Confucianism

No Chinese term for this tradition contains Confucius' name. The names are 儒家 Rújiā, the school of the ru — the scholars — and 儒教 Rújiào, the teaching of the ru. The Western word was manufactured in the seventeenth century, when Jesuit missionaries Latinised the honorific 孔夫子, Kongfuzi, into Confucius and named the whole tradition after him. East Asian usage never has. A tradition defined by handing things on was renamed by the people it was handed to.

Whether it is a religion, a philosophy, a theory of government or a way of life is genuinely disputed among scholars, and the dispute is not a failure of definition. It functions as a diffused religion: enacted through family life, the state and scholarly practice rather than through a separate institution with clergy and congregations. Tradition is both the accurate word and the one this site already uses. Some scholars prefer Ruism as more faithful to the Chinese.

What it contributes to the perennial conversation is the machinery of transmission, worked out in more detail than anywhere else. The teacher who refuses the founder's title and calls himself a transmitter. Filial piety described not as sentiment but as the root of all virtue and the stem out of which moral teaching grows. The funeral rites and the sacrifices, sustained across generations, made the measure of a society's moral condition. The lineage of teacher and student treated as the thing that carries knowledge, rather than the text alone.

It is the tradition that took most seriously the question the others mostly leave implicit: not what is true, but how what is true survives the death of the people who know it.