The Manchu Exegesis of the Lúnyǔ

The officially sanctioned Manchu translation of the Analects, completed in 1654 and revised in 1756, is valuable for the insights it provides into Qing-dynasty traditions of Lunyi interpretation and the then-contemporary understanding of key Confucian ethical notions of ren, yi, 11, dao, and de. By examining the words employed in the Manchu translation of the Analects and exploring their etymology, which is sometimes Chinese and Mongolian as well as Manchu, it is possible to identify the aspects and nuances that the Manchus apparently understood these Confucian ethical terms to possess. The existence of a significant corpus of words borrowed from Mongolian, combined with evidence from Jurchen suggest that there may have been some kind of northern border tradition of Lunyu interpretation that began with the reign of the Khitans and lasted for almost a millennium, in contradistinction to the established Chinese tradition

Art · Exegesis · Theology · China's Ethnic Minorities and Relations · Chinese history and philosophy · Linguistics and Cultural Studies · Philosophy

• The Manchu-Language Archives of the Qing Dynasty and the Origins of the Palace Memorial System

  Mark Elliott, Mark C Elliott•Late imperial China•2001

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