Ritual held the Zhou world together — the ceremonies, precedences and music that told everyone who stood where and why — and in the sixth century BCE it had not been abandoned. It was being performed, correctly, by the men dismantling the thing it described. The kings of Zhou still held their titles and almost nothing else; regional lords fought their own wars, struck their own alliances and ignored the court; and in the small eastern state of Lu three ministerial families had taken the government from the duke so completely that in 517 they drove him out of his own capital.
Into that a minor nobleman's son, left poor when his father died young, proposed a remedy that sounds almost weightless against armies: a collapsing state is cured by the character of the men running it — not sharper law, not a stronger claim to the throne, but better people, made better on purpose.
Then he built the machinery for making them. Learning had been aristocratic property, taught by officials to men who would inherit office regardless. He took students by aptitude rather than birth, for whatever token of tuition a family could carry — the first private teacher in China, with three thousand students by later tradition and seventy-two who mastered the full curriculum. Nobility stopped being a fact about your parents and became something you could fail at.
His terms were ordinary words he made load-bearing. Ren, in most translations benevolence, is simply caring what things look like from where another person is standing. Li, ritual, is the whole inherited apparatus of conduct, from state sacrifice down to how you greet a neighbour — the training that turns a decent impulse into reliable behaviour. Performed without reverence, he said, it was worth nothing. The junzi, the gentleman, was the person in whom the training had taken. And a ruler who managed his people by punishment would get people who evaded punishment; a ruler who managed them by his own conduct would get people with a sense of shame.
That was the political programme, and rulers found it useless. He was given small posts — granary accounts, livestock records, later a judicial office. Around 498 he backed a campaign to pull down the fortified towns from which the three families held Lu, and it failed. He left, and spent roughly fourteen years moving between Wei, Song, Chen, Cai and Chu in search of a ruler who would try it, at one point stranded between Chen and Cai with his students and no food. He came home to Lu in 484 with no office and taught until he died. His finest student, Yan Hui, died first; the Analects has him crying out that Heaven had destroyed him. Nothing in the record suggests he was vindicated in his lifetime.
Everything after is the argument about what he said. The Analects is a compilation, traditionally by his disciples, though other writers show real interest in it only from the second century BCE, and scholars now disagree sharply about how early its authority actually is; the standard biography was written by Sima Qian nearly four hundred years after the death it describes. What is not in doubt is the scale of the afterlife. From 136 BCE the Han court installed classicists at its centre. From 1313 to 1905, the texts assembled around him were the examination that decided who governed China. Jesuit scholars latinised his name in the late sixteenth century, published him in Paris in 1687, and handed him to Leibniz as proof that reason alone could reach a moral law. In 1919 reformers demanded Mr Science and Mr Democracy in place of Mr Confucius; in 1973 a state campaign attacked him by name; today that same state funds his revival.