论Lún语Yǔ · The Analects

The Lunyu (Analects) is not a treatise Confucius wrote but a compilation his students assembled after his death in 479 BCE — short, aphoristic, often situational ('The Master said...'). Twenty books of fragments that nonetheless add up to a coherent moral picture: learning as a lifelong posture, ritual as the grammar of social life, the junzi (the cultivated person) as an ethical center of gravity. The text set the agenda for two thousand years of East Asian thought and is still the entry point most readers meet first. Its influence on the language is hard to overstate — many chengyu in this library's catalog trace back verbatim to a line here (见贤思齐, 温故知新, 三人行必有我师). English seeding is James Legge (public domain); modern alternatives (Lau, Slingerland, Ames & Rosemont, Watson) are referenced by the platform, not stored.