Kʻung-Tsʻung-tzu Book

The K'ung-ts'ung-tzu (The K'ung Family Masters Anthology) is a collection of writings, most of them discourses, that narrate the lives and scholarly activities of one lineage of Confucius' family, beginning with the Warring States period, and continuing with the establishment of the Ch'in dynasty and the succeeding Han dynasty. The book is divided into three parts. The first, introductory part deals with the Confucian character and literary mood of the K'ung-ts'ung-tzu. It embeds the philosophical position of the text within the Confucian tradition; it discusses the varied content of the text as a whole, and characterizes the gloomy mood that prevails in it. The second part consists of an annotated translation of chapters 15-23 of the text. The third part is a computational reconstruction of the K'ung-ts'ung-tzu's eleventh chapter, a concise dictionary entitled Hsiao Erh-ya.