ng Confucians and Confucianists have made contributions by editing, commentating, and developing the teaching. However, the many schools of Confucianism all base their theories on Analects, and look upon the book as their common scripture. As a philosophy, Confucianism explicates how to make the many dimensions of man's existence more reasonable. What Confucius was mainly concerned with is how to revive and maintain an ideal society. He felt a sympathetic understanding for the traditional institutions, rituals, music, and literature of the early Zhou Dynasty, and tried to rationalize and justify them in ethical terms. Confucius lived in a time of upheavals. He believed that only by restoring the Zhou Li (rituals) could an ideal human society be achieved. On the one hand, the unnamed Zhou religion constitutes part of Li -- "holy ritual" and "sacred ceremony." Confucius interpreted the religious rituals of the Zhou Dynasty not as sacrifices asking for the blessings of the gods, but as ceremonies performed by human agents and manifesting the civilized and cultured patterns of behavior developed through generations of human wisdom. Li embodied, for him, the ethical core of Chinese society. On the other hand, Confucius applied the term "ritual" to actions beyond the formal sacrifices and religious ceremonies to include social rituals: courtesies, accepted standards of behavior and social relationships. He saw these time-honored and traditional rituals as the basis of human civilization, and felt that only a civilized society could have a stable, unified, and enduring social order. However, the society is not mechanically composed of men. Men become a truly human as their raw impulse is shaped by Li, the specifically humanizing form of the dynamic relation of man-to-man. According to Confucianism, all human relationships involved a set of defined roles and mutual obligations between the prince and officials, and fathers and sons; each ...
