New Book: History of Chinese Classical Scholarship

The Social Sciences Academic Press in Beijing, the publishing arm of the Chinese Academy of Social Science, has published the Chinese translation of Professor of Chinese from the Dept. of Asian and Near Eastern Languages, David B. Honey’s book History of Chinese Classical Scholarship. Vol. 1, Zhou Period: Confucius, the Six Classics and Scholastic Transmission.

It is a study of the antecedents of classical scholarship as defined by the career of Confucius, his immediate disciples, and his intellectual followers Mengzi and Xunzi. Classical scholarship is defined as the intellectual and philological engagement with the texts of the ancient classics as transmitted by Confucius and the effort to extract and apply their moral messages. Oral transmission in ritualized teaching settings is an important sub-field treated by the paradigm of performative ritual. This Chinese translation precedes the publication of the English version, and hence is the first appearance of Dr. Honey’s scholarly project in print.