Confucius › A game
Did Confucius say it?
Twelve famous lines. Some are in the Analects. Some are from an American newspaper, an English novelist and somebody else’s book. Real Confucius, or fortune cookie?
The real lines are quoted in the English of the old translations, mostly Leonard Lyall’s of 1909. That is a clue, but not a reliable one: some of the fakes are old too.
Nothing survives in his hand, and the Analects was put together by other people over generations. The most that can be said for any real line is that a school which revered him believed he had said it. The fakes cannot claim even that.
Where the fakes came fromMore about Confucius
The trial file
A short piece, free: what the documents in Galileo’s own trial file actually say, including the two pages that decided it. It isn’t sold anywhere, and it’s the fastest way to see how these books are built.
One email when there’s a new book. Nothing else, and you can leave any time.