Four Books App

Book Reader & Scholarly Utility

Ancient teachings, correct transmission, modern tech.

The Four Books App for iOS and Android 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. 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.

  • Learn Classical Chinese

    Study Classical and Middle Chinese with literal glosses for grammar and per-character meaning. A highly configurable dual-language presentation parsable by sentence.

  • Reading Experience

    Meticulous attention to readability: translation, typography, and a full-screen reader for tablets. This Classic deserves to be both scholarly and good reading, just as the native text is.

  • Optimized Multi-platform

    Phones feature an intuitive tab bar design for one-handed navigation, while tablets leverage a powerful sidebar for efficient browsing through verses. Runs on iOS and Android, as well as macOS.

  • Dual-Platform Native UI

    Pure native tech on each: SwiftUI on Apple and Jetpack Compose on Android keep it snappy. And our embedded SQLite Confucian database sources any passage lightning-fast.