皇帝的孝道：法籍耶穌會士韓國英譯介《御製定孝經衍義》初探

Abstract

While recent studies of the Jesuit Pierre-Martial Cibot (1727-80) have focused on his scientific works of Chinese botany and medical science, I would prefer to draw scholarly attention to his rarely investigated works on the translation of Chinese classics. This paper examines the way Cibot translated and interpreted Yuding xiaojing yanyi, which was one of his translations collected in his Doctrine ancienne et nouvelle des Chinois sur la piete filiale (1779) published (with the support of the French King Louis XV) in the fourth volume of Memoires concernant l'histoire, les sciences, les arts, les moeurs, les usages des Chinois. Differing from the first Xiaojing translator Francois Noel (1651-1729), who based his translation on the literati's texts (oeuvres litteraires), Cibot interpreted the meaning and the praxes of xiao in the context of the imperial texts of the early Qing. In this paper, I restrict my discussion to the textual analysis of Cibot's introduction to Kangxi Emperor's Yuzhi xiaojing yanyixu that is one of the imperial texts published in the same volume of Memoires. The Emperor is seen as the patriarch of the great family of the whole empire whose two obligations of xiao: loving and respecting the otherm, which constitutes the whole argument of Yuding xiaojing yanyi. The meaning of xiao was one of the debated topics in the Chinese Rites Controversy. Cibot's emphasis on the Emperor's piety recorded in the imperial texts seems to me to indicate that the moral and political interpretations of this Xiaojing was one of the last endeavors to defend the Riccian position concerning the Chinese ancestral rite, with the support of the imperial authorities of France and China, during the critical time of the Society of Jesus in the eighteenth century.