PhD Project Marco Pouget

Eastern Han Philological Practices. Zheng Xuan‘s 鄭玄 Commentary to the Liji 禮記

Subject: Sinology
Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Michael Lackner (FAU), Prof. Dr. Hans van Ess (LMU)

Commentaries to the (Chinese) classics have been and still are most often utilised as tools to aid the understanding of the texts they attach themselves to. If a given commentary appears suitable to aid our understanding, as well as our preconceived image of what we suppose a passage says or what discourse it will fit into, we adopt the way of reading advanced by the commentary. If, however, the commentary strikes us as unintelligible or unsuitable, we choose to ignore it. As helpful as this approach may be to our own thinking, this method is not without its problems: Commentaries issue from an individual’s understanding of what a text needs to be understood, what target group is to be addressed and what requirements they would have, and what the role of the classic is before the intellectual tapestry of the time.
To nit-pick what we like from among a textual tradition, disregarding the manifold influences at play within the commentary’s discourse, not only means missing out on discovering why the commentary says what it says, offering a potentially better understanding of the classic, but also lets slide the opportunity to shed some light on what motivated the commentary, what requirements and assumptions informed it, and by means of which techniques it reaches its goals.

My project aims to reverse this selective approach, shifting gears towards perceiving of an exemplary commentary as a source of its own. The zhu 注 (“filled in”) commentary to the Notes on Morality (Liji 禮記) represents the specific perspective of Eastern Han 漢 (25-220 CE) scholar, teacher, and commentator Zheng Xuan 鄭玄 (127-200) before the backdrop of his time, and most likely with a certain target group in mind.
Zheng Xuan’s commentary is the earliest tangible layer in the stratigraphy of the Notes on Morality’s tradition, in many ways contributing to a philological stabilisation and (pre-)exegetical scene-setting for scholarship pertaining to this text and its canon. From drawing intertextual connections and noting textual variants to summarising the general idea of a passage, Zheng applies a toolkit of specific techniques to guide his readers through the text. It is these techniques and their underlying motives I want to trace, describe, and analyse: What does the commentary do, how, and why?

I aim to show that Zheng Xuan’s commentary is not (only) a convenient tool. It can impose striking twists on the “main text”, take idiosyncratic angles, or alter its complexity rather than breaking the text down. There is a discourse going on which the commentator purposefully weighs in on, and Zheng displays a voice and an agenda of his own, which has become inseparable from the Notes on Morality. Especially in light of the lasting impact it had on Chinese intellectual history to this day, his commentary thus likewise merits further exploration both for the philological practices it employs, as well as for the act of mediation between people and texts it ventures to accomplish.