 So in this video, we're going to look at Confucianism. Now, you might wonder what a video on Confucianism is doing in a playlist titled Introduction to World Religions. After all, Confucianism isn't technically a world religion, and it's not. I'm not arguing that it is. But I am going to ask why. So the next set of videos, we will look at the subjects of these next videos and we will ask the question whether this is a religion or not. Now, some of them explicitly are religion, some of them explicitly are not. But we probably still room to ask the question of why. So, like I said, this one, we're going to take a look at Confucianism. Now, there's a couple of things to remember about Confucianism, kind of helps to place it in the conceptual landscape, so to speak. The first thing about Confucianism, especially what might set it apart from other sorts of ideas, is that the basic unit of humanity is relationship. It's not the individual. What is going to determine the success of humanity is going to be your, you know, the measure of what you are, right, is not based upon you, right, it's based upon your relationship to others. Now, you know, this is really different from a typical 21st century American mindset, of course, right, we very much favor the individual over relationship. But, you know, it's individual rights that matter, right, that sort of thing. But, you know, to be fair, the word humanity does not mean human, right, it does not refer to a specific human or even, you know, necessarily human nature. We could think of it as, you know, our human nature, okay, that's one way to interpret it, but another way to interpret it is all of humanity. And when you talk about all the humanity, we're talking about all individual humans and relationships, they have to one another. So, for Confucianism, what's important is the relationships that one has to other human beings. This is going to determine who and what you are. Another important thing about Confucianism is not really a, you know, it's not really a way of belief, right. They don't sit down and tell you to believe along those things. Rather, it's action, right. It's what you do as opposed to what you believe. Now, there's two big concepts, or, you know, several big concepts. So, you know, that kind of like go hand in hand. The first one is REN. Now, literal translation is something like virtue. Another way to think about it is how you become a person. So, REN is developed through community life. Who you are is informed by what you do and how you act with others. It's the relationships you form with others. And, you know, the family is kind of the starting point for REN. And who you are in the family is, you know, by what that means is how you behave and what you're supposed to do within the family. That is kind of an analogy for everyone else. For REN, not only do you care for and look out for your individual family, or yourself and individual family members, but for everybody, or your one big community. This leads us to Lee. Lee is something like propriety of formal behavior. Now, you know, REN is how, you know, one of the ways to look at REN is how you care for others, how you relate to others. You know, Lee is something like propriety, manners, formal behavior. That's what they think of as very structured manners. Now, without REN, Lee is just simply formalism. It's just behavior with no intention or care. So, something that we do here in the West is, you know, we're very, you know, someone says, how are you? You say, oh, I'm fine. But, you know, usually you're not really thinking about it, right? Or, hey, good to see you, but you're not really thinking about it. It's just something you say. But with REN, you have what's added to the formalism for the formal behavior of Lee is this propriety. It is this caring about your function and place within the society. Now, when you do well, when you do well following Lee and developing this REN, you become somebody, kind of like a hero in a way. You become somebody who's praiseworthy. You care about others, and you work within the society. Now, it's important to remember that for REN, it doesn't really matter what successes you have, right? That isn't what makes you a person. You know, you get sales manager of the year, right? That's not important. It doesn't really matter your station life. It doesn't matter whether you're a policeman. It doesn't matter whether you're a farmer or a judge. What's going to determine whether you've done a good job or whether you're praiseworthy, where you've achieved the day is the word day, is if you acted according to REN. You worked within your station, regardless of what your station is. Now, there's some characteristics of Confucianism. And the first one is the study, right? If you're following Confucianism, you study your own cultural heritage. You look towards and try to understand what's happened in your history, what's happened in your past, in your present, how your culture works now, not only primarily to find your place in it, to act according to Lee and act with REN. But once you learn these lessons about your culture, well, then you act on them. You act on it, right? You're trying to, once you've learned your place within the culture and how to care for others, once you've learned your place in the big, extended family, you act on that. You don't just ignore it. You don't just learn it and set it aside. And finally, your social success, I said this already, your social success is measured by REN, not by your place, like in the hierarchy of society, and even, you know, what awards or accolades you've won. As far as that's because a day is what matters, whether you're praiseworthy, not so much the awards or the station you have in life. And kind of what's on the flip side of day, right, is shame, shame. Somebody who has day cares for other people, works within the society, develops all of oneself, maximum, tries to cultivate one's abilities and talents for the benefit of everyone, that's day. The self-sufficient person who doesn't care about others, who thinks that he's actually independent of others, or that person has shame. They have shame, you know, even if they're acting accordingly, right, they have shame because they're not concerned with others and they don't care what others say. So again, the success then is measured by REN. If you don't fulfill REN, then you're shameful. Now, you know, I said that Confucianism isn't really about beliefs and primarily it's not, but there are three things that Confucius takes or things that is true. And that human nature essentially is endowed with a capacity for good. It's not inherently flawed, it's not inherently evil, that sort of thing. But you know, since we have this capacity for good, what follows from that is that we should act on it, we should be good and we should be good for the sake of being good. After all, that's what we do, right? That's part of our human nature. It's that we do the good. And you know, if you do good, if you do good, then others will be inspired and the culture, the society will prosper. So not only should you do good, but when you do so, everybody, the society itself will improve. You'll achieve that day, right? You'll have that day. And since you are this hero, you're somebody worth looking up to, you will inspire others to do the same. Now, Confucius had a couple of, say attitudes or beliefs about religion, but a lot of people say he wasn't out to start his own religion. After all, the prevailing, I guess you call it religion of the time was ancestor worship. And yeah, I mean, it was the religion of the time when you worshiped your own ancestors. And again, Confucius, appealing to Confucianism, probably isn't gonna have a problem with this because he considers the culture, the relationship to be the most important thing. So of course you're going to worship your ancestors. They are your family. And he thought that, sure, we can talk about ghosts and we can talk about spirits, but we shouldn't fall into superstition. Now, what he's doing there, he's probably thinking, I don't know any specific examples from ancient China, but in the West, what's a superstition? If you spill salt, throw some of it over your left shoulder to avoid bad luck, right? Well, there's just no causal connection between the spilling of salt and bad luck, right? It just, it doesn't make any sense. So he's probably trying to set aside any sort of these weird superstitions and there's just no connection between some sort of behavior and one's ancestors or anything like that. So, but he still thought there were ghosts and spirits, okay. But beyond that, you ought to be real careful by trying to say anything further. Now, Confucius thought that heaven was very much involved in his life. Heaven gave him his mission. Heaven knew his actions. Heaven determined his fate. Now, before you think, it's like, whoa, hold on a second. Let me just get finished with that whole superstition stuff. Well, remember, right? For Confucius, what's important is the relationship. That's what's important is relationship. And, you know, exactly how to phrase this. You know, it makes all kinds of sense that Confucius would think that there's something like heaven anyway. If he thought ancestor was worship, then sure, there's going to be a heaven. Now, heaven is not the celestial wonderful place. Not necessarily that, right? Heaven is one's ancestors. Heaven is the community of the afterlife. Now, if you're willing to accept the idea that your current community, the corporeal community, has something to say and do with your life, right? They're all going to be involved in your life. After all, we're all involved with each other. Then it's not a stretch to think that heaven, you know, your ancestors, your deceased ancestors, that heaven is also involved in your life. This is not so weird to say. You know, if we consider that they're there, so it's, you know, this is part and parcel of Confucius' belief. Isn't something just kind of tacked on to it? Now, and again, heaven is, again, this kind of community of his ancestors. So, with the importance that ancestors and community have, well, of course, he's going to think that heaven has at least something to do with the way that his life is going. So, this is kind of an overview of Confucius. Kind of an overview of Confucius. And really, the big thing to remember here is the importance that he placed on one's role in the society.