The Origins Of Chinese Literary Hermeneutics

The Shijing ("Canon of Odes") is China's oldest poetry collection, traditionally considered to have been edited by Confucius himself. Despite their enormous importance for Confucianism and Chinese civilization, the 305 odes have for millennia also puzzled readers. Why did the Sage include in the Canon apparently lewd poems about women promising men to "hitch up" their skirts and "wade the river," and men "tossing and turning in bed" yearning for young women? What did the innumerable representations of plants, beasts, and birds, and of various climactic and astronomical phenomena, signify beyond their immediate function as natural descriptions? One such puzzled reader was Mao Heng, a learned Confucian employed at a minor court in the mid-second century BCE. The object of this study is the Commentary that Mao composed on the Odes, and in particular the hermeneutic tool—the xing—that he invented to explain the figurality and tropes at play in them. Mao's "xingish" interpretation of the Odes is both genuinely hermeneutic, in that it explains the rhetorical organization of these poems, and thoroughly ideological, since it allows Mao to transform them into Confucian dogma. The book also argues that the xing, content, function, and cultural importance, is comparable to the Aristotelian concept of metaphor (metaphora), and that the xing, the Odes, and the practice of shi (Chinese "poetry") demand an intercultural, "comparative" reading for a more nuanced understanding.

Covering a time of great intellectual ferment and great influence on what was to come, this book explores the literary and hermeneutic world of early medieval China. In addition to profound political changes, the fall of the Han dynasty allowed new currents in aesthetics, literature, interpretation, ethics, and religion to emerge during the Wei-Jin Nanbeichao period. The contributors to this volume present developments in literature and interpretation during this era from a variety of methodological perspectives, frequently highlighting issues hitherto unremarked in Western or even Chinese and Japanese scholarship. These include the rise of new literary and artistic values as the Han declined, changing patterns of patronage that helped reshape literary tastes and genres, and new developments in literary criticism. The religious changes of the period are revealed in the literary self-presentation of spiritual seekers, the influence of Daoism on motifs in poetry, and Buddhist influences on both poetry and historiography. Traditional Chinese literary figures, such as the fox and the ghost, receive fresh analysis about their particular representation during this period.

This book explores the reasons for adopting a hermeneutical version of reception theory in discussing modern Chinese culture. Between Tradition and Change is centered around the contributions of Hu Shi, Lu Xun, and Mao Dun to May Fourth Literature. It employs literary theory (hermeneutics) in order to clarify the meaning of cultural change, instead of merely offering a history of May Fourth culture or a discussion of representative figures.Contents: Preface; Acknowledgments; May Fourth Literature Between Past and Present; Problems in May Fourth Interpretation; Hermeneutics and Chinese Literary History; Reception Theory and the May Fourth Reader; The Formation of the Reader in Hu Shi, Lu Xun, and Mao Dun; May Fourth Literature and Dialogue East/West; Notes; Bibliography.

In recent years in the "West," scholars have attempted to unravel old constructs of interpretation and understanding, using the discipline of hermeneutics, or the scientific study of textual interpretation. Borrowed from students of the ever growing body of biblical interpretive literature that originated in the early Christian era, theoretical hermeneutics has given many contemporary scholars potent tools of textual interpretation. Classics and Interpretations applies this method to Chinese culture. Several essays focus on hermeneutic traditions of Neo-Confucianism. Others move outside of these traditions to attempt an understanding of the role of hermeneutics in Taoist and Buddhist textual interpretation, in Chinese poetics and painting, and in contemporary Chinese culture. This volume makes a concerted effort to remedy our ignorance of the Chinese hermeneutical tradition. Part 1, "The Great Learning and Hermeneutics," demonstrates the use of commentary to define how the individual creates his social self, and discusses differing interpretations of the Ta-hsueh text and its treatment as either canonical or heterodox. Part 2, "Canonicity and Orthodoxy," considers the philosophical touchstones employed by Neo-Confucian canonical exegetes and polemicists, and discusses the Han canonization of the scriptural Five Classics, while illuminating a double standard that existed in the hermeneutical regime of late imperial China. Part 3, "Hermeneutics as Politics," discusses the transformation of both the classics and scholars, and explores the dominant hermeneutic tradition in Chinese historiography, the scriptural tradition and reinterpretation of the Ch'un-ch'iu, and reveals the pragmatism of Chinese hermeneutics through comparison of the Sung debates over the Mencius. The concluding sections include essays on "Chu Hsi and Interpretation of Chinese Classics," "Hermeneutic Traditions in Chinese Poetics and Non-Confucian Contexts," "Reinterpretation of Confucian Texts in the Ming-Ch'ing Period," and "Contemporary Interpretations of Confucian Culture." Through these literate and brilliantly written essays the reader witnesses not merely the great breadth and depth of Chinese hermeneutics but also its continuity and evolutionary vigor. This volume will excite scholars of the Confucian, Buddhist, and Taoist systems of thought and belief as well as students of history and hermeneutics.

This is a history of the hermeneutics of China's earliest classic, the Book of Odes, which was probably compiled about the 6th century BC. Neither a reading of the Odes as such, nor yet a history of their interpretation, this study attempts rather to trace the principles that guided the interpretation of the Odes over some two thousand years of Chinese history. The book begins by tracing the rise and development in China of the disposition to treat certain 'classical' texts as the ultimate repositories of the culture's values and norms, a disposition that was to shape the political, social, and cultural institutions of traditional China. A notable example was the examination system, which tested candidates for state office on their knowledge of the canon, in the process making questions concerning the interpretation of the canon prominent in public as well as in private life. The author then describes the emergence of the distinctive and influential hermeneutic associated with the Odes.

Questions of the nature of understanding and interpretation—hermeneutics—are fundamental in human life, though historically Westerners have tended to consider these questions within a purely Western context. In this comparative study, Zhang Longxi investigates the metaphorical nature of poetic language, highlighting the central figures of reality and meaning in both Eastern and Western thought: the Tao and the Logos. The author develops a powerful cross-cultural and interdisciplinary hermeneutic analysis that relates individual works of literature not only to their respective cultures, but to a combined worldview where East meets West. Zhang's book brings together philosophy and literature, theory and practical criticism, the Western and the non-Western in defining common ground on which East and West may come to a mutual understanding. He provides commentary on the rich traditions of poetry and poetics in ancient China; equally illuminating are Zhang's astute analyses of Western poets such as Rilke, Shakespeare, and Mallarmé and his critical engagement with the work of Foucault, Derrida, and de Man, among others. Wide-ranging and learned, this definitive work in East-West comparative poetics and the hermeneutic tradition will be of interest to specialists in comparative literature, philosophy, literary theory, poetry and poetics, and Chinese literature and history.

Considered second only to Confucius in the history of Chinese thought, Mencius (371?-289 b.c.), was a moral philosopher whose arguments, while pragmatically rooted in the political and social conditions of his time, go beyond particular situations to probe their origins and speculate on their larger implications. His writings constitute a living tradition in China and the world at large. Sinological studies of Mencius have long emphasized philological and archaeological research, situating the texts mainly in Chinese history. Critical appraisal of the texts lends itself to Western traditions of interpretation. In Mencian Hermeneutics, Chun-chieh Huang utilizes both approaches to offer a historical and universal understanding of Mencius. Huang builds from the premise that Mencius' thinking and all Chinese thought are sociopolitical in tone and humanistic and metaphysical in nature and range. The strength of Mencius' thought lies in the organic mutuality of these factors. His arguments are shaped by the politics, literature, and economics of his age. At the same time, the concrete programs he proposed and his sharp criticisms of alternative policies are rooted in the metaphysical soil of man and the world, human solidarity and cosmic symbiosis, and human nature within the natural world. The book is divided into two parts. Part 1 analyzes the concrete as opposed to the theoretical character of Mencius' thought. Huang demonstrates the organic unity of his intellectual system with its concepts of linkage between innermost to outermost, self to social, rightness vs. profit, and his political ideal of populist government through familial empathy. Part 2 deals with the long historical odyssey of Mencius' work in China's interpretive tradition, an exegetical process similar in its origins to Western hermeneutics. In comparing and analyzing these approaches to Mencius, Huang seeks to show that Chinese hermeneutics is more than an activity of intellectual curiosity about the ancient world, but is instead a means to sociopolitical action, an application in society of the fruits of personal cultivation. Mencian Hermeneutics will be of interest to Chinese area specialists, sociologists, literary scholars, and philosophers. Chun-chieh Huang is a professor of history and chairman of the Commission of General Education at National Taiwan University in Taipei. He is the author of five books on Confucianism and five books on Taiwan.

This volume deals with the development of Chinese hermeneutics, or exegetic systems, from their beginnings to the twentieth century. The contributors address critical issues in the study of Chinese hermeneutics by focusing on key periods during which the hermeneutic tradition in China underwent significant changes. The volume is divided into six parts, corresponding to the six major periods of intellectual change in traditional and contemporary China. Part 1 considers the foundational period of Chinese hermeneutics, examining Confucian classics such as the Analects, Mencius, and the Book of Odes. Part 2 traces the broadening of the hermeneutic tradition from Confucian classics to the military canon, political discourse, astronomy, and Buddhist exegesis from the Han to the Chinese Middle Ages. In Part 3 the focus is on Zhu Xi's monumental synthesis and redefinition of the Confucian tradition at the beginning of the early modern period. His vision of Confucian thought remained influential throughout the imperial period, and his interpretations of the Confucian classics became state orthodoxy starting with the thirteenth century. Part 4 focuses on this challenge and discusses the intellectual changes that took place during the late imperial period and their profound effects on Chinese hermeneutics. Part 5 documents the challenges to traditional Chinese hermeneutics in the modern era and the emergence of a new, critical hermeneutics in the beginning of the twentieth century. The volume concludes with Part 6, which explores Chinese hermeneutics from a comparative perspective and identifies its distinctive features. The understanding of Chinese hermeneutics gained from these essays is that of a dynamic plurality of traditions that has endured into the twentieth century and continues to shape contemporary intellectual debates. Ching-I Tu is professor and chairperson in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey. He is the author of Poetic Remarks in the Human World, and editor of Tradition and Creativity: Essays on East Asian Civilization and Classics and Interpretations: The Hermeneutic Tradition in Chinese Culture, both published by Transaction.