Imagining Boundaries: Changing Confusion Doctrines, Texts and Hermeneutics

by Chow, Kai-Wing; Ng, On-Cho; Henderson, John B.

• ISBN13: 9780791441985
• ISBN10: 0791441989
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1999-06-01
• Publisher: State Univ of New York Pr

Summary

Imagining Boundaries explores the mapping of the intellectual tradition of Confucianism in Chinese history. The authors show that the Confucian tradition is not a neatly packaged organic whole in which the constitutive parts fall naturally into place, but rather that it displays the ruptures of all cultural constructions. Accordingly, Confucianism has been configured and reconfigured in time in to changing intellectual and circumstances.

This anthology addresses the constant negotiation of the boundaries of Confucianism within itself and in relation to other intellectual traditions, the fluidity of the Confucian canon, the dialogical relations Between text and discourse in establishing boundaries for the Confucian tradition, and the textual and discursive strategies employed in the imagining of boundaries, which expanded or restricted the intellectual space of Confucianism.

Rejecting an interpretation of Confucianism as a homogenous master-narrative and worldview, the book uses the variegated histories of Confucianism to interrogate the tradition itself, un

Author Biography

Kai-Wing Chow is Associate Professor of History and East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana and is the author of The Rise of Ritualism in Late Imperial China: Ethics, Classics, and Lineage Discourse. On-Cho Ng is Associate Professor of History at Pennsylvania State University. John B. Henderson is Professor of History and Religious Studies at Louisiana State University. He is the author of several books, including, most recently, The Construction of Orthodoxy and Heresy: Neo-Confucian, Islamic, Jewish and Early Christian Patterns, also published by SUNY Press.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Fluidity of the Confucian Canon and Discursive Strategies	1	(16)
On-Cho Ng
Kai-Wing Chow
A Problematic Model: The Han ``Orthodox Synthesis,'' Then and Now	17	(40)
Michael Nylan
The Formulation of Early Medieval Confucian Metaphysics: Huang K'an's (488-545) Accommodation of Neo-Taoism and Buddhism	57	(28)
Yuet Keung Lo
Military Governance versus Civil Governance: A Comparison of the Old History and the New History of the Five Dynasties	85	(22)
Tze-Ki Hon
Strategies in Neo-Confucian Heresiography	107	(14)
John B. Henderson
``Goodness Unbound'': Wang Yang-ming and the Redrawing of the Boundary of Confucianism	121	(26)
Kandice Hauf
Between Canonicity and Heterodoxy: Hermeneutical Moments of the Great Learning (Ta-hsueh)	147	(18)
Kai-Wing Chow
Negotiating the Boundary between Hermeneutics and Philosophy in Early Ch'ing Ch'eng-Chu Confucianism: Li Kuang-ti's (1642-1718) Study of the Doctrine of the Mean (Chung-yung) and Great Learning (Ta-hsueh)	165	(30)
On-Cho Ng
Treading the Weedy Path: T'ang Chen (1630-1704) and the World of the Confucian Middlebrow	195	(18)
Hsiung Ping-Chen
Discovering Monotheistic Metaphysics: The Exegetical Reflections of James Legge (1815-1897) and Lo Chung-fan (d. circa 1850)	213	(42)
Lauren Pfister
Contributors	255	(2)
Index	257