Confucian and Buddhist Me’s

Who am I? How should I act? Why?

These questions keep coming to mind lately. Maybe because I have now entered my seventh decade of life. So, I am stepping aside for a moment from the onslaught of daily news fraught with unrelenting disquiet. Pondering briefly the self in culture and belief on the long and winding road of life. What of the individual in the Confucian and Buddhist traditions of China?

Landscape painting with poem alluding to virtuous and lowly men, by Gong Xian, 1688, Metropolitan Museum of Art

Don’t buy the hype. The individual plays a starring role in these Chinese philosophical and religious practices.

We often hear that “China is a Confucian country based on collective harmony and order.” This is the default counterpoint to “America is a country based on individualism and free expression (as we revel in its disorder).” It implies that there is no I in China, only us, and that this is bad.

There are indeed truths in these statements, but they are also misleading, or should be. Collective. Individual. Mutually exclusive. Compatible. It is not so simple.

Confucianism and Buddhism in China are ancient. One developed in the central Chinese heartland some twenty-five centuries ago. The other migrated in over the Silk Road from what are now India and Nepal almost twenty centuries ago shortly after Jesus Christ was roaming the world.

Confucius statue at Confucius Temple, Shangqiu Ancient City, Henan, China (photo by author)

Where does the individual (I) come into play in a Confucian heritage that can superficially be seen to suppress the self to the service of society?

When we talk of Confucianism in the West, what comes to our minds is generally the later Song Dynasty systematic re-interpretation of the original. This more rigid Neo-Confucianism began flourishing 1500 years after Confucius died. The self was key here to achieving an ethical and moral society.

To a Neo-Confucianist, a good person is one who acts in a socially conscious and responsible manner. Each person is charged with learning his true nature, cultivating his moral self, and engaging in ethical conduct. A goal is to “overcome the selfishness of human desires.” The individual has a duty to the wider community, and the good individual acts on that duty. The above is accomplished in part by “doing what is right because it is the right thing to do.”

Jumping back to c 500-250 BCE, early Confucianism was a looser set of guidance promoted by Confucius and his successors. The goal was for the individual to be a good and humane person and thereby promote a better society. To do this, the individual was encouraged to be in tune with those around him, strive to relate to others, understand others, and work to support them. Individuals were the bricks of community, and the society built with these bricks was stronger, more harmonious, and more humane not only for being built and supported together but also for having higher quality bricks. This philosophical principle lives on in the Chinese consciousness today.

Yet we still have to deal with those pesky base desires that trap us, limit us, demand attention. Confucianism calls on the I’s to break free of their respective desires in order to be able to act in the best interests of the wider We. Following prescribed ritual is the path to self-cultivation, to bringing about personal goodness, humaneness, and ultimately a better world.

Confucius’ Doctrine of the Middle Way encapsulates this philosophy of avoiding extremes to achieve harmony in the complicated, conflicting world that is humanity. The individual is central to the community, but not more important than it. If the goal of Confucianism is for individuals to better society, then America is anything but Confucian. We are suffocating in individual desires, insecurities, and hubris. Empathy is lost. We live by extremes. There is no harmony. When the individuals in a society do not agree on what the right thing to do is, how can they do right as a group?

Fengxue Buddhist Temple, near Ruzhou, Henan, China (photo by author)

The individual is fundamental to Buddhism as well. It is not the same, though, as the express linkage in the Confucian instruction that a person becomes good by working to better the self in order to better the community. Rather, the Buddhist goal is to cultivate oneself to realize the true nature of the world and nurture one’s place in it and the self in a more positive, fulfilling way. The fact that this will also benefit the community is an added plus.

Buddhism teaches that suffering exists in life, that desire and ignorance cause suffering, and that individuals have the ability within themselves to achieve release from this cycle of causes and effects. Where Confucianism has its ritual to be a good person, Buddhism has its Eight-Fold Path to individual enlightenment. Study, belief, compassion, and ethical living are once again essential ingredients of self.

Buddhism is an internal and demanding cultivation of the self. An integral part of this is calming the mind. It is an affirmative, individual step that calls for training and repetition. While lifelong, dedicated meditation is the gold standard, any scheduled disengaging from the always-on world of social media, news, doomscrolling, and worries to seek contemplative quiet will also help. The individual is ultimately in charge of seeking and finding space within to let him or herself better process and cope with tumultuous life and inevitable death.

Some fictional, spiritual and practical advice for the individual that is no less real or relevant for its creation:1

“Don’t look at people by their category--gender, race, social standing, age--but relate to them inside-to-inside, soul-to-soul, from and to that place where we’re so much more alike than different.”

“…give up the crutch of having a plan….[We can make] all the plans we want, [but] we can never really know what will happen a month, a week, or even a few seconds in the future….”

“‘…when you meditate, when you go past the words, when you see that everything in words is metaphor for something bigger, then you have the whole big space to go around….[W]hen you die, if you know this other part, this absolute, this energy, then it is not so scary, dying. Maybe you understand the bigger you then, and when the little you dies it will be not so hard….’”

For me the mental clatter of my monkey mind is incessant. I tried through Qigong practice for several years to empty my thoughts, to concentrate on my qi, to slow down the processes of the world. Once, maybe twice, for a couple heartbeats, I may have felt the clarity of silence, only to be whisked away in the next deep breath. Knowing the path is easy; following the path is not.

Thus, I close with the words of Carl Spackler in Caddyshack. After providing the Dalai Lama with a service (a Himalayan looper), his caddy was blessed by the Tibetan spiritual leader with this: “…when you die, on your deathbed, you will receive total consciousness. ‘So I got that goin’ for me, which is nice.’” You go, Carl.

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Notes

1 My thoughts in this article have been guided in part by Roland Merullo’s four-book series, Breakfast with Buddha, Lunch with Buddha, Dinner with Buddha, and Dessert with Buddha; the Harvard X Online Course “China Humanities: The Individual in Chinese Culture;” and Donia Zhang’s January 2026 article, “Qufu City and Confucian Architecture,” in the Athens Journal of Architecture.