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The Master's Voice: On Reading, Translating and Interpreting the Analects of Confucius

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2009

Alice W. Cheang
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Extract

The end of the twentieth century witnessed a Confucian revival. Beginning in the 1980s, we had, among those who would speak in behalf of the Chinese, advocates like Tu Wei-ming who predicted a “third wave” of Confucianism that—with the gradual waning of Marx-Leninism's star—would provide a new ideological foundation to undergird the economic boom on Asia's Pacific Rim. In the West, the years preceding the fin de siècle produced a bumper crop of scholarly works on Confucian thought and—more to the general public's benefit and interest—numerous translations of the Lunyu, the collection of sayings which (according to tradition) contain all that we have of Confucius's teachings, as directly transmitted to his disciples. This essay reviews four of these translations, those by (in alphabetical order) Roger T. Ames and Henry Rosemont, Jr., E. Bruce and A. Taeko Brooks, Chichung Huang, and Pierre Ryckmans (writing under the pseudonym Simon Leys). All use “theAnalects” as their title, after the nineteenth-century missionary-scholar James Legge. The four are by no means the only recent translations of the book, although two are among the very best, but they represent something of the broad spectrum of styles and approaches to interpreting Confucius. I would like first, however, to describe my own approach to reading the Analects—not my interpretation of its contents but my understanding of how the text works on me as one of its many readers—by way of outlining a general framework for my review.

Type
Review Essay
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 62 , Issue 3 , Summer 2000 , pp. 563 - 582
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 2000

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References

1 With some exceptions: Book III, which has many passages on ritual, and Book X, nearly all of which is about ritual etiquette. In Books XVI through XX, universally regarded as of later origin than the rest of the Analects, the passages tend to be longer, with some narrative content, including numerous anecdotes about Confucius and his disciples and their encounters with historical and imaginary figures.

2 Bu ru usually means “not the equal of” in the sense of “inferior to,” so a grammarian might argue, prima facie, that only the first reading is valid; but we may also construe an implied topic in the passage: “In depravity, the barbarians [who still honor their rulers] have not reached the level of the Chinese [who no longer do so].” Both readings are thus grammatically possible, and in both Confucius—whether praising or censuring—shows himself loyal to his own cultural group. Leys also compares the merits of these two readings (see his note on this passage, pp. 121–23).

3 At the same time, the translators run the risk of foregrounding western values in their own analytical interpretation of the Analects. Here are two examples: (1) They apologize for the lack of a coherent vision in the Analects, adding that there is greater coherence than is apparent at a first reading (pp. 9–10). I see the deliberate suppression of systematic arrangement in the received text of the Analects as vital to the way in which the Analects has traditionally instructed its readers. Perhaps, to a sensibility weaned on Confucius and Laozi, the arguments of Hegel may come across as inordinately and overwhelmingly monolithic. (2) The translators deduce, from the hierarchical relationship implicit in the terms shi (“scholar-apprenctice”), junzi (“exemplary person”) and shengren (“sage”), that these are stages in human development marking progress further and further along a path towards an ultimate destination (pp. 62–65); but—as Fingarette and others have demonstrated, and Ames and Rosemont's own findings would seem to corroborate—the “way” as conceived in the Analects is not so much the path leading towards a goal as it makes a goal out of being on the path, so that the way is, as it were, its own destination. In other words, there is no necessary order of progression, and this may be one of the reasons why there is no necessary order of presentation.

4 Jensen, Lionel M., Manufacturing Confucianism: Chinese Tradition and Universal Civilization (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1997), pp. 17–18.Google Scholar

5 His argument is based on the study of two key moments in the history of cultural exchange between China and the Western world—the exportation of Confucius as an icon to Europe by Jesuit missionaries in the sixteenth century and his reappropriation at the beginning of the twentieth by intellectual leaders of the May Fourth Movement.

6 Hence Jorge Luis Borges's remark, quoted by Leys (p. xviii), about “improving” upon Shakespeare. This is why it is not only permissible, but sometimes even commendable, to stage productions of Shakespeare in different period styles, or to recreate Macbeth in Japanese and Hamlet in Russian.

7 To use the interpretive categories of classical Chinese, organization in a text like the Analects takes place xing er xia (“below, or after, form”) and not xing er shang (“above, or before, form”), that is, after the text has already been written and not before; in other words, it is to the reader and not the author that the final authority for constituting the meaning of the text belongs. Here perhaps lies the key to the perceived difference between the essentialistic “thing” -orientation that Ames and Rosemont describe as characteristic of the Abrahamic traditions and the mode predominating in classical Chinese texts which seems more attuned to events and relations. It is not that the Chinese are intrinsically less competent at synthesizing general principles from detailed particulars, or even that they have some inborn aversion to thought requiring a high degree of organization; it is simply that, whatever their natural predilections, they happen to have in their early written tradition a number of texts, including the Analects, that impose this reconstitutive activity upon the reader.

8 “Confucius” is the standard way of referring to this person in a Western language, so I will continue to use it, even though, as Lionel Jensen points out, it is a Latinization of the Chinese. A rose by any other name smells just as sweet, and has the advantage of being a widely recognized signifier of the object.

9 Waley, Arthur, trans., The Analects of Confucius (1938; reprint, New York: Vintage Books, 1989), p. 25.Google Scholar

10 While there has been no lack of ultraconservatives, so far there have been, strictly speaking, no ultraleftists.

11 This nonevolutionary view of the Analects—and of all early Confucian texts, which Huang appears to hold in similar regard—explains why it is possible for him to quote from the Book of Rites (Li Ji) to explicate a point left unclear or indistinct in the Analects, as though the two were effectively interchangeable: if both texts are authoritative sources of Confucius's timeless wisdom, then where their contents overlap, the one can indeed be substituted for the other. It also explains his extraordinary freedom in the use of lexicographical sources. In his glossary of Analects terms, Huang takes definitions equally readily from the Shuo Wen, the earliest (Han Dynasty) dictionary, and from Republican dictionaries such as the Ci Hai or Ci Yuan, as if the language had not evolved in the intervening millenia.

12 In this, Brooks appears to be approaching agreement with Jensen, who states the even more radical position that (irrespective of whether there was an historical Confucius, whose existence Jensen does not contest but regards as beside the point) the Confucius we know—as reconstituted in the minds of posterity—is a trope, a rhetorical figure over which successive generations have hung the drapery of their own fabrications. But finally there is a world of difference between their two positions. Brooks holds that there is not much of the historical Confucius in the Analects, not that there is none, nor by any means that the historical Confucius is irrelevant to the study of the formation of Confucianism. Far from it: the Confucius of Book IV—Brooks's “real” Confucius—determines the form and sets the moral tone of the whole text of the Analects.

13 Their emphasis is reflected in the subtitle of their work and in the glossary provided in the introductory material, which privileges those terms in the Analects havingto do with speculative philosophy (such as dao, “the Way”, and tian, usually translated as “Heaven”) over those used more commonly in the context of self-cultivation (ren and li), even though the latter have much greater frequency of occurrence.