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Hello in the fifth century BC a wise man called Kung Fu Chu said

Study the past if you would divine the future

This powerful maxim helped form the body of ideas which more than Buddhism more than Taoism more even than communism has defined

What it is to be Chinese it's a philosophy that we call Confucianism?

Confucius is the Latinization of Kung Fu Chu and as well as asserting the importance of learning from the past

It embodies a respect for hierarchy ritual and self-cultivation through learning

Confucius said learning without thought is labor lost thought without learning is perilous

But who was Confucius and how did his ideas manage to become the bedrock for a civilization?

With me to go over two thousand years of China's past in the hope of divining the future of Confucianism

His Francis Wood, Curator of the Chinese section of the British Library

Tim Barrett, Professor of East Asian History at the School of Oriental and African Studies of Lanyl University and

Dr. Teotel Yu, Tutorial fellow in Oriental Studies at Whadam College

Oxford, I start with you, Dr. Teotel Yu, who just briefly who was Confucius?

What kind of man is he? How did he start teaching?

He was a kind of itinerant teacher at the time

He belonged to a class of people who were coming up to the fore of

What we call in Chinese is the the Shu which is invariant is translated as the scribes and knights

Enrate people who were not actually inheriting a great deal from their family background but belong to the noble houses and

They were well educated and they went around trying to find a job of their own and they propounded their own ideas and

And and he wasn't the only one

...