The Teachings of Confucius - Special Edition Paperback – September 9, 2005

This review is for "The Teachings of Confucius" by Daniel Willey (paperback)This may be a case of Amazon's poor categorization of reviews. I thought this was the complete teachings of Confucius as some of the reviews here claim. It doesn't not contain Analects, Doctrine of the Mean and The Great Learning. Instead, this is just a collection of inspirational quotes. It even says at the beginning that the quotes in the book are collected from many sources and time periods. What does that mean? Are these the teachings of Confucius or are the inspirational quotes are the Confucius-like? I really don't know. I ordered this to learn about Confucius. This isn't the book for that. This is more like buying a desk calendar that has a daily inspirational quote. There is no other information in this book about its content. I'll keep it and read it, but my search continues.EDIT:I've updated this review and gave it another couple of stars. It's not fair to pan this book if it's a case of Amazon's categorization. There is another book of the same title which is more of a study of Confucius, but when you click "Paperback" it takes you to this book which is not the same (It's a different author.) I thought I was getting the other book. This isn't bad if you're just looking for a collection of quotes. It's large print and some pages have one quote and some have two or three. They're categorized to some degree. I assume the "many sources" referred to in the intro has to do with the translations. I have it at work and browse the pages now and then.

This book has a typo every two or three pages. "Fun disclosure" instead of "Full disclosure" is one of the more comical examples of something Confucius surely never said, and exemplifies a recurring motif of putting an "n" in place of 2 "l"s.Another curiosity mentioned is a cow that was "homed" instead of "horned".The typos include missing articles, missing pronouns, and sentences that do not parse. These categories of errors cause me to wonder whether the person who laid out the book was merely unfamiliar with English or unacquainted with the Latin alphabet as well. Perhaps the entire job was done with primitive optical character recognition software and no human supervision. That would explain the visual nature of many of the errors.A pretty poor job considering that you can get Analects free at Gutenberg.org

Confucius says: Good book!

Hard to read translation into English. I thought there would be more insight into what was meant by the writings of Confucius but this book is simply a translation. I saw a lot of expressions used in fortune cookies.

If you haven't read anything about Confucius, this is a wonderful place to start. I had to get this for my Introduction to World Religions class and it was an easy read, but very profound. I would recommend it to anyone.

What a rip-off. Don't buy unless you can browse electronically first. In which case you wouldn't buy anyway.

Total waste of money. It's a children's book

We recently visited a Confucius centre in Shanghai and wanted to read the teachings again at home and found the simple way this book is written made it interesting and light reading.

Its just a list of metaphors and wisdom reputedly from Confucius. I was expecting a little more.

Nothing is there in this book on few quotes of Confucius in a bigger fond size. Actually this is not a book at all one has taken quotes from internet and put it into few pages with a cover.

It was ok