Unit 15 · Interpreters Across the Centuries

Open a traditional Chinese edition of the Analects and you will see large characters for the text and small characters for notes packed between the lines. The notes are the commentary. Some editions carry several layers: an early commentary, a later subcommentary, and notes on both. Readers met the classics through these layers.

In Europe, philosophers often wrote new treatises under their own names. In China, many thinkers built new ideas by explaining old texts. A commentator could say something bold while presenting it as the true meaning of Confucius or Laozi. Scholars call this the hermeneutic tradition: the art of interpreting texts.

This means that the history of Chinese philosophy is partly a history of readings. When you read Zhu Xi, you read Zhu Xi reading the Analects. When you read Wang Bi, you read Wang Bi reading the Daodejing. To understand a later thinker, you ask what text they were explaining and what they changed.

He Yan, who died in 249 CE, was a scholar and official of the Wei state. With others, he compiled the Collected Explanations of the Analects, the Lunyu jijie. It gathered notes from earlier Han and Wei scholars, adding his own. It is the oldest complete Analects commentary to survive.

A collected commentary is a kind of anthology: it gathers voices. Readers could see several explanations of one line side by side. For about nine hundred years, until Zhu Xi’s notes replaced it in the exam system, He Yan’s collection was the main way scholars read the Analects.

He Yan was also linked to a new movement of thought in his time, often called Xuanxue, "Profound Learning" or "Learning of the Mysterious." Its thinkers read the Laozi, the Zhuangzi and the Book of Changes alongside Confucius. They asked about being and nonbeing. Wang Bi was its youngest star.

Wang Bi died at 23. In that short life he wrote commentaries on the Daodejing and the Book of Changes that are still read today. His text of the Daodejing became one of the main received versions. Much of what readers know as the standard Daodejing passed through his hands.

Wang Bi stressed wu, nothingness or nonbeing. For him, the Dao has no form and no name. Because it is nothing in particular, it can be the root of every particular thing. He read chapter 11’s empty hub and chapter 40’s "being comes from nonbeing" in this light. This view is often called "valuing nonbeing."

A famous anecdote in the Shishuo xinyu shows his balance. Someone asked why Confucius never spoke of nonbeing while Laozi spoke of it all the time. Wang Bi is said to have answered that Confucius embodied nonbeing, so he did not need to speak of it; Laozi had not fully embodied it, so he talked about it. The answer honors both sages.

Zhu Xi was the great organizer of what English writers call Neo-Confucianism, a revival of Confucian thought in the Song dynasty. He answered Buddhist and Daoist ideas with a full account of the world built from Confucian classics. His teachers included thinkers of the Cheng brothers’ school.

Two terms are central. Li 理, principle, is the pattern or reason that makes a thing what it is and what it should be. It is a different word and character from li 禮, ritual. Qi is the vital stuff or energy that everything is made of. Every thing has both: principle gives the pattern, qi gives the form.

For Zhu Xi, human nature is principle, and so it is good, as Mencius said. But each person’s qi can be clear or cloudy, which is why people act badly. Learning clears the cloud. This let Zhu Xi explain both Mencius’s good nature and the plain fact that people often do wrong.

The Great Learning is a short text that Zhu Xi made one of the Four Books. It lists steps: investigating things, extending knowledge, making the will sincere, rectifying the mind, cultivating the self, ordering the family, governing the state, bringing peace to the world. The first step is gewu.

Zhu Xi read gewu as "investigating things": reaching out to things and studying their principle. He thought the text had lost a passage explaining this, so he wrote a short supplement in its place. In his reading, you study one thing today and another tomorrow. Over time, understanding suddenly connects.

Zhu Xi mostly meant studying the classics, history and human affairs, not staring at plants. His method was patient and gradual. Readers praise it as disciplined learning. Critics said it split knowing from the mind and made learning endless. Wang Yangming’s bamboo story comes from this debate.

Zhu Xi grouped the Analects, the Mencius, the Great Learning and the Doctrine of the Mean as the Four Books. He published them together with his commentaries in 1190. He meant them as a path for learners: start with the Great Learning, then the Analects, the Mencius, and the Doctrine of the Mean.

After his death, his reputation rose. In 1313 the Yuan dynasty made his commentaries the standard for the civil service exams. For nearly six hundred years, until the exams ended in 1905, students across China memorized the Four Books through Zhu Xi’s eyes. Korea’s Joseon dynasty also made his school its orthodoxy.

The exams opened office to men of many backgrounds, but they excluded women entirely, and few poor families could pay for years of study. Critics, then and later, said the system turned learning into rote memorizing of one approved reading. Defenders praised its fairness compared with birth. Historians describe both sides.

Wang Yangming, named Wang Shouren, was a scholar, official and general of the Ming dynasty. In 1506 he angered a powerful court eunuch and was beaten and sent to a remote post at Longchang, in Guizhou, in the southwest. There, according to his own account and his students, he had a sudden insight in 1508.

He came to think that the mind already holds principle. There is no need to seek it outside in things. Scholars summarize his view as "the mind is principle." This echoed the earlier thinker Lu Jiuyuan, a rival of Zhu Xi. So the later movement is often called the School of Mind, set against Zhu Xi’s School of Principle.

The insight changed Wang’s reading of gewu. Zhu Xi read ge as "reaching" things. Wang read it as "rectifying": setting right the intentions of the mind as it meets things. The same two characters now pointed inward. The Great Learning had not changed, but its first step had turned around.

A student once told Wang Yangming that people know they should honor their parents but often fail to do it. So knowing and acting must be two things. Wang disagreed. In Instructions for Practical Living, he says such people do not yet truly know. Real knowing already includes doing.

His example was simple. Seeing a lovely color belongs to knowing. Loving it belongs to acting. But you love it the moment you see it. You do not see it first and then decide to love it. In the same way, true moral knowledge moves a person at once. This teaching is called the unity of knowledge and action.

Wang also taught liangzhi, "innate knowing of the good," a term he took from Mencius 7A.15. Everyone, he said, has this inner knowing. The task is to extend it into every act. Critics warned that trusting the mind could lead to careless study. Admirers said it made learning live.

In Korea, the Joseon court made Zhu Xi’s school its orthodoxy. Scholars such as Yi Hwang, known as Toegye (1501–1570), and Yi I, known as Yulgok (1536–1584), debated how principle and qi relate in human feelings. Their letters are major works of philosophy. Wang Yangming’s teaching was often viewed with suspicion there.

In Japan, Zhu Xi’s school gained official support under the Tokugawa shogunate. Wang Yangming’s teaching, called Yomeigaku, also found strong followers, some of them activists who stressed action. Other Japanese scholars, like Ito Jinsai, tried to go back behind both to the Analects and Mencius themselves.

Vietnamese scholars also studied Zhu Xi’s commentaries for exams. The debate between principle in things and principle in the mind became a shared East Asian conversation. Today scholars in Seoul, Kyoto, Taipei and Beijing still study it. This course names these readers and does not rank them.

Every commentary answers questions of its own time. Wang Bi wrote when thinkers were debating being and nonbeing. Zhu Xi wrote when Buddhism offered a strong account of mind and world, and Confucians wanted a full answer. Wang Yangming wrote when Zhu Xi’s readings had become an exam routine.

So you can read a commentary with four questions. What text and line is it explaining? What problem of its time is it answering? What new terms does it bring in, such as nonbeing or principle? And what does it change or add to the plain text? These questions keep you from mixing the classic with its reader.

This is not a way of dismissing commentators. Many readers value them as the best guides to the classics. Many traditions of practice also live through commentary. Knowing a reading’s history lets you respect it and see it clearly. It also helps you see your own reading as one more in a long line.

The New Culture Movement began in magazines like New Youth, founded in 1915. Its writers, such as Chen Duxiu and Hu Shi, called for writing in everyday Chinese instead of classical style. They praised science and democracy. Many said Confucian ethics kept women, the young and the poor in their places.

A slogan from these years is usually translated "Down with the Confucian shop." It is linked with Hu Shi, who in 1921 praised the essayist Wu Yu for attacking "the Confucian shop." Historians note that Hu Shi himself was more measured than the slogan. He studied the classics for his whole life.

The May Fourth writers attacked especially the "three bonds," the Han-era teaching that ruler guides minister, father guides son and husband guides wife. They linked these bonds to arranged marriage, foot binding and silence before authority. Their defenders say they were attacking real harms. Their critics say they blamed the classics for what later societies built on them.

The Cultural Revolution, launched by Mao Zedong in 1966, attacked the "Four Olds": old customs, culture, habits and ideas. In late 1966 Red Guards damaged the Confucius temple, family mansion and cemetery in Qufu, Confucius’s hometown. Many temples, books and art works across China were destroyed.

In 1973–74 a national campaign called "Criticize Lin Biao, Criticize Confucius" linked the former defense minister Lin Biao, who had died in 1971, with Confucius. Articles recast Confucius as a defender of slave owners. Historians widely read the campaign as also aimed at living political figures, using Confucius as a proxy.

Families who kept ancestor rites and scholars who studied the classics often suffered in these years. After Mao’s death in 1976 the campaigns ended. The Qufu sites were later restored, and the Confucius temple, mansion and cemetery were named a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1994. Chinese scholars and families remember this period in many different ways.

Mencius 3A.4 lists five relationships: father and son, ruler and minister, husband and wife, elder and younger, friend and friend. Only the last is between equals. Later ritual texts taught women the "three obediences": to father, then husband, then son. For centuries women were excluded from the exams and most public offices.

Feminist readers respond in several ways. Some argue the tradition built women’s subordination into its core. Some, such as the scholar Lisa Rosenlee in Confucianism and Women (2006), trace how gender roles and Confucian teaching grew together over history. Others argue that ideas like ren and reciprocity can be used to support equality.

Readers also turn to the Daodejing, which prizes the soft, the low and the "female." Chapter 28 advises knowing the male but keeping to the female. Some feminist readers welcome this. Others warn that praising "feminine" softness can still fix women in one role. The debate is lively and unsettled, and the course describes it without ruling.

In 1958, four scholars living outside mainland China, Mou Zongsan, Tang Junyi, Xu Fuguan and Carsun Chang (Zhang Junmai), issued a manifesto. They argued that Chinese culture, and Confucianism at its heart, had a living spiritual core. It could learn from Western democracy and science without losing itself.

Scholars call this movement New Confucianism. Its thinkers drew on Mencius and Wang Yangming. They held that inner moral knowing is the root of culture. Later, Tu Weiming, teaching at Harvard, spoke of a "third epoch" of Confucianism in a global age.

Critics raise questions. Some ask whether New Confucians gave democracy real roots or just added it on. Some mainland scholars in the 1980s and 1990s criticized the movement; others joined it. Some writers promote a "political Confucianism" instead. The debates show the tradition being argued about by its own members.

After the Cultural Revolution, scholars in China began to study Confucius again. By the 2000s interest had grown widely. In 2006 Yu Dan, a media studies professor, gave television lectures on the Analects that became a bestselling book. Some families sent children to classes to recite the classics.

Government leaders also began to speak of Confucian values such as harmony. Confucius’s birthday ceremonies in Qufu became large public events. Some observers see a real cultural revival. Others see the state using tradition for its own ends. Many see both at once.

Scholars within China differ too. Some welcome popular interest. Some said Yu Dan’s book simplified the Analects into self-help. Some promote Confucianism as a basis for politics; others worry about that. The revival is not one thing. It is many readers, with many aims, reading the same old texts.

In 2004 China opened its first Confucius Institute, in Seoul. The institutes were partnerships between Chinese organizations and foreign universities. They taught Chinese language and culture and held events such as New Year celebrations. By the late 2010s there were hundreds around the world, including many in the United States.

Critics raised concerns about academic freedom: the right of scholars to teach and research without outside pressure. Some argued the institutes avoided topics the Chinese government considered sensitive. Supporters said they offered language classes many schools could not otherwise afford. Reports by scholars and the U.S. government weighed in.

Between about 2019 and 2022, most Confucius Institutes in the United States closed. China reorganized the program’s management in 2020. Note what the name does and does not mean. The institutes used Confucius as a cultural symbol. Their classes were mostly about language, not the Analects.

Jesuit missionaries in China studied the classics closely. In 1687 a group of them published Confucius Sinarum Philosophus, "Confucius, Philosopher of the Chinese," in Latin. It translated the Analects, the Great Learning and the Doctrine of the Mean. It gave Europe its name for Kong Fuzi: Confucius.

European thinkers of the Enlightenment read these translations with interest. Some, such as Voltaire, admired what they saw as a moral order not founded on church authority. Others were more critical. Their images of China often said as much about Europe’s debates as about China.

In the 1800s Protestant missionaries and scholars, including Legge, made fuller translations with the Chinese text beside them. Legge’s work set a standard. It also carried his own views. Later scholars, Chinese and Western, built on it and argued with it. Every stage of Western reading was also a stage of interpretation.

Leo Tolstoy, the Russian novelist, read the Daodejing in his later years and helped prepare a Russian version. He saw in it a teaching of nonviolence close to his own reading of the Gospels. The German philosopher Martin Heidegger tried, in 1946, to translate parts of it with the Chinese scholar Paul Shih-yi Hsiao, but the project stopped.

In 1997 the novelist Ursula K. Le Guin published her own rendering, calling it a version and not a translation. Many popular books, such as The Tao of Pooh (1982), used the Daodejing to talk about calm and simplicity. Business books quote it on leadership. It has been put into English hundreds of times.

Scholars respond in different ways. Some welcome the wide interest. Some worry about "Tao of" books that cut the text from its Chinese setting and from living Daoist religion. Some Daoist practitioners say Western readers often forget temples, rituals and priests. Knowing these debates helps a reader cite carefully.

An insider reads a text as part of a tradition they belong to: a Daoist priest reciting the Daodejing, a Confucian family reading the Analects at home, a New Confucian scholar. An outsider reads from another place: a historian, a Western philosopher, a novelist. Many readers are partly both.

Each position sees something. Insiders know how the text lives in practice: in ritual, family and memory. Outsiders may notice patterns an insider takes for granted, or compare it with other traditions. Each can also miss things. Scholars of religion often ask how to respect insiders while studying carefully.

Chinese American readers often stand between. Some grew up with Qingming visits and New Year customs and later studied the classics at school. Some have written about stereotypes like the "Confucius says" joke that flatten their heritage. Listening to many readers, without ranking them, is part of reading these classics well.

Put the readings from this chapter on a map. At one side, May Fourth writers and Cultural Revolution campaigns rejected Confucius as a symbol of the old order. In the middle, feminist and critical scholars ask what to keep and what to change. On the other side, New Confucians and revivalists defend the tradition’s core.

Add a second line for use. Some readers use the classics for politics: states, campaigns, institutes. Some use them for personal life: self-help, meditation, family. Some use them for scholarship: dating texts, comparing translations. The same book, like the Analects, appears in every corner.

This kind of reception history studies how a text has been read over time. It does not decide which reading is right. It shows the reasons behind each one. That is what allows a careful writer to say, for example, "May Fourth critics read the three bonds as oppressive; New Confucians answered that..."