A History of Chinese Classical Scholarship, Volume I, Zhou: Confucius, The Six Classics, And Scholastic Transmission

by David B Honey

Overview

The first volume of David M. Honey’s comprehensive history of Chinese thought offers a close study of Confucius, that tradition’s proto-classicist. This opening volume examines Confucius traditions that largely formed the views of later classicists, who regarded him as their profession’s patron saint. Honey’s survey begins by examining how these views informed the Chinese classicists’ own identities as textual critics and interpreters, all dedicated to self-cultivation for government service. It focuses on Confucius’s methods as a proto-classical master and teacher, and on the media in which he worked, including the spoken word and written texts. As Honey explains, Confucius’s immediate motivations were twofold: the moral development of himself and his disciples and the ritual application of the lessons from the classics. His instruction occurred in ritualized settings in the form of a question and answer catechism between master and disciples. This pedagogical approach will be analyzed through the interpretive paradigm of “performative ritual,” borrowed from recent studies of Greek classical drama. The volume concludes with a detailed treatment of a trio of Confucius’s disciples who were most prominent in transmitting his teachings, and with chapters on his intellectual inheritors, Mencius and Xunzi.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781680539608
Publisher:	Academica Press
Publication date:	08/01/2021
Pages:	438
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

David B. Honey was born in El Paso Texas, but grew up in Southern California. Graduating from UCLA in 1980, he earned his MA (1984) and PhD (1988) degrees from the University of California, Berkeley. Since 1987, he has taught classical Chinese and Chinese literature at Brigham Young University where he was honored as the Humanities Professor of Chinese from 2020 through 2022. His major publications reflect variegated research interests. The Rise of the Medieval Hsiung-nu: The Biography of Liu Yuan (1990), Incense at the Altar: Pioneering Sinologists and the Development of Classical Chinese Philology (2001), a work composed in Chinese, Xifang jingxueshi gailun 西方經學史概論 (A Short History of Classical Scholarship in the West) (2012), and The Southern Garden Poetry Society: Literary Culture and Social Memory in Guangdong (2013) all represent these ancillary interests. A Chinese translation of Incense at the Altar is currently in press. Professor Honey’s main research commitment is represented by this publication of the first three volumes of a projected five-volume set titled A History of Chinese Classical Scholarship. Vols. one (2018) and two (2019) have appeared in Chinese translation by Social Sciences Academic Press, Beijing.

Editorial Reviews

Brilliant and monumental. It introduces the English reader into the vast and exceedingly rich world of classical Chinese scholarship, which arguably constituted the core intellectual tradition in China for almost three millennia. David B. Honey’s knowledge of the sources, both primary and secondary, and his grasp of the central issues of this long history are quite stunning and establish a gold mine of information that will assuredly be searched and tapped by specialists and other intellectually engaged readers for many decades, if not for centuries, to come.

Stephen W. Durrant

Impressive and substantial. I appreciate the scope of this work and the depth of scholarship that has gone into it. Everything is presented clearly and in admirable detail. It is a magnificent work; I look forward to seeing it in print.

William G. Boltz

The History of Chinese Classical Scholarship is a uniquely ambitious endeavor. Panoramic in perspective and impressively rich in detail, it judiciously balances traditional views with current, including comparative, approaches. Specialists and general readers alike will find much to explore in David Honey’s account of one of the world’s greatest scholarly traditions.

Martin Kern

David B. Honey is a sinologist who is ‘waiting for the past.’ His five volumes of A History of Chinese Classical Scholarship, which took over a decade to compose, sort out the historical development of the Chinese Classics over the millennia, and fill in a large gap in western sinological circles resulting from the lack of a general history of Chinese classical scholarship. He moves in and out between the two traditions of Chinese and western classical studies, seeking mutual confirmation among the different traditions. He attempts to generate new knowledge by uncovering historical facts, and his openness constantly updates the inheritance of and research methods on the Chinese Classics. His studies of the classics for over twenty years are the result of a reserve of insight, extracting the kindling of revelation from the hidden recesses of abundant traditional sources and modern studies. This forms a special archaeology of knowledge, which penetrates the depths of time. A History of Chinese Classical Scholarship heralds the arrival of the production of iterative knowledge in sinology.

Lin Jiangquan