SUNY series in Chinese Philosophy and Culture
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John Dewey and Daoist Thought
Experiments in Intra-cultural Philosophy
by Jim Behuniak
Part 1 of the SUNY series in Chinese Philosophy and Culture series
Proposes an "intra-cultural philosophy" based on John Dewey's "cultural turn" and promotes Daoist thought as a resource that can help to reconstruct outmoded assumptions that continue to shape how we currently think.
In this timely and original work, Dewey's late-period "cultural turn" is recovered and "intra-cultural philosophy" proposed as its next logical step-a step beyond what is commonly known as comparative philosophy. The first of two volumes, John Dewey and Daoist Thought argues that early Chinese thought is poised to join forces with Dewey in meeting our most urgent cultural needs: namely, helping us to correct our outdated Greek-medieval assumptions, especially where these result in pre-Darwinian inferences about the world.
Relying on the latest research in both Chinese and American philosophies, Jim Behuniak establishes "specific philosophical relationships" between Dewey's ideas and early Daoist thought, suggesting how, together, they can assist us in getting our thinking "back in gear" with the world as it is currently known through the biological, physical, and cognitive sciences. Topics covered include the organization of organic form, teleology, cosmology, knowledge, the body, and technolog-thus engaging Dewey with themes generally associated with Daoist thought. Volume one works to establish "Chinese natural philosophy" as an empirical framework in which to consider cultural-level phenomena in volume two.
Jim Behuniak is Professor of Philosophy at Colby College. He is the author of John Dewey and Confucian Thought: Experiments in Intra-cultural Philosophy, Volume Two and Mencius on Becoming Human, both also published by SUNY Press.
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From Metaphysical Representations to Aesthetic Life
Toward the Encounter with the Other in the Perspective of Daoism
by Massimiliano Lacertosa
Part of the SUNY series in Chinese Philosophy and Culture series
What is "Chinese philosophy?" What is "philosophy" itself? How can one understand unfamiliar philosophical stances? How can comparison become a prominent philosophical tool? In this book, Massimiliano Lacertosa examines these questions by proposing an ethical understanding of the aesthetic encounter with the other and the world. Through the analysis of the works of Laozi, Zhuangzi, Nietzsche, and Heidegger, among others, this book explores the possibilities of stepping out of the anthropocentric standpoint and seeing the relation of objects in the world under a different light. This implies a shift from the metaphysical representation of the world divided between the sensible and the supersensible to an aesthetic and undivided experience of the world in which one partakes in the constant transformation of the myriad things. Approachable yet rigorous, this book is essential reading for anyone interested in the most fundamental issues of philosophy and in the challenges of doing philosophy in a multicultural context.
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Writing Early China
by Edward L. Shaughnessy
Part of the SUNY series in Chinese Philosophy and Culture series
Archaeological discoveries over the past one hundred years have resulted in repeated calls to "rewrite ancient Chinese history." This is especially true of documents written on oracle bones, bronze vessels, and bamboo strips. In Writing Early China, Edward L. Shaughnessy surveys all of these types of documents and considers what they reveal about the creation and transmission of knowledge in ancient China. Opposed to the common view that most knowledge was transmitted orally in ancient China, Shaughnessy demonstrates that by no later than the tenth-century BCE scribes were writing lengthy texts like portions of the Chinese classics, and that by the fourth-century BCE the primary mode of textual transmission was by way of visual copying from one manuscript to another.
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Unlocking the Chinese Gate
Manifestations of the Space "In-Between" in Early China
by Galia Dor
Part of the SUNY series in Chinese Philosophy and Culture series
Unlocking the Chinese Gate offers an innovative analysis of gates in early Chinese thought and material culture. Observing gates from various perspectives-including philosophy, architecture, and psychology-and through the conceptual lens of Chinese correlative thinking, Galia Dor conceptualizes the Chinese gate as a membrane-like apparatus that, from the space "in-between," efficaciously manifests (de) the Way (dao) into the "ten thousand" forms of actualized life. This methodology exposes an open-to-closed gradation between pairs of inside/outside (wai/nei) that resonates throughout the Chinese model of psychocosmic concentric circles. The consequential strategies (e.g., continuity/break, chaos/order) demonstrate how early Chinese cosmological, philosophical, and political idealities, as well as afterlife religious beliefs, were applied-including the various approaches to and practices of self-cultivation. The book sheds new light on ancient Chinese thought and material culture and offers points of comparison to Western thought and modern science, including a model of "decision-gating" that carries relevant implications and insights to our current lives.
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The Whirlpool That Produced China
Stag Hunting on the Central Plain
by Tingyang Zhao
Part of the SUNY series in Chinese Philosophy and Culture series
In The Whirlpool That Produced China, Tingyang Zhao offers a philosophical interpretation of China's historicity, explaining how the expansion of China was not due to the lures of expansionist behavior but to the offerings of the surrounding contenders as they were constantly being pulled into a whirlpool of growth and amalgamation. The peoples surrounding China on all four sides sought to win the greatest material benefits and greatest spiritual resources by shaping their ways of thinking and living around the evolving core culture of the central plains. Zhao also investigates how the tianxia vision of world order was able to dissolve the fierce currents of contention and create out of them the inclusive model of many cultures and many peoples with many forms of governance. He explains these reasons for why China became China by weaving together ontology with game theory methodology: the "stag hunt." Ultimately, Zhao addresses the question of how ancient China became such an irresistible attraction-a stag-to its vital periphery that once a population and territory was drawn into the game, or the whirlpool, it was difficult if not impossible to withdraw.
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Affective Betrayal
Mind, Music, and Embodied Action in Late Qing China
by Jean Tsui
Part of the SUNY series in Chinese Philosophy and Culture series
Affective Betrayal uses "affect" as an analytical category to explicate the fragility and fragmentation of Chinese political modernity. In so doing, the book uncovers some of the unresolved moral and philosophical obstacles China encountered in the past, as well as the cultural predicament the country faces at present.
At the turn of the twentieth century, China's leading reformer Liang Qichao (1873–1929) presented modern political knowledge in musical and visual representational formats that were designed to stimulate readers' bodily senses. By expanding the reception of textual knowledge from "reading" to "listening" and "visualizing experiences," Liang generated an epistemic shift, and perhaps an all-inclusive internal intellectual, philosophical, and moral transition, alongside China's modern political reform. By tracing the marginalized academic and philosophical positions Liang sought to restore in China's incipient democratic movement, Affective Betrayal examines how his attempts to conjoin Confucian morality and liberal democracy expose hidden anxieties as well as inherent contradictions between these two systems of thought. These conflicts, besides disrupting the stability of China's burgeoning modern political order, explain why the import of modern concepts led to China's continued political impasse, rather than rationality and progress, after the 1911 revolution.
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Narrative Devices in the Shiji
Retelling the Past
by Lei Yang
Part of the SUNY series in Chinese Philosophy and Culture series
Narrative Devices in the Shiji: Retelling the Past offers the first systematic analysis of narratives in early Chinese historical writings from 400 BCE to 100 CE, with a focus on the Shiji (Records of the Historian), a vast collection of historical accounts completed by Sima Qian (145–86 BCE). For centuries, the dominant approach to the Shiji has been to infer Sima's intentions from his biographical experiences and subsequently project them back into the text. This has caused the import of the work to be overshadowed by Sima's tragedy of castration, and has minimized the question of how narrative as a form affects the text's interpretation. Lei Yang fills the gap by exploring how Sima manipulated the Shiji's narrative structure to represent the past. Drawing on Gérard Genette's narratological theories, the book examines how sequences of events build causality, what is slowed down and sped up to manage information control, and how the text provides multiple perspectives on the same events. Redefining the Shiji's place as a turning point in Chinese textual history, Narrative Devices in the Shiji sheds light on the evolution of early Chinese historiography. As an interdisciplinary dialogue between Chinese texts and the Western theories, it opens the Shiji to new interpretations and provides a novel framework for Chinese historical writings.
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Li Dazhao
China's First Communist
by Patrick Fuliang Shan
Part of the SUNY series in Chinese Philosophy and Culture series
As one of the founders of the Chinese Communist Party, Li Dazhao (1889–1927) was a key figure in China's transition from empire to republic, from tradition to modernity, and from imperial rule to turbulent revolution. Patrick Fuliang Shan's biography of Li, the first English-language study in over half a century, draws on a wealth of Chinese-language primary and secondary sources to examine Li's early life, family, education, and career; his endeavors to introduce Western civilization to the Chinese; his switch to communism and his leadership role in the early Communist movement; his political maneuvers and revolutionary activities; and his tragic death at the hands of the warlord Zhang Zuolin. While its focus is on Li's personal odyssey and extraordinary journey, the book also presents an in-depth analysis of China's broad national experience and its march towards modernity.
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Bone, Bronze, and Bamboo
Unearthing Early China with Sarah Allan
by Various Authors
Part of the SUNY series in Chinese Philosophy and Culture series
Bone, Bronze, and Bamboo explores the tremendous wealth of newly unearthed artifacts and manuscripts that have been revolutionizing the study of early China. Leading scholars from China and abroad lend their expertise in archaeology, art history, paleography, intellectual history, and many other disciplines to show how these fascinating finds change our understanding of China's past. Organized in a chronological progression from the Shang to Han periods, and treating bone, bronze, and bamboo-strip artifacts in turn, the book treats a wide breadth of topics, from the status of owls in Shang religion to the Zhou court's economic interest in managing salt resources, and from the conceptual evolution of de 德 in Spring and Autumn covenants to the interplay between materiality and text in Han scribal primers. Bone, Bronze, and Bamboo exemplifies the exciting energy and sense of discovery inspired by these sources in recent years, while surveying the latest debates and developments shaping early China as a field.
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Myth and the Making of History
Narrating Early China with Sarah Allan
by Various Authors
Part of the SUNY series in Chinese Philosophy and Culture series
Myth and the Making of History examines the relationship between myth and history in early China, a topic that has been explored by American paleographer and scholar of ancient China Sarah Allan throughout her career. Allan has worked at a crucial and sensitive intersection, where myth and history collide at the very heart of China's origin story. Her work has created an intellectual space in which the disciplines of philosophy, history, anthropology, archeology, philology, and literature have come together, helping to change the way scholars conceive of historical patterns in China's past. In Myth and the Making of History, eleven senior and emerging scholars, from both China and the West, respond to the intellectual challenge raised by Allan's theoretical model of analysis of mythologized and historical figures (and even dynasties) that have intrigued scholars for generations and play a central role in the Chinese historical imagination. The book will be of great interest to all scholars and students of China-of whatever level and discipline-and, indeed, those concerned with other early civilizations as well.
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Metaphor and Meaning
Thinking Through Early China with Sarah Allan
by Various Authors
Part of the SUNY series in Chinese Philosophy and Culture series
In Metaphor and Meaning, scholars from China, the United States, and Europe draw on Sarah Allan's groundbreaking application of conceptual metaphor theory to the study of early Chinese philosophy and material culture. Conceptual metaphor theory treats metaphors not just as linguistic expressions but as fundamental structures of thought that define one's conceptual system and perception of reality. To understand another culture's worldview, then, hinges upon identifying the right metaphors, through which it then becomes possible to navigate between shared and unshared experiences. The contributors pursue lines of argument that complement, enhance, or challenge Allan's prior investigations into these root metaphors of early Chinese philosophy, whether by explicitly engaging with conceptual metaphor theory or, more indirectly, by addressing meaning construction in a broader sense. Like Allan's interpretative works, Metaphor and Meaning interrogates both transmitted traditions and newly unearthed archaeological finds to understand how people in early China thought about the cosmos, society, and themselves.
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The Origins of Chinese Literary Hermeneutics
A Study of the Shijing and the Mao School of Confucian Exegesis
by Martin Svensson Ekström
Part of the SUNY series in Chinese Philosophy and Culture series
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.
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Technical Arts in the Han Histories
Tables and Treatises in the Shiji and Hanshu
by Various Authors
Part of the SUNY series in Chinese Philosophy and Culture series
The first concerted attempt to analyze how the histories Shiji and Hanshu described the technical arts as they were applied in vital areas of the administration of pre-Han and Han China.
While cultural literacy in early China was grounded in learning the Classics, basic competence in official life was generally predicated on acquiring several forms of technical knowledge. Recent archaeological finds have brought renewed attention to the use of technical manuals and mantic techniques within a huge range of discrete contexts, pushing historians to move beyond the generalities offered by past scholarship. To explore these uses, Technical Arts in the Han Histories delves deeply into the rarely studied "Treatises" and "Tables" compiled for the first two standard histories, the Shiji (Historical Records) and Hanshu (History of Han), important supplements to the better-known biographical chapters, and models for the inclusion of technical subjects in the twenty-three later "Standard Histories" of imperial China. Indeed, for a great many aspects of life in early imperial society, they constitute our best primary sources for understanding complex realities and perceptions. The essays in this volume seek to explain how different social groups thought of, disseminated, and withheld technical knowledge relating to the body, body politic, and cosmos, in the process of detailing the preoccupations of successive courts from Qin through Eastern Han in administering the localities, the frontier zones, and their numerous subjects (at the time, roughly one-quarter of the world's population).
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Persons Emerging
Three Neo-Confucian Perspectives on Transcending Self-Boundaries
by Galia Patt-Shamir
Part of the SUNY series in Chinese Philosophy and Culture series
Offers three neo-Confucian understandings of broadening the Way as broadening oneself, through an ongoing process of removing self-boundaries.
Persons Emerging explores the renewed idea of the Confucian person in the eleventh-century philosophies of Zhou Dunyi, Shao Yong, and Zhang Zai. Galia Patt-Shamir discusses their responses to the Confucian challenge that the Way, as perfection, can be broadened by the person who travels it. Suggesting that the three neo-Confucian philosophers undertake the classical Confucian task of "broadening the way," each proposes to deal with it from a different angle: Zhou Dunyi offers a metaphysical emerging out of the infinitude-finitude boundary, Shao Yong emerges out of the epistemological boundary between in and out, and Zhang Zai offers a pragmatic emerging out of the boundary between life and death.
Through the lens of these three Song-period China philosophers, the idea of "transcending self-boundaries" places neo-Confucian philosophies within the global philosophical context. Patt-Shamir questions the Confucian notions of person, Way, and how they relate to human flourishing to highlight how the emergence of personhood demands transcending metaphysical, epistemological, and moral self-boundaries.
Galia Patt-Shamir is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Tel-Aviv University, Israel. She is the author of To Broaden the Way: A Confucian-Jewish Dialogue, and, in Hebrew, Tongshu — Text and Commentary and A Human Riddle: Human Nature in Chinese Philosophy.
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Zhuangzi and the Becoming of Nothingness
by David Chai
Part of the SUNY series in Chinese Philosophy and Culture series
Investigates the cosmological and metaphysical thought in the Zhuangzi from the perspective of nothingness.
Zhuangzi and the Becoming of Nothingness offers a radical rereading of the Daoist classic Zhuangzi by bringing to light the role of nothingness in grounding the cosmological and metaphysical aspects of its thought. Through a careful analysis of the text and its appended commentaries, David Chai reveals not only how nothingness physically enriches the myriad things of the world, but also why the Zhuangzi prefers nothingness over being as a means to expound the authentic way of Dao. Chai weaves together Dao, nothingness, and being in order to reassess the nature and significance of Daoist philosophy, both within its own historical milieu and for modern readers interested in applying the principles of Daoism to their own lived experiences. Chai concludes that nothingness is neither a nihilistic force nor an existential threat; instead, it is a vital component of Dao's creative power and the life-praxis of the sage.
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Neo-Confucian Ecological Humanism
An Interpretive Engagement with Wang Fuzhi (1619-1692)
by Nicholas S. Brasovan
Part of the SUNY series in Chinese Philosophy and Culture series
Addresses Ming Dynasty philosopher Wang Fuzhi's neo-Confucianism from the perspective of contemporary ecological humanism.
In this novel engagement with Ming Dynasty philosopher Wang Fuzhi (1619—1692), Nicholas S. Brasovan presents Wang's neo-Confucianism as an important theoretical resource for engaging with contemporary ecological humanism. Brasovan coins the term "person-in-the-world" to capture ecological humanism's fundamental premise that humans and nature are inextricably bound together, and argues that Wang's cosmology of energy (qi) gives us a rich conceptual vocabulary for understanding the continuity that exists between persons and the natural world. The book makes a significant contribution to English-language scholarship on Wang Fuzhi and to Chinese intellectual history, with new English translations of classical Chinese, Mandarin, and French texts in Chinese philosophy and culture. This innovative work of comparative philosophy not only presents a systematic and comprehensive interpretation of Wang's thought but also shows its relevance to contemporary discussions in the philosophy of ecology.
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Apophatic Paths From Europe to China
Regions without Borders
by William Franke
Part of the SUNY series in Chinese Philosophy and Culture series
An encounter between Franke's philosophy of the unsayable and Eastern apophatic wisdom in the domains of poetry, thought, and culture.
In Apophatic Paths from Europe to China, William Franke brings his original philosophy of the unsayable, previously developed from Western sources such as ancient Neoplatonism, medieval mysticism, and postmodern negative theology, into dialogue with Eastern traditions of thought. In particular, he compares the Daoist Way of Chinese wisdom with Western apophatic thought that likewise pivots on recognizing the nonexistent, the unthinkable, and the unsayable. Leveraging François Jullien's exegesis of the Chinese classics' challenge to rethink the very basis of life and consciousness, Franke proposes negative theology as an analogue to the Chinese model of thought, which has long been recognized for its special attunement to silence at the limits of language. Crucial to Franke's agenda is the endeavor to discern and renew the claim of universality, rethought and reconfigured within the predicament of philosophy today considered specifically as a cultural or, more exactly, intercultural predicament.
William Franke is Professor of Comparative Literature at Vanderbilt University and the author of many books, including A Philosophy of the Unsayable.
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Confucianism's Prospects
A Reassessment
by Shaun O'Dwyer
Part of the SUNY series in Chinese Philosophy and Culture series
Challenges descriptions of East Asian societies as Confucian cultures and communitarian Confucian models as a political alternative to liberal democracy.
In Confucianism's Prospects, Shaun O'Dwyer offers a rare critical engagement with English language scholarship on Confucianism. Against the background of historical and sociological research into the rapid modernization of East Asian societies, O'Dwyer reviews several key Confucian ethical ideas and proposals for East Asian alternatives to liberal democracy that have emerged from this scholarship. He also puts the following question to Confucian scholars: what prospects do those ideas and proposals have in East Asian societies in which liberal democracy and pluralism are well established, and individualization and declining fertility are impacting deeply upon family life? In making his case, O'Dwyer draws upon the neglected work of Japanese philosophers and intellectuals who were witnesses to Japan's pioneering East Asian modernization, and protagonists in the rise and disastrous wartime fall of its own modernized Confucianism. He contests a sometimes Sinocentric and ahistorical conception of East Asian societies as "Confucian societies," while also recognizing that Confucian traditions can contribute importantly to global philosophical dialogue, and to civic and religious life.
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Birth in Ancient China
A Study of Metaphor and Cultural Identity in Pre-Imperial China
by Constance A. Cook
Part of the SUNY series in Chinese Philosophy and Culture series
Reveals cultural paradigms and historical prejudices regarding the role of birthing and women in the reproduction of society.
Using newly discovered and excavated texts, Constance A. Cook and Xinhui Luo systematically explore material culture, inscriptions, transmitted texts, and genealogies from BCE China to reconstruct the role of women in social reproduction in the ancient Chinese world. Applying paleographical, linguistic, and historical analyses, Cook and Luo discuss fertility rituals, birthing experiences, divine conceptions, divine births, and the overall influence of gendered supernatural agencies on the experience and outcome of birth. They unpack a cultural paradigm in which birth is not only a philosophical symbol of eternal return and renewal but also an abiding religious and social focus for lineage continuity. They also suggest that some of the mythical founder heroes traditionally assumed to be male may in fact have had female identities. Students of ancient history, particularly Chinese history, will find this book an essential complement to traditional historical narratives, while the exploration of ancient religious texts, many unknown in the West, provides a unique perspective into the study of the formation of mythology and the role of birthing in early religion.
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Understanding the Analects of Confucius
A New Translation of Lunyu with Annotations
by Peimin Ni
Part of the SUNY series in Chinese Philosophy and Culture series
A new translation and commentary of the Analects for contemporary audiences.
Winner of the 2019 Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for a Translation of a Scholarly Study of Literature presented by the Modern Language Association
The Analects of Confucius is arguably the single most influential work of China's cultural heritage. In this new English translation, Peimin Ni accomplishes the rare feat of simultaneously providing a faithful translation of the text, offering his own reading based on gongfu (practice) perspective, and presenting major alternative readings to help the reader understand how diverse interpretations and controversies arise. In addition to the inclusion of the original Chinese text, Ni adds a comprehensive introduction, a discussion of key terms, annotations, and extensive cross-references. In doing so, Ni makes the text accessible and engaging for today's audience.
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Dao and Sign in History
Daoist Arche-Semiotics in Ancient and Medieval China
by Daniel Fried
Part of the SUNY series in Chinese Philosophy and Culture series
Provides a new perspective on important linguistic issues in philosophical and religious Daoism through the comparative lens of twentieth-century European philosophies of language.
From its earliest origins in the Dao De Jing, Daoism has been known as a movement that is skeptical of the ability of language to fully express the truth. While many scholars have compared the earliest works of Daoism to language-skeptical movements in twentieth-century European philosophy and have debated to what degree early Daoism does or does not resemble these recent movements, Daniel Fried breaks new ground by examining a much broader array of Daoist materials from ancient and medieval China and showing how these works influenced ideas about language in medieval religion, literature, and politics. Through an extended comparison with a broad sample of European philosophical works, the book explores how ideas about language grow out of a given historical moment and advances a larger argument about how philosophical and religious ideas cannot be divided into "content" and "context."
Daniel Fried is Associate Professor of Chinese and Comparative Literature at the University of Alberta, and is President of the Association of Chinese and Comparative Literature.
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Literate Community in Early Imperial China
The Northwestern Frontier in Han Times
by Charles Sanft
Part of the SUNY series in Chinese Philosophy and Culture series
Explores the role of meditation on the five elements in the practice of Yoga.
This book examines ancient written materials from China's northwestern border regions to offer fresh insights into the role of text in shaping society and culture during the Han period (206/2 BCE—220 CE). Left behind by military installations, these documents-wooden strips and other nontraditional textual materials such as silk-recorded the lives and activities of military personnel and the people around them. Charles Sanft explores their functions and uses by looking at a fascinating array of material, including posted texts on signaling across distances, practical texts on brewing beer and evaluating swords, and letters exchanged by officials working in low rungs of the bureaucracy. By focusing on all members of the community, he argues that a much broader section of early society had meaningful interactions with text than previously believed. This major shift in interpretation challenges long-standing assumptions about the limited range of influence that text and literacy had on culture and society and makes important contributions to early China studies, the study of literacy, and to the global history of non-elites.
Charles Sanft is Associate Professor in the Department of History at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. He is the author of Communication and Cooperation in Early Imperial China: Publicizing the Qin Dynasty, also published by SUNY Press.
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Between History and Philosophy
Anecdotes in Early China
by Various Authors
Part of the SUNY series in Chinese Philosophy and Culture series
Analyzes the use of anecdotes as an essential rhetorical tool and form of persuasion in various literary genres in early China.
Between History and Philosophy is the first book-length study in English to focus on the rhetorical functions and forms of anecdotal narratives in early China. Edited by Paul van Els and Sarah A. Queen, this volume advances the thesis that anecdotes-brief, freestanding accounts of single events involving historical figures, and occasionally also unnamed persons, animals, objects, or abstractions-served as an essential tool of persuasion and meaning-making within larger texts. Contributors to the volume analyze the use of anecdotes from the Warring States Period to the Han Dynasty, including their relations to other types of narrative, their circulation and reception, and their central position as a mode of argumentation in a variety of historical and philosophical literary genres.
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Beyond the Troubled Water of Shifei
From Disputation to Walking-Two-Roads in the Zhuangzi
by Lin Ma
Part of the SUNY series in Chinese Philosophy and Culture series
Offers the first focused study of the shifei debates of the Warring States period in ancient China and challenges the imposition of Western conceptual categories onto these debates.
In recent decades, a growing concern in studies in Chinese intellectual history is that Chinese classics have been forced into systems of classification prevalent in Western philosophy and thus imperceptibly transformed into examples that echo Western philosophy. Lin Ma and Jaap van Brakel offer a methodology to counter this approach, and illustrate their method by carrying out a transcultural inquiry into the complexities involved in understanding shi and fei and their cognate phrases in the Warring States texts, the Zhuangzi in particular. The authors discuss important features of Zhuangzi's stance with regard to language-meaning, knowledge-doubt, questioning, equalizing, and his well-known deconstruction of the discourse in ancient China on shifei. Ma and van Brakel suggest that shi and fei apply to both descriptive and prescriptive languages and do not presuppose any fact/value dichotomy, and thus cannot be translated as either true/false or right/wrong. Instead, shi and fei can be grasped in terms of a pre-philosophical notion of fitting. Ma and van Brakel also highlight Zhuangzi's idea of "walking-two-roads" as the most significant component of his stance. In addition, they argue that all of Zhuangzi's positive recommendations are presented in a language whose meaning is not fixed and that every stance he is committed to remains subject to fundamental questioning as a way of life.
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Human Becomings
Theorizing Persons for Confucian Role Ethics
by Roger T. Ames
Part of the SUNY series in Chinese Philosophy and Culture series
Offers an in-depth exposition of the Confucian conception of persons as the starting point of Confucian ethics.
Human Becomings, Roger T. Ames argues that the appropriateness of categorizing Confucian ethics as role ethics turns largely on the conception of person that is presupposed within the interpretive context of classical Chinese philosophy. By beginning with first self-consciously and critically theorizing the Confucian conception of persons as the starting point of Confucian ethics, Ames posits that the ultimate goal will be to take the Confucian tradition on its own terms and to let it speak with its own voice without overwriting it with cultural importances not its own. He argues that perhaps the most important contribution Confucian philosophy can make to contemporary ethical, social, and political discourse is the conception of focus-field, relationally constituted persons as a robust alternative to the ideology of individualism with single actors playing to win.
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Friendship and Hospitality
The Jesuit-Confucian Encounter in Late Ming China
by Dongfeng Xu
Part of the SUNY series in Chinese Philosophy and Culture series
Offers a comparative and deconstructive reading of the cross-cultural encounter between the Jesuits and their Confucian hosts in late Ming China.
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A Philosophical Defense of Culture
Perspectives from Confucianism and Cassirer
by Shuchen Xiang
Part of the SUNY series in Chinese Philosophy and Culture series
Draws on two different but strikingly similar streams in our world tradition to argue for the contemporary philosophical relevance of "culture."
In A Philosophical Defense of Culture, Shuchen Xiang draws on the Confucian philosophy of "culture" and Ernst Cassirer's philosophy of symbolic forms to argue for the importance of "culture" as a philosophic paradigm. A defining ideal of Confucian-Chinese civilization, culture (wen) spans everything from natural patterns and the individual units that make up Chinese writing to literature and other refining vocations of the human being. Wen is thus the soul of Confucian-Chinese philosophy. Similarly, as a philosopher who bridged the classical age of German humanism and postwar modernity, Cassirer implored his and future generations to think of humankind in terms of their culture and to think of the human being as a "symbolic animal." The philosophies of culture of these two traditions, very much compatible, are of urgent relevance to our contemporary epoch. Xiang describes the similarity of their projects by way of their conception of the human being, her relationship to nature, the relationship of human culture to nature, the importance of cultural pluralism, and the role of the arts in human life, as well as the metaphysical frameworks that gave rise to such conceptions. Combining textual exegesis in classical Chinese texts and an exposition of Cassirer's most important insights against the backdrop of post—Kantian philosophy, this book is philosophy written in a cosmopolitan mode, arguing for the contemporary philosophical relevance of "culture" by drawing on and bringing together two different but strikingly similar streams in our world tradition.
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Appreciating the Chinese Difference
Engaging Roger T. Ames on Methods, Issues, and Roles
by Various Authors
Part of the SUNY series in Chinese Philosophy and Culture series
A wide-ranging exploration and critical assessment of the work of a major figure in Chinese and comparative philosophy.
In this volume, prominent philosophers working in Chinese thought and related areas critically reflect upon the work of Roger T. Ames, one of the most significant contemporary figures working in the field of Chinese philosophy. Through his decades of collaborative work in comparative methodology and cross-cultural interpretation, along with a number of pathbreaking translations of Chinese philosophical texts, Ames has managed to challenge standing paradigms and open fresh avenues of research into the Chinese tradition. His work will be read and studied for years to come.
The original essays presented here, which are substantive philosophical contributions in their own right, cover the full range of Ames's scholarly output. They address methodological questions as well as specific issues in textual interpretation, including ample discussion of Ames's most recent and provocative contribution: Confucian "role ethics." In the final section of the book, Ames responds to each essay. The result is a conversation and engagement that both underscores the vitality of his thinking and indicates the directions it may take in the future. Altogether, this work provides a snapshot of a remarkable career-and an invitation to continue reflecting upon its meaning and importance.
Jim Behuniak is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Colby College and the author of Mencius on Becoming Human, also published by SUNY Press.
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Human Beings or Human Becomings?
A Conversation with Confucianism on the Concept of Person
by Various Authors
Part of the SUNY series in Chinese Philosophy and Culture series
Agues that Confucianism and other East Asian philosophical traditions can be resources for understanding and addressing current global challenges such as climate change and hunger.
Great transformations are reshaping human life, social institutions, and the world around us, raising profound questions about our fundamental values. We now have the knowledge and the technical expertise, for instance, to realize a world in which no child needs to go to bed hungry-and yet, hunger persists. And although the causes of planetary climate disruption are well known, action of the scale and resolution needed to address it remain elusive.
In order to deepen our understanding of these transformations and the ethical responses they demand, considering how they are seen from different civilizational perspectives is imperative.
Acknowledging the rise of China both geopolitically and culturally, the essays in this volume enter into critical and yet appreciative conversations with East Asian philosophical traditions-primarily Confucianism, but also Buddhism and Daoism-drawing on their conceptual resources to understand what it means to be human as irreducibly relational. The opening chapters establish a framework for seeing the resolution of global predicaments, such as persistent hunger and climate disruption, as relational challenges that cannot be addressed from within the horizons of any ethics committed to taking the individual as the basic unit of moral analysis. Subsequent chapters turn to Confucian traditions as resources for addressing these challenges, reimagining personhood as a process of responsive, humane becoming and envisioning ethics as a necessarily historical and yet open-ended process of relational refinement and evolving values.
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Lore and Verse
Poems on History in Early Medieval China
by Yue Zhang
Part of the SUNY series in Chinese Philosophy and Culture series
Lore and Verse is the first English-language book dedicated entirely to studying poems on history (yongshi shi) in premodern China. Focusing on works by poets from the entire range of early medieval China (220-589), Yue Zhang explores how history was disseminated and interpreted through poetry, as well as how and why certain historical figures were commemorated in poetry. In writing poems on history, poets retrospectively crafted their own identities through their celebration of historical figures, and they prospectively fortified a continuous lineage for transmitting their values and reputation to future generations. This continuous tradition of cultural memory informs a poet's reception of historical figures, which in turn shapes that tradition through further intertextual connections. Lore and Verse questions the sweeping generalization of early medieval Chinese poetry as consisting mainly of exuberant images and an ornamental style ”an inaccurate characterization repeated by later historians and literary critics”and it provides translations, close readings, and analyses of selected poems on history that will be useful for students, instructors, and general readers interested in premodern Chinese literature and culture.
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Reconsidering the Life of Power
Ritual, Body, and Art in Critical Theory and Chinese Philosophy
by James Garrison
Part of the SUNY series in Chinese Philosophy and Culture series
Offers a compelling intercultural perspective on body, art, self, and society.
Reconsidering the Life of Power examines Chinese perspectives on bodily self-cultivation and explores how these can be resources for working past the ritual scripts of everyday life. In recent decades, European and American thinkers like Michel Foucault and Judith Butler have called attention to the way that people live out ritual scripts in order to be recognized by other people such that they might survive. Philosophers in China, however, have a long history of considering ritual not just in terms of confining power structures but also in terms of empowering artistic self-cultivation. Out of this convergence, a response to Butler's The Psychic Life of Power becomes possible, along with fascinating implications for improving real-world experience.
James Garrison looks at art and aesthetics as a way of responding positively to the vicissitudes of everyday life. This means reframing ritual practice in domains like meditation, yoga, tai chi chuan, dance, calisthenics, fashion, and beyond as a kind of work that delves into and unearths society's long-accruing unconscious habits in a way that makes conscious one's everyday speech, comportment, countenance, and presence. The everyday body thus becomes an artwork, speaking in novel ways to the everyday self by revealing an alternative to the programmed ritual scripts through which most of us tend to survive. Reconsidering the Life of Power offers a compelling contemporary intercultural perspective on body, art, self, and society that bridges theory and practice by providing an actionable yet deeply philosophical approach to enhancing life.
James Garrison is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Baldwin Wallace University.
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Abolishing Boundaries
Global Utopias in the Formation of Modern Chinese Political Thought, 1880–1940
by Peter Zarrow
Part of the SUNY series in Chinese Philosophy and Culture series
Offers new perspectives on modern Chinese political thought.
Focusing on four key Chinese intellectuals of the first half of the twentieth century, Abolishing Boundaries offers new perspectives on modern Chinese political thought. These four intellectuals-Kang Youwei, Cai Yuanpei, Chen Duxiu, and Hu Shi-were deeply familiar with the Confucian and Buddhist classical texts, while also interested in the West's utopian literature of the late nineteenth century as well as Kant and the neo-Kantians, Marxists, and John Dewey and new liberalism, respectively. Although none of these four intellectuals can simply be labeled utopian thinkers, this book highlights how their thinking was intertwined with utopian ideals to produce theories of secular transcendence, liberalism, and communism, and how, in explicit and implicit ways, their ideas required some utopian impulse in order to escape the boundaries they identified as imprisoning the Chinese people and all humanity. To abolish these boundaries was to imagine alternatives to the unbearable present. This was not a matter of armchair philosophizing but of thinking through new ways to commit to action. These men did not hold a totalistic picture of some perfect society, but in distinctly different ways they all displayed a utopian impulse that fueled radical visions of change. Their work reveals much about the underlying forces shaping modern thought in China-and the world. Reacting to China's problems, they sought a better future for all humanity.
Peter Zarrow is Professor of History at the University of Connecticut. His previous books include Educating China: Knowledge, Society, and Textbooks in a Modernizing World, 1902–1937 and After Empire: The Conceptual Transformation of the Chinese State, 1885–1924.
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Heaven Is Empty
A Cross-Cultural Approach to "Religion" and Empire in Ancient China
by Filippo Marsili
Part of the SUNY series in Chinese Philosophy and Culture series
Offers a new perspective on the relationship between religion and the creation of the first Chinese empires.
Heaven Is Empty offers a new comparative perspective on the role of the sacred in the formation of China's early empires (221 BCE—9 CE) and shows how the unification of the Central States was possible without a unitary and universalistic conception of religion. The cohesive function of the ancient Mediterranean cult of the divinized ruler was crucial for the legitimization of Rome's empire across geographical and social boundaries. Eventually reelaborated in Christian terms, it came to embody the timelessness and universality of Western conceptions of legitimate authority, while representing an analytical template for studying other ancient empires. Filippo Marsili challenges such approaches in his examination of the reign of Emperor Wu of the Han (141—87 BCE). Wu purposely drew from regional traditions and tried to gain the support of local communities through his patronage of local cults. He was interested in rituals that envisioned the monarch as a military leader, who directly controlled the land and its resources, as a means for legitimizing radical administrative and economic centralization. In reconstructing this imperial model, Marsili reinterprets fragmentary official accounts in light of material evidence and noncanonical and recently excavated texts. In bringing to life the courts, battlefields, markets, shrines, and pleasure quarters of early imperial China, Heaven Is Empty provides a postmodern and postcolonial reassessment of "religion" before the arrival of Buddhism and challenges the application of Greco-Roman and Abrahamic systemic, identitary, and exclusionary notions of the "sacred" to the analysis of pre-Christian and non-Western realities.
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Confucianism and American Philosophy
by Mathew A. Foust
Part of the SUNY series in Chinese Philosophy and Culture series
A comparative analysis of Confucianism and the American Transcendentalist and Pragmatist traditions.
In this highly original work, Mathew A. Foust breaks new ground in comparative studies through his exploration of the connections between Confucianism and the American Transcendentalist and Pragmatist movements. In his examination of a broad range of philosophers, including Confucius, Mencius, Xunzi, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Charles Peirce, William James, and Josiah Royce, Foust traces direct lines of influence from early translations of Confucian texts and brings to light conceptual affinities that have been previously overlooked. Combining resources from both traditions, Confucianism and American Philosophy offers fresh insights into contemporary problems and exemplifies the potential of cross-cultural dialogue in an increasingly pluralistic world.
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Language as Bodily Practice in Early China
A Chinese Grammatology
by Jane Geaney
Part of the SUNY series in Chinese Philosophy and Culture series
Challenges the idea held by many prominent twentieth-century Sinologists that early China experienced a "language crisis."
Jane Geaney argues that early Chinese conceptions of speech and naming cannot be properly understood if viewed through the dominant Western philosophical tradition in which language is framed through dualisms that are based on hierarchies of speech and writing, such as reality/appearance and one/many. Instead, early Chinese texts repeatedly create pairings of sounds and various visible things. This aural/visual polarity suggests that texts from early China treat speech as a bodily practice that is not detachable from its use in everyday experience. Firmly grounded in ideas about bodies from the early texts themselves, Geaney's interpretation offers new insights into three key themes in these texts: the notion of speakers' intentions (yi), the physical process of emulating exemplary people, and Confucius's proposal to rectify names (zhengming).
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A Walk in the Night With Zhuangzi
Musings on an Ancient Chinese Manuscript
by Kuan-yun Huang
Part of the SUNY series in Chinese Philosophy and Culture series
At the heart of "All Things Flow into Form" (Fan wu liu xing), an ancient Chinese manuscript recently salvaged from the black market, is a concern with the process of self-cultivation, particularly the advancement through the incremental stages and the outcome that awaits one in the end: enlightenment, transparency, and self-possession. Critical to this discussion is a conception of a mind within a mind, the unity of which is obtained through the isolation of an innermost core free from extraneous distractions. Such a state is presented as an ideal for kingship, and the text, despite its possibly very ancient roots, is focused on the ruler's ethical training rather than his political maneuvers, his obligation to Heaven and the spirits rather than his dominance over his subjects. Probing deep into this text, we may observe heretofore unappreciated aspects of many of the transmitted literary sources, and in turn, come to more definite conclusions about the manuscript itself. To the extent that this analysis is successful, it illustrates an approach that can be tested against future efforts to read ancient Chinese texts in the light of newly unearthed documents.
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Confucian Liberalism
Mou Zongsan and Hegelian Liberalism
by Roy Tseng
Part of the SUNY series in Chinese Philosophy and Culture series
Does Confucianism conflict with liberalism? Confucian Liberalism sheds new light on this long-standing debate entwined with the discourse of Chinese modernity. Focusing on the legacy of Mou Zongsan, the book significantly recasts the moral character and political ideal of Confucianism, accompanied by a Hegelian retreatment of the multiple facets of Western modernity and its core values, such as individuality, self-realization, democracy, civilized society, citizenship, public good, freedom, and human rights. The book offers a culturally sensitive way of reevaluating liberal language and forges a reconciliation between the two extremes of anti-Confucian liberalism and anti-liberal Confucianism. The result-Confucian liberalism-is akin to civil liberalism, in that it rests the form of liberal democracy on the content of "Confucian democratic civility." It is also comparable to perfectionist liberalism, endorsing a nondominant concept of the common good surrounded by a set of "Confucian governing and civic virtues."
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The Future of China's Past
Reflections on the Meaning of China's Rise
by Albert Welter
Part of the SUNY series in Chinese Philosophy and Culture series
“The Future of China's Past” examines how China's traditional culture is being reinvented and manipulated for political purposes. Like no time before in its recent history, and certainly at no time in the history of the People's Republic, China is being shaped in terms of its past, but which past-Confucianism, Legalism, Daoism, Buddhism-or combination of pasts is being held up as the model? Given its growing economic, political, and cultural significance, it is incumbent upon us to take China's rise seriously, yet perspectives involving modern and contemporary geopolitical and intrastate dynamics are insufficient, on their own, for understanding China's rise, and the same holds true for economic analyses, however pertinent. Instead, this book looks at current engagements with models of China's past, introducing the four traditional lenses of Chinese thought and reflecting on their potential relevance for China's-and the world's-future.
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The Annotated Laozi
A New Translation of the Daodejing
by Paul Fischer
Part of the SUNY series in Chinese Philosophy and Culture series
Written more than two thousand years ago, the Laozi, or Daodejing, is a classic of Chinese intellectual history and has been of foundational importance to cultural and religious history throughout East Asia. It is now venerated as a masterpiece of self-cultivation, with a poetic narrative that remains accessible and relevant even today. Paul Fischer's new, annotated translation aims for fidelity to the original text as well as clarity for a modern audience. Fischer's notes and explanations bring out obscure meanings in ancient Chinese wording and rhetoric, elucidate the connections among the eighty-one short chapters, and clarify the coherence of the work as a whole. Carefully considering the various manuscripts that have been archaeologically uncovered in recent decades, as well as the variations among received versions of the Laozi, Fischer's translation discloses the beauty and meaning of the original. This book will benefit students and readers interested in intellectual history as well as those who want to explore what the text has to say about the meaning of life.
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Cognition and Practice
Li Zehou's Philosophical Aesthetics
by Rafal Banka
Part of the SUNY series in Chinese Philosophy and Culture series
This is the first book on the role of cognition in the aesthetic theory of Li Zehou (1930—2021), one of China's most important and influential contemporary philosophers. The cognitive dimension and its integration with practice is discussed by examining one of Li's pivotal concepts: "subjectality," a human subject shaped by the world in which they live, including beauty and aesthetic experience. Li's theory is also contextualized in the threefold inspiration coming from Confucian, Kantian, and Marxist philosophies, which differently conceptualize the aesthetic and cognitive dimensions in humans. By referring to different aesthetic theories and interdisciplinary approaches to cognition, the book aims to show how Li's cognitively oriented project can contribute to contemporary research into aesthetics. Although primarily written for philosophers working in aesthetics, Chinese, and comparative philosophy, the book is also addressed to anyone interested in contemporary Chinese thought.
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Self-Cultivation in Early China
by Paul Fischer
Part of the SUNY series in Chinese Philosophy and Culture series
Self-Cultivation in Early China is an introduction to multiple aspects of the foundational practice of self-cultivation in early China (c.1000 to 100 BCE). Drawing on the Chinese classics and the dozens of scholars' texts (both received and excavated) that together form the basis of intellectual history for China and all of East Asia, the book's analysis relies on the topics and categories that were central to the thought of these authors, including such well-known thinkers as Confucius and Laozi. This book describes a salient point of view from which we may consider the broader landscape of Chinese intellectual history and presents an important paradigm of the scholarly Chinese worldview that is ideal for comparison with paradigms in other communities, ancient or modern, across the globe.
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The Rhetoric of Hiddenness in Traditional Chinese Culture
by Various Authors
Part of the SUNY series in Chinese Philosophy and Culture series
This volume brings together fourteen essays that explore the role of hiddenness-as both an object and a mode of representation-in the history of cultural production in China from the Warring States Period (403—221 BCE) to the end of the Qing Dynasty (1911) and beyond. The rhetorical use of various forms of hiddenness makes its appearance in literary, political, philosophical, and religious writings, as well as in the visual arts. Working in fields as disparate as traditional Chinese literature, religion, philosophy, history, medicine, and art, the contributors attempt to characterize one of the fundamental signifying practices in traditional Chinese cultural production. In the process, they not only reveal otherwise obscure patterns connecting longstanding social, political, aesthetic, and epistemological practices, but also contribute to ongoing discussions-well beyond the field of China studies-regarding the representation and communicability of knowledge, as well as the practices controlling its dissemination.
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The Emergence of Word-Meaning in Early China
A Grammatology
by Jane Geaney
Part of the SUNY series in Chinese Philosophy and Culture series
Posits the origin of a specifically Chinese concept of "word-meaning," and sheds new light on the linguistic ideas in early Chinese philosophical texts.
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The Old Master
A Syncretic Reading of the Laozi from the Mawangdui Text A Onward
by Hongkyung Kim
Part of the SUNY series in Chinese Philosophy and Culture series
A unique translation of and commentary on the Laozi, based on the oldest edition of the work.
This unique, highly contextualized translation of the Laozi is based on the earliest known edition of the work, Text A of the Mawangdui Laozi, written before 202 BCE. No other editions are comparable to this text in its antiquity. Hongkyung Kim also incorporates the recent archaeological discovery of Laozi-related documents disentombed in 1993 in Guodian, seeing these documents as proto-materials for compilation of the Laozi and revealing clues for disentangling the work from complicated exegetical contentions. Kim makes extensive use of Chinese commentaries on the Laozi and also examines the classic Chinese texts closely associated with the formation of the work to illuminate the intellectual and historical context of Laozi's philosophy.
Kim offers several original and thought-provoking arguments on the Laozi, including that the work was compiled during the Qin, which has traditionally been viewed as typical of Legalist states, and that the Laozi should be recognized as a syncretic text before being labeled a Daoist one.
Hongkyung Kim is Associate Professor of East Asian Thought and Religions at Stony Brook University, State University of New York.
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Intimate Memory
Gender and Mourning in Late Imperial China
by Martin W. Huang
Part of the SUNY series in Chinese Philosophy and Culture series
Sheds new light on pre-modern Chinese gender relationships in the context of marriage, male Confucian literati self-presentation, and social networks.
In the first study of its kind about the role played by intimate memory in the mourning literature of late imperial China, Martin W. Huang focuses on the question of how men mourned and wrote about women to whom they were closely related. Drawing upon memoirs, epitaphs, biographies, litanies, and elegiac poems, Huang explores issues such as how intimacy shaped the ways in which bereaved male authors conceived of womanhood and how such conceptualizations were inevitably also acts of self-reflection about themselves as men. Their memorial writings reveal complicated self-images as husbands, brothers, sons, and educated Confucian males, while their representations of women are much more complex and diverse than the representations we find in more public genres such as Confucian female exemplar biographies.
Martin W. Huang is Professor of Chinese at the University of California, Irvine and the author of Negotiating Masculinities in Late Imperial China.
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Having a Word with Angus Graham
At Twenty-Five Years into His Immortality
by Various Authors
Part of the SUNY series in Chinese Philosophy and Culture series
Critical reflections on the work of Angus Charles Graham, renowned Western scholar of Chinese philosophy and sinology.
This volume engages with the works and ideas of Angus Charles Graham (1919—1991), one of the most prominent Western scholars of Chinese philosophy, at the twenty-fifth anniversary of his passing. Over a professional career of more than thirty years, Angus Graham produced an impressive amount of scholarship on a wide array of topics, ranging from Chinese grammar and philology to poetry and philosophy. His combination of rigorous scholarship and philosophical originality has continued to inspire scholars to tackle related research topics, and in so doing, has required of them a response to his views. This book illustrates the range of scholarship still elaborating upon, disagreeing with, and reacting to Graham's work on Chinese thought, philosophy, philology, and translation.
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China's Lonely Revolution
The Local Communist Movement of Hainan Island, 1926-1956
by Jeremy A. Murray
Part of the SUNY series in Chinese Philosophy and Culture series
Presents a new view of the Chinese revolution through the lens of the local Communist movement in Hainan between 1926 and 1956.
Jeremy A. Murray's study of local Communist revolutionaries in Hainan between 1926 and 1956 provides a window into the diversity and complexity of the Chinese revolution. Long at the margins of the Chinese state, Hainan was once known by mainlanders only for its malarial climate and fierce indigenous people. In spite of efforts by the Chinese Nationalists and the Japanese to exterminate Hainan's Communists, the movement survived because of an alliance with the indigenous Li. For years it persevered, though in complete isolation from Communist headquarters on the mainland. Using Chinese-language sources, archival materials, and interviews, Murray draws a vivid picture of this movement from the Hainanese perspective, and broadens our understanding of how patriotism, Party loyalty, and Chinese identity have been experienced and interpreted in modern China.
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Reading for the Moral
Exemplarity and the Confucian Moral Imagination in Seventeenth-Century Chinese Short Fiction
by Maria Franca Sibau
Part of the SUNY series in Chinese Philosophy and Culture series
Reassesses didacticism in seventeenth-century Chinese vernacular fiction and challenges the view that the late Ming was a notoriously immoral time.
Reading for the Moral offers an innovative reassessment of the nature of moral representation and exemplarity in Chinese vernacular fiction. Maria Franca Sibau focuses on two little-studied story collections published at the end of the Ming dynasty, Exemplary Words for the World (Xingshi yan, 1632) and Bell in the Still Night (Qingye zhong, c. 1645). Far from being tediously moralistic tales, these stories of loyal ministers, filial children, chaste widows, and selfless friends provide a deeper understanding of the five cardinal relationships central to Confucian ethics. They explore the inherent tension between what we might call textbook morality, on the one hand, and untidy everyday life, on the other. The stories often take a critical view of mechanical notions of retribution, countering it with the logic of virtue as its own reward. Conflict between passion and duty is typically resolved in favor of duty, a duty redefined with a palpable sense of urgency. In constructing vernacular representations of moral exemplars from the recent historical past rather than from remote or fictitious antiquity, the story compilers show how these virtues are not abstract or monolithic norms, but play out within the contingencies of time and space.