Thought Atlasof Human Culture through Chronology
China

Analects

論語 (Lunyu)

Confucius (compiled by disciples) · compiled c. 5th-3rd century BC · Qufu, State of Lu (China) · philosophy

A good society is built not by law or force but by the cultivated character of those who lead it.

A loosely organized collection of sayings, brief dialogues, and anecdotes attributed to Confucius, compiled not by the philosopher himself but by generations of his disciples and their own students over roughly two centuries, arranged into twenty books with no single sustained argument. Its recurring concerns are the cultivation of ren, or humaneness, through li, the ritual propriety that Confucius treats as the grammar of a functioning social order, and the vision of the junzi, the exemplary person whose moral self-cultivation is a lifelong, never-finished project. Confucius argues throughout that a ruler who governs by moral example and ritual, not by law and punishment alone, earns genuine order rather than mere compliance. Compiled into something like its current form by the Han dynasty, the text became a core component of the Confucian canon, and from 1313 one of the Four Books at the heart of the imperial civil service examinations until their abolition in 1905.

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Fed into

  • Mozi · c. 430-250 BC (Mozi's own teachings recorded, then expanded by generations of his disciples)
  • Mencius · c. 320-250 BC
  • Book of Rites · c. 300-50 BC (Warring States ritual essays compiled into their current form in the Western Han)
  • Xiaojing · c. 300-150 BC
  • Xunzi · c. 260-230 BC (edited into its standard 32-chapter form by Liu Xiang in the 1st century BC)
  • Lüshi Chunqiu · 239 BC
  • Chunqiu Fanlu · c. 140-100 BC (compiled across Dong Zhongshu's career; modern scholarship, notably Sarah Queen and Michael Loewe, treats the received 82-chapter text as a heterogeneous compilation substantially assembled after his death, with a number of chapters not his own work)
  • Yantie Lun · c. 81-60 BC (transcript of an 81 BC court debate, compiled somewhat later by Huan Kuan)
  • Shuoyuan · 17 BC
  • Fayan · c. 5 BC - AD 15
  • Lunheng · c. AD 70-97
  • Baihu Tong · AD 79 (transcript of the White Tiger Hall conference)
  • Mouzi Lihuolun · traditionally set c. AD 195 in the far south during the collapse of Han authority; many modern scholars date the text's actual composition later, some as late as the 4th-5th century AD, and it survives only in a later collection

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