Zhu Xi’s Four Books with Collected Commentaries 四書章句集注, as the scholar Wing-tsit Chan noted, has “exercised far greater influence on Chinese life and thought in the last six hundred years than any other Classic.” And this influence was not confined to China but extended to Korea, Japan, and Vietnam. We could even go so far as to say that if East Asia had a “Bible” during the last millennium, it was this book; yet inexplicably, it has never been translated into English. Our project is to rectify this omission and provide the first complete English translation.

To be sure, the stand-alone verses of the Great Learning, the Analects, the Book of Mengzi, and the Doctrine of the Mean have been translated numerous times. But that is not how these texts have traditionally been studied in East Asia. The “Four Books” constitute in truth a single classic, published in 1190 by Zhu Xi (1130–1200), which serves not merely as an introduction to Confucian thought but as the foundation of a classical education: teaching thorough reading, the meaning of terms, sound reasoning, literary composition, ethics, and human relations. Here the learner attends a great concert of ancient and medieval Confucian thinkers, gathered into one text, what tradition calls the Great Synthesis (ji dacheng 集大成).

Having shaped the lives of billions, this classic deserves to exist in its proper form in English. To this end we have budgeted six years and 12,000 hours to translate the 804 verses with commentaries—a quarter million characters. In the first phase we will translate the 284 most influential verses by 2027, following the same selections Chan made in his textbook, A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy; from there we will work through the 520 lesser-known verses, completing the whole by 2031. In the meantime, new verses are published monthly in the Four Books App (for iOS and Android), so that readers may take up the study at once.

As for the translation itself, we follow the English lineage of Wing-tsit Chan (1901–1994), who perfected what James Legge (1815–1897) had pioneered a century before. The Legge-Chan lineage is distinguished by its general fidelity to the orthodox Confucian transmission, that of Zhu Xi, which formed the basis of Chinese education from 1313 to 1905. Both men shared a commitment to carrying Chinese learning to the West and thus focused their efforts on the traditions that most shaped East Asian civilization. Both men lived in the late Qing dynasty, when Confucian education was the standard, Chan attending a Confucian academy in Guangdong Province from the age of five, and Legge working in Hong Kong for almost thirty years. And both men spent their lives producing translations of the Classics that are at once scholarly and good reading. Given such accomplishments, some of which cannot be reproduced today, and the value of continuing an established lexicon familiar to readers, we honor the lineage while daring to make well-considered refinements.

For this work we have established our academy, Daoxue xuetang 道學學堂. The academy takes as its model traditional xuetang 學堂, literally “learning centers,” which historically taught the Confucian Classics and Classical Chinese; our distinction is that we transmit East to West, into English, and by means of modern technology. The word daoxue 道學, literally “Way studies,” is the original name of the school of Cheng Yi and Zhu Xi, known in China today as lixue 理學 and in Korea as Seongnihak 성리학 or Jujahak 주자학; and as the name itself declares, the school’s purpose is to transmit the Way handed down from Master Kong (551–479 BC, “Confucius”) and Mengzi (371–289 BC, “Mencius”).

Zhu Xi himself lived in a time when new block printing technology made widespread distribution of the Classics possible, and his employment of this medium shaped history. Today, digital technologies afford comparable capacities for transmission, augmented by configurable displays and analytical tools, yet these remain largely unexplored by classicists. As his teacher Cheng Yi said, “Are not the Classics the way by which to enter the Way?” We ask, are not apps the way by which to enter the Classics?

— Daoxue Academy 道學學堂