Tung Chung-shu, 'Ch'un-ch'iu fan-lu': Uppiger Tau des Fruhling-und-Herbst-Klassikers; Ubersetzung und Annotation der Kapitel eins bis sechs.

• Author: Arbuckle, Gary

Competition would be fierce were there ever an attempt to award a prize for the most blatant neglect and misunderstanding of an ancient Chinese philosophical text; but if such a contest were held, one can be sure that the Chunqiu fanlu would at least rate an honorable mention. This eighty-one-chapter collection of essays and fragments (of which three are missing from the extant text), allegedly by the Former Han Confucian Dong Zhongshu, has never been fully rendered into English or any other Western language, and enjoys the dubious distinction of being one of the few important Chinese texts to lack a Japanese translation (the Shunju hanro by Hihara Toshikuni |Meitoku, 1977~, despite its title, covers only the first five chapters). Moreover, discoveries made during the past thirty years but largely ignored until quite recently have made the vast majority of previous studies of the text and its alleged author at least partially obsolete.

The work under review is an annotated translation of the first six chapters of the Chunqiu fanlu, with copious notes, a superficially impressive apparatus of textual criticism, and reproduction of the Chinese original. What do we have a right to expect? First, of course, that it be as reliable and accurate as possible; but also, in the case of such a problematic and frequently questioned collection, that it provide background information on both the contents of the work and the controversies that have surrounded it. Gassmann's book, while a welcome addition to the study of a particularly neglected portion of a disregarded and misunderstood text, is not an unqualified success on either score. Especially when it comes to the authenticity and background of the work, it tends to deal with problems by ignoring them, an ignorance that sometimes reflects itself in the translation and produces unnecessary error and confusion.

A brief sketch of the text's history may serve to illustrate the risks entailed by any attempt to go at it blind. Although the Chunqiu fanlu has been widely reputed to be from the hand of Dong Zhongshu (c. 195-115 B.C.), the effective founder of the Former Han Gongyang tradition and arguably the most important Confucian of the entire Han dynasty, no work of that name can be attested in contemporary sources. Its closest equivalent, listed in the bibliographic treatise to the Hanshu, is a collection entitled simply Dong Zhongshu. This was 123 chapters long, and the most common assumption has been that the 81 chapters of the Chunqiu fanlu represent the portion of the Dong Zhongshu that survived the battering of time between the end of the Han and the early sixth century, when the Chunqiu fanlu is first mentioned in bibliographies and cited by name in the works of other scholars. However, the remarks by Ban Gu at the end of Dong Zhongshu's Hanshu biography seem to indicate that several chapters near the beginning of the present Chunqiu fanlu were not included in the Dong Zhongshu. They seem to have formed part of another, independent collection, perhaps partially from Dong's hand but not listed under his name in contemporary sources. What this collection might have been, and how it was transmuted into the present Chunqiu fanlu, are two of the many relevant problems that Gassmann either glosses over or disregards entirely.

From the viewpoint of textual history, the Chunqiu fanlu is problematic; when one analyzes its content, the questions...