One Classic and Two Classical Traditions

The Recovery and Transmission of a Lost Edition of the Analects

Bibliographic Data

ID23167883
AuthorsBenjamin A Elman (corresponding author)
Year2009
Volume64
Issue1
Pages53-82
Publication date2009-03-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueMonumenta Nipponica (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0027-0741 • E-ISSN: 1880-1390
PublisherProject MUSE (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1353/mni.0.0053
OpenAlexW1976154819
LanguageEN
Citations received4
References cited11

One Classic and Two Classical Traditions:The Recovery and Transmission of a Lost Edition of the Analects Benjamin A. Elman (bio) IN both China and Japan in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the turn away from the interpretive commentarial approach to classical texts associated with the Song and Ming traditions of Confucian scholarship led to an emphasis on textual criticism and philological approaches. It also spurred interest in older, pre-Song commentarial traditions. A certain degree of mutual awareness and exchange of knowledge accompanied this common interest, but until late in the Tokugawa period, to a large extent the pursuit of critical textual studies in the two countries followed separate trajectories. The discovery, editing, and publication in Japan of rare texts or texts that had been lost in China and the subsequent Chinese reception of these Japanese editions exemplify these circumstances. In Japan, Ogyū Sorai (1666–1728), who led the challenge to the interpretations of the Confucian canon associated with the Song scholars Cheng Yi (1033–1107) and Zhu Xi (1130–1200), encouraged his followers to search out copies of the pre-Song commentaries. Several of his disciples traveled a hundred kilometers north of Edo to the Ashikaga Gakkō in Shimotsuke province (modern Tochigi prefecture), a center of learning that had flourished from the mid-Muromachi to the [End Page 53] early Edo period and was known as a repository of both early printed editions and manuscript copies of Chinese texts. Editions of the texts Sorai's followers found there and collated were eventually published and found their way to Qing China via Chinese merchants engaged in the trade between Nagasaki and Ningbo (Mingzhou) in Zhejiang, which was then the main Chinese port for trade with Japan. The efforts of the Tokugawa scholars and their patrons to make their findings public and to have them transmitted to China bespeaks their confidence in their own level of knowledge of a shared tradition and their desire to participate, even from a distance, in the larger international world of Confucian scholarship. Qing scholars, on the other hand, were intrigued to learn of the existence of valuable texts in Japan, but tended to make their own use of the editions prepared by their Tokugawa counterparts, uses that accorded with their own interests and concerns. The history of one such text brought to light by a Sorai scholar shows that various ironies attended the process of recovery and transmission. The text in question is Huang Kan's (488–545) Lunyu yishu (Jp. Rongo giso, Subcommentary for the Meaning of the Analects), collated and published in 1750 by Sorai's student Nemoto Sonshi (1699–1764).1 Qing scholars welcomed the restoration of this text, which had disappeared as an integral work in China during the Southern Song (1127–1279), not only because it provided information about the pre-Song tradition of classical learning, but also because its preface appeared to recommend a philological approach to the study of texts compatible with their own. Questions remain, however, whether Huang Kan's seemingly precocious methodological insight was more than adventitious. Further, although the reputation of the Ashikaga Gakkō as a repository of rare texts lent additional credence to Nemoto's recension, the preface to Rongo giso included in it most likely did not derive from the version of that work that he found there. Sorai-School Textual Studies and the Ashikaga Gakkō Sorai's break with the meditative and reflective character of Cheng-Zhu scholarship and his advocacy of what he termed kobunji—reading ancient texts with attention to the language of the time in which they were written—led him to take issue as well with the Cheng-Zhu commentarial tradition, which had held a preeminent position in Japan for the preceding century. As his follower Dazai Shundai (1680–1747) described the situation in regard to studies of the Analects, during the Song, Confucius's teachings had been so mixed with Buddhism that the two had become thoroughly confused, and ancient glosses (kokun) for the text had been lost. Confronting this situation, through his comparison of terms found in the Analects to the usage in other ancient works and the Han commentaries, Sorai had succeeded in correcting...

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