The Concept Of Gentlemen In Book Of Changes And Confucius Analects

In the long river of the history, there is a unique ideal personality in each nation. The gentlemanly concept is not only the pattern of the ideal personality in the tradition of Confucianism, but also the very significant part of the entire traditional Chinese ethic thinking. The early Confucian work Book of Changes and The Analects of Confucius contain the rich gentlemanly thinking. This paper tries to interpret the gentlemanly thinking in the two books preliminarily and illustrate the different ideas of the two books and the relationship between the ideas about the gentlemanly thinking of them, pointing out that the Confucian gentlemanly thinking originates and results from developing the useful and discarding the useless of the thinking in West Zhou Dynasty, which is represented by Book of Changes, and is an theoretical outcome of the integration of the ideas of its own time and the gentlemanly thinking in Book of Changes. The paper is divided into four parts.Part one is referring to the Book of Changes. In this part, the author indicates the characteristics of the gentleman personality the Book views, and the way to achieve the personality it recommends, such as cautiously to speak and act, keep with the inner honesty while away from evil occurrence, positive self-control.Part two is to the Analects of Confucius. This part is about the idea of gentleman personality mentioned in the Analects. According to it, as to the personality, there are four levels of it, i.e., saint, eminent person, gentleman and churls, of which the gentlemen is regarded to be the representation of the ideal personality. It lays stress upon social concerns and duties that a gentleman should have, such as the social values, community responsibilities, positive attitudes, and particularly the necessity of self-control, promoting the similar caution or carefulness principles over behavior, the Tao's priority to richness, the importance of intelligent and knowledge, gentle manner, family piety, moral cultivations and other virtues.Part three runs a comparison between the two sources in terms of the ideal personality the gentleman delivers. In this part, the author analyzes the similarities and differences of the gentlemanly thinking in the Analects of Confucius and Book of changes, arguing the similar conceptive structure of the personality shared by them, the differences of them, for example, the theoretical base, i.e. the universal views of Heaven and Human, the comprehension of the key term of De(å¾·), the means of expressions and the basic moral psychological models.Part four comes to the relative analysis then the conclusions. Through analysis, the author points out that they represent the ideas of different times and that Confucius gains a lot from the gentlemanly thinking booted and input in Book of Changes. And the gentlemanly thinking in The Analects of Confucius is the result of developing the useful and discarding the useless of the gentlemanly thinking in West Zhou Dynasty specially represented by Book of Changes, and it is also the result of the integration of the idea of its own times and the gentlemanly thinking in Book of Changes.