The Book of Kong 孔

Confucius died in 479 BC, in a small Chinese kingdom that did not know what to do with him. His name was Kong. He believed his work had failed. His teaching, twenty-five centuries later, is still doing work in the lives of people on every continent on Earth.

The Book of Kong is the personal reckoning of one of those people. S Y Kelake came to Confucius by way of a martial arts class in Essex when he was twenty-three. He did not, at the time, know he was meeting Confucius. The school whose syllabus he was reading was called Ren Yi Wu Kwan Tang Sou Dao, founded by Grandmaster M K Loke, and the seven principles on its door were Confucian principles in their plainest possible form. Across thirty years of training, family life, and the storm of a terminal cancer diagnosis at forty-three, the principles did their slow patient work.

This book is what the work produced.

It moves in four parts. Part One introduces the Confucius the writer met, for a reader who may never have read him. Part Two unpacks the seven principles of the school as practices for an ordinary life: loyalty, filial care, respect for those who have walked the road before, the long building of the person, humility, the owning of one’s story, and the carrying of what was given. Part Three lays the long Confucian diagnosis quietly next to the contemporary West, without despair. Part Four describes what the principles produced when the body stopped being his: the consultant’s room in May 2014 with his wife on one side and his mother on the other; the year the practice paused; the return to training under Grandmaster M K Loke years later; the form that came looking for him as the body changed.

The book is for adolescents and adults who have been kept from the great teachings, and who would like to know what is still worth carrying. It is the thirteenth volume in the Seeking That Which Was Lost series, alongside The Free and Easy (on Zhuangzi), The Book of Yalun (on Lao Tzu), and the other volumes by the same author.