Zhu Xi's Reading of the Analects: Canon, Commentary, and the Classical Tradition.

• Author: Slingerland, Edward
• Position: Book Review

Zhu Xi's Reading of the Analects: Canon, Commentary, and the Classical Tradition. By DANIEL K. GARDNER. New York: COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2003. Pp. 226. $52.50 (cloth); $19.50 (paper).

This is a small gem of a book, representing Gardner's latest contribution to a relatively recent trend of approaching the Analects from a more hermeneutically informed perspective--that is, of viewing the text as embedded in a historical context rather than as an ahistorical object of study. (Other recent examples of this trend include Tu Ching-i, ed., Classics and Interpretations [Transaction Publishers, 2000]; Kai-wing Chow et al., eds., Imagining Boundaries: Changing Confucian Doctrines, Texts, and Hermeneutics [State Univ. of New York Press, 1999); John Henderson, Scripture, Canon, Commentary [Princeton Univ. Press, 1991]; John Kieschnick, "Analects 12.1 and the Commentarial Tradition," JAOS 112 [1992]: 567-76; and P. J. Ivanhoe, "Whose Confucius? Which Analects?" in Confucius and the Analects, ed. B. Van Norden [Oxford Univ. Press, 2002], 119-33.) Such approaches tend to focus on how the Analects has historically been received by the tradition, and view the text as having, as Gardner puts it, "no one real meaning ... the true meaning of the Analects is the actual meaning that actual readers, to whom the text is meaningful, discover in it. This actual meaning evolves over time and place" (p. 178). One might contrast this approach with that of, say, Bruce and Taeko Brooks' Original Analects (Columbia Univ. Press, 1998), the goal of which is to recover the original meaning of the book through a detailed hypothesis of its formation as a text. As Gardner notes, "as fascinating and important as such [studies] are, they shed little light on how the text as received by the tradition was in fact understood by Chinese for the past two millennia" (p. 28, n. 44).

An ahistorical attitude is reflected in most Western translations of the Analects, which translate only the primary text, usually gliding smoothly over the interpretive decisions that must be made at almost every point in the process. Ahistorical approaches mask the opaqueness of the primary text, which is in many places incomprehensible without commentarial input, and obscure the fact that "the understanding that virtually every Chinese reader of the Analects since the Han period takes away from the text"--and therefore the understanding of Western translators and commentators relying upon these...