The Zhuangzi, hermeneutics and (philological) corpus linguistics

Dao Companion to the Philosophy of the Zhuangzi, 2022

Among the many themes that can be subjected to philosophical investigation, language, in particular, poses a unique challenge, as it constitutes the core medium by which ideas are communicated and, in some views, formed. In order to undertake an unbiased examination of language, therefore, one has to become aware of one's own words, a task which cannot be taken lightly; doubting the validity of words, a standpoint which is commonly associated with Daoist philosophy, is even more challenging, as it forces the thinker to face the problem of self-reference: to paraphrase Bai Juyi's satirical criticism of the Laozi, how can one say that those who know do not speak, and still be regarded as one of the knowers? 1 In the following pages I will examine the treatment of language in the Zhuangzi, a text which was perhaps more fearless than any other work that came before it (and many that followed) when facing the challenges posed by this complicated issue, and which consequently demonstrated a fascinating tension: a masterpiece of words that according to some could have earned its fame due to its literary brilliance alone (Mair 2000: 30, Ivanhoe 1993: 639], which, at the same time, in Graham's words, "professes a boundless scepticism as to the possibility of ever saying anything" [1989a: 25].

2020

Penning an essay on Zhu Xi’s thoughts in terms of hermeneutics implies a comparative agenda and perspective. While constructing the rationale and practice of Zhu’s exegesis of the classics by appealing to Western philosophies of reading, touching on such hermeneutic issues as original meaning, contemporary appropriation, authorial intent, and readerly contingency, I hope to throw into relief the cross-cultural consonance and dissonance discernible in the acts of interpretation. The aim is to shed some light on the attendant counterpoint engendered by divergent cultural assumptions, contrasting religio-philosophical values, varying epistemological stances, and different ontological conceptions of canonicity, authorship, and readership. To address comparatively reading matters East and West via Zhu Xi’s commentarial efforts, and to claim that reading is a universal imperative, is to posit that between commensurability and contravention, common paths of reading toward a deeper understa...

This paper is written for the University of Leuven course ‘Lexicology and Morphology’ (F0VG6a). It focuses mostly on lexicology and follows the application of four different linguistic streams to the Chinese word junzi, mostly translated as ‘Prince’, ‘gentleman’. The four streams are historicalphilological semantics, structuralist semantics, neostructuralist semantics and cognitive semantics. Based on Dirk Geeraerts’s survey of these theories in his book Theories of Lexical Semantics, the paper addresses issues like semasiological versus onomasiological theories, individual versus systemic perspectives, and decontextualization versus recontextualization. The study proposes that a full investigation into the meaning of a word should not be confined to a single theory, but needs a set of varying frameworks. Furthermore it is shown how a Chinese word can be analyzed through this set of more Western inspired set of theories.

This essay maps the changing contours of Yijing (Classic of Changes, aka Changes) exegesis, focusing in particular on certain specialized terms that deal with the related problems of "knowing fate" (zhiming ) and "establishing fate" (liming ). Among the concepts to be discussed (listed alphabetically in pinyin transliteration) are

Journal of Chinese Literature and Culture, 2014

The four-character statement "Yi yi ni zhi" 以意逆志 by Mencius on how to interpret the Book of Poetry has won praise from critics of all persuasions for nearly a millennium. How could this Mencian statement become a credo for so many different and often mutually opposed interpretive traditions? The extraordinary "versatility" of the Mencian statement, this article suggests, has much to do with the rich inherent ambiguity of uninflected classical Chinese. By adroitly exploiting the ambiguities of the words yi 意, ni 逆, and zhi 志 as well as its syntax, traditional Chinese critics continually reinterpreted the Mencian statement in a way that justified their novel interpretive approaches. So, by investigating the continual reinterpretation of the Mencian statement, this article maps out the rise of diverse interpretive approaches from pre-Han times through the Qing. It also discovers two distinctive thrusts of these approaches and sheds light on the underlying dynamic unity of the Chinese interpretive tradition. Keywords Chinese interpretive theory, Mencius on interpretation, "The Mao Prefaces, " Zhu Xi on interpretation, the interpretive approaches to the Shijing (Book of Poetry) The four-character statement "Yi yi ni zhi" 以意逆志 by Mencius on how to interpret the Book of Poetry (hereafter the Poetry or Shijing) has won praise from critics of all persuasions for nearly a millennium. It has been described as "having exhaustively elucidated the way of explaining the Poetry" 盡說詩之道, 1 "the most excellent exposition on the interpretation of the Poetry since high antiquity" 千古談詩之妙詮, 2 and the "ultimate principle for explicators of the Poetry" 説詩者之宗. 3 This quasi-universal endorsement might seem puzzling to someone unfamiliar with Chinese