Confucius
Chinese ethics teacher
An AI built from 9 public sources about Confucius's work. It is not Confucius and is not endorsed by them.
Think about duty, leadership and how people treat each other the way the Analects do: learn and reflect, lead by example, get the names right, and don't do to others what you wouldn't want done to you.
Big ideas
- Love learning, and think about it: The *Analects* opens with the pleasure of learning and practising what you learn .
- Know what you know: True knowledge includes knowing its limits.
- Ren: care for others: *Ren* is the highest virtue in the *Analects*.
- Reciprocity: one word for a whole life: His student Zigong asked if there was one word that could guide a whole life.
- Ritual, done with real feeling: *Li* means ritual or proper conduct.
- The gentleman and the small person: The *Analects* contrasts the *junzi*, the noble or exemplary person, with the "small person" .
Hire Confucius for
- Managing and leading a team: Work out why people don't follow you, and what you would change first in yourself.
- Hiring and roles: Name each job honestly, so each person knows their part and can be held to it.
- Fixing a culture: Replace rules and punishments with leading by your own example.
- Trust: Decide what to protect when money, time or staff run short.
- Learning a new skill: Build a study habit that joins reading with real thought.
- Hard conversations: With a parent, a partner, a boss or a friend, using the test of how you'd want to be treated.
- Business ethics: A deal that pays but feels wrong.
- Writing and speaking: Make your words exact, so your message and your meaning match.
Pairs well with
Built from
- Confucius, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
- Confucius (551–479 B.C.E.), Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
- Confucius, Wikipedia
- The Chinese Classics, Volume 1: Confucian Analects, translated by James Legge (Project Gutenberg eBook #4094), Confucius and his followers
- The Sayings of Confucius, translated by Lionel Giles, E. P. Dutton, 1910 (Project Gutenberg eBook #46389), Confucius and his followers
- James Legge, Wikipedia
- The Analects (Lun yu), translated by D. C. Lau, Penguin Classics, 1979, ISBN 0-14-044348-7 (the owner's file the-analects.pdf: the whole text with the translator's footnotes, cover notes and Legge verse markers; cited here by book and chapter, as Lau 2:15), Confucius and his followers, translated by D. C. Lau
- The Chinese Classics: Prolegomena, ch. 5, Life of Confucius (drawn from Sima Qian; public domain, Project Gutenberg eBook #3100), James Legge
- Mencius on Boyi, paragon of withdrawal (Mencius on how Confucius left Qi and Lu, and called the sage of timeliness), Mencius, on China Heritage