Overview

According to Ban Gu, writing in the Book of Han, the Analects originated as individual records kept by Confucius's disciples of conversations between the Master and them, which were then collected and jointly edited by the disciples after Confucius's death in 479 BC. The work is therefore titled Lunyu meaning edited conversations or selected speeches . This broadly forms the traditional account of the genesis of the work accepted by later generations of scholars, for example the Song dynasty neo-Confucian scholar Zhu Xi stated that Analects is the records of Confucius's first- and second-generation pupils.This traditional view has been challenged by Chinese, Japanese, and Western scholars. The Qing dynasty philologist Cui Shu argued on linguistic ground that the last five books were produced much later than the rest of the work. Ito Jinsai claimed that, because of differences he saw in patterns of language and content in the Analects, a distinction in authorship should be made between the upper Analects (Books 1-10) and lower Analects (Books 11-20). Arthur Waley speculated that Books 3-9 represent the earliest parts of the book. E. Bruce Brooks and A. Taeko Brooks reviewed previous theories of the chapters' creation and produced a four stratum theory of the text's creation. Many modern scholars now believe that the work was compiled over a period of around two hundred years, some time during the Warring States period (476-221 BC), with some questioning the authenticity of some of the sayings. Because no texts dated earlier than about 50 BC have been discovered, and because the Analects was not referred to by name in any existing source before the early Han dynasty, some scholars have proposed dates as late as 140 BC for the text's compilation.Regardless of how early the text of the Analects existed, most Analects scholars believe that by the early Han dynasty (206 BC-220 AD) the book was widely known and transmitted throughout China in a mostly complete form, and that the book acquired its final, complete form during the Han dynasty. However, Han dynasty writer Wang Chong claimed that all copies of the Analects that existed during the Han dynasty were incomplete and formed only a part of a much larger work. This is supported by the fact that a larger collection of Confucius's teachings did exist in the Warring States period than has been preserved directly in the Analects: 75% of Confucius's sayings cited by his second-generation student, Mencius, do not exist in the received text of the Analects.

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