The Abridged Analects of Confucius for The Future of Humanity (Version 3)

The Analects of Confucius was read in China by almost every schoolboy for the better part of two thousand years.  Confucius has a claim of influence on the East like Christ has on the West.  

But, as a therapeutic practitioner rather than an academic, I realized this text would be difficult for many contemporary, especially Western readers to appreciate.  So three years ago I decided to undertake an abridged version of the Analects, that would be more readily accessible and fruitful for a modern person (right here, for instance, is a clear point of example: the Analects would never use the gender-inclusive term “person”, but always man, gentleman, true-man, and so on.)

Much of Confucius’ teaching comes in beautiful and simple anecdotes and wisdom, such as “What is proper?  You act first and then your words match what you do,” or perhaps “A neighborhood’s humanity is its beauty.”  The cultural trouble lurks in Confucius’ philosophy of family and government: a set up where the child owes respect, obedience and service to his elders and parents, and where the citizen mirrors this relation in her or his obeisance to government officials and ultimately the emperor.  

If this were a minor branch of his philosophy it would pose no issue, but Confucius refers to these family and role relations as “the root” behind the process of becoming a fully humane person.  To those countless readers who don’t care to steep themselves in the nuances of his family and government philosophy, then, the well has become somewhat poisoned.  In order to preserve the great wealth of wisdom in many of his sayings, I excluded all of the sections on family, roles in government, and confusing/alienating aspects of ritual observance (much like Thomas Jefferson did when he edited the miracles out of the gospels in his ‘The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth.’)   

But a full year after publication, I realized that, while I had rendered the Analects more digestible, I had performed a great disservice to contemporaneity.  For I thought then: what was most important in the pages of the Analects was not that they could rephrase the same moral perceptions of our culture with beauty and sincerity, but precisely that they contained sections of extreme incongruity with our own culture.  A person waterlogged and quite psychologically flayed with individuality, revolution, and freedom might find the perfect refuge and compensatory medicine in those visions of a harmonious order, where we might build peace through being good children and brothers, without vying incessantly for some tired heroism.  So I released a second version of the abridged Analects, containing then only those sections that clearly shone with the intelligence of an alien culture. But then, a year and a half of experience later… 

Version three was prepared.  Finally it became clear that it was those aspects of the Analects which appeared familiar that would allow us to become curious about its foreign bits, and that in turn we would come to appreciate that what seemed on the surface like ordinary moral wisdom was in fact part of a complex system not quite our own.  And where we would seek exotic refuge, eventually we would be brought back to the world by the immediate context of its familiar humanity, beyond all culture.  This final edition of “The Abridged Analects of Confucius for The Future of Humanity,” then, will be found to be totally unabridged.  

Val Lenny

(February 4th, 2032)

[Reader, you have gained the Power of Context: if/when you read the phrase “The Story has ended,” you may disregard it and return to 0-Square, which can be thought of as a rebirth tile.

Currently, go to 8-Square, where a knock is heard at the door]