A 1995 animation, two disciples, and a Taiwanese source

Until they saw this animation, the notes write, Confucius had been someone they met in middle- and high-school morals and ethics: fragments of thought, the six arts (ritual, music, archery, charioteering, writing, and number), and humaneness, rightness, ritual, and wisdom. Watching a life drawn out, they say, they could feel a human side more vividly than in a book.

The film, they write, is framed as a conversation in which two disciples, Zigong and Zeng Shen, remember Confucius. It first aired in 1995; even so, they found the drawing of background, figures, and colour strong enough to hold them. The story, they say, was rebuilt from the Taiwanese cartoonist the notes name Jeong Mun — Chen Uen is the established form — and his Chronicle of Eastern Zhou Heroes. The life is looked at under filial piety and ritual, and the work was praised, they write, for treating the history faithfully.

Kong Qiu of Lu, orphaned, still studying

Confucius, the notes write, was born in 551 BCE in the state of Lu, in the late Spring and Autumn period, “2,500 years ago” as they phrase it — left in that window. Kong Qiu is the name; Confucius is what he later came to be called. His father died when he was three, his mother when he was fifteen, and he was left an orphan.

He tended livestock and worked as an undertaker to live, and did not stop writing and studying. With no parents and nothing in hand, they write, the child Kong Qiu had only learning he undertook himself. Because he was alone he took on many kinds of work; that work became experience, widened his view, and became a ground and a drive for the thought he would hold.

Fourteen years away, a return, and teaching at sixty-nine

At thirty-one, they write, he visited Luoyang, then went from state to state, completing his ideas. He spent fourteen years away from Lu, putting what he thought to the rulers of each state; they did not take up the ideal, and he came home. He started as a low official and helped with the work of the state; the districts he governed, the notes say, soon grew plentiful and orderly. He had seemed to them a man of fine words about an ideal cultural state; the film, they write, showed someone who, from a low standing, worked hard to make known the ritual he believed was right.

Even so the ideal was not realised. He went from state to state, and no one recognised him. The wall between the ideal and the world, they write, was too high, given his standing and the power of those above him. At sixty-nine he went home and gave himself to teaching his disciples. What they had learned in class, they conclude, had been only a skimming beside the path the film lays out.

The same Korean report, at fuller length, is on CampusDown.

Sources

1. The notes, a student viewing of a 1995 animation of Confucius’s life: Zigong and Zeng Shen looking back, Chen Uen’s Chronicle of Eastern Zhou Heroes as the named source, Kong Qiu born 551 BCE in Lu, and a return at sixty-nine to teach.

Last updated: 15 November 2026