The Analects

The Lunyu, usually rendered Analects and more literally something like selected sayings, is not a treatise and does not argue in sequence. It is a collection of short units, most of them a sentence or two: a question from a disciple and a reply, a judgement on a historical figure, an observation about someone's character, occasionally a note on how the Master stood, ate or dressed. The twenty books are named from their opening words and have no thematic organisation worth the name.

Four terms carry most of the weight. Ren, written with the graphs for person and two, is the humaneness that consists in treating others as fully persons; Confucius refuses to define it abstractly and gives different answers to different questioners, including the negative form of the golden rule, not imposing on others what you would not want yourself. Li is ritual propriety, covering everything from sacrifice to how one greets a guest, and the claim is that outward form and inward disposition make each other rather than one merely expressing the other. Junzi, once meaning a ruler's son, is redefined as the man of cultivated character, which detaches worth from birth and is among the book's most consequential moves. Zhengming, the rectification of names, holds that disorder begins when words no longer match realities: a ruler who is not behaving as a ruler should not be called one.

The tone is worth noting. The Confucius of the Analects is often blunt, sometimes funny, capable of irritation and of admitting failure, and he insists he transmits rather than creates. It is a portrait, not a system.

Nothing in the Analects claims Confucius wrote it, and its own form rules that out: he is referred to in the third person, his death is reported, and disciples are given honorifics they would not have used of themselves. The text was compiled after 479 BCE by disciples and then by their disciples, and the process ran for well over a century.

The layering is visible without any special apparatus. The middle books tend to be terse and concrete; several of the later ones are longer, more discursive, and interested in cosmological or bureaucratic questions that the earlier material ignores. Book ten is almost entirely a description of ritual deportment, quite unlike anything around it. Books sixteen to twenty are widely regarded as the latest stratum and are the least likely to preserve anything close to the man's own words. Scholars from the Song dynasty onwards noticed the seams, and modern analysis, notably the stratification proposed by E. Bruce and A. Taeko Brooks, has pushed the argument much further, though their detailed chronology is contested and no reconstruction commands general assent.

Manuscript evidence begins with the bamboo Analects excavated in 1973 from a Han tomb at Dingzhou in Hebei, whose occupant died in 55 BCE. More than six hundred slips survived, damaged by a fire set by tomb robbers and then by the Tangshan earthquake of 1976, and the transcription was not published until 1997. It is the oldest known copy. It differs from the received text in wording at many points and in the arrangement of some passages, but the book it contains is recognisably the same book, which tells against any theory of drastic later rewriting.

For the first millennium of its life the Analects had a curious status: universally read, used to teach children literacy and morals together, but ranked below the Five Classics, which were the texts a serious scholar commented on. It was a primer and an aid, not the centre of the curriculum. It was carved among the seven texts of the Xiping Stone Classics at Luoyang between 175 and 183 CE, and among the twelve of the Kaicheng Stone Classics in 837.

That changed in the twelfth century. Zhu Xi, the systematiser of Neo-Confucianism, grouped the Analects with the Mencius and with two chapters extracted from the Book of Rites, the Great Learning and the Doctrine of the Mean, publishing them in 1190 as a set with his own commentary. These Four Books were shorter than the Five Classics, and Zhu Xi argued they should be read first and in a fixed order, the Great Learning to lay out the programme, then the Analects, then Mencius, then the Doctrine of the Mean. He was not demoting the older classics so much as putting a new gateway in front of them, but the practical effect was to make the Analects the first and most intensively studied of all Confucian texts.

In 1313 the Yuan court made the Four Books with Zhu Xi's commentaries the core of the reinstated civil service examinations, and they remained so until the examination system was abolished in 1905. For nearly six centuries every man who sought office in China had memorised the Analects and learnt one authorised way of reading it. No other book has been so thoroughly bound to the machinery of a state.