C., during that
wonderful century of religious revival which saw the birth of Ezra,
Gautama, and Lao Tsze, and in boyhood he displayed an unusually sedate
temperament which made him seem to be what we would now call an
"old-fashioned child." The period during which he lived was that of
feudal China. From the ago of twenty-two, while holding an office in the
state of Lu within the modern province of Shan-Tung, he gathered around
him young men as pupils with whom, like Socrates, he conversed in
question and answer. He made the teachings of the ancients the subjects
of his research, and he was at all times a diligent student of the
primeval records. These sacred books are called King, or Ki[=o] in
Japanese, and are: Shu King, a collection of historic documents; Shih
King, or Book of Odes; Hsiao King, or Classic of Filial Piety, and Yi
King, or Book of Changes.[2] This division of the old sacred canon,
resembles the Christian or non-Jewish arrangement of the Old Testament
scriptures in the four parts of Law, History, Poetry and Prophesy,
though in the Chinese we have History, Poetry, Ethics and Divination.[3]
His own table-talk, conversations, discussions and notes were compiled
by his pupils, and are preserved in the work entitled in English, "The
Confucian Analects," which is one of the four books constituting the
most sacred portion of Chinese philosophy and instruction.
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