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Towards a History of Confucian Classical Studies - John B. Henderson, Scripture, Canon, and Commentary: A Comparison of Confucian and Western Exegesis. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991. xii + 247pp. - Steven Van Zoeren, Poetry and Personality: Reading, Exegesis, and Hermeneutics in Traditional China. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991. viii + 333 pp.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 March 2015
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References
1. The works of Marcel Granet on the Shi jing 詩經 and Bernhard Karlgren on the Shi jing and Shang shu 尙書could be taken as representative of these two approaches.
2. A number of books on the history of jingxue have appeared in China and Japan. Pi Xirui's 皮錫瑞 Jingxue lishi 經學歷史 (1907; reprinted with the invaluable annotations of Zhou Yutong 周予同： Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1959, and various Taiwan editions) initiated modern studies of jingxueshi (although it adopts an engaged New Text approach)Google Scholar. The recently published collection of the jingxueshi studies of Zhou Yutong is probably the most comprehensive volume to date: Zhou Yutong jingxueshi lunzhu xuanji 周予同經學史論著選集, ed. Weizheng, Zhu 朱維錚 (Shanghai: Renrnin chubanshe, 1983)Google Scholar.
3. An additional tradition important for future jingxueshi research would be the hermeneutical tradition associated with the Daoist canon.
4. This choice of sources tends to influence Henderson's account in another way. Commentators whose extant work largely takes the form of running commentary are little represented. The most obvious example is Kong Yingda 孑穎達, the leading orthodox commentator of the Tang, who is mentioned by Henderson only once (p. 212).
5. Shchutskii, Iulian, Researches on the I Ching (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 207 Google Scholar.
6. Henderson does include a considerable amount of material concerning the other classics. His method is to use such material to strengthen his general arguments, rather than to claim that it is representative of the exegetical traditions for these classics.
7. During the Han, an ingenious device was used to indicate the degree to which a text was granted authoritative status. In editions of bound bamboo strips, the length of the strips signified the status of the text. Hence, the “Five Classics” were inscribed on strips twice the length of those used for the less canonical Xiao jing 孝經, with the Analects being allotted only one-third the length of the most celebrated jing ( Yutong, Zhou, Zhou Yutong jingxueshi, 274 Google Scholar; Henderson somewhat misinterprets this discussion [p. 70]). This suggests that early in the commentary era canonicity was not seen as a black-and-white issue.
8. Henderson's representation of the Qin as closing off the age of canon should probably be somewhat modified in light of the continued elaboration of texts such as the Liji 禮記 during the Han. Consideration should also be given to the straightforward “forging” of texts, which continued through the Han, and the rise and decline of the chanwei 識緯 apocrypha. It is difficult to distinguish some of these activities from, say, the fabrication of the “earliest” chapters of the Shang shu during the pre-Qin Warring States era.
9. Elsewhere in his book (pp. 204–205), Henderson cites traditional commentators who challenged the claims of comprehensiveness made for the more esoteric classics.
10. Smith, Kidder et al., Sung Dynasty Uses of the I Ching (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
11. In particular, while we are accustomed to think of Zhu Xi principally as a synthecist, the accounts of his classical scholarship given by Van Zoeren and by Joseph Adler are testimony to his innovative scholarly imagination.
12. Liji zhushu 禮記注疏, “Yueji” 樂記 (beiyao, Sibu ed.), 38.7a Google Scholar. The fact that the Shuowen jiezi 說文解字 dictionaty (roughly contemporary with the “Preface”) defines shi by treating zhi as a paronym suggests that the semantic linkage between the two words had a long tradition. Even the allusion to the shi yan zhi formula in the “Preface” itself can be read as descriptive of the genre rather than the specific Shi corpus.
13. Brief discussions of the Western Han appear in Henderson, 39–43, and Van Zoeren, 81–85.
14. Han shu 漢書 (rpt. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1962), 75.3159 Google Scholar.
15. Han shu, 75.3153–54Google Scholar. The political power of Western Han Confucians is reflected in the fact that, despite the enormity of Sui Meng's act of lèse majesté, Zhao di's successor shortly restored Sui's honor by appointing his son to office.
16. Han shu, 75.3155 Google Scholar. The regent Huo Guang 霍光, who initially assumed that Xiahou was remonstrating on the basis of inside information of the impending demotion of the king, is said to have been so impressed by his arts that he enfoeffed him and appointed him to instruct the young Empress Dowager.
17. See the discussions of Fang, Jing 京房 and Feng, Yi 翼奉 in Dull, Jack, “A Historical Introduction to the Apocryphal (Ch'an-Wei) Texts of the Han Dynasty” (Ph.D. dissertation: University of Washington, 1966), Chapter 2Google Scholar. The Fengsu tongyi 風俗通義, an Eastern Han text, records a legend about Dong Zhongshu that conveys belief in the talismanic properties of the classics. In the tale, Dong renders powerless the curses of a shaman by donning court clothes, facing south, and chanting classical texts (ch. 9; noted in Fushi, Lin 林富士, Mandai de wuzhe 漢代的巫者 [Taipei: Daoxiang chubanshe, 1988], 73)Google Scholar. We have probably underestimated the degree to which later classical interpreters employed similarly irrational perspectives. For example, Joseph Adler has demonstrated how Zhu Xi's Yi jing hermeneutic relies upon spiritualistic beliefs concerning the magical properties of the text and of milfoil stalks; see Smith, et al., Song Dynasty Uses of the I Ching, especially 190–198 Google Scholar).
18. Chunqiu Gongyang zhuan Heshi jiegu 春秋公羊傳何氏解話 (beiyao, Sibu ed.), Yin 1, 1.2b Google Scholar. Note also, “That to which heaven and earth gives birth cannot be the property of a single family” (Yin 1, 1.6b). David McMullen notes the persistence of the subversive tendencies of the Gongyang tradition in the Tang, as well as the survival of its omenological associations; State and Scholars in T'ang China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 80 Google Scholar.
19. Chuncjiu Gongyang zhuan, Ai 14, 28.6 Google Scholar
20. Attention to the history of the examination system can help reveal the complexities of the political function of the classics. For example, for the early Tang period, the political centrality of jingxue is suggested by the imperial commission of the zhengyi project in order to propagate authorized interpretations for examination training and evaluation (Van Zoeren, 128). However, the Tang examination system included a number of tracks, and the mingjing 明經 track, which most heavily stressed canonical mastery (in a very routinized form), diminished, both in terms of the number of degrees awarded and the prestige they carried, in favor of the poetry-oriented jinshi 進士 degree. This suggests that canonical orthodoxy was, in fact, not as central a concern. See Duanlin, Ma 馬端臨, Wenxian tongkao 文獻通考 (rpt., Shanghai: Commercial Press, 1936), 30.283a Google Scholar.
21. McMullen, , State and Scholars in T'ang China, 105–112 Google Scholar. McMullen's book, as it pertains to classical studies, is a particularly valuable portrait of the political facets of jingxue.
22. Wang Anshi went so far as to compose his own eccentric classical commentary as a new orthodoxy for examination purposes, hoping thus to cultivate a bureaucracy canonically sympathetic to his New Policies. For an account of Song Neo-Confucianism that analyzes the interplay of scholarship and politics see Liu, James T.C., China Turning Inward: Intellectual and Politicai Changes in the Early Twelfth Century (Cambridge, Mass.: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1988), especially 43–51 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.