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Preface
If one were to ask what the single most influential work in Chinese history is, the answer would definitely be Lunyu, the Confucian Analects. Its influence on Chinese history and culture is comparable to that of the Bible on the Western world. It is neither a tract of the prosaic moralism contained in the fortune cookies in Chinese restaurants nor a manual of political administration that prescribes dos and don’ts for new initiates. This book—claiming a readership of billions of people throughout history in China, East Asia, and now even in the Western world—must be one that has struck a chord of sympathy in readers. This chord of sympathy must arise from the existential concerns that Confucius shared with every member of the human race: How can a person overcome the egoistic tendency that plagues life? How does a person see the value of communal existence? What should be the ultimate concern in life?
These questions and others require adopting a line of inquiry into the Analects that is explicitly existential. An existential reading of the Analects differs from other lines of inquiry in that it attempts to reveal not only what the text communicated to the original audience but also