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Confucius: The Man and the Way of Gongfu. By Peimin Ni. Lanham: Roman & Littlefield, 2016. Pp. xxii + 165. Paperback $29.00, ISBN 978-1-4422-5742-9.
In Confucius: the Man and the Way of Gongfu, Peimin Ni offers an overview of the historical Confucius and his organic vision of how to live. Ni's motivation is that many comparable introductions are "simply repeating his life story and listing his main ideas" (p. xi). Ni insists that, "we have to get to the depth required by Confucius' thought" (p. x), which will then explain why Confucius' influence has endured. The book is structured as six chapters, each focusing on one aspect of Confucius: as historical figure, as spiritual leader, as philosopher, as political reformer, as educator and as a person. A full understanding of Confucius, Ni states, requires seeing how the different aspects inform each other, like a "crystal" (p. xi).
This carefully constructed portrait of Confucius is ordered around a guiding idea, captured by the Song-Ming Confucian term gongfu Й^. This refers to skills and abilities cultivated over time, and which equip a person to excel at the art of life, broadly understood, in ways that evade abstractions or principles. This characterizes the teachings and "mission" of Confucius and the Analects. Through consistent application and training, a person's entire sensibility and thought patterns can be transformed, creating an exemplar for others and for posterity.
Instructions must be "lived" in order to be grasped, and often cannot be grasped through a simple act of cognition. "Lived" here means whole-hearted and embodied commitment to realize a teaching-such as a passage from the Analects-reflecting on it, practicing it, turning it into a practical habit or disposition. As Ni notes, "...to be ren [human-hearted] is not a matter of having an intellectual understanding of it" (p. 126).
A gongfu reading thus emphasizes what a passage can contribute to one's personal cultivation rather than its literal truth or falsity. Here, Ni draws heavily on Austin's theory of speech acts. Consider the infamous passage on unreliable "women and petty people" (17.25), often cited for sexism. Ni argues that this passage's significance lies beyond...