The Unbroken Thread by Sohrab Ahmari

Author:Sohrab Ahmari [Ahmari, Sohrab]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2021-05-11T04:00:00+00:00

Shusun was bedridden and too sick to manage his family, much less carry out his role as chief counselor to the ruler. So Niu took complete control of his father’s affairs. Eventually, he resolved to murder the old man, and this he did by simply refusing the food and water sent for Shusun. “After three days of deprivation, the counselor of Lu died alone in his mansion.”10

After offing his father, Niu continued to manipulate the affairs of state and the other leading families. When the legitimate son who had been wrongly exiled returned to take his father’s job as chief counselor, Niu had him assassinated. In his place, Niu installed a young man named Zhaozi, another son of Shusun’s from a concubine. Niu figured that a concubine’s son who owed his rise to him would serve as the perfect puppet. But Zhaozi refused to play his designated role in Niu’s schemes.

As soon as he took office, Zhaozi convened the family for a meeting. “Niu has brought disaster to the Shusuns,” he told them. “We must kill him right away!”11 Sensing the reversal in his fortune, Niu escaped to Qi, as his father once had done. But his kinsmen tracked him down, beheaded him, and tossed his severed head into a bramble bush. Niu’s reign of terror came to a close.

When Shusun Bao died, the state of Lu was home to a thirteen-year-old boy living a hardscrabble life with his single mother. As he grew up, he heard the story of the late chief counselor and was riveted by it.12 The Shusun Bao tragedy, and other stories of the kind, would form the basis of the civilization-defining philosophy this boy would weave as an adult. At the heart of his ideas was the question of children’s obligations to parents and other elder kin—that is to say, the problem of filiality.

The boy was called Qiu Kong, though he won renown in his lifetime as Kong-fuzi, or Master Kong. In the West, we know him by the Latinized name Confucius.

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