TRANSCRIPTIONS AND COPY OF ARTICLES, STORIES AND SCRIPT For Exercise 1: EASTERN PHILOSOPHY -CONFUCIUS said to have been born in 551 B.C, in China. He may have been a student of the Daoist me We know very little for certain about the life of the Chinese Philosopher, Confucius. F Minister of crime under Duke Ding in the state of Lu. However, Confucius and the Duke fell out Lao Tzu. According to tradition, he began government service and served many roles including after the duke received a present from a neighboring ruler, 80 beautiful women and 124 horses found deeply improper for a ruler. So he left the court and wandered for years. come Compleats (Lunyu), "a collection of sayings written down by his followers. Some of the morale Around between the 3rd and the 5 century B.C., Confucius works were collected into the Confucius taught are easily recognizable. Most notably his version of the Golden Rule: "Do not or old-fashioned to the modern ears specially to Western ones. But we need his advice all the more 7 Confucius helps us to remember: 1. Ceremony is important, The Analects are filled with strange conversations between Confucius and his disciples like this one: Tze-kung wants to do away with the offering of a sheep. Confucius said, “Tze, you love the sheep, I love the ceremony.” At first this is baffling if not also humorous. Why not save the sheep? But Confucius is reminding Tze and us about the importance of ceremony. In the modern world, we tend to shun ceremony, and see this is a good thing, a sign of intimacy or lacjk of pretension. But Confucius believed in the value of ceremonies over sheep because he valued what he called "Ritual Propriety (Li).” This might seem a very outdated and conservative idea but in fact many of us long for particular rituals. That meal mum cooked for us whenever we were seek or that yearly birthday outing. We understand that certain premeditated, deliberate and precise gestures steer our emotions deeply. Rituals make our intentions clear and they help us to understand how to behave. 2. We should treat or parents with reverence. In particular, Confucius has a very strict idea about how we should behave towards our parents. He believed that we should obey them when we are young, care for them when they are old, mourn at length when they die and make huge sacrifices in their memory thereafter. He even said that we shouldn't travel faraway while our parents are alive and should cover for them when they steal a sheep. This attitude is known as "Filial Piety (Xiao)." This sounds strange now when many of us leave our parents' home as teenagers and rarely return to visit. We may even see them as strangers arbitrarily trust upon us by fate. After all our parents are so out of touch so pitifully human in their shortcomings, so difficult, so judgmental and they have such bad taste in music, Yet Confucius recognized that in many ways moral life begins in the family. We cannot truly be caring, wise, grateful and conscientious unless we remember mum's birthday and meet dad for lunch
