The Analects

The Analects is the collection of sayings and conversations of Confucius, the Chinese teacher and philosopher, gathered by his followers. Also known as the Sayings of Confucius, it has been one of the most widely read and studied books in China for more than two thousand years. This Atlas Media edition uses James Legge’s English translation from his series The Chinese Classics.

The Analects is not a continuous argument. It is made of hundreds of short passages arranged in twenty books: brief remarks by the Master, exchanges with his disciples, and observations about how a person should live and how a state should be governed. A large number of passages begin with the words “The Master said”.

According to the Han dynasty historian Ban Gu, the book began as records kept by Confucius’s disciples of their conversations with him, which were collected and edited after his death in 479 BC. Modern scholars believe the work was compiled over roughly two centuries during the Warring States period and reached its final form under the Han dynasty. Its Chinese title, Lunyu, may mean “edited conversations” or “selected sayings”.

Several versions circulated in the early Han dynasty: one from the state of Lu, one from Qi, and an “Old Text” version said to have been found hidden in a wall of the house believed to have been Confucius’s own. The text read today comes from a combination of the Lu and Qi versions made by Zhang Yu, tutor to Emperor Cheng of Han.

At the centre of the book is ren, often translated as humaneness or benevolence: a complete virtue that a person cultivates over a lifetime. Confucius taught that the most basic step towards ren is filial piety, devotion to one’s parents and older siblings.

Ren grows through li, the rituals and forms of propriety by which people show respect for one another and take up their responsible roles in society. For Confucius this did not mean suppressing one’s desires, but learning to reconcile them with the needs of family and community.

Government is a constant theme. Confucius believed that the welfare of a country depended on the moral cultivation of its people, beginning with its leaders, and that a ruler’s virtue, de, was the first requirement for leadership.

The book also gives one of the oldest statements of what is now called the Golden Rule, in its inverted form: “Do not do to others what you would not like done to yourself.”

Confucius’s aim as a teacher, as the Analects presents it, was to produce people of good character who would carry themselves with gravity, speak correctly and show integrity in all things.