Confucius and the Superior Person

"Do not do unto others what you do not want done to yourself" is Confucius's articulation of the Golden Rule, a rule that can be found in nearly every religion and tradition. When asked to describe its essence he replied, reciprocity. Confucius was alive from 551–479 BCE and taught, what in the West, could be called a secular humanist ethic — although in a few centuries, temples could be found where people would present sacrifices to his spirit.

The primary text of Confucius's teaching is in the Analects, which means a collection of works — a work compiled by his students. The Analects focuses on people in the context of a hierarchical society in which he lived. It has often been compared to Plato's Republic, written a century later in Greece, dealing with the same issues — to present to rulers of warring states an ethical system to use to govern a complex society.

Confucius took the character for man or person, 人, rén (jen), and added the number two, 二, to create  仁, also pronounced ren. Ren is a human-hearted person, who cares for others as a parent would for an infant.

Unlike the idea of self-improvement for its own sake, Confucious emphasized self-improvement for the purpose of interacting with fellow humans with benevolence. ​

Yi, righteousness, embodies honest and fair play. The Confucian idea of Li,often translated as ritual, is the outward manifestation of ren and yi.

Added to this is filial piety, which is extended to loyalty.

Finally, the fifth Confucian virtue is learning.​​

Confucius insisted that these virtues had to be embodied by the ruling class. So, junzi (chun-tzu), 君子, literally the ruler's son or child, became more than merely inherited power. To be called junzi, one had to embody ren and the other Confucian virtues.

Junzi is translated as superior man or noble one in most I Ching translations. This should be read as a person who embodies and is acting in accordance with the Confucian virtues of human-heartedness, righteousness, loyally, while exhibiting the accepted customs of society.

The Dao, Yin-Yang, Chi, and Synchronicity

The Dao (or Tao) is The Way or more concretely the path. The Daodejing (Tao te Ching), written in around 530 BC, attributed to Laozi (Lao Tzu) is considered the founding text for Daoism as a philosophy. The first verso of the Daodejing (Using Legge's and Muller's translation):

The Dao that can be trodden

is not the enduring and unchanging Dao.

The name that can be named

is not the enduring and unchanging name.

If we perceive it as having no name,

     it is the Originator of heaven and earth;

If we give it a name,

     it is the Mother of all things.

Always without desire

    we see the mystery,

But we desire,

   Only the outer fringe we shall see.

These two aspects, really the same;

  though we give it different names.

This sameness is the mystery,

A mystery within mystery;

The door to all marvels.

It is mysterious, but still, at least until we examine it. Then it becomes the Mother of all things. As the idea of Yin and Yang developed, it becomes the Mother of all things changing, in a Yin-Yang cycle, each according to its nature.

As the Yin-Yang of nature was observed and the Yin-Yang exhibited as a life-force, this was called Qi (Chi, Ch'i).​

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This manifests itself in the Yin-Yang symbol, where the light, energetic, creative, force has a small dark dot, the potential within it for change. The dark, passive, receptive force which draws the light to it, to grow, but retains the light dot, the potential for the creative. This is the Law of Change manifests in the I Ching.

The unbroken, light, yang lines combined with the broken, dark, yin lines to make up the 8 Trigrams and 64 Hexagrams. As they interact and change, it becomes a model of the dynamics of the Universe and of human interactions

The Law of Change leads to what Carl Yung calls synchronicity. Things do affect each other, even when there is no apparent cause and effect relationship. So, when you cast the coins or manipulate the yarrow stalks, this idea of the Dao from which all things arise, yin-yang manifests itself, the cycles of nature work in synchronicity, it is said that you are participating in this very cycle as the coins fall and the stalks are laid down in carefully counted piles.

I Ching of a 1,000 Doors

Somewhere in the world is a building made of 1,000 doors. It reminds me that the I Ching, in its 3,000 year journey with humankind has been approached by people from many, many traditions...

•••• from humans who saw the world full of spirits with whom they had to work with to make the processes of nature work — thus the need to perform the right ritual and prepare the correct sacrifice.

•••• to the followers of Laozi who saw the world working in accordance with the Laws of Change — everything changing according to its nature,

•••• to Confucius and his followers who saw the I Ching as a path to a moral life,

•••• to Christian missionaries who translated the book to Latin and English,

•••• to Mystics who saw magic in it,

•••• to psychologists who write about it as a therapeutic tool in Psychology Today,

•••• and to this engineer, who the more he understands about Western science, the more he has to admit that there is more to the human experience than the answers delivered by current science.

My purpose is to introduce what I have learned about the I Ching, honoring all of the ways of approaching the Sage — and I am sure there are at least a thousand of them.