Analects

What It Is

About five hundred short passages in twenty books, assembled after the death of Confucius (551 to 479 BC) by his followers, and by their followers after them. He did not write it. It records what he was remembered saying and doing.

Expect nothing that looks like Western philosophy. No system, no treatise, no chain of argument. There are fragments: a question and a two-line answer, a remark to a student, a note on how he behaved at court or what he refused to eat. Some passages read like private jokes among people who died two and a half thousand years ago.

The strangeness is the point. Confucius is not trying to prove anything to you. He is trying to form a person, and the book works the way a teacher works: by example, correction, repetition and the occasional unexplained silence.

It is short. Two to four hours if you read it straight through, which you should not.

Why It Matters

For two thousand years this was the most influential book on earth by any reasonable count of readers. It shaped the ethics, family life, education and government of China, Korea, Japan and Vietnam, and the imperial examinations that selected China's officials for a millennium were built on it. Its assumptions still run under the daily life of a fifth of humanity.

For a Western reader it offers something rarer than agreement. Here is a complete and serious ethics built without God, without metaphysics, without rights, and without the individual as the basic unit, made instead out of relationships, ritual, role and the slow work of self-cultivation. Its key words, ren, li and junzi, will not go cleanly into English, and that resistance is the most interesting thing about them.

Its central political claim is one no modern state has fully faced: that a society is held together by the character of its rulers and the habits of its people, and that law and punishment are what you fall back on once that has already failed. The Jesuits carried it to Europe in the seventeenth century; Leibniz and Voltaire read it with astonishment. It has been argued about ever since, and the arguing is part of the tradition.

Before You Read

The great mistake is to read it like a book, front to back, in a weekend. It will slide straight off you. Read a few passages a day for a month; the text was built for exactly that.

The difficulty is compression and missing context rather than language. Many passages turn on who is being spoken to, and you have never heard of them. This is why the edition matters more here than for almost any other book on the list. You need commentary. A bare translation will leave you baffled and bored.

Book 10, which describes Confucius's personal conduct in minute ceremonial detail, is heavy going for newcomers. Read it lightly the first time and come back when you understand why the small things mattered so much to him.

Which Translation to Read

• Edward Slingerland (Hackett, 2003) — recommended. The full title tells you why: Analects, with Selections from Traditional Commentaries. For every passage you get the text, then the ways Chinese readers have understood it over two millennia. That solves the book's central problem: the Analects is close to unreadable without the tradition that grew up around it. Accurate, generous and cheap. The cost: the commentary triples the length, and Slingerland's English is workmanlike rather than lovely. View on Amazon →
• Simon Leys (W. W. Norton, 1997; also as a Norton Critical Edition edited by Michael Nylan, 2014). The most graceful English version there is: concise, natural, quotable, with notes that are essays in miniature. The one to read for pleasure. The cost: those notes are personal and selective, and they will not teach you the commentarial tradition.
• Annping Chin (Penguin Classics, 2014). A historian's Analects, strong on who all these people actually were, drawing on recently excavated texts. Excellent if the historical Confucius is what you are after. The cost: the commentary is dense, and the translation is less memorable than Leys.

Take Slingerland to understand it, Leys to enjoy it, Chin to place it in its century. D. C. Lau's Penguin version (1979) remains sound.

Getting the Most From This Book

Read the commentary. Skipping it is not a shortcut; it is the reason most Western readers put this book down.

Note the passages that irritate you. The Analects is at its most useful where it is least congenial: on hierarchy, ritual, deference and the family. Do not rush to turn Confucius into a modern liberal you already agree with, and do not dismiss him for failing to be one.

Read it twice, then keep it near your desk. It is one of the few books on this list designed to be consulted for a lifetime rather than finished.