9781887178631

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While Confucius failed in his lifetime to rescue a crumbling civilization with his teachings, he was to become the most influential sage in human history. His thought, still remarkably current and even innovative after 2,500 years, survives here in THE ANALECTS--a collection of brief aphoristic sayings that has had a deeper impact on more people's lives over a longer period of time than any other book in human history. Formulated in the ruins of a society that had been founded on untenable spiritualistic concepts of governance, Confucius's philosophy postulated a humanistic social order that has survived as China's social ideal ever since. Beginning with the realization that society is a structure of human relationships, Confucius saw that in a healthy society this structure must be a selfless weave of caring relationships. Those caring relationships are a system of "ritual" that people enact in their daily lives, thus infusing the secular with sacred dimensions. Confucius' teachings are very literary in nature. THE ANALECTS is made up of dialogues, stories, and anecdotes, always aphoristic and full of poetic turns of thought. And it is this literary dimension that makes Confucius so engaging and compelling as he builds his majestic vision of human community as an integral part of a self-generating and harmonious cosmos.

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