Organized by: Research Centre for East Asian Cultures, St Anne’s College

The late Han scholar Zheng Xuan 鄭玄 (127–200) produced some of the best-known and most influential
commentaries to the Ru “Confucian” canonical texts (or “classics”, jing 經). It is well known that later
commentarial scholars from Wang Su 王肅 (195–256) onward disagreed with many of Zheng’s
interpretations of ritual and other points. This talk will present examples of Zheng’s commentaries on texts
to demonstrate that these criticisms arose from his fundamentally different approach to understanding the
canons. In contrast to his successors, who focussed on content such as ideology and historical institutions,
Zheng viewed the texts themselves as paramount, and read them as constructing a wider, tightly-organized
organic context. His individual glosses were calibrated to this wider context, and were therefore seen as
misreadings by later scholars who did not understand the premises of his approach.
Hashimoto Hidemi 橋本秀美 is Professor of Chinese at Aoyama Gakuin University in Japan, and was for
many years a professor in the Department of History at Peking University, teaching Chinese canonical texts
and scholarship (jingxue 經學). He has published numerous books and articles in Chinese and Japanese, as
well as overseeing publication of a number of rare woodblock editions.