The reading room

His sayings

• Lyall, The Sayings of Confucius (1909)The translation the book quotes: short, plain, and it keeps gentleman for junzi. Project Gutenberg.
• Legge, The Chinese Classics, vol. 1: Confucian AnalectsThe Victorian standard, with Legge's notes, including his verdict on Zhu Xi's reading of ‘no categories’.
• The Analects, Chinese and English, passage by passageChinese Text Project. The original beside Legge's English, searchable, with the modern numbering.
• Robert Eno, The Analects of Confucius: A Teaching TranslationA modern translation free from Indiana University, with the textual problems on the surface rather than in the back.

The record of his life

• The Zuo Tradition (Chunqiu Zuozhuan)The chronicle almost every dated scene stands on: the cockfight, Jiagu, the fortresses, the death. The Chinese text, on the Chinese Text Project.
• Sima Qian, Records of the Grand Historian: the hereditary housesChapter 47 is the life of Confucius, written four centuries later, the source of nearly everything in the received story.

The lines he did not say

• XunziThe follower two centuries later whose four steps of hearing, seeing, knowing and doing became ‘I hear and I forget’.
• DaodejingThe other book, where the journey of a thousand li begins beneath your feet.
• Goldsmith, The Citizen of the WorldThe letters of an invented Chinese philosopher in London, begun 1760. The seventh has ‘our greatest glory’. HathiTrust.

The ground and the place

• Falkenhausen, Chinese Society in the Age of Confucius (2006)The archaeology of the bronzes and the graves: the rulebook he thought was ancient, and when it was really made. Free from UCLA.
• Temple and Cemetery of Confucius, QufuUNESCO World Heritage listing for his town: the temple, the family mansion, and the cemetery.

Links checked October 2026. If one has moved, tell me.