Genealogy of the Way: The Construction and Uses of the Confucian Tradition in Late Imperial China (review)

Abstract

564 China Review International: Vol. 3, No. 2, Fall 1996 While Hurvitz may remain the preferred version for those requiring scholarly conventions such as the use of Sanskrit diacritics, the Watson translation will prove especially accessible to those encountering this important scripture for the first time. In the final analysis, readers will have to evaluate Watson's version based on their own needs and interests, but I, for one, will be switching to the Watson translation for classroom use. William E. Deal Case Western Reserve University William E. Deal is Severance Associate Professor ofthe History ofReligions in the Department ofReligion at Case Western Reserve University specializing in Japanese interpretations ofthe Lotus Sutra. m Thomas A. Wilson. Genealogy ofthe Way: The Construction and Uses ofthe Confucian Tradition in Late Imperial China. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995. xiv, 376 pp. Hardcover $49.50, isbn 0-8047-2425-3. Thomas Wilson's Genealogy ofthe Way is about the ideological use of genealogical discourse in Confucian learning from the Song period into the Qing. This was ideological because, Wilson argues, genealogical discourse was used as a signifying strategy by certain Confucian scholars "to establish control over the institutional, ritual, and textual practices that have regulated statements about the Confucian tradition as a contested arena" (p. 14). The discourse—its constituent problems, organizing concepts, modes of articulation, and institutional sites—was genealogical because it defined tradition in terms of a lineage of orthodox masters (Dao School Confucians). In support of this, a body of texts (Confucian anthologies) was produced. Genealogy and anthology came together during the course of the Song dynasty thanks largely to the efforts of Zhu Xi, but the Song legacy was challenged from two perspectives during the late Ming and early Qing periods. First, followers ofWang Yangming redefined the genealogy of the Way and produced new anthologies to mediate between the Cheng Yi-Zhu Xi and Lu Jiuyuan-Wang Yangming lines, efforts that were resisted by supporters ofZhu Xi. Second, Huang y niversi y zongxi proposed a new, more historically grounded way ofthinking about the tradition ofConfucian learning. Wilson demonstrates that Song thinkers were quite conscious ofwhat they were doing and, when it came to their anthology project, what editorial adjustments were necessary to support the chosen genealogy. The ofHawai'i Press Reviews 565 book deals with the two sides ofthis separately, the firstpartwith state and private efforts to canonize an orthodoxlineage and the second with the various kinds ofanthologies produced in the process. Genealogy ofthe Waydraws intelligently and broadly from a vast amount ofmaterial spread over a period of nearly two and a halfmillennia. It is well informed in the matters it addresses. Its quotations are well chosen and well translated, and its interpretations of the texts are persuasive. Traditional sinological circles might define the subject ofthis book in other terms. Genealogy ofthe Way is about the use by Song and Ming Neo-Confucians1 ofthe idea of daotong (the idea that there was a single, exclusive succession offigures who had truly understood the Way, beginning with the sages and worthies of antiquity and then, after a fifteen-hundred-year intermission, continuing with Zhou Dunyi, the Cheng brothers, and Zhu Xi in the Song dynasty) to claim authority over truth, and their compilation ofanthologies in support of their claims. It explains how they began to make these claims in the Song (but looks at related issues in earlier periods as well) and how the Cheng-Zhu versions were contested and defended in the late Ming and early Qing. Although much ofthe ground Wilson covers is known, it has not been put together like this before. Moreover, he adds to our knowledge an account of a number oflate Ming to early Qing Neo-Confucian anthologies and a discussion of the apparent intellectual pluralism that informed Huang Zongxi's compilation ofthe Cases-of-Learninganthologies ofSong through Ming literati thought. However, it is not the seventeenth-century anthologies that claim our attention but Wilson's development of a postmodern perspective on the Neo-Confucian tradition. Genealogy ofthe Way is evidence, I think, ofhow valuable this kind oftheoretical reflection can be. It has given the author a method for making sense ofwhat would otherwise be a...