Book Review

Asia

Michael Nylan's effort to revisit the five earliest Chinese classics (Odes, Documents, Changes, Rites, and Spring and Autumn Annals) is a welcome and thought-provoking work, especially since recent scholarship has paid little attention to the early Chinese classical tradition. Revaluation of this tradition is also significant due to its profound and lasting influence on Chinese and other cultures of East Asia. Nylan begins with a general history of the "Five Classics" canon. She discusses the formation and the impact of this early canon, dealing with the questions of how, from the twelfth century on, its contents were overshadowed and reduced to a secondary position by the "Four Books" (Analects, Mencius, Great Learning, and Doctrine of the Mean) and its modern fate after the collapse of the last Chinese dynasty in 1911. Her point throughout is that the evolution of this classical tradition shows that it was anything but monolithic.

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From the outset, Nylan argues that while the term "Confucian" is the conventionally accepted English equivalent to the Chinese term Ru, the word should rather be translated as "classicist" in order to reflect more accurately the status of the majority of Ru who, in general, regarded state service as their primary profession. Nylan thus restricts her use of "Confucian" to those "self-identified followers of Confucius's ethical teachings and their cultural products" (p. 2). She apparently has no doubt that, despite their small number, there were some Ru who had committed themselves to "the Confucian Way identified with the Ancients" (p. 3). One reason for making this distinction is to support the view that certain forms of some of the five early, but unrelated, texts had long been in existence before Confucius (551–479 B.C.) prescribed them to his students, and had certainly been used and transmitted by educated Chinese prior to Confucius's time. As we know, many ideas fundamental to Confucius's teaching, such as filial piety and ancestor worship, actually had their roots in these ancient texts. In short, Nylan reminds us that the "Confucian" origin of the Five Classics was a constructed myth.

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