Instant Access To 100,000+ Essays!

Of the ancient Confucian scholars the two most important are Confucius and Mencius. Their doctrines have laid out a design for ethical living and moral decision making that Chinese people have followed for centuries of time. This paper seeks to further analyze the ethical views of Confucius and Mencius, and through Tai Chen’s Meng Tzu-I shu-cheng, connect the aforementioned philosophies by using his questions to show that ther doctrines justify each other. Kongzi, or Confucius, was the father figure for a Chinese ideology and philosophy that would affect the way Chinese people think and live for thousands of years after his death. It is important to note that Confucius claims no ownership to his philosophies; he did not consider himself the founder of any school or philosophical movement, and once said of himself, “I transmit but do not create. I believe in and love the ancients” (Analects 1.1). Although he only claimed himself to be a transmitter, because of the expansion and continuation of his ideology through later philosophers, it is evident that he also a creator. Confucian morals focus around man. Confucius believed that man “can make the Way (Tao) great,” and not that “the Way can make man great.”(Chan 1