Confucius Say: Man who jump off cliff, jump to conclusion!

It's unlikely that any profound religious and ethical teacher in the history of humankind has inspired so many jokes, most of them scurrilous, as the ancient Chinese sage Kung Fu-tse; this character assassination nearly twenty-five centuries after his death makes two facts very clear.  First, the blase manner in which most Americans openly express their suspicions of, condescension toward, or blatant dislike for persons of Asian extraction, a racist tendency which would seem to them unacceptable and shameful if it were to be expressed toward African-Americans.  Second, unlike Zoroaster, Bodhidharma, Lao-tse, Mahavira, and the Guru Nanak, Concucius is the only Asian religious figure besides the Buddha to have survived, albeit in garbled form, as a living conceptual entity in the 21st-century American popular mentality.

I've read the Analects at least twice, in the James Legge traslation, and found it enormously wise, even if occasionally opaque due to its extraordinary pithiness and unavoidable grounding in alien Chinese societal norms vastly remote in space, culture, and time. With the Dhammapada, the Tao-te-Ching, the Bhagavad-Gita, and The Art of War, it's one of the classic works of Eastern wisdom I hope to re-read every few years until I die; I find that I derive new benefit with each re-reading as a result of my personal growth and the elapsed time in between visits.

I use that word "visits" decidedly.  Re-reading Confucius is like returning to the home of an old teacher, one who, although older, has not lost any shred of the mental acuity which first attracted you to him and caused you, in after years, to regard him as one of the formative influences upon your intellect, character, and life. The Analects is a perfect example of the way in which a thinking person can have a genuine relationship with another mind: two hands touching across the chasm of the centuries because of a shared love of thought and a respect for the undiminished power of ideas.

362 days, 50 novels, 49 books of non-fiction to go.