The Analects

What it is

The Lúnyǔ — selected sayings — a collection of around five hundred short passages recording the words and conduct of Confucius and his disciples, in twenty books.

It is not a treatise and does not argue. Most passages are a few lines. Someone asks a question; the Master answers, often obliquely, sometimes differently to different questioners; occasionally someone is rebuked. There is no system, no definitions, no sustained exposition.

That form is not a defect of transmission. The tradition holds that character is formed by particular encounters rather than by principles, and a book of particular encounters is what it produced.

Where it came from

Compiled by disciples and their successors over perhaps two centuries after Confucius's death in 479 BCE. It contains layers of different dates — books three to nine are generally regarded as the oldest core, later books show signs of later composition — so the text is a sedimentary record rather than a memoir.

How it is read

Slowly, and a passage at a time. Reading it straight through produces a blur; the tradition read it repeatedly over a lifetime, with commentary, and it rewards that.

Some of what is in it:

The negative formulation of the ethical rule, offered when a disciple asks for one word to practise all one's life: reciprocity — what you do not wish for yourself, do not do to others. It predates the positive Christian form by five centuries and is arguably the more workable version, since it does not assume other people want what you want.

The autobiographical passage, which is the most quoted thing he said: at fifteen he set his heart on learning; at thirty he stood firm; at forty he had no doubts; at fifty he knew the mandate of heaven; at sixty his ear was obedient; at seventy he could follow his heart's desire without overstepping the line. A description of moral development as taking a lifetime, and of freedom as what arrives at the end of discipline rather than in place of it.

On the spirits: respect them and keep them at a distance. Asked about serving the spirits, he replies that one cannot yet serve people. Asked about death, he says one does not yet understand life.

And the human material, which is easy to miss. He weeps uncontrollably when his favourite disciple Yan Hui dies, and when reproved for excess replies that if not for this man, for whom? Told that a stranger had described him as looking like a stray dog, he laughs and says the description is apt. He spent his life seeking a ruler who would employ his ideas and never found one, and the book does not conceal the disappointment.

What we can and cannot say

We can say its social consequence is enormous. As the core of the imperial examination curriculum for something like thirteen centuries, it was the text through which access to power in China was mediated — a position no other book has held for so long anywhere.

We can say it travelled west and had effects there, which is unusual in this section, where the traffic is nearly all the other way.

Jesuit missionaries in China translated Confucian texts into Latin, publishing Confucius Sinarum Philosophus in Paris in 1687. European intellectuals read it with real attention. Leibniz corresponded about Chinese thought and admired what he found. Voltaire used Confucius polemically — a moral philosophy with no revelation, no priesthood and no miracles, sustaining a vast civilisation, was extremely useful to an Enlightenment argument against clerical authority. He hung a portrait of Confucius in his study.

The reading was selective and served European purposes. It was also real influence flowing from China into the European Enlightenment, and it is not much taught.

We can say the tradition's difficulties are visible in the text. The five relationships are asymmetrical, the position of women is poor, and the emphasis on ritual propriety can be read as conservative in the strong sense. Chinese reformers have made both cases — that this is the source of a stifling social order, and that the tradition contains its own correctives — for over a century.

We cannot recover Confucius. The Analects is a compilation of uncertain layers about a man who wrote nothing, and the further one reads in the later books the less secure it becomes. What survives is a portrait: a man who thought that how people treat each other is the whole of the matter, who believed he was transmitting rather than inventing, and who did not get the job he wanted.

Further reading

• Edward Slingerland's translation with traditional commentary (2003) — the best English edition.
• D.C. Lau's translation, for a plainer rendering.
• Books 3–9 first, if reading selectively.