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Analects
"Portrait of the First Teacher, Confucius, Giving a Lecture"
Traditional Chinese	論語
Simplified Chinese	论语
Transcriptions Mandarin - Hanyu Pinyin Lún Yǔ Min - Hokkien POJ lūn-gí/lūn-gú Wu - Romanization len nyiu Cantonese (Yue) - Jyutping Leon4 Jyu5

The Analects, or Lunyu (simplified Chinese: 论语; traditional Chinese: 論語; pinyin: Lún Yǔ; literally "Classified/Ordered Sayings^[1]"), also known as the Analects of Confucius, are the collection of sayings and ideas of central Chinese thinker and philosopher Confucius, written by his followers. Written during the Spring and Autumn Period through the Warring States Period (ca. 475 BC - 221 BC), the Analects is the representative work of Confucianism and continues to have a substantial influence on Chinese and East Asian thought and values today.^[1]

History and versions[link]

A commentary on the Analects, printed book published in Ming Dynasty

A page from the Analects

Analects, by Confucius, from Östasiatiska Museet, Stockholm

The Analects was traditionally attributed to Confucius and was written around 500 BC.^[2] Most of the text however were written by Confucius' pupils during the period 30 to 50 years after his death. Beginning some time during the Spring and Autumn Period, the work was probably finished during the Warring States Period, though the exact publication date of the first complete Analects cannot be pinpointed. Much as the Republic purports to be a collection of Socrates' discussions but actually contains original material from his disciple Plato, the Analects were almost certainly penned and compiled by disciples and second-generation disciples of Confucius, albeit being mostly about Confucius himself and his thought.

Chapters in the Analects are grouped by individual themes. However, the chapters are not arranged in any sort of way so as to carry a continuous stream of thought or idea. In fact, the sequence of the chapters could be said to be completely random, with the themes of adjacent chapters completely unrelated to each other.

Moreover, central themes recur repeatedly in different chapters, sometimes in exactly the same wording and sometimes with small variations. This has led some to believe that the book was not written by a single individual, but was the collective effort of many. However, the final editors of the Analects were likely disciples of Zengzi, who was one of the most established students of Confucius.

A version of the analects, written on bamboo strips from before 55 BC, was discovered in a tomb at Dingzhou/Dingxian in Hebei province in 1973 and published in 1997. Although fragmentary, the version could shed considerable light on the textual tradition of the Analects if its readings were ever fully employed in a critical edition.

Towards the late Western Han Dynasty, Zhang Yu, a teacher of Emperor Cheng, combined the Lu and Qi versions of Analects but kept to the number of chapters in the Lu Analects. Zhang's version then came to be known as the Marquis Zhang Analects, which is largely the version we know today.

E. Bruce Brooks and Taeko Brooks, in their work The Original Analects, suggest an alternative interpretation of the chapters' organization, based on language usage patterns within the text. This work suggests that the text of the Analects as we have received them is heavily accreted, and represents the additions of many generations of school heads. Due to the changing political, social, and cultural environments, different heads of the Confucian school chose to praise or denigrate different of their predecessors, and even described very different social practices and ritual environments. Brooks and Brooks view a subset of Analects 4 as representing the ideas of the original Confucius, who lived during a time when the traditional bonds of a warrior-based, personality-based society were breaking down to change to a more mediated society with a broader nobility from the old military elite and with less direct access to the king: these early chapters represent the old military ethic of extreme faithfulness to superiors and paternal care for inferiors, with almost no emphasis on mannered ritual, as chronologically later chapters might suggest.

Influence and significance[link]

Since Confucius' time, the Analects has heavily influenced the philosophy and moral values of China and later other East Asian countries as well. Together with the other three volumes of the Four Books, it taught the basic Confucian values including social and ritual propriety (禮/礼), righteousness, loyalty, and filial piety, all centered about the central thought of Confucius – humanity and the "proper man" or "gentleman" (君子).

For almost two thousand years, the Analects had also been the fundamental course of study for any Chinese scholar, for a man was not considered morally upright or enlightened if he did not study Confucius' works. The imperial examination, started in the Sui Dynasty and eventually abolished in late Qing Dynasty (early 20th century), emphasized Confucian studies and expected candidates to quote and apply the words of Confucius in their essays.

Portions were translated into Latin by Western Christian missionaries in the late 16th century. The Analects has also been translated into many languages, most notably into English by James Legge, Arthur Waley, Charles Muller, and William Edward Soothill.

A particular point of interest lies in Chapter 10 of the book, which contains detailed descriptions of Confucius' behaviors in various daily activities. This has been pointed to by Voltaire and Ezra Pound to show how much Confucius was a mere human. Simon Leys, who recently translated the Analects into English and French, said that the book may have been the first in human history to describe the life of an individual, historic personage. Similarly, Elias Canetti writes: "Confucius' Conversations are the oldest complete intellectual and spiritual portrait of a man. It strikes one as a modern book; everything it contains and indeed everything it lacks is important." (Conscience of Words, p. 173.)

Contents[link]

The traditional titles given to each chapter are mostly the initial two or three characters (incipits). For instance, the first chapter of Book 1, "Xue er," started with a Confucian teaching "The Master said, Is it not pleasant to learn with a constant perseverance and application? (子曰：“學而時習之，不亦說乎？ Zǐ yuē: Xué ér shí xí zhī, bù yì yuè hū?)." In some cases, they may indicate, as the Brooks propose, a central theme of the chapter. However, it is inappropriate to regard the title as a capture or a generalization of the content of the chapter.

Translations[link]

• Legge, James (1861). Confucian Analects, the Great Learning, and the Doctrine of the Mean. The Chinese Classics. I. London: Trübner. http://www.archive.org/details/chineseclassics02legggoog.  Revised second edition (1893), Oxford: Clarendon Press, reprinted by Cosimo in 2006 (ISBN 978-1-60520-643-1).
• Lyall, Leonard A. (1909). The Sayings of Confucius. London: Longmans, Green and Co.. OCLC 1435673. http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/2/4/0/5/24055/24055-h/24055-h.htm. 
• Soothill, William Edward (1910). The Analects of Confucius. Yokohama: Fukuin Printing. http://oll.libertyfund.org/title/1846. 
• Waley, Arthur (1938). The Analects. London: George Allen and Unwin. http://acc6.its.brooklyn.cuny.edu/~phalsall/texts/analects.txt.  Reprinted by Alfred A. Knopf in 2000 (ISBN 978-0-375-41204-2).
• Brooks, E. Bruce; Brooks, Taeko (2001). The Original Analects. New York: Columbia University Press. 

See also[link]

• Chinese classic texts
• Sacred text
• Virtue jurisprudence

References[link]

External links[link]

Wikisource has original text related to this article: The Analects

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Analects

Look up analects in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

Chinese Wikisource has original text related to this article: 論語

• The Analects Chinese-English bilingual text (Legge's translation) with links to Zhu Xi's commentary - Chinese Text Project
• Multilingual edition of the Analects in Chinese, English and French
• Legge's English translation from the University of Adelaide Library. No section numbers.
• Translations of the Analects in over 20 languages. With footnotes.
• Latin Translation (Zottoli, 1879)
• Full Text of Lunyu - English
• The Analects by Confucius written ca. 500 B.C.E.
• Audio archive in mp3 format
• The Analects of Confucius, translated by A. Charles Muller
• Analects Of Confucius online library

Arthur David Waley CH, CBE (Chinese: 衛利; pinyin: Wèilì, 19 August 1889 – 27 June 1966) was an English orientalist and sinologist.

Life[link]

Waley was born in Tunbridge Wells, Kent, England, as Arthur David Schloss, son of the economist David Frederick Schloss. Of Jewish heritage, he changed his surname to his paternal grandmother's maiden name, Waley, in 1914, as one of many English men and women who changed German surnames to more English-sounding names during WWI. Educated at Rugby School, he entered King's College, at the University of Cambridge in 1907, where he studied Classics, and was awarded a bachelor's degree in 1910.

Waley was appointed Assistant Keeper of Oriental Prints and Manuscripts at the British Museum in 1913. During this time he taught himself Chinese and Japanese, partly to help catalogue the paintings in the Museum's collection. He quit in 1929 to devote himself fully to his literary and cultural interests, though he continued to lecture in the School of Oriental and African Studies, London. In 1918, he met Beryl de Zoete, a dance critic and writer; they lived together until her death in 1962. In 1966, Arthur Waley married Alison Robinson, whom he had first met in 1929. They lived in Highgate in London, and she became a familiar figure in later years, living beyond the age of 100.

Waley lived in Bloomsbury and had a number of friends among the Bloomsbury Group, many of whom he had met as an undergraduate. He was one of the earliest to recognize Ronald Firbank as an accomplished author, and together with Osbert Sitwell provided an introduction to Firbank's first collected edition.

Noted American poet Ezra Pound was instrumental in getting Waley's first translations into print in The Little Review. His view of Waley's early work was mixed, however. As he wrote to Margaret Anderson, the Review's editor, in a letter of 2 July 1917: "Have at last got hold of Waley's translations from Po chu I. Some of the poems are magnificent. Nearly all the translations marred by his bungling English and defective rhythm... I shall try to buy the best ones, and to get him to remove some of the botched places. (He is stubborn as a donkey, or a scholar.)" Yet Waley, in his Introduction in his translation of The Way and its Power, explains that he was careful to put meaning above style in translations where meaning would be reasonably considered of more importance to the modern Western reader.

He died in London and is buried in Highgate Cemetery.

Honours[link]

Waley was elected an honorary fellow of King's College, Cambridge in 1945, received the Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) honor in 1952, the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry in 1953, and the Order of the Companions of Honour (CH) in 1956.

• • Order of the Companions of Honour, 1956.
• • Commander of the Order of the British Empire, 1952.

Works[link]

His many translations include A Hundred and Seventy Chinese Poems (1918), Japanese Poetry: The Uta (1919), The No Plays of Japan (1921), The Tale of Genji (published in 6 volumes from 1921-33), The Pillow Book of Sei Shōnagon (1928), The Kutune Shirka (1951), Monkey (1942, an abridged version of Journey to the West), The Poetry and Career of Li Po (1959) and The Secret History of the Mongols and Other Pieces (1964). Waley received the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his translation of Monkey, and his translations of the classics, the Analects of Confucius and The Way and its Power (Tao Te Ching), are still regarded highly by his peers. Dutch poet J. Slauerhoff used poems from A Hundred and Seventy Chinese Poems and More Translations from the Chinese to write his 1929 adaptation of Chinese poetry, Yoeng Poe Tsjoeng.

These translations are widely regarded as poems in their own right, and have been included in many anthologies such as the Oxford Book of Modern Verse 1892-1935, Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse and Penguin Book of Contemporary Verse (1918-1960) under Waley's name.

Despite translating many Chinese and Japanese classical texts into English, including much poetry and several philosophical works, Waley never travelled to the Far East. In his preface to The Secret History of the Mongols, he writes that he was not a master of many languages, but claims to have known Chinese and Japanese fairly well, a good deal of Ainu and Mongolian, and some Hebrew and Syriac.

Selected works[link]

Wikisource has original works written by or about: Arthur Waley

• A Hundred and Seventy Chinese Poems, 1918
• More Translations from the Chinese (Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1919).
• Japanese Poetry: The Uta, 1919
• The Nō Plays of Japan, 1921
• The Temple and Other Poems, 1923
• Introduction to the Study of Chinese Painting, 1923
• The Tale of Genji, by Lady Murasaki, 1925-1933
• The Pillow Book of Sei Shōnagon, 1928
• The Way and its Power: A Study of the Tao Te Ching and its Place in Chinese Thought, 1934
• The Book of Songs (Shih Ching), 1937
• The Analects of Confucius, 1938
• Three Ways of Thought in Ancient China, 1939
• Translations from the Chinese, a compilation, 1941
• Monkey, 1942
• Chinese Poems, 1946
• The Life and Times of Po Chü-I, 1949
• The Real Tripitaka and Other Pieces, 1952
• The Nine Songs: A Study of Shamanism in Ancient China, 1955
• Yuan Mei: Eighteenth Century Chinese Poet, 1956
• The Opium War through Chinese Eyes, 1958
• The Poetry and Career of Li Po, 1959
• Ballads and Stories from Tun-Huang, 1960
• The Secret History of the Mongols, 1963

References[link]

• "Arthur Waley, 76, Orientalist, Dead; Translator of Chinese and Japanese Literature," New York Times. 28 June 1966.
• Gruchy, John Walter de. (2003). Orienting Arthur Waley: Japonism, Orientalism, and the Creation of Japanese Literature in English. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. 10-ISBN 0-8248-2567-5.
• Waley, Alison. (1982). A Half of Two Lives. London: George Weidenfeld & Nicolson. (Reprinted in 1983 by McGraw-Hill.)
• Morris, Ivan I. (1970). Madly Singing in the Mountains: An Appreciation and Anthology of Arthur Waley. London: Allen & Unwin.
• Jones, Francis A. (1968). A Bibliography of Arthur Waley. New Bunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press.

External links[link]

• Warring States Project, University of Massachusetts Biography [1]
• Waley's translation of The Way and its Power
• Works by Arthur Waley at Project Gutenberg