A Reader’s Companion to the Confucian Analects

The major purpose of this little book is to make it easier for you the reader to come to terms with, and profit from one that is even smaller in the original, the Analects, which is made up of a number of statements of, by and about Confucius, the Latinized rendering of the name of China’s most famous thinker. Further on I shall have much to say about that book, but first I need to say a few things about this one. It is intended basically as a preface or prolegomenon to the Analects rather than a synopsis of its contents, perhaps best construed as a tool: I have put together a series of comments, hints, finding lists and suggestions to aid readers in coming to their own interpretation of the book, necessary if it is to enrich and possibly transform their philosophical and/or religious orientations. The 511 little “sayings” that comprise the book have spoken to countless thousands across the ages, but they have not said the same things even to all readers within a single time period, let alone over the course of two millennia, in very different cultural circumstances.