Rectifying a Name? “Ruism” and “Confucianism”

An article by Ruism.org, the Confucian Digital Library · October 2026

Since the Han dynasty, the tradition has called itself 儒家 (rújiā, “the school of the Ru”) or 儒學 (rúxué, “the learning of the Ru”).11儒學: Shiji 59, of Liu De, Prince Xian of Hejian (好儒學, “loved the learning of the Ru”). 儒家: Hanshu 30 (藝文志), as a bibliographic category. The word 儒 alone is older, used both by the Ru (Analects 6.13; the Xunzi chapter 儒效) and by their critics (the Mozi chapter 非儒, “Against the Ru”). In English it is usually called “Confucianism,” a Western coinage of the nineteenth century, and some scholars argue that this name misdescribes it.

To rectify a name, in the tradition’s own sense, is to make it fit what it names. This article sets out where the English name came from, the case against it and the case for it, and why, rightly understood, “Ruism” and “Confucianism” can stand side by side.

How “Confucianism” Came About

The name took shape in two stages. First, Jesuit missionaries of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Matteo Ricci and his successors, Latinized 孔夫子 (Kǒng Fūzǐ, “Master Kong”) as Confucius. They presented him to Europe as the philosopher of the Chinese, a role the title of Confucius Sinarum Philosophus (1687) made explicit. Ricci, however, described the tradition as that of the literati, naming it after its scholars rather than its founder.22Couplet et al., Confucius Sinarum Philosophus (1687). Ricci, Storia, 1:115; Hosne 2014. Trigault’s Latin version (1615) brought Ricci’s account to European readers.

Second, the “-ism” arrived in the nineteenth century. The adjective “Confucian” is attested in English from 1693, but the earliest recorded use of “Confucianism” is from 1829, in The Canton Register, an English-language newspaper of the foreign community in Canton.33OED, s.v. “Confucianism” (1829) and “Confucian” (1693); Canton Register 2, no. 1 (3 Jan. 1829), p. 2, unsigned editorial. The paper was founded in 1827 by the Scottish merchant James Matheson and his nephew Alexander; its first editor was William Wightman Wood of Philadelphia. The word spread from the mid-century through Protestant missionary scholarship, above all the work of James Legge, who with Max Müller placed “Confucianism” among the “world religions” of the new comparative study of religion.44Legge 1880. Legge also translated Ru and Daoist texts for Max Müller’s Sacred Books of the East (1879–1891). See Sun 2013. It is now standard in English, even for Chinese institutions: 尼山世界儒學中心 calls itself the Nishan World Center for Confucian Studies.55Founded in Qufu in 2019; English-language site: chinakongzi.org.

The Objections to the Name

Critics of the name raise two objections.

It reduces a tradition to one man

The Ru tradition is a scholarly community spanning some 2,500 years, shaped by Mencius, Xunzi, Dong Zhongshu, Zhu Xi, Wang Yangming and many others. Naming it after Confucius, the argument runs, implies that they were all expounding one man’s doctrine.

Bin Song points out that religious studies has faced this problem before. “Mohammedanism,” still current when “Confucianism” appeared, followed the same founder-centred model, and Muslims objected to it; English usage has since adopted “Islam,” the tradition’s own name.66Song 2020. The founder-named term for Islam is older than “Confucianism”: the OED records “Mahometanism” from before 1613 and “Mohammedanism” from 1732. Gibb’s Mohammedanism (1949) was later reissued as Islam.

It frames the tradition as a founded religion

The objection is not to the suffix, since “Ruism” is also an -ism, but to the template: Christ and Christianity, the Buddha and Buddhism.

The word did not always carry that implication: its earliest recorded use states that “Confucianism is not religion. It is merely a system of ethics, and petty ettiquette.”77Canton Register, 3 Jan. 1829, p. 2 (see note 3); spelling as in the original. Whether the Ru tradition is a religion is a genuine question, debated in China. In the 1910s Kang Youwei and his disciple Chen Huanzhang campaigned to make 孔教 (Kǒngjiào, “the teaching of Confucius”), a founder-centred name in Chinese, the state religion of the Republic.88Kang first proposed a state Confucian religion to the Guangxu emperor in 1898. Chen Huanzhang founded the Confucian Association (孔教會) in 1912; the question was debated during the drafting of the Republican constitution, 1913–1917, and the proposal was not adopted. Critics of “Confucianism” hold that the question should be argued on the tradition’s own terms, not settled in advance by its English name.

What Does 儒 (Rú) Mean?

The character 儒 combines the “person” radical 亻 with the phonetic 需. The Han dictionary Shuōwén jiězì (c. 100 CE) glosses it as 柔 (róu, “pliant, gentle”) and as “a designation for men of the arts” (術士之偁). The Qing commentator Duan Yucai explained these arts through Zheng Xuan’s Han gloss on the Rites of Zhou: the Ru taught the people the six arts of ritual, music, archery, charioteering, writing and numbers.99儒，柔也。術士之偁。从人需聲。 Shuōwén jiězì 8A (偁 = 稱); the postface is dated 100 CE, and the work was presented to the throne in 121. Duan Yucai gives Zheng Xuan’s note on the Zhouli as 儒有六藝以教民者, and adds 六藝者，禮樂射御書數也. How to read the gloss is debated, but it names a type of person, not a doctrine.

Whether the Ru existed as a recognized group before Confucius remains open. An influential hypothesis, advanced by Hu Shi in 說儒 (1934), holds that they did, as ritual specialists descended from the conquered Shang. The early evidence is thin, however: in the Analects the word occurs in only one passage (6.13).1010Hu Shi 1934, building on Zhang Binglin’s 原儒 (1910). Analects 6.13 (6.11 in Legge): 子謂子夏曰：「女為君子儒，無為小人儒。」 The character occurs twice, but only in this passage.

Either way, 儒 names a kind of person, the cultivated scholar, rather than a founder. This is what advocates of “Ruism” want the English name to keep.

The Rectification of Names (正名)

Advocates of “Ruism” point to an irony. One of Confucius’s best-known teachings is the rectification of names (正名, zhèngmíng):

名不正，則言不順；言不順，則事不成。

“If names be not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things. If language be not in accordance with the truth of things, affairs cannot be carried on to success.”

— Analects 13.3, trans. James Legge1111Legge 1861, Analects XIII.iii.5. Zilu has asked what Confucius would do first if the ruler of Wei entrusted him with the government.

On their reading, calling the tradition by a name it never chose, and one that misdescribes it, is the kind of error zhèngmíng warns against. In the passage, Confucius is answering a question about governing the state of Wei, so applying it to an English label extends the teaching beyond its original setting.

The Case for Keeping “Confucianism”

The old name deserves a fair hearing. “Confucianism” has nearly two centuries of use behind it. It is the word most readers know, the heading under which libraries catalogue the tradition, and the term most scholars still write. Nor does foreign origin make a name wrong: “China” is not what China calls itself, and no one proposes abandoning it.

The strongest form of this argument comes from within the tradition. In his chapter on the rectification of names, Xunzi held that names have no intrinsic appropriateness: they become appropriate through established convention (約定俗成, yuē dìng sú chéng). By that standard, two centuries of usage are their own justification.1212Xunzi 22 (正名): 名無固宜，約之以命，約定俗成謂之宜，異於約則謂之不宜; and 今聖王沒，名守慢，奇辭起，名實亂……若有王者起，必將有循於舊名，有作於新名. Translations ours.

The same chapter, however, describes an age in which “names and realities are in confusion” (名實亂), and expects a true king, should one arise, to “follow some old names and create new ones” (有循於舊名，有作於新名). Convention, on this view, makes a name appropriate but does not rule out replacing one.

Advocates of “Ruism” add that their objection is not who coined the name but what it says. “China” makes no claim about what China is; “Confucianism,” they argue, presents the tradition as one man’s doctrine, on the model of a founded religion.

Who Uses “Ruism”

“Confucianism” remains the standard term in English-language scholarship. A minority of scholars have argued for “Ru” and “Ruism,” and others have flagged the problem in other ways:

Robert Eno (Indiana University) argued for “Ruism” in The Confucian Creation of Heaven (1990); his later translations use “Ru” and “Ruist” alongside the more frequent “Confucian.”1313Eno 1990, 7: “we will call its members by the name they originally bore, ‘Ru’ 儒; their philosophy we will call ‘Ruism.’” His Analects translation (2015) notes that “Confucianism is sometimes called Ruism in English.”

David Elstein (SUNY New Paltz) writes of “Ruism” and “Ruist” thought, as in Democracy in Contemporary Confucian Philosophy (2014).1414Elstein 2014, with chapters such as “Classical Ruist Political Thought” and “Mou Zongsan on How Ruism Justifies Democracy.”

Bin Song (Washington College) has argued for the change at length (see note 6).

Lionel Jensen, in Manufacturing Confucianism (1997), traced how “Confucius” and “Confucianism” were constructed, from the Jesuits to modern Chinese intellectuals; Nicolas Standaert has contested his account of the Jesuits’ role.1515Jensen 1997; Standaert 1999.

Michael Nylan put the adjective in quotation marks in The Five “Confucian” Classics (2001).1616Nylan 2001.

Two Names for One Tradition

Set side by side, the arguments are not symmetrical, but neither defeats the other. The objection to “Confucianism” has substance: the name does centre a scholarly community on one man. Yet the distortion is mild, and readers who know the tradition correct it without effort. “Ruism,” for its part, is not simply the precise name. It is opaque to most English readers; it is still an -ism that turns a community into a doctrine; and 儒 was once broader than the tradition, a word for men of the arts in general.1717Zhang Binglin’s 原儒 (1910) distinguished a general sense of 儒 (all men of the arts), a narrower one (teachers of the six arts) and a particular one (the followers of Confucius). Each name brings out something true: “Ruism” the community of scholars and the older learning they carried, “Confucianism” the exemplar and the canon at its centre.

Chinese has always used both kinds of name. Beside 儒 and 儒家, and the Song revival’s 道學 (dàoxué, “the Learning of the Way”) and 理學 (lǐxué, “the Learning of Principle”), which name the scholars or the Way, there are 孔門 (“the school of Kongzi”), 孔孟之道 (“the Way of Kong and Meng”) and 孔教, which name the founder. Neither kind displaced the other.

The tradition’s own authorities point the same way. Kongzi followed conventions that harmed nothing and resisted those that distorted something that mattered:

麻冕，禮也；今也純，儉，吾從眾。拜下，禮也；今拜乎上，泰也。雖違眾，吾從下。

“A cap of linen is what the rites prescribe; today silk is used, which is more economical, and I follow the majority. To bow below the hall is what the rites prescribe; today people bow after ascending, which is presumptuous. Though it goes against the majority, I bow below.”

— Analects 9.3, trans. ours1818Analects 9.3 (IX.iii in Legge).

On this criterion, “Confucianism” can be followed where it does no harm, and set aside where the distortion it carries would mislead.

Xunzi weighed a name by two standards in the same chapter. Convention makes a name appropriate (約定俗成謂之宜), and a name is good in itself when it is “direct, easy and not contrary” (徑易而不拂). By these standards neither name wins outright: “Confucianism” has convention and ease, “Ruism” stands closer to the tradition’s own name. Above both stood communication: “if a single name suffices to convey the meaning, use the single name” (單足以喻則單). And Xunzi condemned those who “split words and arbitrarily create names, confusing correct names” (析辭擅作名，以亂正名), which counsels against forcing a new name where the old one serves.1919Xunzi 22: 名有固善，徑易而不拂，謂之善名; 單足以喻則單，單不足以喻則兼; 故析辭擅作名，以亂正名，使民疑惑，人多辨訟，則謂之大姦. Translations ours.

Zhu Xi used several names, each for its purpose: 吾儒, “we Ru,” when he set his learning against Buddhism (“the Buddhists are empty, we Ru are substantial”); 道學 for his movement; and a transmission of the Way (道統) that runs through Confucius, whom Mencius had called the one who “gathered the great completion” (集大成). His method, too, was to keep received terms and clarify them by commentary rather than discard them.2020Zhuzi yulei 126: 釋氏虛，吾儒實. Zhu Xi, preface to the Zhongyong zhangju: 蓋自上古聖神繼天立極，而道統之傳有自來矣. Mencius 5B.1: 孔子之謂集大成. On his method, see his Collected Commentaries on the Four Books (四書章句集注).

None of the three, of course, spoke to an English label; their texts offer criteria, not verdicts. Applied together, they suggest that the tradition has two legitimate names, and that the choice between them depends on the reader and the purpose.

Our Usage

This library applies that conclusion in each of its languages, by Xunzi’s test: what matters is whether a name communicates to its readers.

In English, “Ruism” has an established, if minority, place in the specialist literature, and it keeps in view what this library is about: a community of scholars over two and a half millennia. It gives the library its name; in its texts, “Ruism” and “Confucianism,” “Ruist” and “Confucian” are used as each is clearer for the reader. Established compounds keep their conventional form: “Neo-Confucianism” for the Song–Ming revival and “New Confucianism” for the twentieth-century movement.

In Spanish and Catalan, ruismo and ruisme have virtually no currency, so using them would not rectify a name but invent one. Our Spanish and Catalan editions, confucianismo.org and confucianisme.cat, therefore use the conventional term and introduce the Ru tradition (儒家) within the text.

Neither choice is a verdict against the other name. Confucius remains the tradition’s greatest teacher and the Analects its foundational text, whichever name one uses; the aim is not a purer name, but a clearer understanding of what both names refer to.

Notes

  1. 儒學: Shiji 59, of Liu De, Prince Xian of Hejian (好儒學, “loved the learning of the Ru”). 儒家: Hanshu 30 (藝文志), as a bibliographic category. The word 儒 alone is older, used both by the Ru (Analects 6.13; the Xunzi chapter 儒效) and by their critics (the Mozi chapter 非儒, “Against the Ru”). ↩︎
  2. Couplet et al., Confucius Sinarum Philosophus (1687). Ricci, Storia, 1:115; Hosne 2014. Trigault’s Latin version (1615) brought Ricci’s account to European readers. ↩︎
  3. OED, s.v. “Confucianism” (1829) and “Confucian” (1693); Canton Register 2, no. 1 (3 Jan. 1829), p. 2, unsigned editorial. The paper was founded in 1827 by the Scottish merchant James Matheson and his nephew Alexander; its first editor was William Wightman Wood of Philadelphia. ↩︎
  4. Legge 1880. Legge also translated Ru and Daoist texts for Max Müller’s Sacred Books of the East (1879–1891). See Sun 2013. ↩︎
  5. Founded in Qufu in 2019; English-language site: chinakongzi.org. ↩︎
  6. Song 2020. The founder-named term for Islam is older than “Confucianism”: the OED records “Mahometanism” from before 1613 and “Mohammedanism” from 1732. Gibb’s Mohammedanism (1949) was later reissued as Islam. ↩︎
  7. Canton Register, 3 Jan. 1829, p. 2 (see note 3); spelling as in the original. ↩︎
  8. Kang first proposed a state Confucian religion to the Guangxu emperor in 1898. Chen Huanzhang founded the Confucian Association (孔教會) in 1912; the question was debated during the drafting of the Republican constitution, 1913–1917, and the proposal was not adopted. ↩︎
  9. 儒，柔也。術士之偁。从人需聲。 Shuōwén jiězì 8A (偁 = 稱); the postface is dated 100 CE, and the work was presented to the throne in 121. Duan Yucai gives Zheng Xuan’s note on the Zhouli as 儒有六藝以教民者, and adds 六藝者，禮樂射御書數也. ↩︎
  10. Hu Shi 1934, building on Zhang Binglin’s 原儒 (1910). Analects 6.13 (6.11 in Legge): 子謂子夏曰：「女為君子儒，無為小人儒。」 The character occurs twice, but only in this passage. ↩︎
  11. Legge 1861, Analects XIII.iii.5. Zilu has asked what Confucius would do first if the ruler of Wei entrusted him with the government. ↩︎
  12. Xunzi 22 (正名): 名無固宜，約之以命，約定俗成謂之宜，異於約則謂之不宜; and 今聖王沒，名守慢，奇辭起，名實亂……若有王者起，必將有循於舊名，有作於新名. Translations ours. ↩︎
  13. Eno 1990, 7: “we will call its members by the name they originally bore, ‘Ru’ 儒; their philosophy we will call ‘Ruism.’” His Analects translation (2015) notes that “Confucianism is sometimes called Ruism in English.” ↩︎
  14. Elstein 2014, with chapters such as “Classical Ruist Political Thought” and “Mou Zongsan on How Ruism Justifies Democracy.” ↩︎
  15. Jensen 1997; Standaert 1999. ↩︎
  16. Nylan 2001. ↩︎
  17. Zhang Binglin’s 原儒 (1910) distinguished a general sense of 儒 (all men of the arts), a narrower one (teachers of the six arts) and a particular one (the followers of Confucius). ↩︎
  18. Analects 9.3 (IX.iii in Legge). ↩︎
  19. Xunzi 22: 名有固善，徑易而不拂，謂之善名; 單足以喻則單，單不足以喻則兼; 故析辭擅作名，以亂正名，使民疑惑，人多辨訟，則謂之大姦. Translations ours. ↩︎
  20. Zhuzi yulei 126: 釋氏虛，吾儒實. Zhu Xi, preface to the Zhongyong zhangju: 蓋自上古聖神繼天立極，而道統之傳有自來矣. Mencius 5B.1: 孔子之謂集大成. On his method, see his Collected Commentaries on the Four Books (四書章句集注). ↩︎

Sources

Chinese texts (Analects, Hanshu, Mencius, Mozi, Shiji, Shuōwén jiězì with Duan Yucai’s commentary, Xunzi, Zhuzi yulei) are cited by chapter from the received texts.

  • The Canton Register 2, no. 1 (3 January 1829).
  • Couplet, Philippe, Prospero Intorcetta, Christian Herdtrich and François de Rougemont. Confucius Sinarum Philosophus. Paris, 1687.
  • Elstein, David. Democracy in Contemporary Confucian Philosophy. London: Routledge, 2014.
  • Eno, Robert. The Confucian Creation of Heaven: Philosophy and the Defense of Ritual Mastery. Albany: SUNY Press, 1990.
  • Eno, Robert, trans. The Analects of Confucius. Online teaching translation, Indiana University, 2015.
  • Gibb, H. A. R. Mohammedanism: An Historical Survey. London: Oxford University Press, 1949. Reissued as Islam: A Historical Survey.
  • Hosne, Ana Carolina. “Friendship among Literati: Matteo Ricci SJ (1552–1610) in Late Ming China.” Journal of Transcultural Studies (2014).
  • Hu Shi 胡適. “Shuo Ru” 說儒. Bulletin of the Institute of History and Philology, Academia Sinica 4.3 (1934): 233–284.
  • Jensen, Lionel M. Manufacturing Confucianism: Chinese Traditions and Universal Civilization. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997.
  • Legge, James. The Chinese Classics. Vol. 1. Oxford, 1861; 2nd ed. 1893.
  • Legge, James. The Religions of China: Confucianism and Tâoism Described and Compared with Christianity. London, 1880.
  • Nylan, Michael. The Five “Confucian” Classics. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001.
  • Oxford English Dictionary. S.vv. “Confucian,” “Confucianism,” “Mahometanism,” “Mohammedanism.”
  • Ricci, Matteo. Storia dell’introduzione del Cristianesimo in Cina. Edited by Pasquale M. D’Elia. Fonti Ricciane, 3 vols. Rome, 1942–1949.
  • Song, Bin. “Unit 1: The Name Controversy of Ru vs Confucianism.” binsong.live, 18 July 2020.
  • Standaert, Nicolas. “The Jesuits Did NOT Manufacture ‘Confucianism’.” East Asian Science, Technology, and Medicine 16 (1999): 115–132.
  • Sun, Anna. Confucianism as a World Religion: Contested Histories and Contemporary Realities. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013.
  • Trigault, Nicolas. De Christiana expeditione apud Sinas. Augsburg, 1615.
  • Zhang Binglin. “Yuan Ru” 原儒. In Guogu lunheng 國故論衡. 1910.
  • Zhu Xi 朱熹. Sishu zhangju jizhu 四書章句集注.

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