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 2500 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' 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 scared dimensions.
Highly regarded for the poetic fluency he brings to his award-winning
work, David Hinton is the first twentieth-century translator to render
the four central masterworks of ancient Chinese thought: Chuang Tzu,
Mencius, The Analects, and Tao te Ching (forthcoming). HIs new
versions are not only inviting and immensely readable, but they also
apply a much-needed consistency to key terms in these texts, lending
structural links and philosophical rigor heretofore unavailable in
English. Breathing new life into these originary classics, Hinton's
translations will stand as the definitive series for our era.
