practice with the author of a certain document. At the same time, many motivations behind the present debates and the questions raised by historians are based on issues concerning the present. Any analysis implies a comparative work between the researcher’s investigation and the arguments expressed in the “old” and “far” text. We are interested in a text because it means something to us, even though it was written in a different situation and context. Old texts are not a “mere repository of culture bound ethical norms” (Hall and Ames, Thinking through Confucius, 6). Obviously the more the interpreter knows about the text and context, the more they are able to engage in cross-cultural comparison (Lane, “Comparing Greek and Chinese,” 588–590). However, the reader or interpreter can never hope to read a document of another age and culture with the eyes of the readers of the same place and time, as they cannot but read it with their own perspectives. History is always “contemporary”—as Benedetto Croce has demonstrated, not to mention the postmodern critique of ahistorical biases—because historians rewrite history to answer the new generations’ questions (Croce, La Storia come Pensiero e come Azione, 5). Moreover, interpretations and reinterpretations cannot be only philological annotations but also re-creations and updates of a previous texts or doctrines (Shun Kwong-loi, “On the Idea of ‘No Self,’” 5–8, 27–30). In other words, raising questions might be an “anachronism” if compared with the specific concerns of a certain writing, but it is a legitimate attempt of reading, discovering elements which are still of interest in the present. The reasonable elaboration of historical questions, logical construction of a theorem, the cautious use of sources, and the ability to read them are among the conditions of serious research. Nevertheless, one cannot but agree with Elman (“The Failures of Contemporary Chinese Intellectual History,” 371–391) on the risks of self-deception for the constant temptations of using inappropriate methods, schemas, categories, as well as raising questions on the basis of more or less fashionable ideologies (modernization, Marxist, Weberian, postmodern ideologies). The final doubt concerns the possibility of depriving us of our own categories, prejudices, ideologies, and beliefs in dealing with any historical question from the formulation of the hypotheses, the raising of questions, to reading/interpreting sources. Thus, the consciousness of the risks and the awareness that contaminations of categories and anachronisms are unavoidable.

9. Xing, in fact, has both a narrower and broader significance than the English term “nature” suggests: (1) xing has a narrower meaning because,