Analects
The Analects, also known as the Sayings of Confucius, is an ancient Chinese philosophical text composed of sayings and ideas attributed to Confucius and his contemporaries, traditionally believed to have been compiled by his followers.
The consensus among scholars is that large portions of the text were composed during the Warring States period, and that the work achieved its final form during the mid-Han dynasty. During the early Han, the Analects was merely considered to be a commentary on the Five Classics. However, by the dynasty's end the status of the Analects had grown to become a central text of Confucianism.
During the late Song dynasty the importance of the Analects as a Chinese philosophy work was raised above that of the older Five Classics, and it was recognized as one of the "Four Books". The Analects has been one of the most widely read and studied books in China for more than two millennia; its ideas continue to have a substantial influence on East Asian thought and values.
Confucius believed that the welfare of a country depended on the moral cultivation of its people, beginning from the nation's leadership. He believed that individuals could begin to cultivate an all-encompassing sense of virtue through ren, and that the most basic step to cultivating ren was filial piety—primarily the devotion to one's parents and older siblings.
He taught that one's individual desires do not need to be suppressed, but that people should be educated to reconcile their desires via li, rituals and forms of propriety, through which people could demonstrate their respect for others and their responsible roles in society. Confucius also believed that a ruler's sense of de, or 'virtue', was his primary prerequisite for leadership.
Confucius' primary goal in educating his students was to produce ethically well-cultivated men who would carry themselves with gravity, speak correctly, and demonstrate consummate integrity in all things.
History
Creation of the text
According to Ban Gu, writing in the Book of Han, the Analects originated as individual records kept by Confucius's disciples of conversations between the Master and them, which were then collected and jointly edited by the disciples after Confucius' death in 479 BC. The work was titled Lunyu during the Han dynasty: in this context the character for lun means 'discuss' or 'dispute', while yu means 'speech' or 'sayings'. Lunyu therefore may mean 'edited conversations', or 'selected speeches'. This broadly forms the traditional account of the genesis of the work accepted by later generations of scholars, for example the Song dynasty neo-Confucian scholar Zhu Xi stated that Analects is the records of Confucius's first- and second-generation pupils.This traditional view has been challenged by Chinese, Japanese, and Western scholars. The Qing dynasty philologist Cui Shu argued on linguistic ground that the last five books were produced much later than the rest of the work. Itō Jinsai claimed that, because of differences he saw in patterns of language and content in the Analects, a distinction in authorship should be made between the "upper Analects" and "lower Analects". Arthur Waley speculated that Books 3–9 represent the earliest parts of the book. E. Bruce Brooks and A. Taeko Brooks reviewed previous theories of the chapters' creation and produced a "four stratum theory" of the text's creation. Many modern scholars now believe that the work was compiled over a period of around two hundred years, some time during the Warring States period, with some questioning the authenticity of some of the sayings. Prior to 2015, no manuscript dated earlier than has been discovered, and because the Analects was not referred to by name in any existing source before the early Han dynasty, some scholars have proposed dates as late as 140 BC for the text's final compilation. In the 2010s, ancient manuscripts containing content matching the received text were recovered by the Anhui University and in Wangjiazui, which date back to before 300 BCE. The discoveries of these manuscripts confirmed that at least by the mid-Warring States period, the tradition of preserving and organizing Confucius' sayings had existed.
Regardless of how early the text of the Analects existed, most Analects scholars believe that by the early Han dynasty the book was widely known and transmitted throughout China in a mostly complete form, and that the book acquired its final, complete form during the Han dynasty. However, Han dynasty writer Wang Chong claimed that all copies of the Analects that existed during the Han dynasty were incomplete and formed only a part of a much larger work. This is supported by the fact that a larger collection of Confucius's teachings did exist in the Warring States period than has been preserved directly in the Analects: 75% of Confucius's sayings cited by his second-generation student, Mencius, do not exist in the received text of the Analects.
Textual history
According to the Han dynasty scholar Liu Xiang, there were two versions of the Analects that existed at the beginning of the Han dynasty: the "Lu version" and the "Qi version". The Lu version contained twenty chapters, and the Qi version contained twenty-two chapters, including two chapters not found in the Lu version. Of the twenty chapters that both versions had in common, the Lu version had more passages. Each version had its own masters, schools, and transmitters.In the reign of Emperor Jing of Han, a third "Old Text" version was discovered hidden in a wall of the home believed at the time to have been Confucius's, when the home was in the process of being destroyed by King Gong of Lu in order to expand the king's palace. The new version did not contain the two extra chapters found in the Qi version, but it split one chapter found in the Lu and Qi versions in two, so it had twenty-one chapters, and the order of the chapters was different.
The old text version got its name because it was written in characters not used since the earlier Warring States period, when it was assumed to have been hidden. According to the Han dynasty scholar Huan Tan, the old text version had four hundred characters different from the Lu version—from which the received text is mostly based—and it seriously differed from the Lu version in 27 places. Of these twenty-seven differences, the received text only agrees with the old text version in two places.
Over a century later,, the tutor of the Analects to Emperor Cheng of Han,, synthesized the Lu and Qi versions by taking the Lu version as authoritative and selectively adding sections from the Qi version, and produced a composite text of the Analects known as the "Zhang Hou Lun". This text was recognized by Zhang Yu's contemporaries and by subsequent Han scholars as superior to either individual version, and is the text that is recognized as the Analects today. No complete copies of either the Lu version or the old text version of the Analects exist today, though fragments of the old text version were discovered at Dunhuang. The Qi version was lost for about 1,800 years, but was rediscovered during the excavation of the tomb of Marquis of Haihun in 2011.
Before the late twentieth century the oldest existing copy of the Analects known to scholars was found in the "Stone Classics of the Xinping Era", a copy of the Confucian classics written in stone in the old Eastern capital of Luoyang. Archaeologists have since discovered two handwritten copies of the Analects that were written, during the Western Han dynasty. They are known as the "Dingzhou Analects", and the "Pyongyang Analects", after the location of the tombs in which they were found. The Dingzhou Analects was discovered in 1973, but no transcription of its contents was published until 1997. The Pyongyang Analects was discovered in 1992. Academic access to the Pyongyang Analects has been highly restricted, and no academic study on it was published until 2009.
The Dingzhou Analects was damaged in a fire shortly after it was entombed in the Han dynasty. It was further damaged in an earthquake shortly after it was recovered, and the surviving text is just under half the size of the received text of the Analects. Of the sections that survive, the Dingzhou Analects is shorter than the received Analects, implying that the text of the Analects was still in the process of expansion when the Dingzhou Analects was entombed. There was evidence that "additions" may have been made to the manuscript after it had been completed, indicating that the writer may have become aware of at least one other version of the Analects and included "extra" material for the sake of completeness.
The content of the Pyongyang Analects is similar to the Dingzhou Analects. Because of the secrecy and isolationism of the North Korean government, only a very cursory study of it has been made available to international scholars, and its contents are not completely known outside of North Korea. Scholars do not agree about whether either the Dingzhou Analects or the Pyongyang Analects represent the Lu version, the Qi version, the old text version, or a different version that was independent of these three traditions.
Prior to 2015, the oldest extant manuscript of the Analects were the discovered texts found in the Tomb of the Marquis of Haihun in 2011; the Haihunhou Analects "circulated at least seventeen years" before the Dingzhou and Pyongyang ones.
In 2015, Anhui University acquired a corpus of excavated Warring States period bamboo strips containing twenty-five Confucius' sayings with a format similar to the transmitted Analects. This set of manuscript was known as the "Anda Manuscript Zhongni Said", where Confucius the master was referred by his courtesy name Zhongni. Part of the manuscripts featuring content matching the Analects was officially published by the university in 2022. A second Warring States manuscript is titled "Kongzi Said" by modern researchers for the formulaic introduction that appears before each saying. It is part of a group of around 800 strips recovered from a tomb in Wangjiazui, Hubei, between 2019 and 2021, nearby what by mid-Warring States was the capital of the state of Chu. This manuscript was originally made up of 330 strips, but only a third have survived. It has not been published in full yet, although a few strips have been made available. This manuscript has so far been shown to have an overlap of 11 sayings with the "Zhongni Said" text published by Anhui University.
Both the "Zhongni Said" and the "Kongzi Said" manuscripts date back to around 300 BCE. The discoveries of these manuscripts confirmed that at least by the mid-Warring States period, the tradition of preserving and organizing Confucius' sayings had existed.