Category Archives: Chinese Texts

Graduate Student Conference

Fourth Annual Stanford-Berkeley Graduate Student Conference on Premodern Chinese Humanities

A joint organizing committee of Stanford University and UC Berkeley faculty announces the Fourth Annual Stanford-Berkeley Graduate Student Conference on Premodern Chinese Humanities, to be held on Friday, April 21 and Saturday, April 22, 2017, at UC Berkeley. This national meeting of graduate students specializing in premodern Chinese studies aims to bring together young scholars from geographically distant institutions to present and discuss innovative research on China.

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Harvard Yenching Library Chinese materials added to Ctext.org

Donald Sturgeon reports that thanks to the support of Harvard Yenching Library, over 5 million pages of scanned materials from the Yenching Library collection have been added to the Library section of the ctext.org site, including high quality images from the Chinese Rare Books Collection. See http://ctext.org/library.pl?if=en&collection=139. Approximate transcriptions created using the ctext.org OCR procedure have also been added to the Wiki, making these materials full-text searchable. In future he hopes to collaborate with other libraries to include materials from their Chinese language collections.

Tang Center: Fellowships, etc.

The Tang Center for Early China, founded at Columbia University in 2015, is dedicated to the advancement of the understanding of the richness and importance of early Chinese civilization as a part of a broader common human heritage. It is committed to doing so through both solid scholarship and broad public outreach. It does this, in part, through programs supporting fellowships and conferences, as well as through publications. A useful overview of funding opportunities is here; and for the center’s website, see here.

New Issue of FPC (11:2)

The latest issue of Frontiers of Philosophy in China has been published, with a special focus on the challenge that excavated texts pose to Chinese philosophical research today. Until the end of August, the full issue (full text) is available here to read or download. The full Table of Contents follows.

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CFP: Society for Early China

The Society for the Study of Early China is pleased to announce its Fifth Annual Conference, which will take place in Toronto on Thursday, 16 March 2017. Like our previous meetings, this one will take place in conjunction with the Association for Asian Studies’ Annual Conference. Registration for the AAS event is not required to attend the SSEC meeting.

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Citing ctext.org

A friendly reminder to be sure to cite ctext.org for those who utilize it.

ctext.org is an invaluable resource and asset to the field. It allows us all a free, quick, and easy way to look up texts we see cited, as well as the ability to look up concordance references. The field is tremendously better off with ctext. This is why it is very important to give the site and its creator/editor, Donald Sturgeon, formal credit in bibliographies, forewords, and footnotes, as per standard academic practice. I am moved to say this because I’ve lately become aware of works that look to be utilizing ctext.org, but fail to formally attribute it in bibliographic material. Instruction on how to cite ctext.org texts can be found here: http://ctext.org/faq/cite. 

CFP: 2nd Conference on Middle Period Chinese Humanities

In 2014, the first “Conference on Middle Period Chinese Humanities” was convened at Harvard, gathering together scholars working on the period covering the Tang through the Ming dynasties in all fields. I had the good fortune to attend, and found it very stimulating — if somewhat short of philosophers. The second such conference has now been announced, to be held at Leiden University, September 14-17, 2017. Those interested in participating are asked to submit an abstract of 300 to 500 words (in English or Chinese) and a CV by October 1, 2016 to: middle.period17@hum.leidenuniv.nl. Those whose abstracts are accepted will be notified by December 1, 2016. For more information, see here.

The meaning of Analects 2.21

Someone said to Confucius, “Master, why don’t you engage in government?” The Master said, “The Book of Documents says, ‘Filial! But be filial, and a friend to your brothers, thus contributing to government.’ Why then do that other kind of ‘engaging in government’?”

或謂孔子曰：「子奚不為政？」子曰：「《書》云：『孝乎惟孝、友于兄弟，施於有政。』是亦為政，奚其為為政？」

I’ll suppose for the sake of argument that the reported exchange is authentic, and argue that it is not significant evidence of Confucius’ views.  Confucius is not aiming to communicate his views here.

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