A Brief History Of The Han Meng Zixue

This dissertation bases on two clues that one is the relationship between Mencius' theory and various masters' theories, and the other is the development of Confucianism in Han Dynasty. Meanwhile, combining with the history of thoughts and academic history, the dissertation describes the locus of the development of Mencius' theory and illustrates how Mencius' theory was accepted, disseminated and studied.Though Mencius' theory was in the secondary position in Han Dynasties, it played important roles in rebuilding Confucianism. Its Confucian spirits affected other schools of philosophy. At the beginning of Han Dynasty, many schools used Mencius' thoughts about "virtue and morality" and "common people being more important than aristocrats" for reference in the process of ruminating over the perdition of Qin Dynasty. In the struggle with legists and Taoism, Mencius' theory enlarged its affects. Meanwhile Mencius' theory with its unique rationality rectified the developing tendency of Confucianism.In the early years of Dong Han, Wang Chong, as a critic, drastically criticized different schools. His Satirizing Mencius systematically and definitely paved the way for criticizing Mencius' theory. The interior reasons of his criticizing Mencius' theory are his character and knowledge structure while the exterior reasons are that Confucianism and Mencius theory was prevailing and popular. However, from the whole book Lun Heng, Wang Chong still holded Confucius and Mencius in esteem. He also stated Mencius and respected Mencius. Satirizing Mencius objectively promised the correct development of Mencius' theory.Syntactic and Semantic Analysis of Mencius, written by Zhao Qi, is the subsistent and earliest annotation of Mencius. Zhao Qi annotated Mencius in three backgrounds. One background is style of erudition, the other one is the turn of studying style at the end of Han Dynasty and the arising personage spirits, and another one is Zhao Qi's experience and family atmosphere. Syntactic and Semantic Analysis of Mencius contains three parts, i.e. Preface, Syntactic and Semantic Analysis, and Postscript. Preface recapitulates the book Mencius and mencius' story and summarizes the motivation of Zhao Qi's annotation of Mencius. Syntactic and Semantic Analysis is the main body of this book. It includes every chapter and sentence of Mencius explained in detail and "Zhang Zhi" which summarized the meaning of each chapter as appendix. Postscript explains the arrangement order of Mencius. Zhao Qi for his Syntactic and Semantic Analysis is regarded as the forefather of Mencius researchers and paves the way for the following Mencius research.Most of works which studied Mencius in Han Dynasties has been lost. This dissertation verifies these works one by one, which contains Liu Xiang's Mencius Annotation, Yang Xiong's Mencius Annotation, Liu Tao's Fu Mengke, Cheng Zeng's Syntactic and Semantic Analysis of Mencius, Zheng Xuan's Mencius Annotation, Gao You's Syntactic and Semantic Analysis of Mencius , and Liu Xi's Mencius Annotation. This dissertation briefly introduces existent situation and descendants' appraisements about these books from the angle of documents.Generally speaking, Mencius' theory in Han Dynasties experienced the process of assimilating other theories of different schools and independently developed at last. In this period, Mencius' theory was paid attention by more and more people.