Four Books App

Book Reader & Scholarly Utility

Ancient teachings, correct transmission, modern tech.

The Four Books App is a book reader and scholarly utility which presents the traditional Confucian curriculum: the Great Learning, the Discourses (or Analects), the Book of Mengzi, and the Doctrine of the Mean. A six-year translation project in progress. Book One is complete, new verses arrive in the app around the first of each month.

Key Features

  • Traditional Interpretation

    A public benefit project to translate Zhu Xi’s never before translated “Four Books with Collected Commentaries” 四書章句集注, the most influential East Asian classic of the last millennium.

  • Established Lexicon

    Builds upon the translation lexicon perfected by Wing-tsit Chan, with roots going back to James Legge. Honoring lineage—with conservative refinements. Uses modern pinyin, of course.

  • 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.

  • Optimized Multi-platform

    iPhone features intuitive tab bar design for one-handed navigation on the go, while iPad leverages a powerful sidebar for efficient browsing through verses. Designed for iOS 26 with iOS 18 fallback.

  • Learn Classical Chinese

    Dual-language presentation with original Chinese verses alongside English translations. A “sentence mode” toggle in the toolbar parses the language pairs line by line for learning Classical Chinese.

  • 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.