The Origins of Chinese Literary Hermeneutics

<p><b>Explores how China's oldest poetry collection was interpreted in a Confucian exegetical text-the </b><b><i>Mao Commentary</i></b><b>-in the mid-second century BCE.</b></p><p>The <i>Shijing</i> (Canon of Odes) is China's oldest poetry collection traditionally considered to have been edited by Confucius himself. Despite their enormous importance for Confucianism and Chinese civilization the 305 odes have for millennia also puzzled readers. Why did the Sage include in the Canon apparently lewd poems about women promising men to hitch up their skirts and wade the river and men tossing and turning in bed yearning for young women? What did the innumerable representations of plants beasts and birds and of various climactic and astronomical phenomena signify beyond their immediate function as natural descriptions?</p><p>One such puzzled reader was Mao Heng a learned Confucian employed at a minor court in the mid-second century BCE. The object of this study is the <i>Commentary</i> that Mao composed on the <i>Odes</i> and in particular the hermeneutic tool-the <i>xing</i>-that he invented to explain the figurality and tropes at play in them. Mao's xingish interpretation of the <i>Odes</i> is both genuinely hermeneutic in that it explains the rhetorical organization of these poems and thoroughly ideological since it allows Mao to transform them into Confucian dogma. The book also argues that the <i>xing</i> content function and cultural importance is comparable to the Aristotelian concept of metaphor (<i>metaphora</i>) and that the <i>xing</i> the <i>Odes</i> and the practice of <i>shi</i> (Chinese poetry) demand an intercultural comparative reading for a more nuanced understanding.</p>