Western Ruist Exegesis For Canon Meaning Reconstruction

With a concern for deep cross-cultural dialogues towards cultural diversity, the ways Chinese classics have been interpreted and represented by western scholars are worth exploring. Taking Legge’s footnotes in his1871Shiing translation as the data, the present study aims to interpret the discourse features of Legges’ Chinese canon meaning reconstruction.A comparative textual analysis of Legge’s footnotes and traditional Chinese commentaries reveals that textual reasoning serves as his outstanding discursive strategy. This is demonstrated in the following three facets:1) Chinese classic commentary genre is adopted with a word-to-word meaning explanation and a multi-voiced fugue in textual explication;2) In the meaning explanation and textual explication, the "cutting and tailoring" strategy stands out as the major writing style as Legge has cited of a great number of Chinese commentary literatures;3)A mode shifting is often done between traditional Chinese commentary genre and modern western disciplinary genres which feature science and history discourses, with science discourse noticeable in his identification of such biological species as "birds, beasts, and plants" and his technical explanation of the ritual objects and history discourse found in his differentiation of the "true" from the "false" of Shijing historical narratives.The above hermeneutic discourse strategies for Legge’s Shijing interpretation demonstrate a multi-voiced fugue in meaning construction of Chinese classics with unique stylistic traits of Chinese commentaries, attaching great significance to the moral, political, and ritual meaning construction via rich intertextuality between his footnotes and traditional Chinese commentaries, presenting and comparing different voices from commentators of different times and showing a historicized on-going dialogue between the classics and the societies. Legge as a Western Ru, therefore, has achieved a cross-cultural meaning reconstruction of Chinese classics as canon exegesis rather than mere translation.The modem western discourses of science and history employed by Legge, unfortunately, hinders the cross-cultural communication of Chinese classics. The science discourse fails to deliver the metaphorical meaning construction as an important part of Shijing exegesis and the history discourse cannot present the "subtle phrasing with profound meanings" strategy in Chinese traditional historiography with historical narratives as data bank for moral lessons rather than as records of facts about the past.Discourse features of Legge’s Shiijng exegesis prompts reflections on a historical task of how Chinese classic exegesis tradition can be revived as a source of meaning for today’s China and the world as a whole. The findings also indicate that cross-cultural communication of Chinese classics should take traditional Chinese classic studies as its foundation, text reasoning as its discourse strategy and cross-disciplinary perspective as its approach towards interpretive academic "thick translations" to present the "local knowledge" of Chinese cultural fabrics.