The Analects, Lunyu, is about 15,900 characters in twenty books, and it is not a treatise. It is a compilation of fragments — a disciple's question and a short answer, an observation about someone's character, occasionally a single sentence with no setting — assembled by students and their students over perhaps a century and a half after Confucius's death in 479 BCE, with later books generally regarded as later material. There is no sustained argument anywhere in it, no definition of its central term, and several passages that no commentator has convincingly construed. Its authority is therefore a function of use rather than of structure: it was memorised in full by schoolchildren across China, Korea, Japan and Vietnam for two thousand years, examined on for six centuries, and commented on continuously since the Han. The result is that its phrases are unmarked idiom in four languages — the opening line about learning and returning to it, the line about not knowing life so how could one know death, the line about the gentleman and the small man.