Similarities And Differences Of The "university" Zheng Xuan Zhu Xi This Test

Since the beginning of the Eastern Han Dynasty, annotation and research of the Confucian classics has primarily revolved around defining and explaining individual words and sentences. Zheng Xuan's annotations of the Confucian Classics are the embodiment of this kind of annotative style. The Neo-Confucianists of the Song era, however, were proponents of Li Xue(理学). They were attempting to expound on the deeper, more theoretical underpinings of the classics through their annotations, and this tendency is clearly reflected in their works.The Great Learning (《大学》 ,Da Xue) originally was just one of many articles collected in Dai Sheng's (戴圣) Book of Rites ( 《礼记》). From the Han Dynasty to the Tang, its status in the academic world was tantamount to all the other articles in the Book of Rites. So naturally, when Zheng Xuan annotated the Three Books of Rites ( "三礼 " ), he did not lend any extra attention to The Great Learning. Once The Great Learning arrived in the hands of the two famous Song Dynasty Neo-Confucianist philosophers Cheng Hao (程颢) and Cheng Yi (程颐), it began to be independantly recognized and researched. Soon afterwards, in Zhu Xi's Neo-Confucianist philosophical system, its status was raised even higher as the central Confucian classic. From then on, not only did The Great Learning become the object of study for countless famous scholars, but it even became mandatory reading for anyone engaged in academic study.This research attempts to compare and contrast Zheng Xuan's version of The Great Learning with Zhu Xi's. This paper has two main aims. One is to gain a deeper knowledge of The Great Learning itself through a comparison of these two influential and authoritative scholars' different versions of it. Two is to use a comparison of their two versions of The Great Learning as a vehicle to gain a stronger understanding of these two scholars' differing individual methodologies, as well as differences in the overall academic methodological trends of their two respective dynasties (Han and Song). This paper is divided into five parts: Chapter One introduces various aspects of the article itself, such as the debate over its authorship, its time of creation, and a general history of its circulationthroughout the ages. Chapter Two dicusses the progression of research on the Confucian classics during the Han Dynasty, along with Zheng Xuan's own unique methodology in the study and annotation of Confucian classics. Chapter Three explores the roots of Song Dynasty Neo-Confucianism and Zhu Xi's own brand thereof. Chapter Four word by word and sentence by sentence directly compares the two scholars' explanations of The Great Learning and their differing explanatory styles. Chapter Five delves into the two scholars' overall views on The Great Learning as a whole and their views on some of the more important questions concerning The Great Learning. It lays particular emphasis on the Neo-Confucianists' theory that the bamboo strips on which The Great Learning was originally written were actually placed in the wrong order early on, so that the version of The Great Learning that Han Dynasty and subsequent scholars based their research on, was incorrect.