The Early History of the Confucian Canon: Successes and Failures of the First Closure

By understanding canon as a triangle involving three factors – texts which were regarded as authoritative within a given community, the list of books which at a certain point in time refers to these works, and the social group involved with the texts – the paper intends to shed light on successes an...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Di Giacinto, Licia 1972- (Author)
Format: Electronic Article
Language:English
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Published: Diagonal-Verlag 2012
In: Zeitschrift für Religionswissenschaft
Year: 2010, Volume: 18, Issue: 2, Pages: 137-162
Online Access: Volltext (Verlag)
Parallel Edition:Non-electronic
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Summary:By understanding canon as a triangle involving three factors – texts which were regarded as authoritative within a given community, the list of books which at a certain point in time refers to these works, and the social group involved with the texts – the paper intends to shed light on successes and failures of the attempts at systematic canonization of ru (Confucian) authoritative texts during the Han 漢 period (206 BC-220 AD). In particular, the late first century BC should be regarded as the arrival point of a first canonization process marked by significant lexical shifts – from jing 經 to liu yi 六藝 to jingdian 經典 – and definable to a certain extent in terms of a closure. This first attempt to close the canon, however, soon turned into a failure. As for the reasons for this breakdown, the paper shall focus on the relationship between ru-ism and religion, here understood both in terms of increasingly organized religious communities and state cults.
ISSN:2194-508X
Contains:In: Zeitschrift für Religionswissenschaft
Persistent identifiers:DOI: 10.1515/zfr.2010.18.2.137