Confucius

Confucius (traditionally 551–479 BC) was born in the small state of Lu, in what is now Shandong province, China, during the political fragmentation of the late Spring and Autumn period, and worked for a time in minor state administrative posts before spending much of his life travelling between rival states offering counsel to their rulers — advice largely unheeded in his own lifetime. He gathered a following of students to whom he taught a philosophy centred on ren (benevolence, humaneness), li (ritual propriety), and the cultivation of moral character as the true basis of good government, in explicit contrast to rule by law and punishment alone; he claimed only to transmit the wisdom of earlier sage-kings, not to originate it. He left no writings of his own; the Analects, a collection of his sayings and conversations compiled by his disciples and their own students after his death, is the primary source for his teaching. Largely obscure in influence during his own life, his philosophy was adopted centuries later as the ideological foundation of the Chinese imperial state and its civil service examinations, shaping East Asian ethics, education, and government for more than two thousand years.