Original Analects Supplement
Preface

This Supplement contains additional comments and corrections to The Original Analects (Columbia 1998; here abbreviated as TOA), which were suggested by others or by our own further work on the Analects and other Warring States texts. There are also some new tools and lists that readers may find convenient. The Supplement is published in this on-line form for maximum accessibility, and to allow for easy additions and updates in future. Suggestions for updates are welcome; there is an E-mail link at the bottom of each page, from which they may be sent to us direct.

Original and interpolated Analects passages are here interfiled, but the reference codes used in TOA are preserved in the interest of compatibility. The superscript number in the original codes (such as *4:18²), which in TOA indicates the chapter to which the passage is relocated in TOA, is here formatted as a parenthesized number: *4:18(2), with the same meaning. For additional convenience, TOA page numbers are sometimes also added (as, [p203]).

We would like to repeat here our earlier acknowledgement of the assistance rendered during the writing of The Original Analects by a research fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The fellowship permitted our work on the whole interconnected corpus of Warring States texts to go forward at a critical period. We express our thanks also to Don and Loretta Gibbs, and to the Mercer Trust, whose support in more recent years has made it possible to continue and extend our researches in the years following the publication of TOA. We would also refer readers to the Afterword at the end of TOA, where, in deference to Chinese precedent, other acknowledgements are given, and other thanks are rendered.

We are additionally grateful to readers in many countries for their responses to TOA, which on the whole have been more favorable than we had a right to expect. We especially appreciate the recurring expressions of interest, by readers and reviewers, in the prospect of further volumes from us dealing with other major texts of the period. We will do what we can, in the coming years, to respond to that interest.

The Preface to TOA ended with these words:

"Readers of this Analects are thus invited to join earlier readers in many centuries and indeed in many languages, who have found in this text a faithful companion on our common, ongoing journey."

It is our impression, surveying things years after the publication of TOA, that the value of the Analects as an ethical support for individuals and civilizations is only enhanced by being seen, as we here try to see it, in its historical character as the shared work of many hands and minds, over the chaotic Warring States centuries. During more recent centuries, which have turned out to be also centuries of conflict, it seems that there is ample work left for dedicated minds and hands to share.

May they be strengthened.

E Bruce Brooks
A Taeko Brooks

22 November 2001

This Supplement is Copyright © 2001- by E Bruce and A Taeko Brooks

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