Analects (論語)

The Analects (Lúnyǔ, 論語) is the canonical record of Confucius's teaching, compiled across several generations after his death (551–479 BCE) by disciples and later transmitters. The text is organized into twenty books containing brief sayings, exchanges, and observations. The form is fragmentary by design: the sayings are presented as encountered rather than as systematic doctrine, and the reader assembles their orientation through sustained engagement with the whole rather than through any single passage.

Within the Death region the architecture engages the Analects through one passage — Book 11.12, the brief exchange between Confucius and his disciple Ji Lu (Zilu) about serving spirits and about death itself. The passage is among the most cited in subsequent commentarial traditions for its specific framing of the relation between life and death.

Notes

The Analects has had an extraordinarily long commentarial history; for centuries it has been read alongside the layered commentaries that have grown around it. The architecture currently does not render this commentarial apparatus. What is rendered is one passage, in a translation chosen for accessibility, with provenance preserved.