 Some excavated texts, like the pre-Han period “Thicket of Sayings” (Yucong 語叢) apothegms excavated at the Guodian site in Hubei Province in 1993, contain fragments of the Analects in circulation without attribution to Confucius. Transmitted materials also show some of the quotations attributed to Confucius in the Analects in the mouths of other historical figures. The fluidity and diversity of Confucius-related materials in circulation prior to the fixing of the Analects text in the second century BCE, suggest that the Analects itself, with its keen interest in ritual, personal ethics, and politics, may well have been in part a topical selection from a larger and more diverse set of available Confucius-related materials. In other words, there were already multiple topical foci prior to any horizon by which we can definitively deem any single focus to be authoritative. It is for this reason that the essential core of the teachings of Confucius is historically underdetermined, and the correct identification of the core teachings is still avidly debated. The following sections treat three key aspects of the philosophy of Confucius, each different but all interrelated, found throughout many of these diverse sets of sources: a theory of how ritual and musical performance functioned to promote unselfishness and train emotions, advice on how to inculcate a set of personal virtues to prepare people to behave morally in different domains of their lives, and a social and political philosophy that abstracted classical ideals of proper conduct in family and official contexts to apply to more general contexts.