Kong Qiu (孔丘), later honored as Kongzi (孔子) or Kong Fuzi (孔夫子), the Latinized form of which is Confucius — a minor state official, teacher, and itinerant adviser in the declining Zhou dynasty of 6th–5th-century BCE China, whose recorded conversations with his students (the Analects, Lunyu) are the foundational text of the East Asian ethical-political tradition. Confucius did not regard himself as an originator but as a transmitter of the wisdom of the early Zhou sages; the tradition he founded — later developed by Mencius (c. 372–289 BCE) and Xunzi (c. 310–235 BCE), codified as state orthodoxy in the Han dynasty, revived as Neo-Confucianism by Zhu Xi (1130–1200), and carried as the shared ethical vocabulary of China, Korea, Japan, and Vietnam for two millennia — is the central intellectual inheritance of a civilization encompassing, at present, more than a fifth of humanity.
The core of the teaching is an ethics of relationship and role. Ren (仁, humaneness, benevolence) is the cardinal virtue, cultivated through li (禮, the ritual practices that shape conduct and feeling), exercised in the five relationships (ruler–subject, parent–child, husband–wife, elder–younger, friend–friend), and expressed in the figure of the junzi (君子, the "gentleman" or exemplary person). Filial piety (xiao, 孝) is the training ground of the wider virtues: one learns to love others by first loving parents; one learns the art of politics by first ordering the household. Political authority, on this picture, is grounded in the moral cultivation of the ruler rather than in law or force — "to govern is to correct" — and a society of well-cultivated persons needs only light institutional scaffolding. "What you do not want done to yourself, do not do to others" (Analects 15.24) gives the tradition its version of the reciprocity principle.
Confucius's durable influence is therefore a civilizational rather than an academic matter. The Chinese imperial examination system (from the Han through 1905) tested candidates on the Confucian classics; Chosŏn Korea, Tokugawa Japan, and Lê-dynasty Vietnam all built state-sanctioned versions of the tradition; the 20th century's attacks on Confucianism (May Fourth in China, Kita Ikki in Japan, the Cultural Revolution) and the 21st century's partial official Chinese rehabilitation are both intelligible only against the depth of the prior influence. For the Western political-philosophical tradition the resonances are most often drawn to Aristotle on the cultivation of virtue and to MacIntyre-style communitarian critiques of individualist liberalism.