The Analects by Confucius: Free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB Download

Free edition · The Analects · c. 5th-3rd century BC

The Analects

By Confucius · (Published c. 5th-3rd century BC) · Trans. by James Legge, 1893 · All Confucius books

Word Count ~29,000 words (estimated)

Reading Time Approx. 1.6 hours (estimated)

Copyright Status Public Domain in the US; check local laws

Source Project Gutenberg #3330

Source Edition Standard Ebooks edition, based on Project Gutenberg #3330

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The opening of Book I

The Master said, “Is it not pleasant to learn with a constant perseverance and application?

“Is it not delightful to have friends coming from distant quarters?

“Is he not a man of complete virtue, who feels no discomposure though men may take no note of him?”

The excerpt is the first three sayings of Book I: the saying on learning with constant perseverance, the saying on friends coming from distant quarters, and the saying on the man of complete virtue who feels no discomposure though men take no note of him.

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Further Reading

Read next: Marcus Aurelius on himself and Aristotle on the good

Free edition

Meditations

By Marcus Aurelius · The Roman notebook of the same practical, aphoristic kind

Free edition

The Nicomachean Ethics

By Aristotle · The Greek inquiry into virtue that answers some of the same questions

The Analects by Confucius: Summary, Ideas & Arguments

This page gives a summary and analysis of The Analects, with the twenty books in reading order and the terms the collection turns on, learning, propriety, filial piety and perfect virtue, explained as they come up. Confucius is the name the sayings are attributed to, but the text itself names no author and was put together by pupils and their successors over several generations, so the voice of the Master and the voice of the school are not always easy to tell apart. The books are built from short units, some a single sentence, some a brief scene with a disciple, and this edition prints them in James Legge’s nineteenth-century translation, with his notes and his numbered sections, so that a passage can be cited the way the commentaries cite it.

Books I to IV set the terms. Learning is a practice and not an accumulation of facts, and it is inseparable from conduct: a young man is told to be filial at home, respectful abroad, truthful in speech, and only then to take up polite studies. Book II joins learning to thought in the sentence that learning without thought is labour lost and thought without learning is perilous, and praises the man who cherishes his old knowledge while he acquires new. The same book turns to government, which works by example, the ruler like the north polar star that keeps its place while the other stars turn towards it, and it contains the Master’s own account of his progress from fifteen, when his mind was bent on learning, to seventy, when he could follow what his heart desired without transgressing what was right. Book III is the book of ritual, the sacrifice, the archery contest and the music of the Shao; Book IV gives the vocabulary of virtue and rightness.

Books V to X are the richest in persons. Book V passes judgement on disciples and on the men of the time, and closes with the wishes of Yen Yuan, Tsze-lu and the Master; Book VI holds the praise of Hui’s joy with a single dish of rice and a gourd of drink in a narrow lane, the cornered vessel that is not a corner, and the account of the art of virtue as establishing oneself and thereby establishing others. Book VII describes a transmitter rather than a maker, learning without satiety and teaching without weariness, and it rebukes Tsai Yu, asleep in the daytime, on the ground that rotten wood cannot be carved. Book VIII rises to T’ai-po, Yao, Shun and Yu. Book IX is the book of the Master’s own mind, and Book X is a portrait of his manner.

The later books shift towards the school. Books XI and XII follow the disciples and their questions, from Yen Hui’s death and the Master’s grief to the roll of disciples distinguished for virtue, speech, administration and letters, and then to the definition of perfect virtue as subduing oneself and returning to propriety. Books XIII and XIV take up government and the weighing of men: the rectification of names, the people who are made numerous, enriched and taught, the uprightness that conceals a father’s theft, and the rule that injury is recompensed with justice and kindness with kindness. Books XV and XVI collect the lists, the three friendships, the three enjoyments, the three errors and the nine things a superior man considers, and XV adds the single word reciprocity, the rule of not doing to others what one would not wish done to oneself.

The last four books are the strangest and the most moving. Book XVII opens with the nearness of human natures and the distance practice makes, and argues for the Odes as a means of stimulation; Book XVIII gives the men who withdrew from office and the recluses who mocked the Master for persisting; Book XIX belongs to Tsze-chang, Tsze-hsia and Tsze-kung, who describe their teacher’s wall as several fathoms high and the few who find the door; Book XX closes with Yao’s charge to Shun and the five excellent and four bad things, and with the last sentence of the book, that without knowing the force of words it is impossible to know men. The rest of our Philosophy Classics sits beside it, with Meditations and the Nicomachean Ethics as the nearest neighbours, and the whole text is at Project Gutenberg #3330 and Standard Ebooks.

Historical Context

The world the sayings presuppose is a scatter of small states in the north-east of China, each with its court, its ministers and its great families. Lu, Wei, Ch’i, Sung, Ch’an and Ch’u are named in the text, and so are the dukes and chiefs who employ or ignore the Master. The political order it assumes is one that has already decayed: in Book XVI the head of the Chi family plans to attack the small state of Chwan-yü inside his own territory, and the Master answers with the doctrine that when right principles prevail government does not rest with the great officers. Book XVIII gives the recluses who had given the world up as lost. The Master moves between these courts, received at one and dismissed at the next: in Book XVIII he leaves when the duke Ching of Ch’i says he is too old to use his doctrines, and again when the women musicians sent from Ch’i keep the court of Lu from sitting for three days.

The book is not the work of one hand or one lifetime. It records the Master in the third person, collects sayings that repeat themselves in slightly different words, and includes conversations with men of the next generations. Book XIX is made almost entirely of the disciples’ own pronouncements, Tsze-chang, Tsze-hsia, Tsang and Tsze-kung, and Tsze-kung there defends his teacher’s reputation against those who thought themselves his equals. The sayings were evidently remembered, taught and written down by a school, and the collection grew as the school grew, which is why the books vary so much in length and in tone.

The text came west through translation. James Legge’s version, made in the nineteenth century and printed with his notes and his division into numbered sections, keeps the speech of the sayings deliberately plain and leaves the Chinese names in their older romanisation, so that the Master is K’ung Ch’iu to the men who address him, while the ethical vocabulary is translated rather than transliterated and the ideal man is almost always the superior man. His notes explain the ritual, the historical allusions and the textual difficulties as they arise. The Standard Ebooks text follows a Project Gutenberg transcription checked against scans of printed copies, and it preserves Legge’s apparatus rather than modernising it. Where the Chinese term matters the notes give it, and where the text is doubtful they say so instead of smoothing the difficulty away.

Key Ideas & Arguments

• Learning: The opening sentence of the book is a question about learning, and the answer runs through every book: learning is practice, it requires perseverance, it is never finished, and it is worthless if it does not change conduct. The Master denies that he was born with knowledge and says he is a man who loves antiquity and seeks it earnestly, and the four things he taught were letters, ethics, devotion of soul and truthfulness. He refused to open the truth to a man who was not eager for it.
• Filial piety: The root of benevolent action, and the first test of character. The text refines it past mere support, since dogs and horses are also supported, and makes the difficulty lie in the countenance. It extends to burying and sacrificing according to propriety, to not travelling far while parents live, and to three years of mourning. Book II gathers four separate questions on it, and Book IV adds that the years of parents should be kept in mind as a cause of both joy and fear.
• Propriety: The rules of ceremony, dress, speech and demeanour, which the book treats as the form that keeps virtue from turning into rudeness or timidity. Without them respectfulness becomes bustle and boldness becomes insubordination. The Master loves the ceremony where others would keep only the sheep, holds that a man who is not humane has no use for the rites, and says he follows the house of Chou because it had the advantage of viewing the two dynasties before it.
• Rightness: What a superior man follows when he has no set mind for or against a thing. It is weighed against gain in the standing formula, in view of gain think of righteousness. The text distinguishes it from profit repeatedly, and makes it the substance of which propriety is the form and humility and sincerity the completion.
• Perfect virtue: The human excellence the whole collection aims at, described as subduing oneself and returning to propriety, as loving all men, and as the art of establishing others when one wishes to be established oneself. He will not grant the name to the disciples he is asked about, says of himself that he dares not rank himself with the sage or the man of perfect virtue, and says he has not seen a man who loved virtue as he loved beauty.
• The superior man: The ethical ideal, contrasted throughout with the small or mean man. He thinks of virtue rather than comfort, of rightness rather than gain, and seeks what is in himself; he is not a utensil, that is, not fitted to one use only. He is grave without pride, sociable without partisanship, and anxious about his own want of ability.

Core Arguments & Influence

• An anthology, not a system: The book has no continuous argument, and any account of its thought has to be assembled from dispersed sayings. That form is itself a claim: the teaching is shown in replies to particular men in particular situations, and the reader is expected to generalise. The repetitions, the parallel versions of the same exchange and the occasional contradiction are not defects to be argued away but evidence of how the material was remembered and taught, and they are why the collection can be read for years without being exhausted. Read straight through it is uneven and repetitive; read by subject it is consistent about conduct and almost silent about metaphysics, and the Master’s refusal to speak of extraordinary things, feats of strength, disorder and spiritual beings sets that limit.
• The school’s book: Books XIX and XX show the collection as the property of a school. The disciples quote their teacher, defend him against rivals, describe his wall and his staircase to heaven, and hand on his judgements. The disciples are named, placed and judged with unusual frankness: four are singled out for virtuous principles, two for speech, two for administrative talent and two for letters. The Master’s own claim to be a transmitter and not a maker fits this: the authority invoked is the older order of Yao, Shun, Yu, T’ang, Wen and Wu, and the argument is always that the present has fallen away from a pattern that is still recoverable, not that a new one must be invented.
• Ritual as the form of character: The book’s most distinctive argument is that inner goodness needs outward form. Propriety without the virtues is empty, and the virtues without propriety turn into their own caricatures: boldness becomes insubordination and straightforwardness becomes rudeness. This is why the collection spends so much space on ceremony, dress, food and bearing, and why Book X can be read as moral philosophy rather than as gossip about a fastidious man. The point is made by accumulation rather than by argument, and the sheer quantity of detail about dress, food and posture is the evidence.
• Government by example: Political argument in the Analects is nearly all about the ruler’s own conduct. Laws and punishments make the people evade them, while virtue and propriety give them a sense of shame and set them right. The ruler is compared to the polar star, to the wind that bends the grass, and to a man whose personal correctness makes orders unnecessary. The rectification of names belongs here too: if words do not match things, the book says, affairs cannot succeed and the people do not know how to move. It is the clearest statement in the collection of why words carry political weight.
• A long afterlife: The collection was made to keep a teacher’s words in use, and Book XIX shows the school already defending them: Tsze-kung compares his master to the sun and moon that cannot be stepped over, and to a wall several fathoms high whose door few find. That defence is where the book’s authority begins. Legge’s translation then carried the sayings into English with the notes of a scholar who had read the commentaries, and the romanisation he chose is the one generations of English readers met first. The result reads at once as ethics, as portraiture and as the record of a school, and the three cannot be separated.

Why Download Our Custom E-Reader Edition of The Analects?

The download is the whole book: the twenty books with all their numbered sections, Legge’s notes where he placed them, and the edition’s front and back matter, with nothing cut. If you want to check a passage against another text, the same translation is at Project Gutenberg #3330, and the phrasing there will match what you read here.

Around the text the page supplies what a book of detached sayings needs: ten summaries that follow the edition’s own divisions, six notes on the ideas the collection turns on, five on its larger arguments, and a short account of the world the sayings presuppose. The groups are editorial, but the books and their numbered sections are the edition’s own, so the summaries can be used as a map while reading.

The files come in three formats with the same text and the same breaks. The EPUB opens in Apple Books, Calibre and most Android readers; the AZW3 is the file for a Kindle; the KEPUB is the one Kobo devices handle best. No account is needed, nothing is locked or watermarked, and the book is short enough to read in a few sittings and to return to afterwards.

• Based on the Standard Ebooks Edition, via Standard Ebooks, whose text is set from a Project Gutenberg transcription checked against Internet Archive scans, in Legge’s translation with the twenty books and their numbered sections intact.
• Complete text of the twenty books From the three opening sayings of Book I to the last sentence of Book XX on the force of words, with every numbered section, Legge’s notes and the edition’s own front and back matter, nothing abridged or modernised.
• Ten groups in the edition’s order Ten summaries that pair adjacent books and stop where the book stops, so the map follows the edition rather than rearranging it, each with the names, the sayings and the arguments of that pair.
• EPUB, AZW3 and KEPUB files The same text in three formats, for Apple Books, Kindle and Kobo, with the book divisions and section numbers intact and no account needed to download any of them.

Part of: Philosophy Classics · Confucius