We imagine history's great sages dispensing wisdom from a throne of success, but Confucius died believing his life's mission was a total failure. This episode follows him from his birth around 551 BCE in the state of Lu, where he was named Qiu, meaning mound, for the sunken shape of his head, through the death of his father when he was three and his mother before she turned forty. To pay for her burial he worked as a bookkeeper and tended sheep and horses, yet as a member of the shi class he mastered the Six Arts and observed a full three-year mourning period that revealed his belief in ritual as the software that keeps the human mind from crashing.

We then trace his rise to Minister of Crime, his audacious plan to convince the Ji, Meng, and Shu clans to tear down their own fortress walls by exploiting their paranoia, the siege that failed  ...