Confucianism

A tradition of ethical and political thought originating with Confucius in the sixth and fifth centuries BCE and systematized by later thinkers, chiefly Mencius, who argued that human nature is fundamentally good and needs cultivation rather than restraint, and Xunzi, who held the opposite, that human nature is self interested and must be shaped by ritual and education. Confucianism holds that moral order radiates outward from well cultivated individuals through the family to the state, and that a ruler governs best by moral example rather than by law and punishment alone. Suppressed under the short lived Qin dynasty, it was adopted as the basis of Chinese state ideology under the Han and remained the framework for civil service examination and elite education for most of the next two thousand years, while also spreading through Korea, Japan, and Vietnam as a shared East Asian ethical vocabulary.