name Confu-cius was an early Latinized version of K’ung Fu-tzu. K’ung was his family name, and Fu-tzu was an honorific similar to the German “Herr Doktor” and meant “master.” Chufu was also where Master K’ung died. And he spent most of the intervening seventy-two years there as well.
During his lifetime, Confucius was not well known outside of Chufu, though he did visit a few of the surrounding kingdoms to promote his notion of good government. In 478 BC, two years after Confucius’ death, the ruler of the state of Lu, of which Chufu was the capital, built a small shrine to the Sage on the site of his old house, and over the centuries it was enlarged at imperial expense into the second biggest shrine hall in China, second only to the imperial shrine hall in Beijing’s Forbidden City. The tourist pamphlet said it was visited by three million people every year. Early the next morning, I made it a point to arrive just as the front gate swung open and, gratefully, before the tour buses.
The complex was so vast, visitors needed a guidebook or a guide, both of which were available at the entrance. From the front gate to the rear wall, the courtyards and shrine halls stretched for an entire kilometer, or about the same distance as they did in the Forbidden City in Beijing, with different views emerging through the archways that divided one shrine hall from the next. That was a concept the Chinese also used in their gardens, but in Chufu it was applied on a much grander scale.
From the front gate, the central processional led through park-like grounds shaded by towering pines and cedars, some of them 2,000 years old, and dozens of ancient steles recording the temple’s renovation by various emperors. The first major structure was the three-story Kuei-wen-ke, or Palace of Scholars, inside whose walls were more than a hundred pictures of the Sage’s life carved onto stone 1,500 years ago. Behind the Kueiwenke was a vast courtyard with even grander steles, most of them with their own enclosures. And beyond the courtyard of steles and off to one side was the Hsingtan, or Apricot Pavilion. That was where Confucius taught when the weather permitted. Next to it, a descendant of the original apricot tree was enjoying another spring. When the weather didn’t permit outside instruction, Confucius taught inside his house, which had since become the second biggest shrine hall in all of China and whose eaves required the support of ten dragon-encircled pillars carved from single blocks of stone.
I tried to imagine the scene of instruction: “ To put into practice what one has learned, is that not happiness? To greet friends from afar, is that not joy? To be unconcerned about being unknown, is that not the mark of a true man?” That was the passage that began the Analects, the collection of sayings that Confucius’ disciples put together after he died. While Mao’s sayings in his Little Red Book had come and gone, those of Confucius were still quoted. They first circulated among his disciples and their disciples until the second century AD, when Cheng Hsuan edited them into their present form: twenty chapters without any discernible order full of all sorts of oddities: “Girls and servants,” the Master said, “are the hardest to deal with. If you’re too familiar, they lose their humility. If you’re too distant, they get upset.” It wasn’t hard to see where all the Confucius Say jokes came from.
Mt. Taishan
My visit to Confucius’ home, or the shrine halls that had overwhelmed it, ended just as the morning tour buses arrived. With his home out of the way, I proceeded to his grave. It was two kilometers north of town, which was a bit beyond my energy level. So I climbed aboard one of the pedicabs that plied the main road of Chufu. A few minutes later, I was in China’s largest manmade forest park. The park covered 200 hectares of former farmland that over the centuries had been planted with 40,000 trees from all parts of China. There were more than 200 species in the park. In addition to Confucius’ tomb, the park contained countless graves of his descendants. But even 200 hectares were not enough. Graves were constantly being dug up to make room for the newly dead. All of Confucius’ relatives had the right to be buried in the park, and there were 130,000 people in Chufu who could trace their ancestry back to the Sage. The solution was to allow his descendants to be buried there temporarily and for their remains to be moved elsewhere when new grave sites were needed.
From the park entrance, it was a short walk to his grave. In keeping with Confucius’ wishes, his tomb was a simple affair: a grass-covered mound with a stone tombstone hewn from the cliffs of Taishan. On it were inscribed the words Hsuan Sheng, Exalted Sage. After paying my respects, I visited the adjacent graves of his son, K’ung Li, and his grandson, K’ung Chi. After Confucius died, his disciple Tseng-tzu carried on the master’s teaching, which Tseng-tzu conveyed in the book known as the Great Learning. After the Analects, that was considered the second of the Confucian classics. Tsengtzu also taught Confucius’ grandson, and the grandson also became a prominent teacher in his own right. His interpretations of his grandfather’s doctrines make up the third Confucian classic, the book called the Doctrine of the Mean. I was a big fan of K’ung Chi’s book. It was so straightforward: “The Tao is what you can never leave. If you could leave it, it wouldn’t be the Tao.”
In front of K’ung Chi’s grave, I paused to admire the twin statues of a general and a minister standing guard. They represented the twin virtues of the Confucian ideal: service to the state in times of peace and service to the state in times of war. After paying my respects, I decided to forego the pedicab and walk back to town. On the way, I visited a temple dedicated to Confucius’ favorite disciple, Yen Hui, whose early death Confucius often lamented. And after another few blocks, I also visited a temple dedicated to the Duke of Chou. The Duke was the father of the first ruler of the state of Lu, of which Chufu was the capital. He was Confucius’ hero.
After returning for lunch back at the Confucius Family Mansion, I hired another pedicab and this time proceeded several kilometers east of town to yet another grave. This one belonged to Shao Hao. Shao Hao was the son of the Yellow Emperor and ruled North China more than 4,500 years ago. His grave was a simple grass-covered mound, but in front of it was a large stone pyramid. The stones were as smooth as glass and defied my best efforts to climb to the top, where several children were congratulating themselves on their success. I gave up and returned to the Confucius Family Mansion.
After a repeat of the previous night’s dinner of smoked tofu and assorted vegetables of the season, I walked out to the small store at the Mansion’s entryway and bought a bottle of Confucius Family Liquor. I thought certainly the Sage’s family must have concocted a noble brew. But I was wrong. Confucius’ family may have been expert in their great ancestor’s Tao of behavior, but the Tao of liquor remained beyond them. After two shots, I gave up, put the cork back in the bottle and left it in a drawer for the next unlucky guest to find.
Confucius’ grave
During his own lifetime, Confucius wasn’t all that well known. His ascension to sagehood was due largely to the efforts of two men who lived south of Chufu. Their names were Hsun-tzu and Meng-tzu. Hsun-tzu’s stomping grounds and grave were a hundred kilometers to the south and a bit too far for me, but Meng-tzu’s old home was only twenty kilometers away in the town of Tsouhsien. And that was where I headed the following morning, this time in a local bus that operated between the two towns every half hour.
In the West, Meng-tzu was known as Mencius, which was how Jesuits in China first romanized his name. As we drove through the barren countryside still waiting for warmer weather, we passed a forested hillside. That was where Mencius’ mother and many of his descendants were buried. His own grave was more remote, about ten kilometers to the east.
The reason Mencius’ mother inevitably came up in stories about him was that she was so concerned with his education, both academic and moral, she moved her home three times before she found a suitable environment for him. The place she finally chose was Tsouhsien.
