Taoists advised a way of life from the cities and the complexities and problems of organized social life, but this advice seemed wrong to the Confucians. They did not think that society should be decentralized; it should be better established and improved, according to its own Tao, i.e., its own laws of order and harmony.

Their founder was Kung-fu-tzu (Confucius), who was born about 551 B.C. Left fatherless at three, Confucius was given an aristocratic training by his devoted mother and early aspired to government office. After her death he turned his home into a private school, where he taught the Six Disciplines in which he himself had been trained (history, poetry, manners, government, divination, and music). He broke the tradition by admitting poor boys to his school. He wished to train them for responsible participation in government. The feudal system established 500 years earlier by the Chou Dynasty was disintegrating, and there seemed only one way to avoid disaster and that was to re-establish li, the manners and morals of the sages of older times, and to inculcate jen, the kindly inward disposition that led men to show “human-heartedness”. Men should exhibit shu, mutuality, or doing as one would be done by. The higher type of man (the chun-tzu) was unfailingly correct in his behaviour and profoundly generous and just. Confucius believed that the rulers set the climate of society: “the prince is like the wind and the people like grass; it is the nature of grass to bend with the wind”.

Confucius encouraged ancestor worship and the domination of the family by its elders. Each member of society should know his place init. With the ideal definition of his place and function in mind (the principle of “the rectification of names"), he should measure up: the emperor should be benevolent and just, the subject loyal; the father wise and kind, the son filially pious; the husband righteous, the wife submissive; the elder brother considerate, the younger brothers deferent; friends instilled with mutuality. This would assure justice, freedom to do easily what is required of one, and happiness arising from social cooperation and harmony.

Confucius felt that he was designated by Heaven to teach his doctrines, and to this extent he was religious, despite scepticism about gods and spirits that allowed only a low-key recognition of supernatural influences.

After Confucius’ death, his disciples formed the Confucian school. They preserved the textbook materials he used in his teaching and these became the Five Classics. By recording his sayings, they created the Analects, one of the four Confucian Books, the others being the Great Learning, the Doctrine of the Mean, and the Essay of Mencius. But for some time they met with strong opposition from the Taoists, the Legalists, and the followers of Mo-tzu. The last were a tightly organized group of proto-communists, who taught that universe love was superior to Confucian filial piety and hard work in the fields more necessary to social order than education. The Legalists were, on the other hand, a proto-fascist group who demanded unquestioning obedience to rulers as possessors of an awesome authority (shih). They succeeded in motivating the Duke of Ch’in to conquer all the provinces and install himself as Shih Huang-ti ("The First Emperor"). He turned on the Confucians and burned their books; but with his death his dynasty fell, and Han emperors who succeeded him sought to restore peace and order by a resort to Confucian principles.

Meanwhile, Confucianism had undergone development. Mencius (371-289 B.C.), the greatest writer of the Confucian school, urged that men are born with a good nature and are corrupted by their environment. Hsun-tzu (298-238 B.C.), on the other hand, maintained with the Legalists that man is born an evil nature that must be controlled firmly; so he advocated strict Confucian training to recondition man into behaving for the general good.

The Han emperors instituted the Confucian academies to prepare students for imperial examinations in the Confucian literature, a measure designated to sift out scholars worthy to be placed in high office. Centuries later, when Buddhism and Taoism had much diminished Confucian influence, the Neo-Confucians (11th and succeeding centuries), especially Chu Hsi and Wang Yang-ming, reinterpreted Confucianism and restored its prestige. The system of examinations in the Confucian classics continued to the beginning of the 20th century, but was discontinued with the Revolution of 1912. Confucianism has been in decline for the past half-century, as it has been opposed as feudal and reactionary.