Overview

In Confucius Beyond the Analects, Michael Hunter challenges the standard view of the Analects as the earliest and most authoritative source of the teachings of Confucius. Arguing from a comprehensive survey of the thousands of extant sayings and stories from the early period, Hunter situates the compilation and rise of the Analects in the Western Han period (206 BCE-9 CE), roughly three centuries after the death of Confucius. As a study of the growth and development of the Confucius figure over the course of the early period, the book is also meant to serve as a roadmap for those interested in exploring the wealth and diversity of Confucius material beyond the Analects.

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'This new study of Confucius (hereafter, Kongzi ) and the Analects (hereafter, Lunyu ) deserves our closest attention and is certain to provoke controversy. Some of its conclusions are not entirely new, as the author acknowledges. That the Lunyu only took form as a text during the Han has been argued, among others, by Zhao Zhenxin , Zhu Weizheng , Tsuda Sokichi, , John Makeham, and many others. (...) Hunter's far more extensive probe of such issues is founded upon his compilation of a vast 230,000-character database of all Confucius-related material in pre-Han and Han texts, including recently excavated texts. He then uses this database to carry out the kind of analysis and cross-checking digitalization facilitates. The results, as I shall attempt to indicate below, are impressive and, for those of us who have held other views of how Lunyu might have taken shape, disturbing. Professor Hunter deserves our praise not just for the prodigious amount of work that went into this study but for his unusual combination of boldness and modesty. (...) What Hunter sees as his mission is to present a vast amount of material and to draw certain conclusions that will need fully to be addressed in future discussions of Lunyu and, more broadly, of the entire Confucius phenomenon (...). Any attempt to summarize the rich contents of Hunter's book, at least with any brevity, is sure to leave out evidence critical to the larger argument as well as a load of information individual researchers will want to incorporate into their own work. (...) The implications of this study are far-reaching and should be of interest, in one way or another, to almost every scholar of early China.' Stephen W. Durrant, University of Oregon, Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews 39 (2017)

Author Information

Michael Hunter, Ph.D.(2012), is an Assistant Professor in the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures at Yale University.

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