Zhu Xi: Basic Teachings by Daniel K. Gardner (review)

Abstract

Like an echo of the “Basic Writings” series with selected translations of Chinese thinkers by Burton Watson published in the 1960s as part of their “Columbia College Program of Translations from the Oriental Classics,” Columbia University Press has now again published a book in the same format: Zhu Xi: Basic Teachings, translated by Daniel K. Gardner, a paperback booklet, 155 pages in length displaying, like the “Basic Writings,” a Han dynasty stone rubbing on its front cover. The contents of the book appear familiar as well. In 1990, Daniel K. Gardner published a translation of chapters 7–13 of the Zhuzi yulei 朱子語類 with 79 pages of introduction, notes, commentary, glossary, bibliography, and index, a most wonderful book.1 Zhu Xi basically follows this composition. The fourteen-page introduction follows the same structure of the earlier seventy-nine-page text: providing the reader with a biography, historical background, philosophy, writings. It includes sentences and entire paragraphs that are copied verbatim from the earlier introduction and basically reads like a summary of it. The following “Notes on the Text and Translation” contains many similar points as the “Note on Text and Translation” of the earlier book, but lacks the discussion of the important issue of contradictory passages, a discussion that due to the lack of commentary in Zhu Xi would have been even more important for this shorter and terser translation. The Zhuzi yulei (Classified Conversations of Master Zhu) is again the main source of the translations in this book. It presents selected translations of the first thirteen chapters of the Zhuzi yulei because these chapters, according to Gardner, “constitute the best overview of Zhu Xi’s basic and most enduring philosophical teachings” (p. xxi). The translations are organized into five chapters: 1. “Foundations of the Universe,” with three sections mainly containing passages from chapters 1–3 of the Zhuzi yulei; 2. “Human Beings,” with three sections mainly containing passages from chapters 4–6 of the Zhuzi yulei; 3. “Learning,” with three sections mainly containing passages from chapters 7–9 of the Zhuzi yulei; 4. “A Theory of Reading,” with three sections mainly containing passages from chapters 10–11 of the Zhuzi yulei with some passages from chapter 14 and other writings such as Zhu Xi ji 朱熹集; and 5. “Moral Self-Cultivation,” with two sections mainly containing passages from chapters 12–13 of the Zhuzi yulei. Three of the five chapters thus contain translations from chapters that Gardner had previously translated, commented and annotated in his 1990 book. The other two chapters present translations of many passages for which we also have translations in Wing-tsit Chan’s Source Book in Chinese Philosophy,