Confucius’s intention seems to have been the restoration of some kind of political and social order in a world which seemed to have forgotten how to accomplish either, and throughout his life he worked to persuade rulers and their ministers to follow the path of virtue, yet while he gathered disciples and followers, he never quite succeeded in his objectives and died a disappointed man. The Analects (the term was first used by James Legge in his 1861 classic translation), a short and pithy book known as the Lunyu (more literally Collected Sayings in Chinese), are concerned with ethics, politics and the organization of society.

Reading Roberts’s new translation of the Analects along with Chin-shin Huang’s study of Confucianism as a religion is instructive because Confucius himself stands between two interpretations-readers can make their own conclusions from a clear and concise translation which is also interpreted by Roberts as he proceeds. And, of course, the fact that there are Confucian temples certainly suggests that Confucius’s teachings, much like Buddhism and Daoism, are more than just “philosophy” to many people. Is Confucianism a religion, or is it a philosophy? “Confucius,” Moss Roberts tells us, “would address things present and manifest, that is, cultural presentations ( wenzhang), but not things invisible and speculative, that is, human nature ( renzhing) and the Way of heaven ( tiandao).” However, in the years after Confucius’s death in 479 BCE, his followers made “things invisible and speculative” the principal parts of the Analects, which had hitherto been “earthbound” and contained “no gestures towards the divine.” Chin-shing Huang, on the other hand, regards Confucianism as a real religion, basing his argument on Wittgenstein’s observation that religions have a “family resemblance”, thus suggesting, as Huang puts it, “the diverse and variegated nature of religion” rather than some monolithic or all-embracing definition.

The analects