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Scripture, Canon, and Commentary
A Comparison of Confucian and Western Exegesis
By John B. Henderson PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1991 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-06832-9
CHAPTER 1
ORIGINS AND ANTECEDENTS OF THE CLASSICS
The Confucian canon (or canons) is as diverse in its origins and complicated in its development as that of almost any major classical or scriptural tradition. Its antecedents may plausibly be traced back to such variegated sources as the oracle-bone divination of the second millennium B.C. and to folk songs and sayings by early inhabitants of the North China Plain. Although standard versions of the canon were fixed under the Han dynasty, with a major reformation coming more than a millennium later in the Suirg era, classical scholars continued to propose revisions and re-enumerations of the classics in the centuries that followed. The relatively amorphous and permeable character of the Confucian canon was, in fact, a source of perplexity for at least one famous scholar of the Han era, the grand historian Ssu-ma T'an (d. 110 B.C.), who once commented that "the Confucians are too broad and lack a vital center."
This complaint notwithstanding, the heterogeneity of the books in the Confucian canon, particularly the Five Classics established under the Han, is not at all atypical when compared with that of canons in other major classical or scriptural traditions. Few if any of these are unified works composed by a single hand or even like-minded hands. Almost all canons are complex anthologies assembled by "schools" and even whole civilizations over long periods of time. The Bible, for example, comprises what remains of the library of an articulate culture assembled over many hundreds of years. It presents such a mosaic of literary forms, including "commandments, aphorisms, epigrams, proverbs, parables, riddles, pericopes, parallel couplets, formulaic phrases, folktales, oracles, epiphanies, Gattungen, Logia, bits of occasional verse, marginal glosses, legends, snippets from historical documents, laws, letters, sermons, hymns, ecstatic visions, rituals, fables, genealogical lists, and so on almost indefinitely," that Northrop Frye speculates: "In no language but Biblical Hebrew, perhaps, would it have been possible to put together so miscellaneous a mass of material." This miscellaneousness was, in fact, better recognized by medieval commentators, who customarily spoke not of the "Bible" but of the "holy books" (sacri libri) and "divine books" (divini libri), than it is by moderns. But for sheer miscellaneousness, the Indian epic, the Mahabharata, outstrips even the Bible and the Hebrew scriptures. According to J.A.B. van Buitenen, an analogical work in Western culture might include something like the following: "an Iliad, rather less tightly structured than it is now, incorporating an abbreviated version of The Odyssey, quite a bit of Hesiod, some adapted sequences from Herodotus, assimilated and distorted pre-Socratic fragments, Socrates by way of Plato by way of Plotinus, a fair proportion of the Gospels by way of moralizing stories, with the whole complex of 200,000 lines worked over, edited, polished by successive waves of anonymous church fathers." Even relatively homogeneous Indian canonical texts such as the Upanishads contain "all sorts of miscellaneous ideas, injunctions, incantations, theological interpretations, conversations, traditions, and so forth ... assembled and set down without any sequence."
Other major scriptures, particularly the Qur'an, are more homogeneous and unified. But even that book "represents an arbitrary arrangement of short passages which had been uttered by the Prophet at various times and in various places throughout his lifetime." Finally, the Iliad and Odyssey, which owing to their finer literary qualities as well as their having been edited by Alexandrian scholars should present more of a united front, have been characterized as containing "a motley collection of tales, traditions, legends, and even forms from different times and places." In sum, although the classics or scriptures in various traditions differ widely from one another in their literary character and intellectual orientation, they are at least alike in their différance, in their heterogeneity and internal dissonance. The characterization of the Classic of Change by the great nineteenth-century I-ching scholar Matsui Rashu, as "an incredible conglomeration of very diverse elements," could well be applied to almost any of the non-Chinese classics or scriptures mentioned above.
Even some traditional commentators recognized the anthological character and disparate sources of canonical works. The T'ang-era classicist Lu Te-ming (556–648), for example, characterized one of the five Confucian classics, the Record of Rites, as an anthology of assorted leftovers from the other two classics on ritual, the Deportment and Rites (I-li) and the Rites of Chou (Chou-li). The Neo-Confucian scholar Wu Ch'eng (1247–1331) also regarded this classic as a heterogeneous collection of fragments with many gaps, and even went so far as to rearrange the received text to make the chapters follow one another in a more logical order. Few classical scholars and commentators, however, expressed such views regarding most of the books in their canon. For such ideas contravened some of their basic assumptions (discussed in chapter 4, below) regarding the character of the canon, particularly that it is self-consistent and well ordered.
While they generally rejected or failed to consider the notion that the classics originated as anthologies that redactors assembled from disparate sources, classicists and commentators in traditional civilizations could hardly have ignored such an important and obvious question as that of the provenance of their canons. Although divine revelation and inspiration is perhaps the most commonly recognized answer to this question in Western and Middle Eastern scriptural traditions, other explanations are possible, including those proposed by early Confucians. Since these explanations considerably influenced Confucian commentators' approaches to their canon, it is appropriate to include an account of them here.
* * *
One of the most peculiar of these theories traced each of the classics to a particular department or office in the legendary exemplary bureaucracy of high antiquity. Specifically, the Office of Music issued the Songs Classic, the Office of Records the Documents Classic and the Spring and Autumn Annals, the Office of Divination the Classic of Change, and the Office of Ritual the Rites. This theory at least had the merit of presenting the classics as an ordered whole, congruent with the organization of the ideal bureaucracy, while implicitly acknowledging their heterogeneous character. It also explained the apparent orientation of a number of these Confucian classics toward matters of statecraft.
A related conception of the origins of the Confucian classics saw them as products of the decline and fall of the ancient bureaucracy and of the exemplary political and moral order it represented. Some traditional scholars expressed this idea with regard to the canon as a whole. According to the Sui History "Treatise on the Classics" (Sui-shu, Ching-chi chih), Confucius' expounding and editing of the classics was his response to the decline of the Chou dynasty and its attendant political and moral order. The Sung-era encyclopedist Cheng Ch'iao (1104–1162) viewed this development from a more cosmic perspective, remarking that when heaven ceased to give birth to sage-rulers as a means of instituting proper political order and human relationships, it did the next best thing by giving birth to the Sage, Confucius, who established the Six Classics as a substitute.
But Confucian commentators more frequently advanced the theory that the classics are products of an era of decline by reference to two particular classics, the Songs Classic and the Spring and Autumn Annals, which are linked in the saying in Mencius that "when the traces of the [ancient] kings were extinguished the Songs was lost; and when the Songs was lost the Annals was composed." A statement in the important Han-era compendium Huai-nan-tzu ([Book of the] Master of Huai-nan) explains the meaning of this rather cryptic utterance by asserting that "when the kingly Way deteriorated, the Songs Classic was composed; when the house of Chou was abandoned and rites and rightness decayed, the Spring and Autumn Annals was composed. The Songs and Annals are epitomes of learning. [But] they are both products of an era of decline." The most important and influential such characterization of the origins of the Songs Classic appears in its "Great Preface" (Ta-hsü), a work traditionally attributed to one of Confucius' disciples, Tzu-hsia, but actually composed by a scholar in the Han era. A famous passage in this preface relates that "when the kingly Way declined and rites and rightness were abandoned, and government by moral instruction lost with each state having a different government and each family different customs, then the 'Changed Airs' and 'Changed Odes' [sections of the Songs] were composed." The Shuo-yüan (Garden of Discourses), a work by the famous Han-era scholar and imperial librarian Liu Hsiang (77–6 B.C.), sets the Annals in a similar context of cultural decline when it attributes to Confucius the following words: "If the virtue of the Chou had not been lost, the Spring and Autumn Annals would not have "been composed. As soon as the Annals was composed, gentlemen knew that the Way of the Chou was lost." A more elaborate expression of this idea appears in a nineteenth-century subcommentary by Ch'en Li (1809–1869) on the Kung-yang Commentary to the Annals:
When the house of Chou [was forced to] move eastward [in 771 B.C., thus marking the end of its effective power], the order and writings of the [ancient] three dynasties were spent. With respect to what is above, none investigated the Way; and with respect to what is below, no one defended the law. Thus the Sage [Confucius] was constrained to compose the Annals to elucidate the system of kingship.
Thus, the one classic that was widely believed to be the product of Confucius' own hand, the Annals, was supposedly his answer to the decline of the ancient political and moral order.
* * *
But what of Confucius' relationship to the other classics, specifically the Documents, Songs, Rites, and Change? The Analects does contain a couple of brief and enigmatic statements that apparently link Confucius to some of the classics, or preclassics. For example: "The Master frequently talked about the Songs, the Documents, and upholding the Rites." Confucius was also said to have wished that he had fifty more years to devote to the study of the Change. These classical texts, however, evidently do not record Confucius' own teachings. The Master is said only to have studied and perhaps taught these texts, or the arts or disciplines associated with them. But is this a sufficiently strong link between the revered founder of a tradition and its canon? Must not Confucius have had a hand in the formation or formulation of the classics and not just in their teaching and transmission?
Scholars of the Han era devised a number of rather intricate formulae that ascribed to Confucius a more active and exalted role in the development of the classics. According to the School Sayings of Confucius (K'ung-tzu chia-yü), "Confucius was born in [the era of) the declining Chou [dynasty] when the records of the former kings were in chaos and disorder.... He expurgated the Songs, expounded the Documents, fixed the Rites, arranged the Music, composed the Spring and Autumn Annals, and exalted and clarified the Way of the Change. Thus he handed down the teachings to later ages as a model."
One might interpret the last sentence in this account to mean that Confucius' primary role was that of a transmitter of the sagely wisdom embodied in the classics. This conception is, moreover, supported by the influential remark attributed to Confucius in the Analects that "I expound but do not innovate, trusting and loving antiquity." But few later commentators took Confucius at his word on this point, identifying him simply as a transmitter. As the Han Confucianist Yang Hsiung (53 B.C.–A.D. 18) remarked regarding the Documents, Songs, Rites, and Annals, Confucius "in some cases followed [existing works] and in some cases composed [new works]." "How," queried the T'ang-era Confucian philosopher Li Ao (fl. 798), "could he like Lao P'eng have confined himself to expounding on ancient affairs?"
Further, even with respect to those classical texts that he was not supposed to have actually composed (principally the Documents, the Songs, and the Rites), Confucius, by most traditional accounts, did not merely transmit. Nor did he limit himself simply to editing or compiling the records of the ancient sage-rulers. Rather, his chief contribution, many scholars of the Han and later eras argued, was in his having expurgated these precanonical writings in the course of transmitting them. The Chinese classics, in other words, became classics, were transformed from collections of ancient records on matters related to politics and ritual into a set of canonical texts by a process of excision or expurgation. And Confucius himself was the grand expurgator of the tradition. Although such a characterization might seem to portray Confucius as a singular figure as nefarious as the proverbial Grand Inquisitor, expurgation and excision are among the main devices employed by commentators in classical or scriptural traditions in general. They are strategies by which later commentators and redactors deal with such problems in canonical texts as improprieties, superfluities, and internal contradictions (as we shall see).
Not all Confucian commentators of later centuries shared this conception of Confucius as grand expurgator or exciser, but most did agree that Confucius' primary contribution to the Songs was his having deleted those which were superfluous or inappropriate for ethical instruction. In the words of Chu Hsi, Confucius "deleted what was superfluous and corrected what was disordered. As to what was good yet not fit to be taken as a model, and evil yet not fit to be taken as a warning, he cut and deleted it in order to conform with succinctness and to make [the Songs] known perpetually." In so doing, Chu Hsi indicated, Confucius transformed a book of its own age, the Songs, into a book for all the ages, one that might teach the good and reform the wicked. In short, through his judicious exercise of excision, Confucius supposedly transformed a precanonical anthology of songs into a classic.
Some scholars of the Han era maintained that Confucius expurgated not only the Songs but the Documents as well, particularly those portions which were confused and irrelevant to the practice of statecraft. The Ming Neo-Confucian philosopher Wang Yang-ming (1472–1529), whose only apparent link with Han exegetes is that both have been characterized as "Confucian," also argued that Confucius abridged the Documents. In so doing, said Wang, he "[retained] only a few chapters concerning the four or five odd centuries of the T'ang, Yu, and Hsia periods." The Record of Rites, the third of the three classics that Confucius was said to have only transmitted, not composed, was also supposed to have been formed through a process of excision, although not necessarily by Confucius. According to a scholar of the third century, Ch'en Shao, the Rites as we have it is the product of a succession of parings, from 204 chapters to 85 chapters to 49 chapters. Even in composing the Spring and Autumn Annals, Confucius by some later accounts judiciously culled material from existing historical chronicles, principally that for the state of Lu, in order to form his classic. In so doing, said the late-Ch'ing historian of the classics P'i Hsi-jui (1850–1908), Confucius "selected only one-tenth [of the original chronicle of Lu], In general he selected [for inclusion] those affairs which could clarify his meaning and stand as a model for later ages. The rest he excised and did not record." Confucius' having followed this procedure, P'i argued, accounted for most of the apparent lacunae and other anomalies in the classic.
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Excerpted from Scripture, Canon, and Commentary by John B. Henderson. Copyright © 1991 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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