Recent Developments in Chinese Studies
1965; American Oriental Society; Volume: 85; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.2307/597980
ISSN2169-2289
Autores Tópico(s)Chinese history and philosophy
ResumoTo SPELL OUT THE PROGRESS in Chinese studies in the last few years is to tell of advances all along the line. I wish I were equal to the task. In my own academic life-time the number of institutions offering courses in the field, the number of qualified teachers, the number and improvement of libraries of Chinese books and books on China, the number of museums which have worthy collections of Chinese objets d'art, the outpouring of funds, both government and private, on behalf of scholarships, fellowships, travel and research, the standard of our publications, the increase in archaeological activity on the mainland and elsewhereall these show marked development, some of them several hundred fold. This is not to report that the best of scholars today are quite the equal of, say, Wang Kuo-wei of China, Kuwabara Jitsuzo of Japan, Paul Pelliot and Henri Maspero of France, and Basil Alexeiev of Russia; still, there is a much larger number of specialists than there ever were a generation ago; there are more aids and tools to work with, so that one doesn't have to be possessed of the prodigious memory of bygone students of Chinese literature; and there is now available through modern methods of reproduction hundreds of important books and manuscripts formerly out of the reach of all but the most fortunate and most travelled inquirer. We are really most blessed. Our problem is to live up to our heritage. Parenthetically I should like to express our debt of gratitude to French scholarship for publishing posthumously a number of monographs by Maspero and Pelliot. For those of the latter we owe much especially to Louis iambis, who has lavished both time and expert knowledge upon them. Let me take up first one blessing which is practically new, at least during the last forty-odd years: the appearance of an ever-increasing number of indexes and concordances. One can truly say, I believe, that here is one western scholarly device, adopted by the Chinese, which is a genuine contribution to an area of study which they have long thought to be peculiarly their own. James Legge probably lighted the way about a century ago with the indexes of subjects, proper names, and Chinese characters and phrases which he made for his translations of The Chinese Classics. But these were incomplete. How often has one run into such old friends as passim, et al, and et saepe in one or another of his indexes and despaired of locating the passage sought for without reading the whole Classic. About the same time that Legge was producing his great series, W. F. Mayers, in his efforts to make use of Chinese cyclopedias of reference, ejaculated in 1869: Yet alas! what student has not groaned in spirit over the chaotic arrangements, the absence of proper indexing and crossreferences, and, above all, the entire lack of information respecting the date and authorship of works quoted from in these vast compilations. As late as 1926 Paul Pelliot wrote, apropos a work by the distinguished scholar Lo Chen-yU (1866-1940), Si du moins nos confreres chinois, dont les travaux sont si remarquables, s'avisaient d'en doubler l'utilite par les index! One recourse in the 1920's was, of course, to hunt up some obliging Chinese friend who knew the whole canon by heart. But such people are becoming all too scarce these days. Their schooling, like our own, is given to stressing all the arts and sciences, and rarely does one encounter a youth today with a stomach full of classical knowledge. The first example of a Chinese produced index I know of (except for the index of all the biographies in the 24 dynastic histories compiled by Wang lui-tsu in 1783 and two similar works published in 1790 and 1800) is one for the very short Tao te ching brought out privately by Admiral Ts'ai T'ing-kan in 1922, a copy of which he gave me at the time, and which I treasure. A year earlier a Japanese scholar, Moriki Kakuzo, published an index of the Four Books, supplementing this service in the 1930's by one of the Five Classics; these, however, had their limitations, as only people acquainted with the Japanese pronunciation of Chinese characters could use them. The major step forward came with the inauguration in 1930 of the Harvard-Yenchinz Institute * This paper was delivered before a meeting of the American Oriental Society at Chicago on April 14, 1965.
Referência(s)