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

fact likely preserves what actually happened between Confucius and his disciples and his contemporaries. The very irregularity of the text suggests its authenticity in that it has not be redacted and revised.

Waley and Van Norden’s Observations

Arthur Waley (1889–1966) observed that even the first ten sections of the Analects are not a monolithic whole. He suggested that sections 3–9 are the earliest portion and that section 10 is irrelevant.³² Recently, Bryan Van Norden echoed this view and further elaborated on it.³³ His argument is based on the text’s style and topics. Van Norden assumed that each section must have a topic of its own, and he found that in sections 3–9 there is an explicit topic not present in sections 1–2. But this assumption, too, is ill founded. For although the redactors of the Analects seem to have grouped chapters around certain topics or themes, on many occasions it is difficult to thematize the disjointed sayings. Even in section 4, in which the topic of ren (benevolence) is prominent, other topics are also covered, including yi (; righteousness), li (; profits) and Dao (; the Way).

Another observation by Arthur Waley should perhaps be noted here concerning the “rectification of names” passage (13:3). Waley argued that because “the language crisis” came much later (The language crisis occurred in the third and fourth century BCE, when philosophers began to be skeptical of the use of language to access the reality) this passage must be an interpolation. But as Yang Bojun pointed out, the “names” here had nothing to do with language but rather are related to the ranks and positions and responsibilities that come with the names.³⁴ Therefore, the Analects was very likely to have taken shape before the language crisis in the third or fourth century BCE. This is but one instance of how interpolation arguments may fail to appreciate all the dimensions of Confucius’s thought expressed within each section of the Analects and throughout the work as a whole.

Brooks and Brooks’s Accretion Theory

Finally, Bruce Brooks and Taeko Brooks’s accretion theory has captured wide contemporary scholarly attention and aroused considerable