The Analects

Confucius · c. 500 BCE · Scripture · Chinese · Ancient

Sayings and short exchanges written down by disciples after his death: a teacher answering the same question differently for different students, declining to discuss spirits until asked something useful about the living, ranking a poor man who is cheerful above a rich man who is merely correct. Government by ritual and personal example rather than by law, and the ideal of the junzi, the person who becomes fully human by cultivating himself, are argued in fragments rather than systems. The foundation of the Chinese examination curriculum for two thousand years, and the text through which East Asia inherited its vocabulary for obligation.

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Lineage

• alludes to ↑ The Classic of Poetry
  Anonymous · c. 600 BCE · Poem
• ↓ The Zhuangzi
  Zhuangzi · c. 300 BCE · Scripture — responds to this

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