the main body of the text conveys one voice, which is forceful, idiosyncratic and, as Elias Canetti has written, ‘the oldest complete intellectual and spiritual portrait of a man’. Just as Marx warned his followers he was not Marxist, Confucius certainly was not a Confucian in the way that Chinese civilisation eventually enshrined him, and indeed as the Mao age vilified and dethroned him.
