Historical archive

Confucianism: the teacher, the student and the bow

Why East Asian martial arts are built on lineage, respect and ritual, and where that comes from.

Stone guardian figures at the Ming tombs near Nanjing, photographed around 1870 — Portrait of a Man at Nanking Tombs / Stone Warriors — Lai Fong (Afong Studio), c. 1870. Cleveland Museum of Art, CC0 (public domain).

The story

Confucius lived in China around 551–479 BCE. His sayings, collected by his followers in the Analects, are about how to be a good person inside a web of relationships: parent and child, ruler and subject, elder and younger, teacher and student. Ritual (li) and respect were the glue of that order.

Archery was one of the “six arts” a gentleman was expected to learn, alongside ritual, music, charioteering, writing and arithmetic. In the Analects (3.7) Confucius says that a gentleman does not compete, except perhaps in archery, and even then he bows before and after and drinks with his rival. Contest is accepted, but it is wrapped in courtesy.

Over the centuries this way of thinking spread to Korea, Japan and Vietnam. It shaped the martial arts more through social form than through technique: the teacher as a parent figure (the Chinese shifu is written “teacher-father”), the seniority of senpai and kōhai in a Japanese dojo, the bow, the lineage chart, and moral rules recited in class, such as the five tenets of ITF taekwondo.

What the tradition holds

Respect for the teacher and for seniors is part of the training.
Skill should be joined to virtue: a strong person must also be a good one.
Ritual, such as the bow, trains the mind and keeps contest civil.

What history and science show

The Analects and the six arts are well documented; the archery passage is genuine (Analects 3.7).
Many dojo customs (grades, uniforms, recited codes) are modern, from the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, even when they use Confucian language.
Strong hierarchy has a downside: it can hide abuse. Modern safeguarding rules in sport exist partly for this reason.

Myth and fact

Myth

Confucius was a martial arts master.

There is no evidence for this. He valued archery and charioteering as part of a gentleman’s education, but he taught ethics and ritual, not fighting.

A note of respect

Confucian values still shape family and school life for hundreds of millions of people. Explaining their history is not a judgement on them.

Images: public-domain or CC0 works credited under each picture, or original WABUKAN ink illustrations. Panels: the story told in numbered comic boxes.

Sources

Confucianism — Wikipedia — en.wikipedia.org
Analects — Wikipedia — en.wikipedia.org
Analects 3 (Ba Yi), Chinese Text Project — ctext.org
Six Arts — Wikipedia — en.wikipedia.org
Senpai and kōhai — Wikipedia — en.wikipedia.org
Portrait of a Man at Nanking Tombs / Stone Warriors — Cleveland Museum of Art — clevelandart.org

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WABUKAN 和武館, «Confucianism: the teacher, the student and the bow», https://wabukan.com/crenca-confucionismo (accessed 2026-10-30).

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