The Four Books, translated by Wing-tsit Chan (1963); Four Books Academy, Pinyin Bilingual Edition (2025)

This edition presents the translation of Wing-tsit Chan (1901-1994) from his monumental work A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy (1963), henceforth “Sourcebook,” which remains the most proper English rendering of these canonical texts: true to Confucian intention, orthodox interpretation, and the feeling of classical prose.

Chan grew up in China during the final days of the Qing Dynasty, studying the Four Books for the civil service examinations from age five, 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 edition with several formatting modifications, while preserving his original translation:

1.  The Four Books are extracted from Sourcebook (chapters 2-5) and rearranged to follow Zhu Xi’s recommended reading order

2. Wade-Giles is updated to pinyin and characters, conforming to current norms, e.g., chün-tzu, in this edition becomes junzi 君子 (“superior man”)

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

4. Passages are slightly renumbered in the Discourses to match indexing conventions (agreeing with ctext.org and Slingerland’s Analects for cross-referencing)

5. In cases of long paragraphs, additional breaks are added to facilitate flow with interlinear Classical Chinese, with careful attention to how these breaks shape the progression of the philosophical argument

6. Most footnotes from the Four Books chapters are included, with relevant footnotes notes from elsewhere in Sourcebook incorporated where helpful, and dates updated where new data is available

7. Commentary is removed (readers are encouraged to consult this in Sourcebook), however all essential points, especially paraphrases of Zhu Xi’s commentary, are spliced and included as footnotes instead

8. Chapter titles are added, and following tradition, these are merely the first two characters of the volume (e.g., xue er 學而 “learn and”)

The translation itself remains unaltered except “Analects,” which is rendered as “Discourses” to match the naming convention used in this edition. Indeed, Chan himself gave “Discourses” as the literal translation of Lunyu 論語.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 from the editor.

— Sol 太陽 솔