About This Edition
What the Analects is, whose translation this is, and how to get the most from the way it is laid out here.
The book
The Analects — in Chinese Lúnyǔ (論語), the “selected sayings” — is the nearest thing we have to a record of Confucius (孔子, Kǒngzǐ, 551–479 BCE) as his students knew him. It is not a treatise and has no argument running through it. It is a gathering of fragments: things the Master said, conversations with disciples and rulers, judgements of character, a few glimpses of how he actually behaved. Compiled by later generations of his followers, it became, for two thousand years, the most-read book in the Chinese world — the text every educated person knew by heart.
Read straight through, it can seem a heap of unconnected remarks. But the same few questions keep returning: how does one become a good person? what binds a family, and what binds a state? what is owed to the dead, to the living, to Heaven? The reward of the book is in circling those questions with him.
The translation
The text here is the translation of James Legge (1815–1897), the Scottish missionary and sinologist whose monumental Chinese Classics first opened these works to English readers. His version is Victorian and sometimes stiff — he renders the central virtue rén now as “perfect virtue,” now as “benevolence” — but it is faithful, complete, and long in the public domain. Where his English turns on a Chinese term, this edition tries to show you the word underneath.
How to read this edition
This is built to be read and studied. A few things to know:
- The ideas are surfaced as you read. Words the original turns on — rén, lǐ, the superior man — are quietly marked in the text. Hover or tap one to see the Chinese character behind Legge’s English and what it means. The full set is on the Concepts page.
- Notes wait in the margin. Beside important sayings you will find short notes — context (注), a modern resonance (今), or a cross-reference (繫). Use the bar at the top of each book to show, hide, or silence them entirely with Focus, when you just want the text.
- Threads gather the scattered. The Analects never collects its sayings by subject. The Threads pages do — every saying on learning, on rule, on family, on Heaven, in one place.
- Everyone is introduced. The disciples are easy to confuse. Who is Who keeps them straight, and the name beside each saying tells you who is speaking.
- You can search the whole text. The search covers all 499 sayings.
- Paper or ink. Use the sun/moon toggle for a light reading surface or a dark one; your choice is remembered.
A note on the text and numbering
The sayings are numbered by book and by their order within it (Book II, saying 4, shown as II.4). This follows Legge’s own division into chapters, which matches the standard numbering almost everywhere; a handful of sayings that the source ran together or split differently may sit one number off from another edition. The source is a lightly-cleaned public-domain transcription and may carry the odd scanning blemish.
Colophon
A reading edition built by Jörn Dinkla, in the spirit of a hand-bound study copy. Typeset in Cormorant Garamond, Spectral, and Noto Serif SC. The translation is in the public domain; the apparatus — the concept glosses, the threads, the margin notes, the who’s-who — is newly written for this edition. Source on GitHub.