To be sure, he modified significantly the cultural materials he inherited. Many ancient Chinese customs, political norms and religious practices were originally founded on supernatural beliefs which, by the time Confucius lived (551–479 BCE), were no longer being taken very seriously among reflective members of the governing elite, and no small measure of his genius lay in giving humanistic and naturalistic justifications for not altogether abandoning those customs, political rules, social norms and religious practices even when their foundational raison d’etre was no longer credible. I will return to this theme later (Chapters 11 and 12), but can amplify briefly here the Master’s insight on this score with a quotation from the early 20th-century American philosopher George Santayana, who said, “I reject wholly the dogma of the Roman Church—but rejoice in the splendor and the beauty of the Mass.” Equally illustrative is the remark attributed to Karl Marx when asked why he attended Mass regularly: “Where else can you hear Bach for nothing?”

It is largely for this reason that Confucianism has never been a static system, despite numerous charges to that effect by its detractors both within and outside East Asia. Indeed, Confucianism has never really been a “system” at all, consistently undergoing change and adaptation throughout its history; one reason it is misleading to use the term “Confucianism” is that there is no word for it in the classical Chinese language (more on that below). Even its earliest heroes after the death of the Master and his immediate circle—Zisi, Mencius, Xunzi, etc.—advanced views that differed from those found in the Analects (and from each other); in the later Han Dynasty writers began adding a metaphysics (and a dogmatism) to the growing tradition that did not exist before; the Song Dynasty neo-Confucian re-interpretations of the texts, synthesized by the prodigious scholar Zhu Xi were deeply indebted to strong Buddhist influences and to manifold social, economic and technological changes that had changed China as well, and those re-interpretations were re-interpreted in turn during the succeeding Ming and Qing dynasties. The views of the Ming thinker Wang Yangming, for instance, are as different from those of Zhu Xi as are Plato’s from Aristotle’s, but they are both described as “(Neo)-Confucians.” The 20th century saw a number of efforts to reconstruct the Confucian persuasion in light of two world wars, the rise and fall of communism, and the internationalization of economic and political affairs, a process ongoing in the 21st century, again, both in China and the West.

In this connection it bears noting that the Confucian vision was challenged from the outset by rival schools of early Chinese thought such as the Mohists, Legalists, Daoists and others. It was later eclipsed religiously by Buddhism for more than a millennium, and then, after the neo-Confucian resurgence that got underway in the 11th century CE, was challenged again by Jesuit, Dominican and Franciscan missionaries at the very end of the 16th century and into the 17th. With the humiliation of China that began 200 years later by imperialist adventurers and Protestant missionaries from Western Europe and the United States—and later Japan and Russia—the Confucian vision was challenged yet again by Western Enlightenment ideas of individualism, equality and democracy, and still later, was eclipsed by Marxist attacks that culminated in the 1970s with the “Anti-Confucius” campaign of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.

From all of these attacks Confucian teachings and practices adapted, recovered and regained a seldom-paralleled prominence which should give pause to thinking that it is only of antiquarian interest today, and/or merely capable of providing some clues as to how contemporary Chinese leaders might think. Rather might we entertain the idea that perhaps there is something in the way of life first envisioned by Confucius that speaks not only to and for the past, but to the present as well, not only to the Chinese, but to peoples of all cultures. There is certainly a Confucian “revival” of sorts going on in mainland China today, much of it without any government support; most universities there, for example, now have schools of Confucian Studies, independent Confucian primary and secondary schools are growing in number throughout the country, while the government has provided funding for the establishment of Confucius Institutes around the world, numbering 350+ at present. This is not to say, however, that the Confucian persuasion should be seen as a universalizing religion or philosophy to which everyone should adhere, for a central element of the general Confucian “way” is that there are many particular human ways, and each of us must tread that way which best suits our histories, genealogies, talents and personalities, a theme to which we will return in the pages to follow.

The 511 sections which comprise the Analects (several of which are duplicative) were written, compiled and edited over the course of three centuries by a number of people about whom we know relatively little. We do not know who the “authors” were with any degree of certainty, nor why the later compilers and editors arranged the text we now have the way they did. The 511 “sayings” consist of fairly laconic statements Confucius is supposed to have made, or answers he gave to his students’ queries. They also contain a number of statements by the students themselves, and still other statements made by we know not who, or when.

These sayings were written down on dried bamboo strips and then rolled into bundles to make a little “book” made up of a number of smaller sections. Several such “books” existed in varied forms and groupings and were in circulation for a considerable period of time before being edited into their present form approximately 50 years after the Han Dynasty (202 BCE–220 CE) was established—i.e., almost 350 years after Confucius died.

It was only during the Han that China began to become a truly manuscript culture, with reading becoming an essential ingredient of personal cultivation, taking on some of the attributes of a spiritual discipline which we will explore in later chapters. Here, however, what must be emphasized is that the lessons Confucius taught he taught orally; contemporary readers of the Analects must attempt to recapture the spirit of personal give-and-take encounters between Master and students, in the same way we should endeavor to do when reading about Socrates, especially in the early and middle dialogues. Another quote from Zhu Xi on reading is apropos here: “It’s best to take up the books of the sages and read them so that you understand their ideas. It’s like speaking with them face to face.”

Of course there were books extant in the time of Confucius, and he regularly exhorted his disciples—including his son—to read and study them, especially the Shijing (Book of Odes, also called the Book of Songs or Book of Poetry) and Shujing (Book of History or Book of Documents), both of which he quotes from himself. The later scholarly traditions have him writing or editing other texts which later became canonical, and definitive of the Chinese cultural tradition: The Book of Changes, The Spring and Autumn Annals and the Zuo Commentary thereon. (He is also linked to one of the famous ritual texts, the Records of Ritual).

But if he was indeed responsible for assembling the “Five Classics,” as these texts came to be known, he must have done so while suffering from a mild form of schizophrenia, for the five differ widely in scope, thrust, doctrines and practices, each presenting materials altogether conflicting with other materials—sometimes even from the same text.

This is another reason why it is misleading to use the term “Confucianism” as a cover term for all the personages found in the Analects and their successors, as if there were a core set of beliefs and practices to which everyone had to adhere in order to insure membership in the group. Quite the contrary: Two centuries after the Master died, the legalist Hanfeizi text described eight factions of “Confucians” with divergent views and practices, not having a great deal in common save for tracing their lineage back to Confucius.

Moreover, it is important to note again that there is no Chinese graph for which “Confucianism” is a translation. Ru , the term used by Hanfeizi and everyone else basically meant simply “classicist,”—the learning of the literati. The term does, however, go back even further in time, to the Shang Dynasty, and probably meant something like “scribe.” Several centuries after the death of Kongqiu or Kongzi—i.e., Confucius—the ru came to have significant access to the throne at the Han court and since that time the graph has taken on the additional meaning of “scholar-official,” but without losing the sense of “classicist.”

For all these reasons today’s readers should not seek an “orthodox” reading of the Analects. The text, although uniformly read and revered, did not itself achieve full canonical status until well over a millennium after achieving its present form, when the interpretation of the text by Zhu Xi became “orthodox,” in that it became a basis of the imperial civil service examinations for over 700 years. (But even then successive governments never forbade private academies from providing “unorthodox” readings of the texts.)

Thus, just as with other schools of thought in classical China, early Confucian teachings and practices are probably best understood in terms of lineages, beginning with the Master himself and his own students, some of whom later took on students themselves, and continuing, with the dominant pattern of scholarship not being book learning, but formal and informal discussion among and between a group of learners centering around a talented teacher. Recapturing this sense of oral learning from reading the Analects we have today is not easy, but is surely worth a try.

Returning now to the text as a physical document, greatly complicating efforts to more definitively establish a chronology for its composition and editing is the fact that in 213 BCE a massive “Burning of the Books” took place during the reign of Qin Shi Huangdi—he of terra cotta tomb soldier fame—with many texts extant at the time not surviving the bibliographic holocaust except in special libraries, themselves destroyed in turn during the years of civil war that followed shortly after the emperor’s death and the fall of the Qin and the rise of the Han.

In sum, like the other great spiritual teachers of antiquity—Socrates, Jesus and the Buddha—Confucius never wrote anything, or at least is not known to have written anything that has come down to us, and thus...