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  • Transmitters and Creators: Chinese Commentators and Commentaries on the Analects
  • Don J. Wyatt (bio)
John Makeham . Transmitters and Creators: Chinese Commentators and Commentaries on the Analects. Harvard East Asian Monographs 228. Cambridge (MA) and London: Harvard University Asia Center, 2003. xvi, 474 pp. Hardcover $50.00, ISBN 0-674-01216-X.

Transmitters and Creators: Chinese Commentators and Commentaries on the Analects receives its title from wordplay on the oft-quoted passage in Analects (Lunyu) 7.1, where Master Kong (Confucius) (551-479 B.C.) professes only "to transmit but not create," and this title aptly directs us to the dual premises that underpin John Makeham's impressive book. Makeham's first premise is one of generic neglect, for he contends that the Chinese commentarial tradition as a whole and the Chinese philosophical commentary in particular have become profoundly but unfairly undervalued, especially from the collective standpoint of many of the Western authors of so much of the contemporary sinological scholarship that is being produced today. He goes so far as to describe an "intellectual" atmosphere in which the question is assuredly entertained discreetly, if not asked openly and outright, "Why bother with the commentaries?" (p. 9). However, [End Page 311] Makeham's second premise is a more particularized and compensatory one than the first. He argues that those who over the centuries have elected to comment on the early Chinese philosophical texts in general and on the Analects as a philosophical work in particular were frequently much more than reflective conveyers of the received ideas embedded in such texts. He contends instead that at least some of these commentators, as investigators of the Analects corpus at different stages in its historical evolution, have supplied and continue to supply the readers of the target texts not merely with clarity but also with unmatched novel insights. Indeed, viewed in this expansive light, these commentators (and particularly those of Confucian ilk) approached being fully as much the creators of the conventions of our understanding as the authors of the original texts on which they comment.

Thus, Transmitters and Creators seems at least partly inspired by Makeham's dissatisfaction with the prevailing methodologies of modern sinological research, which he sees as deficient because of their collective failure to take fully into account and to incorporate properly the commentarial tradition. Consequently, Makeham is, in large part, offering something of an indictment, for we need little doubt that he is reacting to a set of implied but troubling truisms that have become especially indicative of contemporary Western scholarship on Chinese classical sources. Nor should we doubt that his concerns are genuine. The fixation of modern sinologists, whether they are aspiring or already established, is primarily on their own production, and, in pursuit of that goal, they have understandably become conditioned to valuing as "original" only the scholarship that they perceive as adding to the expansion of the fund of knowledge in some unprecedented way. In practice, this disposition has led them to value the work commented on (interestingly, even when that work is known to be corrupt or otherwise inauthentic) far more and sometimes at the expense of any of the commentaries on it. Conversely, modern scholars are inclined to denigrate and label as "unoriginal" any scholarship that they presume only restates or reaffirms some indeterminate quotient of what they feel is already articulated by the target text. They have therefore accustomed themselves to making quick and oftentimes less than fully examined judgments about where value lies—resulting in prejudicial appraisals of the contributive potentials of mediating materials like commentaries and leading to obliquely disparaging summations about whatever "new" is likely to be extracted from them.

Contemporary scholars have thus become almost reflexively predictable in assuming the unoriginality of commentaries, and they have frequently affixed that stigma prematurely, without really digging deeply enough beneath the commentarial surface to discover otherwise. But, according to Makeham, this set of assumptions and way of operating could not be more mistaken, misapplied, or undeserved than in the case of the Chinese interlinear philosophical commentary. His book employs an informed selection of these extant commentaries on the Analects as a way of substantiating and reifying this argument. [End Page...

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