A Personal Reaction to the Analects of Confucius Essay

Sometime You Got It. Sometime You Don't a personal reaction the Analects of ConfuciusThought is what distinguishes humans from animals. It is the driving force that brings human societies to the belief of superiority over the rest of the living world. However, this is not to say that humans are the only living species that have thought. It is just that we are aware of only our thoughts and may not answer for other sentient beings. Thought produces such ideas from which religion, numbers, alphabets, and spoken language manifest. Thought gives humans the ability to ponder circumstances and determine solutions to problems. Thought is imagination, reflection, and cogitation. Most of all thought procures answers that shape cultural lives around the world. It is thought from great thinkers that influence the values and habits of a culture. This essay will focus on the most and least appealing themes of one of the world's great thinkers, Confucius. Thoughts of Confucius are carried through history in a book called the Lun-yu. According to Hucker, "the title means discourses and is normally translated Analects (77)." It is also important to explain that Confucius himself does not write the Analects. They are but "a collection of Confucius's sayings that appear to have been remembered and passed along by his disciples until they were gathered up into a single compilation, probably not many decades after his death (Hucker, 77)." For this reason I am a little skeptic about the authenticity of these works, but I am also aware that the Analects are the only source that claim to show the thoughts of Confucius in the purest form. In this case, I leave my skepticism behind and take the Analects to be the only understanding I have into the world of Confucius. I may also not forget the magnitude of impact this book has on Chinese culture beginning centuries before present. Traditional dates place Confucius between 551-479 B.C. (Ebrey, 17). Most themes...

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