The Four Books, translated by Wing-tsit Chan (1963); Four Books Org pinyin bilingual edition (2025)

This online edition presents Wing-tsit Chan’s translation from A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy (1963), hereafter “Sourcebook,” which remains the most proper English rendering of these canonical texts—true to Confucian intention, orthodox interpretation, and the feeling of classical prose (古文).

Chan grew up in China during the fall of the Qing Dynasty, studying the Four Books for the civil service examinations from age six, thus a native speaker of Classical Chinese and a recipient of traditional interpretation. Arriving in America and working as a professor for three decades, he lamented the scarcity of correct knowledge in Chinese philosophy departments and the lack of a suitable textbook. Thus he dedicated ten years to create Sourcebook, which, as he wished, became public domain.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​¹

With reverence for Chan’s scholarship and transmission, I have prepared this digital edition with several formatting modifications, while preserving his original translation:

1. The Four Books are rearranged to follow Zhu Xi’s recommended reading order

2. Wade-Giles is updated to pinyin and characters, conforming to current norms

3. Speaker dialogue uses colons instead of quotation marks (e.g. Someone said: XYZ), reserving double quotes for referencing ancient texts—as these speakers frequently do

4. Passages are slightly renumbered in some cases, such as the Lunyu, to match contemporary indexing conventions (agreeing with CTEXT.org and Slingerland’s Analects for cross-referencing)

5. In occasional cases of extremely long paragraphs, additional breaks are added to facilitate flow with interlinear Classical Chinese

6. Classical Chinese text appears after each paragraph

7. Commentary is removed (readers are encouraged to consult this in Sourcebook). Only essential footnotes are included, and when impacted by new data since 1963, they have been updated.

The translation itself remains unaltered except “Analects,” which is rendered as “Discourses” to match the naming convention on this site. Indeed, Chan himself noted that “Discourses” was the literal translation of Lunyu.²

Also, in updating the translation from Wade-Giles to pinyin, I necessarily confronted the traditional Latinization “Confucius.” The original Chinese text refers to him simply as zi 子 (“Master“ or “Teacher”), and his family name is Kong 孔. I render it as “Master Kong” on first reference in each passage, and thereafter as “Kongzi” following the common Chinese usage of 孔子. Similarly, “Mencius” is now rendered “Mengzi” 孟子.

All introductory quotations and footnotes found in the following four texts are extracted from Chan’s Sourcebook without additional comment.

-Sol 솔