Abstract

A new scholarly movement of sorts emerged during the early Han period, associated with the acceptance of certain commentaries (zhuan 傳) on the classic history Chunqiu 春秋 (Spring and Autumn Annals) and related texts, written and complied in the" new script" of Han scholars recompiling early materials. The texts and ideas associated with this movement (although there have long been questions as to just how much of an actual intellectual movement this was) are largely syncretic and constructive in nature. The central text of this" New Text Confucianism," the Gongyang 公羊 commentary on the Chunqiu, was more concerned with offering explanations of what scholars took to be the inherent deeper meanings of the Chunqiu than with reconstruction of early understandings of the text (although proponents certainly also thought that these meanings were inherent in the texts, rather than added or read into them by later thinkers). One way of understanding the" New Text" movement is as a constructive and syncretic response to the modern use of ancient texts during the Han, and as a way to revitalize and systematize the ideas in earlier texts (although the authors of the Gongyang and its proponents in the Han certainly saw the text as expressing the core messages of the Chunqiu, rather than creating their own). The creative and syncretic nature of the" New Text" movement was opposed to what one may see as the historicism of the" Old Text" movement taken as associated with the Zuo 左 commentary and supposed ancient texts advocated by Liu Xin 劉歆 (50 BCE–23 CE). ¹ Later philosophers criticized what they took to be the speculative …