I couldn’t find anything on how the term ‘Golden Rule’ came about. That’s a good question though. I’d never thought about it before.

Since others have posted the versions of the Golden Rule that they’ve heard, I hope you don’t mind me adding a bit of comparison and contrast.

I recall from my studies of Confucianism in college, that Confucius, or more properly, K'ung fu-tzu, (Grand Master K’ung) had his own version of the Golden Rule: “Do not do to others what you do not want them to do to you” (Analects 15:23). Master K’ung’s version (written around 500 BCE) predates Jesus’ more popular version in Matthew 7:12 (written between 40 and 60 CE) by 540 to 560 years.

Although the two versions appear to have the same result, consider that Master K’ung’s version is the passive form of the same concept, “do not do”, and Jesus’ version is the active version “do”. Of course, most would consider this a quibble, but the problem with the active version is that it does not take into account a sadomasochist. With the active version, a person who enjoys inflicting pain, and, more importantly, enjoys receiving pain, is encouraged to inflict pain: “do”. The passive version eliminates this problem: “do not do”.

In writing this, I decided to look up Master K’ung’s version to quote it correctly. In doing so, I found the following site with several “versions” of the Golden Rule:

http://www.unification.net/ws/theme015.htm

Of course, one Golden Rule the site leaves out is: “The one with the gold makes the rules.”