CHAPTER IO Liu Baonan and Han Learning

This chapter examines some of the defining features of Liu Baonan's scholarship and philosophy to show how they inform the interpretations in Correct Meaning. The central question is whether Liu's commitment to the methodology of evidential scholarship warrants identifying him as a Han Learning (Hanxue i~*) partisan. Three broad issues are examined: Liu's assumptions about, and attitudes toward, influential Han scholars of the Analects (Sima Qian, Wang Su, Kong Anguo, and Zheng Xuan); the ques­ tion of how narrowly committed Liu was to the authority of Han sources and Han philology; and the role of ethical values (traditionally emphasized by Song Learning scholars) in Liu's philosophical priorities.

Reliance on the Shiji In the attempt to make sense of and lend order to the interpretation of the text, many traditional commentators on the Analects showed a willingness to organize the events described in that book into a narrative. A narrative reading of the Analects was most commonly employed to create a meaning­ ful totality for ' life--even if the constraints of the interlinear commentary form meant forgoing a chronological exposition-in which episodes in and around Confucius' life were interpreted so as to cast him consistendy in the role of teacher and/ or sage. Nevertheless, the great ma­ jority of these commentators implicidy or explicidy appealed to a meta­ narrative-one constructed outside the text-to provide the structure for the chronological ordering of events. Historically, the most important such meta-narrative was that of Sima Qian, although it was only with 's CollectedAnnotations on the Analects that it began to be cited with any regular­ ity in a commentary. In the selective chronological reconstruction of Liu Baonan and Han Learning events in Confucius' life, both in his biography of Confucius in "Kongzi shijia" and in the chronological tables in S hiji, Sima Qian selected particular passages from the Analects and wove them into a chronological narrative. If the success of this approach is judged in terms of its influence, longevity, and authority (often unacknowledged but still patently in evidence), then rearranging individual sections in the received text into a linear unfolding of events to constitute a single story line with a beginning and end was well worth the trouble. Some commentators even proposed that the text as it stands already evidences a linear, sequential coherence. Zhu Xi's general injunctions on the importance of following a sequence in learning and reading (word to word, section to section, and chapter to chapter) might qualify as one ex­ ample. The problem with this prescription is that the onus for apprehend­ ing the existence of the proposed sequence and its efficacious import rests solely with the individual reader (ifde )@) {~); only occasionally did Zhu plot its unfolding with reference to a sequence of passages. A more circum­ scribed model of sequential arrangement1 was proposed by Huang Kan and Xing Bing, who, in their respective prefatory comments to the twenty chapters, identified a different "inner logic" informing the sequence of the received order. Huang's proposal is unsatisfactory insofar as his synoptic characterization of the overall import of each chapter is not borne out by the evidence of each section in a given chapter. Liu Baonan, who was strongly critical of Huang for linking individual chapters in this way, also took Zhao to task for claiming that individual sections were grouped or clustered according to their length and that their sequential arrangement is based on topical and thematic clustering.2 ­ spite this, Liu himself identified many examples of topical and thematic clustering3 and proposed chronological connections between sequential

r. Even Sima Qian's historically contextualized narrative is, at best, piecemeal--he was unable to synthesize all of the events related in the Analects---and internally incon­ sistent, particularly on chronological matters. 2. LU1!JII zhengyi, prefatory comments, I.I. 3· For example, in the final part of his commentary to po, Liu identified several clusters: he saw 3·3 as following on from 3.1 and 3.2 (as had Huang Kan and Zhu Xi) on the basis of his claim that the word (person) in 3·3 refers to the Ji family and the Three Families; 7.17 and 7.18 on the basis of his claim that suo r.Jf in 7.18 refers to Changes Jb in 7.17; and 19.15 and 19.16 on the basis of claim that nan neng ~fi~ refers to tang tang~~. Other clusters he identified are 6.r and 6.2; 6.8 and 6.9; 8.8 and 8.9; 9.6 and 9.7; !2.1-12.3; and I2.I7-I9.