ABSTRACT
The traditional date for the birth of Confucius is about 550 B.C. He was orphaned at an early age, and that he grew up in poverty. Confucius was the rare man free of the ambitions that drive most people. His delight was to understand the Way of the ancients, see how it ordered human affairs. Confucius helped China step out of the cosmological myth, move toward a more rational view of human affairs as things that human understanding ought to direct, but he never abandoned the cosmological context of human existence. Confucius thought of the individual human being as part of larger social entities. Confucian spirituality is more humanistic than religious. The living person, in the Confucian order of things, is far more complex than a mere momentary existence. The idea of an isolated individual who eventually dies a lonely death in the secularized biophysiological sense is not even a rejected possibility in the Confucian perception of human reality.
