ABSTRACT
“When the false is made true, the truth is inevitably false.” In the history of research on Confucius, the phenomenon of taking what is false as the truth or obfuscating the truth through false impressions has been only too common. The reason the image of Confucius went through so many vicissitudes was that there were too many of the “outer coverings.” All the pseudoimages of Confucius produced by history might be viewed as the products of a range of particular apologetics. The history of the development of the false Confucius is, in a word, the history of the deification of the true Confucius. Confucius’s transformation from a human being to a god, which began just after he died and reached its peak in the early part of the Eastern Han dynasty, took about four hundred years. The research on Confucius since 1949, many methods have been used, from traditional textual criticism to modern systems theory.
