The Analects of Confucius, side by side

You already know the golden rule: treat others the way you want to be treated. Twenty-five centuries before anyone phrased it that way, Confucius was asked to name a single word a person could practice for a whole life. He gave its mirror image.

The word was 恕, shu, which translators render as reciprocity, or consideration, or putting yourself in the other person's place. Then he unpacked it in eight characters: 己所不欲，勿施於人. Do not do to others what you would not want done to you. Not the warm, do-good version. The colder, harder one: start by not doing harm. Here are six readers crossing those same eight characters.

Same eight characters. Most land in nearly the same place, which is the point: when the Chinese is plain, the translators agree, and you can trust the line. The trouble starts with the words that have no English. The book's highest virtue, 仁 ren, is benevolence to Legge, Goodness to Waley, humaneness to Watson and Chin, and authoritative conduct to Ames and Rosemont. Its ideal person, 君子 junzi, is a gentleman, a superior man, or an exemplary person depending on who you read. Those are the places this page is built for.

The Analects is not a book Confucius wrote. It is fragments his students wrote down, and their students after them, over a couple of centuries: short scenes that almost all begin 子曰, the Master said. It reads less like scripture than like a notebook kept by people who did not want to forget how he talked. Confucius himself claimed to be inventing nothing. I transmit but do not create, he said (7.1); he thought he was just handing on what the old sages already knew.

Below is the whole book, all 20 books and roughly 500 short chapters, in the order the tradition fixed them. For each one you get the Chinese, then every English version I could gather, stacked so you can read them against each other. For the keystone chapters, the ones the rest of the book leans on, there is a plain-language breakdown of what it is doing and where the translators part ways. The gold-dotted chapters in the index are the ones with a breakdown. Use the arrows or your keyboard to move around.

Where the text comes from

Every translation here is reproduced verbatim, not paraphrased. The two complete ones were pulled with scripts and parsed, so nothing in them was retyped or reworded by hand or by a model. The keystone renderings were read from clean editions and checked against the original wording. The only change to any quotation is curly quotation marks turned straight, to match the rest of the site.

• The Chinese is the received text, and James Legge's 1893 English, both from the Chinese Text Project, both public domain. Legge runs the full length of the book.
• A. Charles Muller's translation, posted free at acmuller.net, also runs the whole book. It is lined up against the Chinese chapter by chapter, since Muller and the Chinese Text Project split a few books into chapters slightly differently.
• The keystone chapters add five more, quoted where a breakdown turns on their wording: Arthur Waley (1938), D. C. Lau (Penguin, 1979), Roger Ames and Henry Rosemont Jr. (1998), Edward Slingerland (Hackett, 2003), and Robert Eno's free online teaching translation (2015). Several are still in copyright and are reproduced here for comparison and study, every translator named, every chapter located.

The breakdowns are mine. They lean on the standard scholarship for the contested lines. Four more translators I lean on for their famous word-choices but do not quote at length, because I could not find a clean machine-readable copy to verify against: Ezra Pound's idiosyncratic 1951 version, Simon Leys (1997), Burton Watson (2007), and Annping Chin (2014). Where a breakdown says how one of them renders ren or junzi, that is a documented choice, not a guess.

The painting on the homepage card is the portrait of Confucius from Half Portraits of the Great Sage and Virtuous Men of Old, an album in the National Palace Museum, Taipei (the same collection as the Lao Tzu painting on the Tao Te Ching card). The cartouche names him 大成至聖文宣王, a posthumous imperial title. Public domain.