Session Abstract

In view of the resurgent popular interest in the Confucian Classics in China and elsewhere, it is timely that historians provide an audience of comparative scholars and Asianists with an account of the Confucian canonical tradition. Viewed in historical perspective, three questions stand out: How the canon began? How it endured major transformations before the onset of modernity? What modern challenges have meant/will mean for the canonical heritage? These problem areas will be explored in the three pivotal eras highlighted in this panel.

      Western scholars have focused on the dominance of culture in traditional Chinese identity, and the Confucian canon has long been a primary locus for such identity.  However, since ancient China’s canon could never have been established without the state’s active participation, Cheng wonders if scholars have downplayed political forces underpinning this cultural worldview.  Archeological finds from the formative stage of China’s canon should enhance our exploration of the impact of shifting power relations among significant participants in the political-cultural system, for they reflect an inner canonical hierarchy pristine to all later recompositions in more mature stages. 

       By the middle era (specifically, during the Song, 960-1279), classicists revitalized the Classics and the status of the philosophical Masters, and Zhu Xi emerged as the most authoritative reader of the Confucian Classics to rationalize and systematize the canon. Zhu’s reorganization of the canon, including his foregrounding the Analects, the Mencius and two chapters from a ritual classic as most essential, promoted these Four Books to such prominence that they became the core curriculum for China’s civil service examinations into the twentieth century. Yin and Tillman (co-authors) also explore Zhu Xi’s work on the Ritual Classics in order to contrast Song transformations from earlier periods and to set the stage for Late Imperial and Modern China’s critical reactions against Song interpretations and utilizations of the canon. Zhu Xi’s philosophical promotion of one’s inner perfectibility, shrouded in and fortified by a thickened canonical system, would become vulnerable when modernity presented other options for humanistic education and ethics.

       Continuing the panel’s emphasis on approaching our subject structurally, Makeham sheds new light on the Levensonian question: Has the Confucian canon permanently lost its relevancy? In addition to an overview of the historical background for today’s discourse on canonical revival, Makeham carefully sets forth major options available to the protagonists for the canon in the wake of irreversible changes in academia and society that occurred in modernizing China. Although a key goal for many of the contemporary protagonists is to see the canon revived under the broad disciplinary umbrella of National Studies, Makeham shows that the stronger the claim made that the canon warrants disciplinary status (and hence taxonomic division), the weaker the case that canon is a holistic field of learning.

       As attention is increasingly drawn to the phenomenon of reviving the Classics and to associated academic/social issues, we historians hope our panel provides background context crucially requisite for addressing issues inherent in the latest recurrent life of the canon in China.