Taiwanese cartoonist Tsai Chih Chung's popularization of the AnalectsConfucius Speaks has arrived in the mail. I know and love Tsai's Zen Speaks, which is funnier, but this is fun too. Some bits are just a little obscure though...
Which has given me an idea for another thing we might do next semester. To name and move beyond the cherry-picking which characterizes most readings of the Analects, I'll ask each student to bring in five or six passages that "really speak to you" and an equal number that "make no sense to you at all." (I include an example from Confucius Speaks.) We'll focus on the latter, and return to them later, to see if we can then make sense of them.
trans. Brian Bruya (Anchor Doubleday, 1996), 137
