Tradition und Moderne: Religion, Philosophie und Literatur in China--Referate der 7. Jahrestagung 1996 der Deutschen Vereinigung fur Chinastudien (review)

Tradition und Moderne(Tradition and modernity) is the collected papers offered at the 1996 conference of the German Association for Chinese Studies (DVCS) in Berlin. The DVCS meets annually, and each year the theme can be rather precise in scope (the Tang dynasty in 1991, the history and current state of German sinology in 1997), or, on the contrary, it can be virtually all-encompassing, as is the case with the collection reviewed here. Among the fifteen contributors a good balance was found between well-established and younger scholars (five were in their early thirties at the time of the conference). For each essay there is an English summary, which in some cases is long and precise enough to give a fair idea of the content, together with a list of key words (in German). Chinese characters are inserted into the text, which makes for easier reading, but on the whole the book is rather dull, as is too often the case with conference proceedings. The volume is dedicated to the memory of Wolfgang Bauer.

In China, tradition and modernity have often been seen as mutually antagonistic, and Heiner Roetz' essay (pp. 15-35) is aimed at those in China who refuse Western values such as democracy and human rights on the pretext that they are incompatible with Chinese tradition—instead such people favor "Asian values," that is, a collective and authoritarian model of society. Part of the problem is that the tradition on which they rely for their argumentation was in reality never either as homogeneous or as unchanging as it appears to them. In addition, there are many arguments againsttradition in ancient Chinese texts, notably in Mohist and Legalist writings, and Confucius himself cautioned that tradition was not to be followed blindly. As a consequence, appeals to tradition in order to reject human rights and democracy are void. All this may not be utterly new, but Roetz deserves credit for offering a systematically arranged list, from all points of view (logical, epistemological, moral, etc.), of ancient arguments against tradition. There are also some stimulating views in his essay—for instance the idea that there was an essential relationship between the interruption of hereditary titles at the end of the Zhou dynasty and the rejection of tradition in the philosophical writings of the time.

Ulrich Lau (pp. 37-57) deals with the earlier stage of jurisdiction in China during the Zhou, before it was rationalized and formalized. In order to verify the hypothesis that in early China as well as in other civilizations law was embedded in a religious context, he examines early legal terms, showing that etymologically a number of these words were linked to ritual or sacrificial practices—thus the component "sheep" in yi("norm") suggests that totemic representations influenced early Zhou legal terms. Lau relies on etymology, but also on semantic comparisons between characters belonging to the same word families (see B. Karlgren and E. Pulleyblank).

Hans-Georg Möller (pp. 49-60), relying on Guo Xiang's interpretation, tries to understand "more Taoistically" (p. 50) the famous "butterfly dream" in the Zhuangzi, which, in standard modern interpretations—for instance, that of Giles—is read as a lesson about the accidental and transient nature of human existence. In Giles' interpretation, Zhuangzi remembers his dream when he awakes, while this is not so in Guo Xiang's reading of the story. Giles' interpretation cannot be labeled "absolutely wrong," but in Möller's view it is less Taoistic than Guo Xiang's suggestion that waking and sleeping are two separate realities— a metaphor for the two separate realms of life and death: the story thus becomes a lesson about the Taoist sage who must lose his "self" in order to achieve a state of "non-presence" within...