Scripture, Canon, and Commentary: A Comparison of Confucian and Western Exegesis.

• Author: Honey, David B.

"The history of Confucianism is the history of the exegesis of the classics, just as that of Christianity is the history of biblical exegesis; the same is also true of Buddhism."(1) This authoritative pronouncement by the late Professor Demieville is an apposite program statement on the need for entering the scholarly fray on Confucianism from the point of view of its commentarial tradition; it also suggests the value of a comparative approach. With this splendid book John B. Henderson fulfills both these expectations in joining an academic enterprise hitherto monopolized by Chinese and Japanese scholars. Building on this traditional body of secondary literature, Henderson adds an entirely new dimension derived from the theoretical concepts and interpretive tools of modern Western religious scholarship, literary criticism, and theory, to expose the unspoken assumptions, hermeneutical aims, and exegetical strategies brought to bear by Confucian exegetes in commenting on a canon.

Henderson's purpose is to explore the commentarial tradition that first delimited, closed, reopened and rearranged, and finally explicated over generations the canonized classics of Confucianism, comparing this tradition in turn with the work of historical and modern commentators on rabbinic Judaism, the Bible, the Quran, the Indian Vedanta, and the Homeric epics. The range of his reading in the primary sources--through the medium of translation, except for Chinese--and in an extended array of the secondary literature of each canonical tradition is most impressive. Because of this, his examples of exegetes and exegesis are always as apt as they are varied.

A lengthy introduction first justifies treating the literary classics of one culture with the political canon of another, comparing both to the religious scriptures of yet another. The first two chapters, "Origins and Antecedents of the Classics," and "Integration, Development, and Closure of Canons," set the stage by defining a canon and analyzing the process and importance of its formation. Chapter three, "Origins, Dimensions, and Apotheosis of Commentaries," stresses that many early classics which were quickly canonized originated as commentaries to other classics, and that later commentaries, because of changing political and intellectual climates, were sometimes elevated to the same status. The impetus for composing commentaries and even specific techniques arose in part from the interpretive traditions of dream, omen, and oracle divination. Thus the political function and influence of the diviner is the heritage of the commentator. Other important contributions of this chapter include treatment of oral modes of interpretation and transmission, the rise of specific schools associated with individual masters, the various types of commentaries, and the interplay between classic and commentary.

Chapters four and five, "Commentarial Assumptions," and "Commentarial Strategies" are the core of this study, as is evident by their length. Examples from the Confucian classics are drawn chiefly from the I-ching, Ch'un-ch'iu, Lun-yu, and Meng-tzu. In chapter four, six commentarial assumptions towards a canon are isolated, and treated in order of importance: a canon is comprehensive, coherent, self-consistent, moral, profound and clear. Chapter five then analyzes the ways these assumptions are evident in actual commentarial operations. Aside from the examples adduced by Henderson from a variety of traditional exegetes both to isolate and illustrate these assumptions, support is elicited from the interpretive frameworks of modern students of world classics which match rather closely the scheme devised by Henderson. This section of the work is not only the most original and most important part of the book, but is also the most satisfactory from the point of view of the sinologist, because the Chinese classics and their commentators are approached directly through Henderson's own translations and interpretations instead of through second-hand citation, a practice that is rather frequent earlier in the work, even in dealing with questions from the Chinese tradition.

The concluding chapter, "Death and Transfiguration of Commentarial World Views," traces the decline in the commentarial form of discourse and its replacement by modern scholarship and criticism. This transformation was helped in part by the increasingly widespread dissemination of classical works through the means of printing, and by the broader application of philological and critical...