An Existential Reading of the Confucian Analects By Andrew Zhon ...

controversy. In their Original Analects, published in 1998, Brooks and Brooks went so far as to argue that all the preceding theories on stratification could be combined to produce a hypothetical chronology of the Analects, which extends from around 479 BCE in Section 4 to 249 BCE in Section 20.

For this chronology, Brooks and Brooks added little solid evidence beyond what had already been stated, such as the death of Zengzi in 8:3³⁵ and the use of the posthumous epithet for Ai-gong in 6:3. It seems to me that the whole project is highly speculative. For instance, in determining the date of section 9, they relied on a single passage (the fifteenth). They asserted that there is a shift in the source of court ceremonies in Lu, and that this shift is reflected in 9:15.³⁶ Brooks and Brooks further claimed that this diplomatic shift might have been caused by the battles between the states of Qi and Lu in the years 412, 411, and 408 BCE; therefore, they conclude, this portion of Lunyu 9 might be dated ca. 405. And because they assumed—according to their accretion theory—that every section is a unit of accretion, they dated the entirety of section 9 to ca. 405. The study by Brooks and Brooks have certainly aroused a new interest in the study of the text of the Analects, but the speculative nature of the work is such that their conclusion about the stratification and chronology of the Analects should not be accepted without doubt.

A Reconsideration of the Text-critical Issue

Therefore, except for Liu Zongyuan, the critical scholars discussed so far have reached their conclusions based on little uncontestable evidence. They have assumed that every section of the Analects ought to share the same literary style. But if, indeed, Master Zeng’s disciples finally wrote down the sayings or observations as remembered by Confucius’s immediate disciples, and if Master Zeng’s disciples or Confucius’s immediate disciples had different literary talents (as they surely did), there is no reason why the style must be the same throughout the work. In the same way, the argument for interpolations within each section is based on the assumption that each section must maintain a single style; this assumption, too, is questionable. The Analects comprises the records of