ABSTRACT
Confucianism notionally began in the sixth century BC with the teachings of an obscure Chinese scholar and occasional government adviser called Kongfuzi (Confucius). This picture, however, is slightly misleading because Confucius was himself drawing upon traditions, ideals and cosmologies that were already ancient. He was in fact calling for a revitalisation of these traditions in an attempt to bring an end to the chaos that had engulfed China in his own day. He reaffirmed the traditional Chinese notion that virtue, morality, humaneness and harmony are all heavenly realities waiting to be discovered through education and the adoption of ‘proper’ relationships between members of families and members of society. In the hands of his disciples and generations of their successors his teaching gave rise to an ethical code that assumed a status akin to that of a state religion (Turner 2006: 212) in China, Korea, Japan and Vietnam, providing a central basis of regime legitimacy for many generations of imperial dynasties. As a state religion and as a system of governance Confucianism is now dead, but at the level of the lived experience of ordinary people, it continues to act as a religion, imposing patterns of social cognition that provide
a reasonably consistent social underlay across Chinese and other East Asian cultures. The divergent elements separating ‘Confucian’ cultures (China, Taiwan, Japan, Korea, Vietnam and the overseas Chinese of Southeast Asia, including those in Singapore) are legion, but the common elements are also very firmly established.
