Editorial Reviews  
Book Description  
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. 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. 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 new translations will stand as the definitive series for our era.