Chinanews.com, Beijing, January 1 (Li Ziwei) "Is Mencius really written by Mencius? Is Xunzi really written by Xunzi? Is the Historical Records comprehensive enough?" On January 7, in a lecture entitled "Co-authors of Early China" sponsored by the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences of Tsinghua University, Greg ('1) and Joanna (P6) Zeluck Chair Professor of Asian Studies at Princeton UniversityMartin Kern asks these questions.
"Since the Han Dynasty, history books have been organized and organized to a greater or lesser extent. However, traditional Chinese writings confuse the image of the philosopher's master in the text with the author of the text. So today you can hear a lot of stories, such as Xunzi wrote "Xunzi" and so on. Cole Martin said.
According to Martin, the names of the authors in these titles are not the original first writers, and "even if Xunzi, Confucius, and Qu Yuan were the spokespersons of the discourses, they were not the authors of the texts of these discourses." This is a completely different question. The author should be an unnamed disciple or other compiler. ”
He explains, "The writings of three of the most famous figures of early China, Confucius, Xunzi, and Mencius, tend to be contradictory and timeline-confused, and for this reason they are considered authentic and unvarnished primary textual material." ”
These somewhat chaotic texts, edited by their disciples or other compilers, were edited, collected, compiled, etc., and compiled into books, so that, in Co Martin's view, "they became unauthored authors by integrating them, writing biographies, and giving explanations." ”
In collating the material, those authors are also the selectors. "The Records of the Historian says that Zhuangzi 'wrote more than 90,<> words', but the heirloom version of the Zhuangzi is less than two-thirds of its length, and Liu Xiang, who was ordered to proofread books in the Han Dynasty, deleted about <>% of the material when sorting out texts such as Xunzi and Guanzi. Cole Martin said.
He argues that the vast majority of early Chinese literature is actually an anthology or a repository of materials limited by certain conditions, and that they are not "written", but are "gradually compiled" to form the works we see today. These recorded texts are like shared property, and their significance does not lie in their origin or the authority of a particular author. Just as Qu Yuan represents not only a poet, but also the pursuit of ideals projected by Chinese intellectuals. ”
He is one of the editors-in-chief of the well-known international sinology journal Bulletin, and has published monographs such as Performance and Interpretation: A Study of Early Chinese Historiography, Texts and Rituals in Early China, and edited Qu Yuan and Chu Ci: New Research Methods and < Zuo Chuan > and Early Chinese Historiography. (ENDS)