Four Books vs Analects Reader

The Four Books App is a book reader and scholarly utility which presents the traditional Confucian curriculum: the Great Learning, the Discourses of Confucius (the Analects), the Book of Mengzi (Mencius), and the Doctrine of the Mean. A six-year translation project in progress. New verses arrive in the app around the first of each month. -- Ancient Teachings, Correct Transmission, Modern Tech -- Traditional Interpretation • A public benefit project to translate Zhu Xi’s “Four Books with Collected Commentaries” 四書章句集注: the classic that defined orthodox Confucianism and served as the basis of the imperial examinations from 1313 to 1905. Established Lexicon • Builds upon the translation lexicon perfected by Wing-tsit Chan (A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy), with roots going back to James Legge (The Chinese Classics). Honoring lineage—with conservative refinements. Uses modern pinyin, of course. Learn Classical Chinese • Study Classical and Middle Chinese with literal glosses for grammar and per-character meaning. Highly configurable dual-language presentation parsable by sentence. Reading Experience • Meticulous attention to readability: translation, typography, and a full-screen reader for iPad. This Classic deserves to be both scholarly and good reading, just as the native text is. Optimized Multi-platform • iPhone features intuitive tab bar design for one-handed navigation, while iPad leverages a powerful sidebar for efficient browsing through verses. Designed for iOS 26. Also runs on Apple Silicon Macs. Apple Native UI • Pure Apple native tech throughout: SwiftUI, FTS5 search, and an embedded SQLite Confucian database for lightning-fast location of verses, key terms, named persons and named texts. -- Basic App & Scholar Pack In-app Purchase -- Basic App: • Core Ancient Verses: 284 most influential • Language: English translation only • Search: Basic, English-only • Encyclopedia: Ancient figures only Scholar Pack: • All Ancient Verses: 804 complete • Traditional Commentary • Language: English & Classical Chinese • Tap Character for Literal Gloss • Full-Verse Literal Gloss Sheets • Sentence-Level Parsing Tool • Search: English & Chinese • Encyclopedia: Ancient and medieval figures • Book 5: Explanation of Terms • No ads, no account creation, no data collection • Small offline app, low battery usage Scholar Pack is a single in-app purchase that includes everything above. It has a final target price, but is currently priced lower based on the percentage completion of the translation. One-time purchase, with all future content delivered free. -- Reach Out -- Please contact us at support@daoxue.academy, or using the in-app contact tools in settings, with questions or requests. We are committed to continual refinement and making this the optimal Confucian Classics app for both scholars and readers.

The complete Analects of Confucius: all twenty books and 512 passages, in the original Chinese and in English, built for actually reading it. Every character is tappable. The card that opens shows what the character means here, in this passage — not a dictionary's one-size answer — along with its reading, the terms it belongs to, and how it is used across the whole book. Pinyin sits over the characters when you want it and disappears when you don't. READ IT YOUR WAY • Study — the full apparatus: text, translation, pinyin, tappable words, per-passage tone coloring. • Translation — the English as a book. The original waits one tap away under each passage. • Chinese — the received text alone, unglossed, with the English one tap away. • Classical — the text as old editions set it, in columns right to left. Four pages to choose from: one typeset, and three photographed from real copies held in Tokyo, Taipei, and Kyoto — a Qing manuscript, a Ming block print, and a 1550 scholar's copy — with every character mapped, so the glosses work even on a photograph. Scroll the book as one column, or turn it one passage per page, like a printed book. THE COMMENTARY GROWS WITH THE PODCAST The app carries the episode guides from the Exploring the Analects podcast — passage by passage: the philosophical discussion, the historical context, the language notes, with the audio a tap away. New episodes arrive as they are published. YOURS, IN THE FULLEST SENSE Notes you take live in your own iCloud Drive as Markdown — readable anywhere, and they outlive the app. The Chinese text is built in and always works offline. There are no accounts, no ads, no analytics, and no tracking: nothing about your reading is collected. Everything is free — the text, both translations, the glosses, the classical pages, the commentary. A tip jar exists for those who want to keep the project going; nothing is unlocked, because nothing is locked.