Analects
論語 (Lunyu)
composition: range-uncertainauthorship: traditional
witness: no autograph or contemporary manuscript from Confucius's own era; the text reaches something like its current form only by the Han dynasty, compiled from generations of disciples' notes and oral transmission
A good society is built not by law or force but by the cultivated character of those who lead it.
- ren (humaneness)
- government by virtue
- ritual propriety (li)
- the exemplary person (junzi)
A loosely organized collection of sayings, brief dialogues, and anecdotes attributed to Confucius, compiled not by the philosopher himself but by generations of his disciples and their own students over roughly two centuries, arranged into twenty books with no single sustained argument; the dates and boundaries of its earliest strata remain disputed among scholars. Its recurring concerns are the cultivation of ren, or humaneness, through li, the ritual propriety that Confucius treats as the grammar of a functioning social order, and the vision of the junzi, the exemplary person whose moral self-cultivation is a lifelong, never-finished project. Confucius argues throughout that a ruler who governs by moral example and ritual, not by law and punishment alone, earns genuine order rather than mere compliance. Compiled into something like its current form by the Han dynasty, the text became a core component of the Confucian canon, and from 1313 one of the Four Books at the heart of the imperial civil service examinations until their abolition in 1905.
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