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Confucius lived as the Spring and Autumn period slid into the Warring States period, and he hoped to restore the order of the earlier Zhou dynasty. He called himself a transmitter rather than a prophet or an inventor, kept the spirit world at a distance and focused on human conduct. His ethics rested on ren, a character of benevolence he defined only through examples, and li, the rituals and propriety that train that character, with the family and filial piety as the first training ground. He told warlords to rule through moral virtue, or de, and taught the rectification of names, insisting that rulers act like the titles they claim.

The rulers ignored him, and he wandered from state to state before turning to teaching students of any class who were eager to learn, refusing to continue if a student shown one corner of a subject could not return with the other three. He died in 479 BCE with no writings of his own. His disciples and their students compiled the Analects over more than two centuries, and scholars such as He Yan and later Zhu Xi made it central to Chinese education and government service.

• Elias Canetti called the Analects the oldest complete intellectual and spiritual portrait of a man.
• Confucius phrased his golden rule in the negative: do not do to others what you would not want done to yourself.
• During the Han dynasty, King Gong of Lu found a copy of the text hidden inside a wall of a house believed to be Confucius’s residence.
• Bamboo strips with fragments of the teachings have been found in tombs, including the Dingzhou discoveries.
• Part of the Analects records his daily habits, such as straightening his mat before sitting, which Voltaire later praised.