Confucius’s Hero’s Journey

ABSTRACT

The quest for the monomyth rakes in an unlikely candidate in Confucius, China’s great sage and moral teacher. However, his brief biography turns out to parallel the call to the collective hero’s journey in stage progression as well as in psychic immersion. Why then did Confucius cut to the quick, whereas the rest of the world told elaborate tales to deliver the same message? A possible answer comes in the prehistorical responses to perennial questions and problems of existence. Although most generated mythological explanations, the I Ching, as per Joseph Campbell, is China’s “mythic” view. This is where the development of cultures parted ways.

KEY WORDS:

• Joseph Campbell
• Confucius
• Confucius’s biography
• existential quest
• hero’s journey
• I Ching
• immanence
• individuation, C. G. Jung
• Liber Novus, monomyth
• myth-making
• virtue

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Meili (May Lee 李梅) Pinto

MEILI (MAY LEE 李梅) PINTO discovered that, in retrospect, Jungian analysis integrated the disparate presences in her psyche. For five years, she heard herself “making the unconscious conscious”: her early exposure to India, China, and Japan and simultaneous immersion in the grammars of three different linguistic families—English, Chinese, and Japanese; her education in the Western scholastic tradition; her career as an English teacher with an attempt at film-making. Through dreamwork she decided to leave New York for San Francisco and enrolled at the California Institute of Integral Studies. Beginning with her 1998 dissertation, entitled “The Great Learning: Confucius’ Implicit Integral Psychology of Individuation Amplified through Jung and Aurobindo,” she has been studying Confucius, proposing a renaissance of the psychology of Confucius. Correspondence: [email protected].