वाचनालय

Analects (Lunyu)

Confucius

Twenty books of brief sayings, dialogues with disciples and princes, and notes on the Master's conduct. Without systematic order, they set out an ethic of self-cultivation: humaneness (ren) as the central virtue, ritual (li) as its form, study and the rectification of names as method, and the gentleman (junzi) as ideal. Three versions circulated under the Han (Lu, Qi and the "old text"); Zheng Xuan's recension and He Yan's commentary fixed the text, and Zhu Xi's (1190) made it the first of the Four Books. It is the main, and almost the only reliable, source on Confucius's thought.