The Analects

The Analects is what survived: short fragments of conversation, brief judgements on persons and situations, occasional flashes of self-portraiture, all compiled by Confucius's students in the generations after his death. There is no system here, no argued treatise. There is the voice of a teacher, and the voices of his pupils trying to remember exactly what he said, and the gaps where memory failed. From this anthology of fragments emerged the moral grammar of an entire civilisation.

Confucius is concerned almost entirely with how a person behaves toward other people — toward parents, rulers, friends, strangers — and how the small daily fidelities of conduct accumulate into character. He prefers concrete cases to abstract principles. He is willing to be wrong in public. He laughs at himself. His admiration for the older sages is qualified, his impatience with disciples who cannot grasp simple distinctions is gentle but unmistakable. The great rhythm of the work is the steady refusal to separate ethics from practice, knowledge from action, the personal from the political.

James Legge's 1893 translation, the version that introduced the Analects to the English-speaking world, preserves much of the original's elliptical compression — sentences end where you do not expect, names appear without explanation, much is left to the reader to weigh. Twenty books, several hundred sayings, none of them long. It rewards the kind of reading you give a poem: short attention, repeated returns.