Confucius - The Analects (Penguin Classics)

PENGUIN CLASSICS

THE ANALECTS

CONFUCIUS ( BC ) was Chinas earliest teacher and moral thinker, and his name is most closely associated with Chinas past. A man from a modest background, Confucius relied on his learning and his practical skills to secure positions first in the aristocratic families and then in the government of his home state of Lu. A falling out with the chief counselor and the ruler of Lu forced him to spend his mid-life in self-exile, wandering from state to state, with a few disciples, in search of a government job. His conversations with disciples and rulers, political operators, and people he happened to meet laid the foundation of a teaching, which, through time, came to shape the Chinese idea of what is moral and what is politically viable, what is a good government and who has integrity. Confucius returned home toward the end of his life at the invitation of his ruler. The number of his disciples grew during those last years, and the people of Lu accorded him the kind of respect he had not known beforethey addressed him as the elder statesman. Confucius description of himself as an old man suggests that he had finally found calm and spontaneity. Yet this is someone who remained careworn about the future of humanity and about the possibility that men and women might lose their way if they become morally unmoored. Confucius died at the age of seventy-two. The Analects , compiled by his disciples and their disciples, is the source of what we know about Confucius conversations with his contemporaries and his observations about the world and about men from the past, and it is the book the Chinese have returned to repeatedly for reflection, renewal, and validation of their own views. ANNPING CHIN teaches in the history department at Yale and is the author of The Authentic Confucius: A Life of Thought and Politics and Four Sisters of Hofei. She lives in West Haven, Connecticut.

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This translation first published in Penguin Books 2014

Translation, introduction, and notes copyright 2014 by Annping Chin

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Confucius.

[Lun y. English]

The analects = Lunyu / Confucius ; translated with an introduction and commentary by Annping Chin.

pages cm. (Penguin classics)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

eBook ISBN - - - 15351 -

I. Chin, Ann-ping, 1950 - translator. II. Title. III. Title: Lunyu.

PL 2478 .L 2014

'. dc 2014010222

Cover design by Nick Misani

Cover art (from outside layer inward): Shufangxuan hezuan sishu tizhu , commentary by Zhu Xi and subcommentaries by Fan Xiang, et al. (published sometime between 1692 and 1722 ); The Morals of Confucius, A Chinese Philosopher (London: F. Fayram, 1724 ); The Chinese Classics, Vol. 1, Confucian Analects , translated by James Legge (London: Truber & Co., 1861 ); Lunyu zhengyi (Collected Commentaries of the Analects) , edited with commentary by Liu Baonan (Sibu beiyao edition, Zhonghua reprint, 1936 ); Zhengshizhu Lunyu jicheng (Excavated Handcopy Manuscript of the Analects from the Tang Dynasty) , edited by Kanaya Osamu (Tokyo: Hebonsha, 1978 ); Confucius image taken from Sheng ji tu by Zhenduo Zheng, 1898 1958 .

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Contents

Appendices

Preface

The Analects is the single most important book in the history of China. Yet for the uninitiated, this fact is hard to grasp because the principal figure in the book, Confucius, is often seen to be responding to a question, offering a comment, or just thinking aloud. [of the question] until everything has been considered.

In the introduction to his translation of Montaignes essays, Donald Frame tells us, Montaigne resists definition.... Yet this very difficulty points to one answer: that the book is the man. Perhaps the same is true of Confucius and the Analects , but the Analects is not a record of what Confucius wrote, only of what he said. It is, in hindsight, the way Confucius represented himself to the world, though he never intended for that to happen, since it was his disciples and generations of disciples following them who compiled the book. How then did such a work end up being the central point of reference for scholars, thinkers, rulers, political counselors, and just about anyone in the last twenty-five hundred years of Chinese history? And how did Confucius voice become a source of authority for the Chinese, even for the leaders of the present Communist government? Through a combination of hard work and chance, one might say.

In the years right after his death in BC, competitive interpretations of what Confucius had taught helped to keep his name and his ideas alive. Then, in the next two hundred years, two followers, Mencius and Xunzi, took his teachings in different directions, and between them much ground was covered, from the self to society and nature. These mens disquisitions on mans inborn dispositions, on his private and public duties, on what is fair and what is misguided judgment, and on the many moral conundrums of life could seem like a long stretch from what Confucius had originally put forth, but the world had changed by their time. People demanded more from the wise and learned because there were more variables in human relationships and in ones relation to the state. Also, more contenders had entered the fieldbut Mencius and Xunzi were not just eyeing the opposition. They had to be ready, of course, to spar with the quickest and most discerning minds of their day, but, more important, they were looking to satisfy their yearning for knowledge. In the course of their endeavor, Confucius would grow in name and stature.

Imperial patronage in the Han dynasty, after China became a unified country in the second century BC , helped Confucius secure a permanent place within Chinas institutions. Bureaucracy, law, education, social organization, and ritual practiceall stood on principles that bore the influence of Confucius assumptions and beliefs. This, however, does not mean that Confucius teachings did not go through periods of decline. The longest of these lasted nearly seven hundred years, from the beginning of the Six Dynasties () to the end of the Tang dynasty (), during which time Buddhism, a foreign religion, captivated the Chinese imagination and the Chinese, in turn, shaped the foreign religion to look like their own. It was in response to the imminent threat of losing their cultural distinction that the Chinese in the beginning of the Song dynasty ( 1279 ) saw a need to revive Confucian teachings. The movement unfolded gradually, and by the end of that dynasty nearly everything was being addressed by this new Confucianism, from the arcane to the practical, from metaphysics to spiritual cultivation, from scholarship to learning and education, from the selection of officials to principles of government.

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