ession would comprise behavior that would accomplish the alignment in the most benevolent manner. From there it followed that the highest and best life would be associated with careful rituals of human interaction. Creel interprets this as Confucius's attempt to "set up a structure of ideas that would last, and be strong enough to serve as a foundation upon which to build the freedom and happiness of the human race" (38). That would help explain the attention to ritual that is a common feature of Chinese social tradition and that has the status of a moral good. But ritual for its own sake is a morally empty form: "While a man's father is alive, look at the bent of his will; when his father is dead, look at his conduct. If for three years he does not alter from the way of his father, he may be called filial" (Confucius, Analects I.1.15). This is another method of saying that the tree is known by its fruit (Matt. 12.13), but the point is that the content of a person's character is known by the results of its positive injection into the world. How mankind injects itself into the world constitutes its moral sense, for good or ill. Thus the moral component of Confucian teaching is always and everywhere present, always and everywhere capable of being judged as good or ill by its manifest content.
According to Creel (38), in his quest to reclaim the golden age, Confucius "made no claim to the possession of the ultimate truth. He was groping toward the truth, by the method of observation and analysis." This may help explain why Confucian doctrine, if it may be so called, is set forth, not in the Western way of long, declarative narrative expositions but in a series of short, often elliptical "analects," whether aphorism or anecdote, that point in the direction of accomplishing the objective of illustrating the benefit of a carefully coherent, carefully decorous structure of human interaction.
The content of li consists of the ceremonies o...