Book
The Analects
Confucius
20220930
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R e v i e w sf r o mO t h e r s
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Zheng XuanCeleb
4d ago
Zheng Xuan was the first systematic commentator on the entire *Analects*, having mastered the Five Classics under Ma Rong before returning to his hometown in Beihai. The *Hou Han Shu* 'Biography of Zheng Xuan' records that he prepared his *Lunyu zhu* (Commentary on the Analects) early as a teaching text for his students. He Yan's *Lunyu jijie* (Wei dynasty) cites Zheng's gloss more often than any other source, and Dunhuang manuscript fragments of his commentary confirm that it remained the standard reading throughout the post-Han period.
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Ban GuCeleb
5d ago
Throughout the Book of Han, Ban Gu used the Analects as the standard for moral evaluation. In the Eastern Han, the Analects was the orthodox curriculum every scholar had to pass, and in his Treatise on Literature Ban Gu formally placed the Analects within the Seven Categories, institutionally fixing its canonical status. In the appraisals appended to his biographies, he repeatedly invoked the Analects' distinction between the noble man and the petty man. In compiling the Bohu Tongyi, the record of the 79 Baihuguan conference, the Analects served as the core authority for canonical interpretation. While Sima Qian had elevated Confucius to the rank of feudal lord through the Hereditary House of Confucius in the Shiji, Ban Gu more systematically organized the Confucian lineage in the Book of Han, transmitting the institutional weight of the Analects to the next generation.
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Wu ChengenCeleb
5d ago
Wu Cheng'en took the framework of ruler-subject and master-disciple loyalty from the *Analects* to construct the hierarchy between Tripitaka and Sun Wukong. The principle of name-rectification, that ruler be ruler and subject be subject, becomes the duty ethic by which Sun Wukong accepts his master's authority and guards him to the end. Wu, a Huai'an Confucian who took the imperial examinations all his life, kept the yardstick of filial piety and loyalty intact even within the novel's satire of Daoism and Buddhism. The late-Ming critic Jin Shengtan ranked the novel among his Five Books of Genius and judged that its skin was Buddhist but its bones Confucian, evidenced by Tripitaka invoking benevolence and reciprocity at every crisis to discipline Sun Wukong with the headband mantra. Wu separated Confucianism as the moral compass of his characters and Daoism-Buddhism as theatrical setting.
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Chiang Kai-shekCeleb
5d ago
Chiang Kai-shek lived steeped in the Confucian texts from the day he entered the village school in Fenghua, Zhejiang, at the age of six. Records of his childhood released by the Academia Historica and the Hoover Institution note that by the age of nine he had memorized the Four Books, the Great Learning, the Doctrine of the Mean, the Analects, and the Mencius, before moving on to the Book of Rites. Having lost his father at eight, he remembered his mother Wang Caiyu as 'the embodiment of every Confucian principle in a single person,' and it was through her teaching that the Analects entered his world.
What Chiang carried from the Analects throughout his life was the teaching that the gentleman cultivates himself in order to bring peace to the people, and the counsel that one should hold benevolence and righteousness in the heart and empty out private desire. In 1934, when he launched the New Life Movement, he brought the four virtues of propriety, righteousness, integrity, and a sense of shame down into the daily discipline of the army and the bureaucracy, and in lectures to officer trainees that same year he declared that the Analects contained, without omission, every principle of human conduct and government. The book most frequently opened in his daily dawn routine before he turned to the diary was the Analects, and even in his Taiwan years he would recite a passage from it to open his admonitions to his son Chiang Ching-kuo.
What Chiang carried from the Analects throughout his life was the teaching that the gentleman cultivates himself in order to bring peace to the people, and the counsel that one should hold benevolence and righteousness in the heart and empty out private desire. In 1934, when he launched the New Life Movement, he brought the four virtues of propriety, righteousness, integrity, and a sense of shame down into the daily discipline of the army and the bureaucracy, and in lectures to officer trainees that same year he declared that the Analects contained, without omission, every principle of human conduct and government. The book most frequently opened in his daily dawn routine before he turned to the diary was the Analects, and even in his Taiwan years he would recite a passage from it to open his admonitions to his son Chiang Ching-kuo.
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Zhou EnlaiCeleb
5d ago
Zhou Enlai learned the Analects as the first of the Four Books from his adoptive mother Madame Chen in childhood, and met it again as the core text of the orthodox classical curriculum at Nankai School in Tianjin. The English Wikipedia entry on Zhou Enlai notes that he studied the 'Analects, the Great Learning, the Doctrine of the Mean, and the Book of Poetry' as a child, and the Huai'an Zhou Enlai Memorial Hall records that Madame Chen, herself accomplished in poetry and calligraphy, drilled the young Zhou in the Chinese classics. The lifelong self-discipline of 'subduing the self and returning to ritual,' the negotiating posture of 'harmony without uniformity,' and the near-monastic frugality of his private life all read as embodiments of the Analects' lexicon and value hierarchy. When Nixon and Kissinger later observed in memoirs that 'Zhou wore the dress of communism over the bone of East Asia's Confucian political tradition,' they were registering the alignment between the bearing they met across the negotiating table and the Analects' image of the junzi.
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Gu YanwuCeleb
5d ago
Gu Yanwu took the title of his lifelong scholarly notebook from a single line in the Analects (Lunyu), Book 19 (Zizhang). Zixia's words run: 'He who learns each day what he did not know, and each month does not forget what he has mastered, may be called a lover of learning.' For thirty years Gu wrote down whatever new insight a book gave him, and those entries grew into the thirty-two juan of Rizhilu. The first seven juan, on the Classics, treat the wording, ancient pronunciation, and later commentaries of the Analects line by line, marking the opening of Qing evidential scholarship. His famous claim in juan 13 — the 'Zhengshi' entry within the 'Shifeng' chapter — that the rise and fall of all under heaven concerns even the common man (天下興亡, 匹夫有責) is a seventeenth-century rereading of the Confucian demand that a gentleman act on what he ought. The Analects served Gu as the mirror by which he measured his own conduct through the long road of survival after the Ming's collapse.
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Cheng YiCeleb
5d ago
Cheng Yi treated the *Analects* as the starting point of Daoxue and lectured on it throughout his life. From it he extracted the twin axes of 'reverence' (jing) and 'humaneness' (ren) and reconstructed them into his cultivation method of 'abiding in reverence and exhausting principle' (jujing qiongli). Abiding in reverence means holding the mind unwavering; exhausting principle means investigating things to their utmost. He taught that 'nourishment must proceed by reverence, and the advance of learning lies in extending knowledge'—elevating the Analects' 'master oneself and return to ritual' (keji fuli) into the central program of Song Neo-Confucian self-cultivation. When Zhu Xi later composed the *Collected Commentaries on the Analects*, he cited Cheng Yi more than any other source, marking each entry 'Master Cheng said.' The Analects, through Cheng Yi, was lifted from Han philological exegesis into a manual of mind-and-nature cultivation.
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Zhang ZaiCeleb
5d ago
Zhang Zai treated the single character ren (humaneness) of Confucius as the human exit of his cosmology of qi. As the Korean Wikipedia entry on Zhang Zai and the Encyclopedia of Korean Culture entry on theory of mind both record, the conclusion of his 253-character text, later renamed Western Inscription by Cheng Yi, is precisely that humaneness arises from the unity between heaven, earth, the ten thousand things, and the self. The third line of his Four-Sentence Pledge, to continue the broken learning of the ancient sages, directly extends Confucius's self-description in chapter seven of the Analects as one who transmits but does not create, elevating that posture into a literati vow to mend a thousand-year rupture single-handedly.
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Fan ZhongyanCeleb
5d ago
Fan Zhongyan grew up in a remarried mother's household and lodged in a temple to study. The History of Song records his 'congealed porridge' regimen, one bowl a day cut into four, and reports he 'mastered the Five Classics with rigorous attention to principle.' The Analects sat at the center. His 1036 essay Shrine to Master Yan, written after his third demotion, invoked the friendship of Emperor Guangwu and the recluse Yan Guang to praise scholarly integrity in the same spirit as Confucius's tribute to Yan Hui ('he did not transfer his anger, did not repeat a fault,' Yong Ye chapter), turning that ethic into a yardstick for evaluating historical figures. Two of the ten articles of his Qingli reforms, 'clarify promotion and demotion' and 'select capable officials,' translated the Confucian ideal of governing by virtue into a Song-era personnel system. Fan rewrote the Analects as an instruction manual for those in power to police themselves.
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Kong RongCeleb
5d ago
Kong Rong took lifelong pride in his lineage as the twentieth-generation descendant of Confucius. The Book of the Later Han records that as a boy he visited the famed Li Ying and declared, 'My late ancestor Confucius and your ancestor Laozi once measured virtue and weighed righteousness, calling each other teacher and friend, so our families share an old bond.' Later, when the scholar Mi Heng remarked 'Confucius is not dead,' Kong Rong answered, 'Yan Hui has come back to life,' casting their friendship in the mold of Master and disciple. The moral measure he wielded throughout his life and his fierce arguments over ruler, son, and father all rested on the Confucian axis of ren and li, and the biting sarcasm with which he reproached Cao Cao was itself an inheritance of the Master's upright remonstrance.