One Classic and Two Classical Traditions: The Recovery and Transmission of a Lost Edition of the Analects

Abstract

N both China and Japan in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the turn away from the interpretive commentarial approach to classical texts associ- ated with the Song and Ming traditions of Confucian scholarship led to an emphasis on textual criticism and philological approaches. It also spurred inter- est in older, pre-Song commentarial traditions. A certain degree of mutual aware- ness and exchange of knowledge accompanied this common interest, but until late in the Tokugawa period, to a large extent the pursuit of critical textual studies in the two countries followed separate trajectories. The discovery, editing, and publication in Japan of rare texts or texts that had been lost in China and the subsequent Chinese reception of these Japanese edi- tions exemplify these circumstances. In Japan, Ogyu Sorai (1666- 1728), who led the challenge to the interpretations of the Confucian canon asso- ciated with the Song scholars Cheng Yi (1033-1107) and Zhu Xi (1130-1200), encouraged his followers to search out copies of the pre-Song com- mentaries. Several of his disciples traveled a hundred kilometers north of Edo to the Ashikaga Gakko in Shimotsuke province (modern Tochigi pre- fecture), a center of learning that had flourished from the mid-Muromachi to the