Essay
The Analects
論語
Confucius · -450
Synopsis
Twenty books of brief sayings, with no narrative thread, in which the master converses with his disciples and with contemporaries, often after the formula “The Master said”. They deal with filial piety, the virtue of humaneness, ritual, the accomplished man and a government that leads by example rather than by punishment. A golden rule appears there in negative form: not to impose on others what one would not want for oneself. The tenth book describes the master's daily conduct.
Context
Tradition holds that the disciples recorded the master's sayings after his death; most scholars place the composition in the Warring States period and the final form in the mid-Han. The text has five hundred and twelve sections in twenty chapters, according to a review of Simon Leys's translation. Zhu Xi made it one of the Four Books, and it continued to be learned for the examinations until their abolition in 1905. The Jesuits produced in Paris, in 1687, the first version in a Western language, in Latin, which Voltaire and Leibniz read. Anne Cheng and Pierre Ryckmans translated it into French, in 1981 and 1987.
Who it is for
A short text, made up of sayings a few lines long; several complete French translations exist, from Gallimard, Seuil or Flammarion.
Prizes and reception
Britannica regards it as the most venerated scripture of the Confucian tradition, and Elias Canetti saw in it the oldest complete portrait of a man.
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