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The portraits in the Kong Miao — the Temple of Confucius in Qufu — were made centuries after my death, based on earlier images that were themselves made from memory and tradition. I look serene. I was not always serene. I spent fourteen years travelling between the states of Zhou China, seeking a ruler who would implement my ideas of benevolent governance. None of them did.

I returned home at sixty-eight and taught for the rest of my life. Three thousand students. Seventy-two who truly understood. The Analects were not written by me but compiled by them — conversations, fragments, observations. A philosophy reconstructed from notes. I would have written it differently. But I did not write it. They did. And perhaps that is as it should be.