Introduction

The Analects of Confucius — R. Eno, 2015

The Analects of Confucius is an anthology of brief passages that present the words of Confucius and his disciples, describe Confucius as a man, and recount some of the events of his life. The book may have begun as a collection by Confucius’s immediate disciples soon after their Master’s death in 479 BCE. In traditional China, it was believed that its contents were quickly assembled at that time, and that it was an accurate record; the English title, which means “brief sayings of Confucius,” reflects this idea of the text. (The Chinese title, Lunyu 論語, means “collated conversations.”) Modern scholars generally see the text as having been brought together over the course of two to three centuries, and believe little if any of it can be viewed as a reliable record of Confucius’s own words, or even of his individual views. Rather, much like the biblical Gospels, to which the text bears some resemblance, the Analects offers an evolving record of the image of Confucius and his ideas through from the changing standpoints of various branches of the school of thought he founded.

This online translation is posted to make it easier to locate an English rendering of this important text with some basic commentary. It has been prepared for use in undergraduate teaching and is not meant to replace published scholarly editions. The interpretations reflected are my own, and in some cases do not represent consensus readings (if such exist — there are, and always have been, competing interpretations of many of the most engaging passages in the text, starting from passage 1.1).

In this very brief introduction to the text, I will summarize a few features of Confucius’s life and social environment, review some basic ways in which the component parts of the Analects are dated by analysts, on a very general level, and note some particular issues concerning key terms and translation, and of personal names.

Confucius

“Confucius” is the name by which English speakers know Kong Qiu 孥久, born near a small ducal state on the Shandong Peninsula in 551 BCE. Centuries earlier, a strong royal state, known as the Zhou (founded in 1045 BCE), had sent members of its high aristocracy to rule regions of its empire as hereditary lords, subjects of the Zhou king, but, so long as they remained loyal, masters of their local domains. In 771 BCE, raids by non-Zhou nomadic peoples led to the death of the Zhou king and the removal of the Zhou capital; from that time on, the Zhou kings had become weak, and the feudal lords had become de facto sovereigns over essentially independent states and statelets. Three themes of Confucius’s day were incessant warfare, which had been pervasive among the feudal lords since the devolution of power into their hands, the further devolution of power from the Zhou-appointed feudal houses into the hands of subordinate families that managed to accumulate power locally, and the rising fluidity of social mobility which this type of open competition for power encouraged, as intelligence and warrior skills in their assistants proved more valuable to competing power-holders than did hereditary pedigree.

Confucius’s father was a member of the low aristocracy of the medium-sized state of Lu 魯. According to our best sources, he was an important aide to a major aristocratic, or “grandee” family. During his prime, this family had served the greatest power holders in Lu by controlling a domain assigned to them on Lu’s southern border, near a small, non-Zhou cultural area called Zou 鎡. Shortly before Confucius’s birth, the family’s domain was relocated to the north, but Confucius’s father, having by his primary wife and his concubines produced no healthy sons to carry on his line, and being now an older man, chose at this time to take as a concubine a woman of Zou. She soon gave birth to Confucius. Three years later, Confucius’s father died, and Confucius apparently grew up with his mother’s family in the border region between Lu and Zou. Reaching adulthood, he traveled to the feudal center of Lu to seek social position, based on his father’s standing and connections.

The state of Lu took pride in the fact that the lineage of its rightful lords, the dukes of Lu, had begun with a famous brother of the Zhou dynastic founder, a man known as the Duke of Zhou. Treasuring Zhou traditions with which he was associated, after the decline of the Zhou royal house the state of Lu had become known as the purest repository of Zhou aristocratic culture. But during the sixth century, these traditions were undermined, as powerful warlord families gained increasing control of government and resources in Lu, gradually marginalizing the legitimate ducal house, and distorting the norms of government form and ceremonial ritual that had made Lu distinct.

When Confucius sought his fortune in Lu, he probably appeared there as a semi-outsider, the son of a “mixed” union between a man of Lu, who had long resided in Zou, and a woman of that non-Zhou place (see passage 3.15). But Confucius made his reputation as a strong advocate of a puristic revival of Zhou traditions in court conduct, religious ceremony, and every aspect of ordinary life. He became expert in these traditions, and it was on the basis of this knowledge and the persuasiveness of his claim that the way to bring order back to “the world” was to recreate early Zhou society through its ritual forms, or “li,” that Confucius became known. The details of what Confucius saw as legitimate Zhou culture and why he thought its patterns were tools for building a new utopia are the principal subjects of the Analects.

His mastery of Zhou cultural forms allowed Confucius to become a teacher of young aristocrats seeking polish, and through their connections, he was able to gain some stature in Lu. Ultimately, he and some of his followers attempted to implement a grand restorationist plan in Lu that would have shifted power back to the ducal house. Shortly after 500 BCE, when Confucius was about fifty, the plan failed, and Confucius was forced to leave his home state. For about fifteen years, he traveled with a retinue of disciples from state to state in eastern China, looking for a ruler who would employ him and adopt the policies he advocated. The Analects pictures some key moments in these travels, which ultimately proved fruitless. A few years before his death, one of Confucius’s senior disciples, a man named Ran Qiu, arranged to have Confucius welcomed back to Lu, where he lived out his days as a teacher of young men, training them in the literary, ritual, and musical arts that he saw as central to the culture of the Zhou.

The Structure and Date of the Analects

During the Classical era, texts were generally recorded by brush and ink, writing on thin strips of bamboo. These strips allowed for about two dozen Chinese characters each. Holes were drilled in each strip and the strips that belonged to a single written work were bound together in a bundle by a string. The Analects, which is composed of about five hundred independent passages, is divided into twenty “books.” Some of these books seem to have originated as strips authored, over a period of years, by a single group, and separated into bundles according to dominant themes. Others of the books seem to have originated independently, and been brought together with the larger number of books at a later date. Within each book, the order of passages appears to have been disrupted over time, to greater or lesser degree, either by disarrangements that occurred after the string of a bundle broke, or because part of the composition process involved conscious rearrangement and insertion of later passages into existing bundles / books, in order to adjust the way the message of the overall text was conveyed.

Through this process, the Analects has come to appear quite random on first reading, and no depth of analysis has yet removed that sense of randomness from large portions of the text. While this is not ideal for readers who wish to understand the message of the Analects, it has been very good news for academic textual analysts, for whom the long process of trying to untangle the text and understand how it came to be shaped as it is has provided gainful employment and opportunities for tenure. * Although there is consensus about a few points, such as the fact that several of the books, such as Books XVI and XX, are very late additions, there is more disagreement than agreement about specific issues of dating and origin of the Analects’ various components. The translation that follows here operates on the following model.

Books III through VII are seen as a core text from a single, relatively early origin, with the books, in their original form (now much altered) sorted by topic in roughly this way:

Among all the books, the most consistent in structure and apparently least altered in form is Book IV. Examination of that book does seem to yield some pretty clear principles about what the original editorial goals were, and what regular processes of alteration later occurred.

Traditionally, it has been widely noted that Books I–X seem to bear some similar features of length, structure, and vocabulary, and it has become common to speak of those books as the “upper text” and Books XI–XX as the “lower text.” Rounding out the “upper text”:

In some of these cases (II and IX), the core theme seems to be present in a relatively small number of passages, and the books seem particularly heterogeneous.

The “lower text” is even less coherent. There seems to be some resemblance of structure and tone among Books XI–XV; in some cases, a thematic aspect seems visible, in others not.

It is reasonable to suggest that at their core, these five chapters originated as sorted collections made by a single branch of the school, different from the branch that may have collected Books III–VII, with the collection deriving from a somewhat later date.

The remaining five books have been regarded for several centuries as later and less authoritative than the others. For some of these, the later date seems certain:

One book among the final five appears different from the rest:

This book may well be much earlier than the others in the “lower text” — it was likely at one time the final book, and the bulk of it may actually have been composed in association with Books III–VII, viewed as the oldest portion of the book.

All of the books bear the traces of rearrangements and later insertions, to a degree that makes it difficult to see any common thematic threads at all. If a full account of these alterations in the text could be made, it would likely provide a clear and valuable reflection of the way that the Confucian school and its various branches developed over the first two or three centuries of the school’s existence.

Recent finds of early manuscripts dating from c. 300 BCE have thrown additional light on these processes of text development. For a fuller discussion, see Appendix 3.

Key Terms and Translation Issues

The philosophy conveyed through the Analects is basically an ethical perspective, and the text has always been understood as structured on a group of key ethical terms. These (along with some terms key to other early streams of Chinese thought) are discussed in more detail in the Glossary (Appendix 2). Notes in the text also touch on all these issues, but a brief overview here may be useful.

There is a group of key terms whose meaning seems to be so flexible, subtle, and disputed that it seems best to leave them untranslated, simply using transcription for them. These include:

In addition to these items, other complex key terms are rendered by very vague English words, the meaning of which can only emerge as contextual usage is noted.

Finally, a set of important terms can be translated with some accuracy into English, but only with the understanding that the conceptual range of the Chinese term may not match English perfectly; in some cases, alternate English translations are used.

Personal Names

Although this is not clear on initial reading, the ideas of the Analects are importantly influenced by the literary character of the text, and the fact that it is presented chiefly as conversational interplay among a relatively limited cast of characters: Confucius (“the Master”), his disciples, and a group of power holders with whom Confucius interacts. The Analects was almost certainly used as a teaching text for later generations of disciples, who were taught not only the text but much detail about the contexts and characters now lost to us, and it is certain that the original audience of the text developed a grasp of the rich nuances conveyed by the way statements in the text are distributed among its various speakers. Most importantly, the disciples in the Analects provided a range of positive and negative models readers could emulate as they attempted to find their way into Confucian teachings, and develop into the true inheritors of the dao of discipleship.

Unfortunately for readers of the text in translation, the characters in the Analects are each referred to by a variety of names, reflecting the customs of the times. It was the general rule that members of the aristocracy, at any level, possessed at least three types of names. They could possess many more. The three basic names are:

When it comes to the disciples, the narrative voice of the text usually refers to them by their polite style name, but Confucius is generally pictured calling them by their personal names (as a teacher, he was a surrogate parent). For example, in passage 11.15 (Book XI, passage 15) we read:

The Master said, “What is Yóu’s zither doing at my gate?” The disciples showed Zilu no respect.

Yóu and Zilu are the same person. He is the disciple Zhong Yóu (surname: Zhong, personal name: Yóu). Confucius calls him by his personal name, but the narrative voice, being a later disciple writing about a revered elder of the past, uses the polite Zilu. (Zilu is, in addition, referred to by what appears to be a “generational name”; Ji Yóu, the “Ji” indicating that in his family, he was the fourth eldest male of his generation.)

Finally, some disciples whose later followers likely had a clear impact on the text are referred to as “masters” in their own right; the most prominent example is “Master Zeng,” who is Zeng Shen, among the youngest of the major disciples. In the case of Zeng Shen, the influence of his own branch of the Confucian school is particularly visible; a portion of Book VIII is devoted to descriptions of his dying words, words likely uttered over forty years after the death of Confucius. The reference to any disciple as “Master” indicates that they had some later influence, but does not indicate that they were, in Confucius’s day, influential among Confucius’s own disciples. Indeed, a number of the greatest disciples died before Confucius, and thus could never have earned the title of “Master” in their own right.

In the notes to the text, I have tried to provide information and reminders necessary to keep track of the various disciples, so that it is possible for their characters and the individual ways their roles shape subtle meaning to emerge. But this is hard to grasp on initial reading, no matter how much help is provided. For the sake of directness, I will close this Introduction with a list of some of the major disciples, and, where it may be known, the dates that have been reconstructed for them. This list by no means exhausts the roster of disciples who appear in the Analects, or even the roster of interesting ones, but these are the ones who appear most frequently. Their names are given as surname + personal name, with style and variant names in parentheses. Fuller descriptions of the major disciples appear in Appendix 1.

Note to Version 2.2 (2015)
The translation text in Version 2.2 includes corrections and changes, mostly minor, to Versions 2.0 (2010) and 2.1 (2012). The notes have been more extensively revised and maps on pp. x–xi have been added.

Maps

China