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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Confucius & Confucianism

Confucius & Confucianism

Kirov, Blago

Paperback

Biographies GeneralGeneral World History

ISBN13: 9798181985414
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Sep 22 2026
Pages: 150
Weight: 0.40
Height: 0.35 Width: 5.50 Depth: 8.50
Language: English
This book makes a radical distinction between the authentic flesh-and-blood man Confucius with his earthly failures and, on the other hand, the doctrine of power assembled a century later upon legends and traditions about Confucius.

The first part of this study takes off the silk mask and the false glamor of legend to introduce us to Kong Qiu, called Confucius. He was neither a deity nor an enlightened mystic but a tragic, deeply vulnerable man, born of an illicit union (ye he) between a 72-year-old veteran father and his concubine, an 18-year-old girl. Kong Qiu grew up an orphan in the mud of poverty, losing his father when he was only three years old. His entire conscious life, his entire philosophical project, was in fact a grandiose attempt to reconstruct the figure of the Missing Father on the scale of the entire state.

The Authentic Confucius is a chronicle of pragmatic cataclysms and political failures. We see how the young Confucius performed brilliant tactical maneuvers at the crossroads in Wufang, how he used his parents' tomb to legitimize himself before the aristocracy in Lu, and how he rose to Supreme Judge in Lu. But his utopia of a society governed solely by morality, the authority of the Ancients, and ritual (Li) crashed head-on in its collision with the brutal reality of the Warring States Period.

Confucius ended his life as a failed, wandering preacher. He traveled from kingdom to kingdom, exiled, misunderstood, and mocked by local tyrants who needed swords, not morals. When he died in 479 BC, Kong Qiu believed he had lost everything, that his work was dead, and that the Bitter Pie of his intellectual endeavor had never been desired by any ruler. Confucius died in solitude, leaving behind only a handful of frightened students and a pile of unsystematized and unrecorded thoughts.

The second part of the book traces the great metamorphosis in which the dust of the failed teacher was absorbed by the state machine to become its eternal operating system. Confucianism was not created by Confucius! It is a powerful, authoritarian doctrine forged more than a century after his death, based on recorded, rearranged, and politically censored memories of Confucius.

The book traces the process of technological updating of Confucianism by two fundamentally different architects. Mencius adopted the silk mask of the Master, stating that human nature is inherently good, and mounted benevolence as a political screen upon the machine of power. Xunzi, however, carried out a brutal revision worthy of a legalist-he nailed into the heart of Confucianism the postulate that man is by nature greedy, wild, and evil, and the only way to tame him is through the iron pressure of Ritual and Law.

When the Han dynasty, through Emperor Wu Di, officially adopted this doctrine of Xunzi, the most supreme cynical synthesis in Asian history was made. The Han took the moral authority of Confucius to turn him into a mask (Outer Confucianism) under which they hid the steel police bolts of total state control (Inner Legalism). The Keju examination system and the eight-legged essay were not designed to free the mind but to lobotomize it and force it into the rhythm of absolute obedience. Every dangerous intellectual was trained to think in a written cage in the name of the Collective Father.

By clearly distinguishing the Man from the Doctrine, this book refuses to slip into the naive enthusiasm of the Western Enlightenment and reveals how this perfectly calibrated machine of power, exercised through control over millions of minds in internal silence, spun on its axis for centuries until it completely lost touch with the economic and technological basis of society, which led China to terminal catastrophe during the Century of Humiliation before the steel and opium of the Western barbarians.

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