Four Books

The Four Books App is a book reader and scholarly utility app which presents the traditional Confucian curriculum: the Great Learning, the Discourses (or Analects), the Book of Mengzi, and the Doctrine of the Mean. A six-year translation project in progress. Book One is complete, 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 never before translated “Four Books with Collected Commentaries” 四書章句集注, the most influential East Asian classic of the last millennium. Established Lexicon • Builds upon the translation lexicon perfected by Wing-tsit Chan, with roots going back to James Legge. Honoring lineage—with conservative refinements. Uses modern pinyin, of course. Apple Native UI • Pure Apple native tech throughout: SwiftUI, FTS5 search, and an embedded SQLite Confucian database for lightning-fast location of verses, key terms, named persons and named texts. Optimized Multi-platform • iPhone features intuitive tab bar design for one-handed navigation on the go, while iPad leverages a powerful sidebar for efficient browsing through verses. Designed for iOS 26 with iOS 18 fallback. Learn Classical Chinese • Dual-language presentation with original Chinese verses alongside English translations. A “sentence mode” toggle in the toolbar parses the language pairs line by line for learning Classical Chinese. Reading Experience • Meticulous attention to readability: translation, typography, and a full-screen reader for iPad. This Classic deserves to be both scholarly and good reading, just as the native text is. -- Basic App & Scholar Pack In-app Purchase -- • Ancient verses: 284 most influential (free) • Ancient verses: 804 complete ($) • Language: English translation (free) • Language: Classical Chinese text ($) • Traditional commentary ($) • Sentence-level parsing tool ($) • Search: English (free) • Search: English & Chinese ($) • Encyclopedia: Basic (free) • Encyclopedia: Complete ($) • Book 5: Definition 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 [email protected], 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.