Most of what circulates in English as "Confucius says" is just horrible jokes or fortune cookie tripe. Almost none of it is the real thing. The Analects is so much better: the real record of a teacher and his students arguing, joking, running from danger, and sharing grief... plus 2,000 years of commentators who think they know what every line means.

A few entertaining things from the real text you might not know:

He loses his cool over a wine vessel. 觚不觚，觚哉！觚哉！ — "A gu that isn't a gu! What a gu! What a gu!" This guy is staring at a cup he thinks is being called the wrong thing and spawning an entire philosophy about the power of names.

He tells his most loyal disciple — the loud one, the ex-fighter who never learned to sit still — that a man like him won't die a natural death. Years later, Zilu is caught in a succession coup in Wey. He could have gotten out. He goes in instead, and when his cap-strings are cut in the fighting, he stops to retie them: "A gentleman may die, but his cap does not come off." When the news reached Confucius, he had the pickled meat carried out of his kitchen and never ate it again. Yum, pickled meat.

And he kept a list of things he refused to discuss: freak occurrences, feats of strength, rebellion, spirits... the clickbait of his time! His response to the spectacle of his own era was to starve it.

I've been making Exploring the Analects, a video series that goes through the text one passage at a time. Every episode takes a passage from its original Chinese, the traditional characters are on screen with pinyin as they're spoken, so you're never taking a translation's word for it, and then gets into what's actually going on: the history of the states and the people involved, where the major translators diverge in their renderings, and what the commentators have been arguing about since the Han dynasty.

You don't need any Chinese to follow it. If you're learning, it's a bonus. The passages are short and self-contained, which makes the Analects one of the friendlier doors into Classical Chinese, and the episodes dig into why the grammar works the way it does.

It's also on Spotify and Apple if you'd rather listen, and I put up full episode guides with the Chinese text at analects.net. If you want a place to start, the wine-vessel episode is a good one.

Happy to answer anything about the text or the fights people have had over it.

Welcome to r/Analects — start here

This is a place to read and talk about the Analects of Confucius (論語) — the actual text, passage by passage. Translation, classical Chinese, history, the ideas themselves, and how they apply to our own lives (or don't!). Whether you're opening the book for the first time or you've got five translations on your shelf and opinions about all of them, you're in the right spot.

A few things about how this works:

Beginners are genuinely welcome. "Which translation should I start with?" and "what does this character actually mean?" are not dumb questions — they're some of the best ones. Ask them. This isn't a gatekeeping kind of place.

Cite the passage. When you reference something, drop the book and chapter (like 1.3 or 6.16) so people can find it, compare translations, and check the original. If you're reading the Chinese, posting the original text is a nice bonus.

Disagree about the text, not the person. Interpretation here is genuinely contested — that's the fun. Argue with the reading, not the reader.

Reading resources

Use whatever helps, ignore the rest.

Translations

If you're picking your first translation, here are some suggestions and why you might want each:

• Peimin Ni — Understanding the Analects of Confucius — the most readable modern translation; includes the Chinese right above each English passage. Ni gives you enough context to understand what's going on without burying you in footnotes. If you want one book to start with, this is probably it.
• Edward Slingerland — Confucius Analects: With Selections from Traditional Commentaries — every passage comes with excerpts from centuries of Chinese commentators arguing about what it means. If you want to see the conversation, not just the text, get this one.
• D.C. Lau — The Analects (Penguin Classics) — clean, no-nonsense, widely assigned in university courses. A solid default if you don't want to overthink the choice.
• Ames & Rosemont — The Analects of Confucius: A Philosophical Translation — deliberately challenges standard readings and pushes back on Western philosophical assumptions. Best if you already have some familiarity and want a different angle.
• Arthur Waley — The Analects of Confucius (1938) — the most literary English version. Beautiful prose that holds up remarkably well, but assumes more of the reader. Better as a second translation than a first.
• James Legge — Confucian Analects (1893) — the Victorian-era translation that shaped how the English-speaking world first encountered Confucius; a challenging place to start. Dated in places, but historically important and free online at ctext.org.

Context & background

You don't need these to start, but they fill in the world around the text:

• Feng Youlan — A Short History of Chinese Philosophy — the classic one-volume introduction to the whole tradition; Confucius is one part of a much bigger story, and this book tells it well
• Bryan Van Norden — Introduction to Classical Chinese Philosophy — accessible modern overview covering Confucianism, Daoism, Mohism, and Legalism
• Sima Qian — Records of the Grand Historian (史記) — the 2nd-century BCE source for much of what we know about Confucius's life and students
• The Mencius (孟子) — the most important successor text; if you like the Analects, read this next. The Van Norden is a highly readable version and includes commentary by Zhu Xi (朱熹); the Legge is challenging, like with The Analects.
• The Zuo Commentary (左傳) — the historical chronicle of Confucius's era; the Spring and Autumn period in granular detail

Online tools

• ctext.org — full Chinese text of the Analects (and dozens of other classical texts) with Legge's English translation side by side; also has a built-in dictionary for looking up characters in context
• analects.net — the full Chinese text with side-by-side translation and pinyin; handy for pulling up a passage mid-discussion. Maintained by yours truly u/interpolating.
• Pleco — the essential Chinese dictionary app (iOS/Android); if you're reading the Chinese at all, install this. Inside Pleco, the Outlier Linguistics dictionary add-on is excellent for understanding why characters look the way they do — what the radicals actually mean, how the character evolved, and how to remember them
• zdic.net — comprehensive Chinese character dictionary with classical definitions, useful when modern dictionaries don't cover classical usage. It includes tabs for classical dictionaries like the Kangxi Zidian (康熙字典) and Shuowen Jiezi (说文解字).

For Chinese language learners

If you're using the Analects as a way into classical Chinese (文言文), a few things worth knowing:

• Classical Chinese grammar is very different from modern Mandarin — particles like 也, 矣, 焉, and 乎 don't mean what they mean today (or don't exist in modern Chinese at all)
• The Analects is actually one of the more approachable classical texts because the passages are short and self-contained
• Start with passages you already understand the meaning of, then work backwards to see how the Chinese expresses it

If you want to study classical Chinese more systematically, these textbooks are worth a look:

• Bryan Van Norden — Classical Chinese for Everyone: A Guide for Absolute Beginners — does what it says; starts from zero and uses Classical Chinese passages of manageable length as examples
• Michael Fuller — An Introduction to Literary Chinese (Harvard East Asian Monographs) — the standard university textbook; more rigorous, assumes some modern Chinese
• Archie Barnes, Don Starr & Graham Ormerod — Du's Handbook of Classical Chinese Grammar — compact reference for grammar patterns and function words; good to keep next to you while reading

The podcast

I also make a passage-by-passage podcast, Exploring the Analects — one of several ways in, mentioned here so you know who's running the place, not as required listening. Each episode reads the passage in Chinese and English, then digs into the history, the language, and what the commentators have argued about for centuries.

Introduce yourself in the comments if you like — which translation you're reading, where you are in the text, or a passage that's been rattling around your head. Welcome, and see you around!

There's a line in the Analects where Confucius trash talks two kinds of people: the smooth talker and the pretty face, and he name-drops two real guys. The backstory is a full Spring and Autumn soap opera.

Background story: Confucius got run out of his home state of 鲁 (Lu) after a political fight went sideways, and spent about 15 years wandering from court to court looking for a ruler who'd actually take his advice. First he went to the state of 卫 (Wei) where the ruler, Duke Ling, gave him a job. So Confucius got a front-row seat to one of the messier courts of the era. Duke Ling was paranoid, easily charmed, and liked to surround himself with people who were clever or beautiful. Enter our two guys.

The pretty one: Prince Chao. He was a son of the ruling house of the state of 宋 (Song) who'd relocated to Wei. A real looker... he completely enchanted the court, most importantly the duke himself. Titles, ranks, a fat salary, the works. Funny thing was Chao was also having an affair with the duke's wife, Nanzi (who happened to be from the same Song ruling clan — make of that what you will). And it was not a secret. The 左传 says, people openly mocked the duke with a little song:

"Since he's already satisfied your sow, why don't you return our fine boar?"

LMFAO.

The duke didn't care. He was too smitten with Chao. But his son the crown prince was humiliated by the whole thing and tried to have Nanzi assassinated, failed, and fled. That eventually spiraled into a father-son war. Reality TV-worthy family amirite?

The smooth talker: Priest Tuo. He ran the Wei ancestral temple and knew the dynasty's genealogy cold. He accompanied Duke Ling to a multi-state summit where the order in which you swore a blood-oath signaled your state's rank. Wei got slotted below the pathetic little state of 蔡 (Cai).

Duke Ling was furious and told Tuo to fix it. So Tuo unloaded a torrent of weaponized genealogy: Wei was founded by a loyal full brother of the Zhou founders, Cai by a brother who rebelled and got exiled, and by the way here are the centuries of chariots and bronzes and honors the Zhou kings lavished on Wei, so how dare you rank us behind them?

It worked. They bumped Wei up. The man won an international ranking dispute with nothing but trash-talk and a family tree.

So that's the world sitting behind these two lines:

子曰：巧言令色，鲜矣仁
zǐ yuē: qiǎo yán lìng sè, xiǎn yǐ rén
"Seldom human-hearted are those whose words and manners aim to please." (1.3)

and the one that actually names them:

子曰：不有祝鮀之佞，而有宋朝之美，难乎免于今之世矣
zǐ yuē: bù yǒu zhù tuó zhī nìng, ér yǒu sòng cháo zhī měi, nán hū miǎn yú jīn zhī shì yǐ
"Without the smooth talk of Priest Tuo and the looks of Prince Chao of Song, it's hard to get by in today's world." (6.16)

Confucius had his fun watching the glib and the gorgeous run the place. But eventually he'd had enough. When Duke Ling asked him for military advice, Confucius basically said "sorry, I'm more of a ritual-vessel guy, never studied war, " then he skipped town the next morning. You know, "Sorry, but I've got a thing."

That's kind of the whole mood of these two passages. Confucius kind of grumbling that charm and good looks keep winning. But maybe he was just a guy who couldn't schmooze and was feeling sorry for himself.

(I make a podcast going through the Analects one passage at a time, and this whole mess is one episode — the writeup even has a chart untangling who's married to whom, who's sleeping with whom, and who tried to assassinate whom, because you genuinely need one. Link below if that all sounds like your kind of thing!)

Episode guide: https://www.analects.net/episodes/hiding-behind-a-smile/

Youtube channel: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLS7yXx_7AjgkntxPCAlZ7D5Y15yRvhcQC&si=khR382aiEabMl8Ed