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Is There a Chinese Word for ‘Confucius’? A Review Article

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 February 2009

T. H. Barrett
T. H. Barrett
Affiliation:
School of Oriental and African Studies, London
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Extract

The dissolution of ideological identities that had seemed since the middle of this century fairly stable would appear to be one of the characteristics of our times. In place of the struggle between Capitalism and Communism, Samuel Huntingdon would wish to erect a more fragmented competition between civilizational blocs, bearing such labels as the Confucian East and the World of Islam. Yet even such an analysis seems already distinctly old-fashioned, imposing a questionable cultural stability on more labile phenomena. As an alternative Lionel Jensen suggests that the first of these labels, at any rate, is in no small measure the creation of early European observers, and that far from basking in any unproblematic sense of identity, some of the best minds of twentieth-century China actually expended much of their ink on a highly problematic search for the origins of an identifiable Confucian group in the early Chinese past.

Type
Articles
Information
Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies , Volume 62 , Issue 1 , January 1999 , pp. 105 - 110
Copyright
Copyright © School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London 1999

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References

1 Huntingdon, Samuel P., ‘The clash of civilisations?’, Foreign Affairs, 72 (Summer, 1993), 22–49.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2 Jensen, Lionel M., Manufacturing Confucianism: Chinese traditions and universal civilization, xix, 444 pp. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 1997 [pub. 1998]. £56.95 (paper £18.95)Google Scholar.

3 Rule, Paul, K'ung-tzu or Confucius? The Jesuit interpretation of Confucianism (Sydney: Allen and Unwin Australia), 1986.Google Scholar

4 Specifically, Waley, Arthur, Ballads and stories from Tun-Huang (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1960), 89–96.Google Scholar

5 Thus McMullen, David, State and scholars in T'ang China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 34.Google Scholar

6 See Zurndorfer, Harriet T., China bibliography: a research guide to reference works about China past and present (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1995), 53–54, n. 134, and 216–17Google Scholar. First edition, 1955–60; I have used the reduced format 1969–71 reprint by the Taishūkan shoten, Tokyo.

7 Cai's fame as a painter stimulated the production of a number of brief notices on him in collections devoted to artists' lives: the most detailed of these is in Wang Zhaoyong Lingbiao hua zhenglue (n.p., 1928) 8.5b—the Hong Kong, Commercial Press reprint of 1961 with further dates of artists determined in an appendix has not been available to me; two more brief biographies may be found through the Harvard-Yenching index to Qing biographies, though unfortunately I have not had access to the earliest of these. The fullest listing of materials on or by Cai may be found in the brief note on him in the Zhongguo meishujia renming cidian, second edition (Shanghai: Shanghai renmin meishu chubanshe, 1987), 1374bGoogle Scholar: two of the biographical sources named there I have also found impossible to locate so far.

8 Of course it cannot be taken as axiomatic that an official from Guangdong in the early to mid-nineteenth century would be part of a solid bloc opposed to an equally solid Manchu dominant elite: Pamela Kyle Crossley, in an eloquent review of Polachek, James, The Inner Opium War (Cambridge, Mass.: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1992)Google Scholar, has argued at length against such an interpretation, in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, Third Series, 3/2, 307–11. But at any rate the ‘Yuan analogy’ seems to have cast a long shadow, making it an area where Chinese writers tended to tread warily until very late in the nineteenth century: note that it was not until that point, for example, that they felt free to support for the legitimacy of Japanese resistance against the Mongols: see Howland, D. R., Borders of Chinese civilisation: geography and history at empire's end (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), 37.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

9 Shunde xianzhi , 27.26a–27a, in edition of 1853 as reprinted in Zhongguo difangzhi congshu (Taibei: Chengwen chubanshe, 1974)Google Scholar. Lin's activities have been described many times, most recently by James Polachek's book, cited in the preceding note.

10 For the summary, see Song- Yuan xuean buyi (ed. in Siming congshu series 5, Ningbo, 1938), 78.42a, and for this work (originally compiled in 1842) and its authors, Hummel, Arthur W. (ed.), Eminent Chinese of the Ch'ing period (1644–1912) (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1943–1944), 353–354Google Scholar. I have found no trace of the published ‘Collected works’ by Cai that might have been consulted by Morohashi if indeed it printed his prose, since it appears to have been solely a poetry collection nor indeed of any anthology likely to contain the piece.

11 Yan Fu, Jingxuan ji , 2.7a, as reprinted in the series Ouxiang lingshi , ed. Miao Quansun (1844–1919), in 1895.

12 I have checked all the Ming period sources on Kong Zhi (including the references in rare gazetteers, available to me on microfilm) listed in Deyi, Wang, et al. , Yuanren zhuanji ziliao suoyin Vol. I (Taibei: Xinwenfeng, 1979), 40, without being able to find any mention of the memorial.Google Scholar

13 See Tillman, Hoyt Cleveland and West, Stephen H., China under Jurchen rule (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1995), 113.Google Scholar

14 Compare the remarks on the original Xu Wenxian tongkao of Wang preface dated 1586 (which regrettably mentions Kong Zhi without citing the memorial, 58.4b in the first edition) and on the Qinding Xu wenxian tongkao compiled in 1747, in Teng, Ssu-yū and Biggerstaff, Knight, An annotated bibliography of select Chinese reference works, 3rd ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971), 111–112.Google Scholar

15 Cf. his remarks in this study, Queli wenxian kao , 8.5a–6a, as reprinted in the series (ed. Fenglin, Miao, et al. ) Kongzi wenhua daquan Jinan: Shandong youyi shushe, 1989Google Scholar. For Kong Jifen, cf. Hummel, Eminent Chinese of the Chՙ ing period, 434. Ming works reprinted in the Kongzi wenhua daquan series (e.g. the Shengmen zhi of 1627, 3B.6a) tend to demote the northern line of Kongs to which Kong Zhi belonged, doubtless (as already explained) because they were seen as collaborators with the barbarians, so Kong Jifen for his part may be read as trying to rescue that line from Chinese historiographic prejudice from his own position as a collaborator with the Manchus. I note, however, that Yu Yue (1821–1906) finds Kong's treatment of the Five Dynasties period unsatisfactory, but that neither he nor any other scholar known to me so far comments on his treatment of the Jin and Yuan era: cf. Yu, , Chunzaitang suibi 10 (Nanjing: Jiangsu renmin chubanshe, 1984), 180.Google Scholar

16 Kong, Queli wenxian tongkao, 8.4b; Qinding Xu wenxian tongkao, 536.14a (in edition of Siku quanshu).