The Authentic Confucius

For more than 2,000 years, Confucius has been an inseparable part of China's history. Yet despite this fame, Confusius the man has been elusive. In this book the author has worked through the most reliable Chinese texts on her quest to sort out what is really known about Confucius from the reconstructions and guesswork that muddled his memory. Here the author illuminates the political and social climate in which Confucius lived. She explains how Confucius made the transition from court advisor to wanderer, and how he reluctantly became a professional teacher as he refined his judgment of human character and composed his vision of a moral political order. The result is a book that shows how Confucius lived and thought: his habits and inclinations, his relation to the people of the time, his work as a teacher and as a counselor, his worries about the world and the generations to come.