consolidate, expand, and refine the " feudal" ritual system. This elaborate system of mutual dependence was based on blood ties, marriage alliances, and old covenants as well as on newly negotiated contracts. The appeal to cultural values and social norms for the maintenance of interstate as well as domestic order was predicated on a shared political vision, namely, that authority lies in universal kingship, heavily invested with ethical and religious power by the "mandate of heaven" (tianming), and that social solidarity is achieved not by legal constraint but by ritual observance. Its implementation enabled the Western Zhou dynasty to survive in relative peace and prosperity for more than five centuries.

Inspired by the statesmanship of Zhougong, Confucius harboured a lifelong dream to be in a position to emulate the duke by putting into practice the political ideas that he had learned from the ancient sages and worthies. Although Confucius never realized his political dream, his conception of politics as moral persuasion became more and more influential.

The concept of " heaven" (tian), unique in Zhou cosmology, was compatible with that of the Lord on High ( Shangdi) in the Shang dynasty. Lord on High may have referred to the ancestral progenitor of the Shang royal lineage, but heaven to the Zhou kings, although also ancestral, was a more-generalized anthropomorphic god. The Zhou belief in the mandate of heaven (the functional equivalent of the will of the Lord on High) differed from the divine right of kings in that there was no guarantee that the descendants of the Zhou royal house would be entrusted with kingship, for, as written in the Shujing ("Classic of History"), "heaven sees as the people see [and] hears as the people hear"; thus, the virtues of the kings were essential for the maintenance of their power and authority. This emphasis on benevolent rulership, expressed in numerous bronze inscriptions, was both a reaction to the collapse of the Shang dynasty and an affirmation of a deep-rooted worldview.

Partly because of the vitality of the feudal ritual system and partly because of the strength of the royal household itself, the Zhou kings were able to control their kingdom for several centuries. In 771 bce, however, they were forced to move their capital eastward to present-day Luoyang to avoid barbarian attacks from Central Asia. Real power thereafter passed into the hands of feudal lords. Since the surviving line of the Zhou kings continued to be recognized in name, they still managed to exercise some measure of symbolic control. By Confucius's time, however, the feudal ritual system had been so fundamentally undermined that the political crises also precipitated a profound sense of moral decline: the centre of symbolic control could no longer hold the kingdom, which had devolved from centuries of civil war into 14 feudal states.

Confucius's response was to address himself to the issue of learning to be human. In so doing he attempted to redefine and revitalize the institutions that for centuries had been vital to political stability and social order: the family, the school, the local community, the state, and the kingdom. Confucius did not accept the status quo, which held that wealth and power spoke the loudest. He felt that virtue (de), both as a personal quality and as a requirement for leadership, was essential for individual dignity, communal solidarity, and political order.

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Confucianism | Meaning, History, Beliefs, & Facts

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Confucianism, the way of life propagated by Confucius (6th-5th century BCE) and followed by the Chinese people for more than two millennia. Still the substance of learning, the source of values, and the social code of the Chinese, it has also influenced other countries, particularly Japan, Korea, and Vietnam.

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1. "Uno que no sepa gobernarse a si mismo, ¿cómo sabrá gobernar a los demás?.
2. "Si ya sabes lo que tienes que hacer y no lo haces entonces estás peor que antes"
3. "Donde hay educación no hay distinción de clases"

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An ancient Chinese text recorded the height of Confucius as nine feet six inches tall. While that document may have exaggerated his physical size, there's no doubt that Confucius was a teacher and philosopher of tremendous stature. His ideals have become intrinsically entwined with the national identity of China and the civilization of East Asia.

The individual known in the West as Confucius was born Kongqiu in 551 B.C. near Qufu, in eastern China. His family may once have been aristocratic, but they apparently fell on hard times, because he took menial jobs as a young man.

Love of learning

Confucius showed a zeal for academics early on. "At 15, I set my heart on learning," he later told his disciples. He studied music, mathematics, the classics, history, and more. He was especially entranced by the early years of the Zhou dynasty (1046-256 B.C.), a peaceful period he perceived as a golden age to be emulated.

Confucius stressed the cultivation of personal qualities such as benevolence, reciprocity, and filial piety.

Confucius believed that education and reflection led to virtue, and that those who aspired to command others must cultivate discipline and moral authority in themselves. He strove to rise through the government ranks, but he tended to offend others with his forceful personality, using his position as a bully pulpit for preaching good governance. He eventually was appointed to the influential post of minister of crime in the state of Lu but fell from favor through his aggressive reform efforts.

He tried for years to reenter public service in order to improve it from within, but he found far greater success as a teacher instead. Confucius broke with tradition in his belief that all human beings could benefit from education. He espoused lifelong learning "for the sake of the self," meaning self- knowledge and self-improvement. He attracted a wide circle of followers, who knew him as Kongfuzi (Master Kong). Those pupils recorded his words in The Analects, a collection of ethical concepts.

As stated in The Analects, Confucius believed that social harmony would naturally follow from the proper ordering of individuals in relation to
one another, with the family unit as the basic building block of society. He therefore stressed the cultivation of personal qualities such as benevolence, reciprocity, and filial piety as essential to the formation of well-educated, conscientious individuals who would benefit society through public service.

Spreading his wisdom

Confucius was largely ignored in his own day. When he died in 479 B.C., he left behind perhaps 3,000 students, who devoted themselves to preserving and propagating their master's precepts. Confucius's teachings were enthusiastically adopted as Chinese state ideology by the Han dynasty in the second century B.C. The Analects would go on to guide governments and individuals for millennia, informing and influencing Chinese history and civilization in the process.

This text is an excerpt from the National Geographic special issue The Most Influential Figures of Ancient History.

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An ancient Chinese text recorded the height of Confucius as nine feet six inches tall. While that document may have exaggerated his physical size, there's no doubt that Confucius was a teacher and philosopher of tremendous stature. His ideals have become intrinsically entwined with the national identity of China and the civilization of East Asia.