Balanced Discourses: A Bilingual Edition.

• Author: Asselin, Mark Laurent
• Position: Book review

Balanced Discourses: A Bilingual Edition. Translated by JOHN MAKEHAM. The Classical Library of Chinese Literature and Thought. New Haven: YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS; Beijing: FOREIGN LANGUAGES PRESS, 2003. Pp. xl + 366. $45.

Xu Gan [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] (170-217 C.E.) is fortunate to have an advocate in John Makeham. The philosophical treatise, Zhong lun [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] by this Jian'an period (196-220 C.E.) scholar has been given scant attention in modern scholarship. Hsiao Kung-chuan, for instance, paid it almost no heed in A History of Chinese Political Thought, disparaging the work as containing "virtually no original views," essentially being a rehash of Confucius and Mencius. Hsiao suggested that the praise Zhong lun received in traditional Chinese scholarship was on account of "the classical elegance of its literary style." (1) Dang Shengyuan, of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, who supplies the first introduction to John Makeham's new, serviceable translation of the work, comments in a similar vein that the spare style of Zhong lun is deserving of praise, but by the same token its concise, compact literary style impedes the work's incisiveness. In what seems a rather tepid defense of Zhong lun, Dang adds that it "boasts some unique intellectual qualities and in its approach to many philosophical problems it makes some definite advances." Dang nonetheless asserts that Zhong lun "is of unique value to the study of the transition in thought between the Han and Wei periods" (p. xix). However that may be, it is also one of the rare philosophical books written at that time that are largely extant, so one must be wary of investing it with too much representative authority. As even Makeham concedes in his introduction, Xu Gan "is not a major figure in Chinese intellectual history ..." (p. xxix).

Precisely because Xu Gan's treatise is a bit off the beaten path, it is a pleasure to have two solid Western-language books on the subject, both produced by John Makeham. Makeham's 1994 work, Name and Actuality in Early Chinese Thought, was a delight to read. (2) Articulate and thoughtful, Name and Actuality in Early Chinese Thought reflected Makeham's careful, diligent study of his subject. He drew out and elucidated Xu Gan's main ideas in Zhong lun, contextualizing them according to their place in the history of ideas in China, and in the light of modern scholarship on Chinese philosophy. Makeham's new work, the long anticipated full translation of Zhong lun, does not disappoint. It is, with some minor exceptions noted below, a good translation that serves as a useful crib for students of literary Chinese and of the history of traditional Chinese political thought. I applaud the editors and publishers of this volume for issuing such a handsome bilingual edition of a relatively minor work. One can only hope to see more along these lines.

Does Zhong lun, in fact, need to be a truly significant work of traditional Chinese political thought to merit this treatment? Not at all. Even though the learned appraisers of...