In March, the Confucius Institute of Vilnius University hosted a lecture by Dr Vytis Silius, a sinologist, researcher, associate professor, who is probably the most comprehensive scholar of the works of Confucius. In his lecture "How to be a good person? Some Examples from Confucius' Lunyu 論語 (Discussions and Conversations)", the speaker introduced us to the world of ethical ideas of classical Confucianism, focusing on the text attributed to Confucius (Kongzi 孔子).
At the beginning of the lecture, the speaker emphasised the otherness of the book's structure, authorship and the historical context of the work's creation. Lunyu is a book in which the text was not written as a coherent narrative. It is made up of many individual small phrases or paragraphs, dialogues, or descriptions and summaries of what has already happened. The coherence of the text becomes apparent when the reader begins to look for the connecting points.
As he continued to read passages from the work, V. Silius focused on a few key concepts. The most important concept in this work, according to the researcher, is "noble man" junzi 君子, which is the starting point and, when reading Lunyu and trying to unpack the text, he looked for links between other terms: communalism Ren 仁, which is opposed to collective action; ritualised behaviour li 禮, a social grammar that helps people to maintain ethical standards.
We have explored the meaning of these concepts and their interrelationships in the text in an attempt to reconstruct the patterns of practical behaviour they were intended to describe. At the same time, we looked at how the relevance of Confucius' ethical ideal is translated into contemporary problems in moral philosophy.
At the end of the lecture, we asked whether Confucius could be called a moral philosopher. The speaker compared the difference between moral norms and etiquette in Eastern and Western cultures. It was concluded that being a good person is quite difficult to explain, especially if one tries to understand it in the context of different cultures.