Confucianism has often been pressed into the service of cultural and national unity in China, but it has never been itself unified throughout its more than two millennia. It has been used by the state and by those who opposed the state; it has supported the claims of the community over those of the individual, just as it has supported the claims of the individual against the community. Although Confucianism is not quite a religion in the modern sense of the term, it has shown the elasticity of the world's great religions, justifying oppressors and giving comfort to the oppressed. Several times it was thought to be dead or dying, and on each of those occasions it has been reborn with renewed vitality, most recently in the past few decades. (The Hutchinson Encyclopedia, 2003)
Through all its variations and its transformations, Confucianism's sole unity has been its scriptural basis in a body of "classics," works ranging in date from murky antiquity to the fifth century B.C. The Analects is only one work in this body of "classics," and it is far from being the oldest. The Analects differs from other works in the canon, however, in representing the voice of Confucius. Here he offers terse comments and judgments that have remained, even to today, a living part of Chinese culture, and a standard by which to evaluate the situations of everyday life.
We can never know with historical certainty whether the words recorded in The Analects are actually those of Confucius himself, or the imaginative reconstruction of what Confucius should have said; but in either case the Confucius of The Analects comes across as a powerful personality. God, as represented in the Bible and the Koran, does not have a "personality." God has judgments that are absolutely valid precisely because they are God's, but we do not say that God has an "opinion."
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