Four Books: Confucian Classics

The Four Books App is a book reader and scholarly utility which presents the traditional Confucian curriculum: the Great Learning, the Discourses of Confucius (the Analects), the Book of Mengzi (Mencius), 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.

-- Ancient Teachings, Correct Transmission, Modern Tech --

Traditional Interpretation

• A public benefit project to translate Zhu Xi’s “Four Books with Collected Commentaries” 四書章句集注: the classic that defined orthodox Confucianism and served as the basis of the imperial examinations from 1313 to 1905.

Established Lexicon

• Builds upon the translation lexicon perfected by Wing-tsit Chan (A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy), with roots going back to James Legge (The Chinese Classics). 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. 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. Designed for Android 16; runs on Android 10 and newer.

Android Native UI

• Pure Android native tech throughout: Kotlin and Jetpack Compose, with an embedded SQLite Confucian database for lightning-fast location of verses, key terms, named persons and named texts.

-- Basic App & Scholar Pack In-app Purchase --

Basic App:

• Core Ancient Verses: 284 most influential

• Language: English translation only

• Search: Basic, English-only

• Encyclopedia: Ancient figures only

Scholar Pack:

• All Ancient Verses: 804 complete

• Traditional Commentary

• Language: English & Classical Chinese

• Tap Character for Literal Gloss

• Full-Verse Literal Gloss Sheets

• Sentence-Level Parsing Tool

• Search: English & Chinese

• Encyclopedia: Ancient and medieval figures

• Book 5: Explanation of Terms

• No ads, no account creation, no data collection

• Small offline app, low battery usage

Scholar Pack is a single in-app purchase that includes everything above. It has a final target price, but is currently priced lower based on the percentage completion of the translation. One-time purchase, with all future content delivered free.

-- Reach Out --

Please contact us at support@daoxue.academy, or using the in-app contact tools in settings, with questions or requests. We are committed to continual refinement and making this the optimal Confucian Classics app for both scholars and readers.