You-Sheng Li (Updated, February 20, 2010) 1. A Note This is not a biography of Confucius but an informal collection of Confucius’s life stories arranged according to time. But it is not a fictional account either. No part of this writing is the author’s imagination without authoritative resources. 2. Confucius’s Father and Mother Confucius was the remote offspring of the royal clans of the Shang dynasty (1600-1100 BC). When the Shang dynasty was overthrown around 1100 BC by the Chou dynasty, one of the family member of the king of Shang, Weizi, was named the Duke of a vassal state, …

You-Sheng Li 1/2/2008 Humans had been living in primary society for thousands of years and showed remarkable resistance to the emergence of secondary society. Surprisingly, once a secondary society well established itself and come to assimilate or conquer its neighbouring primary societies, the vulnerability of primary society is more than obvious: It is literally defenceless. Of course, there had been no typical primary society any more once all sorts of secondary society appeared in human history. But some lands were closer to the ancient system of primary society while others may be typical secondary society. During the numerous conflicts and …

You-Sheng Li (Written in June 2012) (Submitted to and accepted by the Ninth ISUD World Congress. ISUD=International Society for Universal Dialogue) Comparing Chinese and Western cultural traditions, scholars often label the former with immanent, aesthetic, intuitive while the latter with transcendental, rational, and postulating. (Hall and Ames, 1987) Theoretically all human societies can be divided into the genetically coded primary society, which is the natural society we are born with, and the man-made secondary society. Those adjective words that describe Chinese and Western cultures fit well into the genetically coded primary society and the man-made secondary society. Since the primary …

You-Sheng Li Abstract Outline All human societies can be divided into two types: genetically coded primary society and man-made secondary society. Western civilization, especially in Mesopotamia and Greece, started with city states, which were formed by free citizens after primary society or clans were disintegrated while Chinese civilization started as the super state of a two-level system. The super state enabled people to live in a relatively peaceful social environment while the two-level system, namely the newly formed secondary societies were built on the top of numerous primary societies, enabled them to still live in primary or quasi-primary society. From …

Confucius and Jesus: Humanism Took Different Pathways in Chinese and Western History Chinese government first named Confucianism as its official ideology in the second century BC. Since then Confucianism remained as the mainstream culture to shape society and the way of life for more than two thousand years until the early twenty century when the first republic of China was founded. As the influence of Western culture entered China and it was followed by the subsequent revolutions, the fading out of Confucianism in the Chinese life occurred in a relatively short time between 1840 and 1919. The Roman Emperor Theodoisius …