In the Library
Analects
Confucius, 479 BCE
- Form
- Form Philosophy
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 2 hours
- Translated by
- Translated by James Legge
- Chapters
- Chapters 20
- Length
- Length 29k words
£1.99
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What you do not want done to yourself, do not do to others.
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Marcus Aurelius does the same thing in fragments of private discipline, but where Confucius answers disciples aloud, the Roman emperor argues only with himself.
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The Tao Te Ching
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The Tao Te Ching does the same work of compressing a whole ethics into short, quotable lines, but trades Confucius's rules and rituals for paradox and letting go.
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The Bhagavad Gita
Vyasa
The Bhagavad Gita does the same thing of a teacher answering urgent questions about duty, but stages it as one dialogue on a battlefield instead of a lifetime of exchanges.
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About the book
A teacher sits with his students in a chamber in the Lu state and answers a question about filial piety, then about governing, then whether a gentleman should eat his rice with care. The Analects collects the conversations of Confucius, who died in 479 BCE, compiled across the next two centuries by his disciples. The book has no argument; it is a sequence of fragments, sometimes a line attributed to the Master, sometimes a brief exchange about ritual, music, or mourning. The Way is never defined, only enacted: in how a son speaks to his father, how a minister advises his ruler, how a man holds restraint when alone. Two millennia of East Asian thought have read this book and called it foundation.