Lesson: Understanding the Literary Style of the Analects
On a first reading – and a second and third – Analects does not always seem to Western readers like a philosophical work. In place of crisp definitions, arguments, and replies to criticisms, one finds anecdotes, snippets of conversations, and descriptions of what might seem trivialities – like how Confucius liked to straighten his mat! Many therefore find Analects dull, puzzling, strange, cryptic, frustrating or – worse – as a pseudo-philosophical text empty of any genuine moral insight. Such attitudes are encouraged by a history of racist and distorting stereotypes of aged sages spouting cryptic lines of ‘Oriental wisdom’.