The two lines most often quoted as his are not his. Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life first carries his name in an American newspaper column in June 1985. A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step is from the Daodejing, a different book from a different tradition, and the Chinese does not say a single step. It says the journey begins beneath your feet.
The picture behind the quotations is in worse condition. The Confucius say voice is an American joke, on record by 1939. The name is Latin, and nobody writing in Chinese has ever used it for him. The religion was filed as one by Victorian scholars in the 1870s. The book of his sayings was put together by other people, over generations, after he died.
What is underneath is a man we know almost nothing about. Nothing survives in his hand. No portrait was made of him from life, and nobody who met him described his face. His followers wrote twenty-seven paragraphs on how he got through a day, down to the length of his nightclothes, and not one line on what he looked like.
The one date
The annals of his own state, Lu, give him eight characters: a death in the fourth month of summer, 479 BC. That is the whole of the bare record, and even that survives in a continuation of the chronicle that not every reader accepts as part of it.
Most of the rest, the mother, the career of offices, the itinerary of his travels, the three thousand students, the deathbed, comes from writers generations after him, above all the historian Sima Qian, writing around 100 BC. That is four centuries later. Even his birth year, 551 BC, is Sima Qian's arithmetic; two commentaries put it a year earlier.
The century he was born into
In 539 BC, when he was twelve, a nobleman of Jin and the chief minister of Qi sat down and compared the ruin of their countries. The man from Qi gave a price. In the market at his capital, he said, artificial feet were expensive and shoes were cheap. The courts were taking feet off faster than the cobblers could sell shoes.
That was how his century held a country together: amputation, execution, and for a family on the losing side, the killing of every male in the line. Most of what he said is an argument against it. A country, he thought, should be held together by the example of the men running it.
Forty years of failure
Lu was a small state run not by its duke but by three great families, cousins of the duke, who had been taking the state apart legally for two generations. In 517 BC the duke attacked the first of them, lost, and fled. Confucius was in his thirties, and he was nobody. He is not in any of it.
He spent forty years trying to get one ruler to govern the way he said, and never once managed it. A steward who had seized the state tried to recruit him and he dodged. He told a student he was only waiting for the right offer. He held one office of state, and left it over a piece of sacrificial meat that never reached him, or over some music girls, depending which source you believe. Then he was abroad for thirteen years.
When he came home, the man who ran Lu hired his students instead of him. The sayings are what he told young men who went on to get the jobs he wanted.
The word on the cover
Gentleman now means a man with manners. It is one translator's English for junzi, and in his century the word meant a lord's son. It came with land, a place at court, and the right to be heard.
What Confucius did was take the word off the father and fasten it to the son's conduct. A gentleman, in his mouth, was a man still being made. The training was the old aristocratic one. What he changed was who could have it. He opened one rung: his own, the bottom edge of the nobility, men with a name and no money. Eighteen centuries later the Chinese state was examining the men it appointed on his book.
He did not claim to have become a gentleman himself.
Everything on this page comes from Confucius: What Makes a Gentleman, which is built from the letters and the printed texts, and says in its notes where each fact comes from.
