The Analects, the principal collection of Confucius’s sayings, contains 20 books in its received form.
The work is arranged as a series of short passages involving Confucius, his students, and other figures. “Book” here means a traditional division of the text, not a separate modern volume. The books vary greatly in length and do not form a continuous biography.
The Analects was compiled and transmitted by later generations of students rather than written by Confucius himself. Its passages discuss education, ritual, government, family relationships, moral cultivation, and exemplary conduct. The text became one of the most influential sources for later Confucian thought.
Readers sometimes confuse the Analects with the Four Books as a whole. The Analects is one of the Four Books, while the other three are the Mencius, Great Learning, and Doctrine of the Mean. Different manuscript traditions produced textual variations, but the received Analects is conventionally divided into 20 books.