Convivium: James Robson, Commenting on Commentaries: The History, Development, and Diversity of the Chinese Commentarial Tradition

Practices of Commentary and The Centre for Medieval Studies welcome James Robson of Harvard University to the CMS Convivium on November 8 from 2:30-4:30 pm. The Convivium is a hybrid event, with the option to attend either in person or virtually via Zoom.

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**IMPORTANT ACCESSIBILITY INFORMATION: The elevator at Lillian Massey Building is currently out of service. Please contact medieval.communications@utoronto.ca to request an accommodation, or select the Zoom option on the RSVP form.

Title

Commenting on Commentaries: The History, Development, and Diversity of the Chinese Commentarial Tradition

Abstract

Jonathan Z. Smith once wrote:  “Where there is a canon we can predict the necessary occurrence of a hermeneute, of an interpreter whose task it is to continually extend the domain of the closed canon over everything that is known or everything that is.” This focus on meaning and the way the commentarial tradition opens up a text by revealing its hidden aspects or adds new meanings for a new age, is of course one fruitful approach, but it has the potential danger of masking the complex variety and function of commentaries that exist within a tradition. This talk seeks to lay new a foundation for studying Chinese commentaries by providing an account of the full range and diversity of the commentarial tradition in China. Rather than focus on commentaries within a single tradition—as much previous scholarship has tended to do—this talk aims to look across traditions to discuss the variety of commentarial styles and formats in classical Confucian, Daoist, and Buddhist commentaries. What different forms (mise en page) did those commentaries take? How were form and content related? How did commentaries solidify the meaning of a classic text and/or how did it breathe new life into it? How might commentaries invite—or even force—a radical reinterpretation of the original text? The history of how commentaries have traditionally be treated as subordinate to the main text is now well known, but there remains much to say about how commentaries were not only significant in the role they played in understanding a text, but also played a variety of different functions. Many Chinese texts, for example, only survive in so far as they were transmitted along with a commentary. These are some of the issues I plan to address in this talk that will approach the Chinese commentarial tradition from a broad perspective that aims to integrate new insights from recent studies on commentaries across different Chinese religious traditions. This remains a necessary step in our understanding of Chinese commentaries since we still have an inadequate grasp of the different genres of commentary and their historical evolution and development. 

Biography

James Robson is the James C. Kralik and Yunli Lou Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University. He served as the Victor and William Fung Director of the Harvard University Asia Center, was recently appointed as the Director of the Harvard-Yenching Institute. He received his Ph.D. from Stanford University, after spending many years doing research in China, Taiwan, and Japan. He previously taught at Williams College and the University of Michigan and was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. He specializes in the history of Chinese Buddhism and Daoism and is the author of the Power of Place: The Religious Landscape of the Southern Sacred Peak [Nanyue 南嶽] in Medieval China (Harvard University Press, 2009), which was awarded the Stanislas Julien Prize awarded by the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres and the Toshihide Numata Prize in Buddhist Studies. He is the co-editor of Images, Relics and Legends–The Formation and Transformation of Buddhist Sacred Sites and Buddhist Monasticism in East Asia: Places of Practice. He is the editor of the Norton Anthology of World Religions: Daoism and is completing a monograph on the Daodejing for the Princeton University Press, Lives of Great Religious Books Series entitled The Daodejing: A Biography.