On-cho Ng

PRIVATE HISTORIOGRAPHY OF THE LATE MING: SOME NOTES ON FIVE WORKS

AbstractChinese historiography up until the Qing dynasty was predominantly official historiography. But the zhengshi (official or standard histories), despite their meticulousness and rich details, can at best provide us with a one-sided picture. The sources employed were almost exclusively official ones, such as the qiji zhu (the diary of activity and repose), the SHIZHENG JI (the records of current government), the HUIYAO or HUIDIAN (the collected statutes), and the SHILU (the VERITABLE RECORDS). Moreover, historians working under the tutelage and supervision of the government were constantly subjected to political pressure and influence. The personality and individuality of the historians were often submerged in the collective effort of compiling the official histories under a commission (guan) or bureau (zhu). The intensification of despotism in the Yuan, Ming and Qing dynasties meant increased political interference with historical compilation. The result was that individual judgment was more than ev...

Thinking Across Cultures: Western Hermeneutics and Chinese Exegesis

All the rich and insightful hermeneutic theories we have had in our possession so far are attempts to apply some local knowledge stemming from some native culture to circumstances and situations everywhere, as theories, with their universalist pretensions and aspirations, are wont to do. But to date, insofar as the “local” is mainly the West, the Euro-American world, it begs the question of how empirically tenable is a locally incubated theory when it is applied to extra-local conditions. In fact, even within the local, as it were, differences and tensions abound. And if we introduce into this welter another local world, say, the Chinese one, the picture gets, needless to say, messier. But then we have no choice but to muddle up the picture, if we are already inescapable denizens of a global city, a cosmopolis which is our current multicultural, intertwined world. Consequently, place and space, that is, varied and varying locality, must intervene in any effort of theory-building in the realm of hermeneutics that purports to explain some general modes of operation in the process of reading and understanding. To more effectively shed light on the other worlds of reading and understanding requires some re-situation of place and space, such that new and broad perspectives may be developed. By redirecting the theoretical gaze from the Euro-American site to the Chinese (specifically, the Confucian) locale, I argue that we should grant the self-explanation and self-identity of thinking agents other than those in the Western world their rightful place in theoretical inquiries into what I call the hermeneutic dictum of human existence, namely, that human living inevitably involves thinking that is interpretation, which is relative to contingent culture-historical dynamics molding the interpreter’s preunderstanding. In other words, if the imperative of interpretation and understanding is what ultimately constitutes human authenticity in the sense of apprehending the meanings of life, how the Confucians read may serve as inspiration, option, and even in some cases, alternative for a more general, more nimble, and interculturally more sensitive inquiry into the ways we read and conceive the self and the world. In short, to take seriously place and space in any hermeneutic project is to argue on behalf on intercultural hermeneutics, of which comparative thinking is integrally a part.

The Commentarial Tradition

In the Confucian tradition, few students of the classics read canonical writings without the aid of some form of gloss or commentary. Not only was commentary necessary to illuminate the numerous obscurities in the canonical texts, but also to defend against heterodox interpretations that might arise from “naive” explanations of the “plain meaning” of the text. But however valuable the services that commentators performed in illuminating obscurities in the canonical texts, this was not the only and perhaps not even the principal function of commentaries. Commentaries to the Analects also served a polemical purpose, to establish that the text lived up to a fairly universal set of criteria.