China Review International

For those who treasured the two blue volumes of the first edition of Sources of Chinese Tradition (hereafter, Sources), a new edition has long been eagerly awaited. After all, the original was compiled in the 1950s and first published in 1960. Many changes have taken place in the field since then. For a start, several excellent anthologies of translated excerpts have appeared.

Second, there has been an enormous amount of archaeological activity in the last fifty years, including the excavation of new versions of received texts and hitherto unknown texts. New branches of archaeology and scholarship have enhanced our understanding not only of traditions as found in texts but also traditions of architecture, clothing, food, sculpture, music, painting, calligraphy, and much else besides, from the Shang to the end of the empire.

Third, the history of the Republic and the People's Republic has opened up as well, with an explosion of new sources. Oral history and a far greater accessibility to participants and scholars in China can now supplement conventional written documents to an extent not possible at the time of the original edition of Sources.

Fourth, the notion that tradition was something enshrined for all time in the classics or sacred texts of a culture has long since been abandoned in favor of the view that it is something that each generation reinvents (frequently using the same terms, but with different meanings). Moreover, at any one time there may be several coexisting traditions. This has been particularly true of the last one hundred years, during which time Chinese traditions have constantly been reinvented and rival versions have competed.

As a result, and fifth, the old view that the sacred texts of a culture alone could serve as the key to that culture has been discarded. Students now use different types of evidence to supplement and check one against the other (e.g., comparing texts with artifacts) in an effort to measure words with deeds and doctrine with praxis and to explore the relationship between theoretical articulations of ideology and lived experience. [End Page 93]

How have the editors taken into account both changes in the field and these new approaches to tradition as they set about the task of updating the original Sources? The short answer is: not very well.

Part of the appeal of the first edition was that when it came it out it held a unique position (almost the only other anthologies available at that time were of Chinese poetry). As an anthology of excerpts from Chinese thinkers it formed the natural companion to the standard textbooks of those days, East Asia: The Great Tradition (1960) and East Asia: The Modern Transformation (1965). Like them, it was influenced by Robert Redfield's theories of the interactions between what he called the great tradition (the conscious, literate heritage of the cities) and the little tradition (the beliefs of the villagers), but the editors of Sources preferred to represent "the great movements of thought among the educated elite of China" (Sources [1963], vol. 2, p. 285).

Now, forty years later, there are many excellent anthologies of Chinese readings available on Chinese history, philosophy, and religion. For example, there are Ebrey (1993) for the whole sweep of history;¹ Cheng, Lestz, and Spence (1999) for the period covered by volume 2 of the new edition of Sources;² or the older Teng and Fairbank (1963) for the years 1839-1923;³ Wing-tsit Chan (1963) for philosophy;⁴ Lopez (1996) for religion;⁵ Lopez (1995) for Buddhism;⁶ and Kohn (1993) and Bokenkamp (1997) for Daoism.⁷ One major field not...