The Great Transformation: The Beginning of Our Religious Traditions

by Karen Armstrong

In India, the yogins had embarked on a solitary quest for the absolute. Confucius would not have understood this. In his view, you needed other people to elicit your full humanity; self-cultivation was a reciprocal process. Instead of seeing family life as an impediment to enlightenment, like the renouncers of India, Confucius saw it as the theater of the religious quest, because it taught every family member to live for others.20 This altruism was essential to the self-cultivation of a junzi: “In order to establish oneself, one should try to establish others,” Confucius explained. “In order to enlarge oneself, one should try to enlarge others.”