The Analects of Confucius
According to Wikipedia, The Analects of Confucius is also known as the Sayings of Confucius or Lunyu. The Analects that is believed to be written and compiled by the followers of Confucius. The analects has gathered about 20 books with 500 strips. The Analects are also one of the bases of information Confucianism. In this literary work, it includes not just the sayings of Confucius but also his ideas.
Here are some famous sayings of Confucius from The Analects:
- "Respect yourself and others will respect you" ~Confucius
What I understood in this saying is that, in order for others to respect you, you must first respect yourself. With this, I learned that, we should respect ourselves because others will respect us if we give value to ourselves through respect. In addition, sometimes respecting ourselves first is an advantage because not all the time people will respect you. Therefore, do not ask for others to respect you, instead let them respect you by respecting yourself first.
- "When you see good man, try to emulate his example, and when you see bad man, search yourself for his faults. Don’t criticize other people’s fault; criticize your own." ~Confucius
What I understood in this saying is that, we should not keep on criticizing others because people make mistakes, so instead of criticizing others, we should criticize ourselves first because we too, make mistakes. With this I learned that we should follow the examples of good people and we should reflect ourselves in the mistakes of others on how it relates to us. I also learned that we should not criticize others because nobody is perfect. And I also learned that we should criticize ourselves because we also make mistakes.
- "To know what you know and know what you don’t know is the characteristics of one who knows." ~Confucius
What I understood in this saying is that, "To know what you know," means knowing what you already know, "and know what you don't know," means learning about other things, therefore, knowing what you already know and learning other things are the characteristics of the person who knows because they tend to learn more and learn new things. With this, I learned that, if we want to be knowledgeable we should not merely stop on learning what we already know but instead we should engage more in learning what we already know and learning new things.
Overall, The Analects taught us a lot of things just by the sayings of Confucius. Thus, we can conclude that "The Analects" contributed or influence most of the people around the world, especially the countries which belongs to Asia.
SOURCES:
No comments:
Post a Comment