taught in the families of nobles, also helping in the administration of their properties.  He made several attempts to obtain advancement, either in vain or with only a short term of employment ending in dismissal.  Thus his career was a continuing pilgrimage from one noble to another, from one feudal lord to another, accompanied by a few young men, sons of scholars, who were partly his pupils and partly his servants.  Many of these disciples seem to have been “illegitimate” sons of noblemen, i.e. sons of concubines, and Confucius’s own family seems to have been of the same origin.  In the strongly patriarchal and patrilinear system of the Chou and the developing primogeniture, children of secondary wives had a lower social status.  Ultimately Confucius gave up his wanderings, settled in his home town of Lu, and there taught his disciples until his death in 479 B.C.

Such was briefly the life of Confucius.  His enemies claim that he was a political intriguer, inciting the feudal lords against each other in the course of his wanderings from one state to another, with the intention of somewhere coming into power himself.  There may, indeed, be some truth in that.

Confucius’s importance lies in the fact that he systematized a body of ideas, not of his own creation, and communicated it to a circle of disciples.  His teachings were later set down in writing and formed, right down to the twentieth century, the moral code of the upper classes of China.  Confucius was fully conscious of his membership of a social class whose existence was tied to that of the feudal lords.  With their disappearance, his type of scholar would become superfluous.  The common people, the lower class, was in his view in an entirely subordinate position.  Thus his moral teaching is a code for the ruling class.  Accordingly it retains almost unaltered the elements of the old cult of Heaven, following the old tradition inherited from the northern peoples.  For him Heaven is not an arbitrarily governing divine tyrant, but the embodiment of a system of legality.  Heaven does not act independently, but follows a universal law, the so-called “Tao”.  Just as sun, moon, and stars move in the heavens in accordance with law, so man should conduct himself on earth in accord with the universal law, not against it.  The ruler should not actively intervene in day-to-day policy, but should only act by setting an example, like Heaven; he should observe the established ceremonies, and offer all sacrifices in accordance with the rites, and then all else will go well in the world.  The individual, too, should be guided exactly in his life by the prescriptions of the rites, so that harmony with the law of the universe may be established.