'To learn, and at the right times to practise what you have learned: is that not a pleasure?' The sayings of Confucius, as his students remembered them.
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Short sayings and brief exchanges between Confucius and his disciples, gathered in twenty books. They cover learning, friendship, ritual, government, grief and what makes a person humane. For two thousand years educated people in China knew them by heart. The press starts with Book 1. None of it is readable here yet; a gift of any size helps.
Confucius, Kong Qiu, lived from 551 to 479 BC in the small state of Lu, a teacher and sometime official who spent years travelling between courts looking for a ruler who would put his ideas to use. He wrote none of this down. His students, and their students, collected the sayings over the generations after his death.
Much of the book turns on one character, 仁, usually translated humaneness or goodness, written as a person beside the number two. Confucius is asked about it again and again and gives almost every student a different answer. Character by character, you can watch him fit the answer to the person asking.
Making an interlinear The Analects is real work — freezing a scholarly source text, aligning every word to its dictionary form, glossing what resists translation, and proofing it all to a hard quality bar. Pressing a book is how that work gets funded. When enough readers press it, Book 1 gets made — and then it is free to read forever, for you and for everyone who comes after.
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