Celebratory events 2023

The Academy is very much honored to have world-renowned Sinologue Professor William H. Nienhauser, Jr. to visit the university as the Institute of Creativity Visiting Fellow and give 2 public talks in October 2023.

Lecture 1: Notes on Having Taught the Lunyu (Confucian Analects)

2023/10/5 │ 16:00 – 17:30

The lecture will explore the major translations in French, German, and English of selected verses of the Analects with the goal to point out aporia and alternative understandings of these passages in light of traditional and modern Chinese and Western scholarship.
Language: English
Summary (Recorded by Zhang Zixuan)
Professor Nienhauser’s lecture ‘Notes on having taught The Analects’ took  the translation into German of Hans van Ess and that of James Legge into English (Confucian Analects) as its documentary wellspring and referenced widely other exegetical texts, both ancient and modern, and the fruits of their research, including Zheng Xuan’s Lunyu Zhengshi zhu (Master Zheng’s notes on The Analects), Huang Kan’s Lunyu yishu (Meaning and supplementary notes on The Analects), Han Yu’s Lunyu bijie (Explanatory writings on The Analects), Xing Bing’s Lunyu zhushu (Notes and supplementary notes on The Analects), Zhu Xi’s Lunyu jizhu (Assembled notes on The Analects), Liu Baonan’s Lunyu Zhengyi (Correct meanings in The Analects), Yang Bojun’s Lunyu yizhu (Translation and notes on The Analects), Qian Mu’s Lunyu xinjie (New explanations of The Analects), and Ruan Yuan’s Lunyu jiaokan ji (Editorial records of The Analects). He shared with us the precious wisdom his mind had received from the process of teaching and researched reading of The Analects.   
Broadly speaking, the lecture itself was split into two parts. The first of these discussed the meaning of the two characters that comprise the title of the work itself: 論 (lun) and 語 (yu), as well as editorial exegesis of them. The consensus view is that 論 (lun) is the second character of a two-character collocation 辯論 (bianlun) that means ‘debate; 語 (yu) has the meaning ‘linguistic records’, ‘dialogue’, and ‘discussion’, or all three of these definitions in combination. Immediately after this, Professor Nienhauser cited the translations of a list of scholars of the two characters in the title, including Arthur Waley, Burton Watson, Michael Nylan, Michael Hunter, and Martin Kern. Particularly interesting in this context are Hans van Ess’ opinion that regards 論 (lun) as an alternative form of 綸 (also lun), which embodies the meaning ‘assembled sayings’ (‘Gesammelte Sprüche’), and Edward Slingerland, who considers that 論語 (lunyu) means ‘an orderly sequence of linguistic records’; but van Ess was the first to propose that The Analects was a literary work organised according to subject matter and chronology. At the same time, it is worth noting that problems of editorial exegesis in The Analects are extremely complex, to the extent that some sentences are replicated in different essays of the compilation. Liu Baonan considered that this was because The Analects ‘was compiled of essays that were composed separately and did not emerge from the hand of one particular individual’. Christoph Harbmeier in his essay “Confucius Ridens: Humor in The Analects” analyses the complexity of editorial exegesis of The Analects and the probable reasons that caused this phenomenon.    
The second part of the lecture presented analysis of selected passages in particular essays in The Analects. Here, the passages that Professor Nienhauser chose included the following: from ‘Gongye Chang’ (a person’s name), ‘if my philosophy cannot be implemented, I would be willing to ride a raft and float on the sea’ (5.7); from ‘Wei zheng’ (On administering governance), ‘administer governance through virtuous morality’ (2.1), ‘Meng Yizi asks: what is filial piety?’ (2.5), and ‘Meng Wubo asks: what is filial piety?’ (2.6); and from ‘Zi Han’ (Confucius rarely…), ‘Confucius rarely spoke of profit, praising instead the will of Heaven and benevolence’ (9.1). He subjected these celebrated passages to a thoroughly researched reading imbued with a spirit of critical enquiry that included discussion of the relationship between The Analects and ‘Kongzi shijia’ (The hereditary family of Confucius) of The Records of the Grand Historian. In the question-and-answer session after the lecture, Professor Nienhauser delved deeply into a detailed discussion on this issue with Assistant Professor Gu Yixin of Lingnan University.      
Lecture video
HKBUTube
Bilibili

Lecture 2: An emotional Confucius and petty Fan Chi [updated]

2023/10/13 │ 16:00 – 17:30

Language: English
Summary (Recorded by Guan Jinglin)
In this lecture, Professor Nienhauser took us on a journey reading the passage 13.4 of The Analects and related material. The problems he discussed included issues pertaining to Confucius’ understanding of what is meant by ‘a menial person’ and his attitudes to ‘planting crops’ and to Fan Chi.
In the passage 13.4 of The Analects, Fan Chi requested that he might study the matter of planting crops, and for his pains was appraised by Confucius as a ‘menial person’. Edward Slingerland translates this term as ‘a common fellow’, which would appear to be a neutral non-pejorative term. In the passage 7.37 of The Analects, for ‘the menial man’ of the phrase ‘the menial man is adept at calculating profit and loss’, Legge translates the relevant term as ‘the mean man’, while Slingerland renders it as ‘a petty man’, and both imply distinct pejorative overtones. Liu Baonan considers that the term ‘a menial person’ means ‘a farmer’, which chimes in perfectly with Confucius’ appraisal of Fan Chi in 13.4 of The Analects. In Confucius’ heart, however, agricultural matters were inferior to those pertaining to ‘the rites’, ‘righteousness’, and ‘trustworthiness’, and thus unworthy of serious study, and anyone who does so is indeed ‘a menial person’. 
Looking once more at Confucius’ attitude to Fan Chi, it too fluctuates repeatedly. In some passages, for example, 2.5 and 12.22 of The Analects, Confucius offers patient guidance to Fan Chi. From another perspective, in 6.22, Fan Chi even enquires about benevolence, and Confucius answers: ‘He who is benevolent first undertakes the task that is difficult and then reaps the benefit,’ as if he is aware of Fan Chi’s leaning to learning how to plant crops so he can make a living, and thus he reminds him that he should not excessively pay attention to any potential reward. In the passage 13.10, the notions of ‘deference’, ‘respect’, and ‘loyalty’ of non-Han ethnicities are borrowed to counter Fan Chi’s crudely materialistic pursuit of agricultural goals by mocking them. The severest criticism is reserved for 13.4, where Confucius, after Fan Chi has left, calls him directly ‘a menial person’. Professor Nienhauser conjectured that Confucius has perhaps seen through Fan Chi and that he has no mind to devote himself to studying and that he only wants to learn skills that will benefit him; for this reason, Confucius has lost hope in him, which is why Confucius has undergone an emotional change of this kind.   
Finally, the conclusion that Professor Nienhauser reached is that Confucius holds different views in respect of issues pertaining to Fan Chi, and his attitude changes and is even capricious. This in turn leads to an image of Confucius that cannot entirely be unified, which probably reflects remnant traces of the editorial and authorial processes by which The Analects was pinned together from a variety of sources.     
Lecture video
HKBUTube
Bilibili

Professor William H. Nienhauser will also host 2 Postgraduate Student Workshops! The workshops' details are as follows:

Translating Sima Qian's Account of Chen She (no online broadcast available)
Workshop 1: 2023/10/6 │ 16:00 – 17:30
Workshop 2: 2023/10/12 │10:30 – 12:00
Venue: SWT 702, Level 7, Shaw Tower, Hong Kong Baptist University
Content: In two meetings participants will work on how to translate and annotate Sima Qian's "Chen She shijia" (Hereditary House of Chen She) using modern and traditional commentaries on and translations of the Shiji as well as related sources. The first session will be exploratory—the sources and methods involved. For the second session participants will present their own renditions of portions of the chapter.
Language: English
Participants: Postgraduate Students
Places for Workshops are limited.
Register now: https://forms.office.com/r/RfsyANCJmc.

William H. Nienhauser, Jr. 倪豪士 (b. 1943) is married with two children and three grand children. He majored in Chinese literature at Indiana University and Bonn University receiving his Ph.D in 1973 under Professor Liu Wuji 柳無忌. That year Nienhauser became assistant professor of East Asian Literature (University of Wisconsin); he has been Halls-Bascom Chair Professor of Chinese Literature there since 1995 (Emeritus since 2020); he also taught or held research grants in China, Taiwan, Japan, Singapore, and Germany. His publications include Indiana Companion to Traditional Chinese Literature (2 vol.), nine volumes of translations from the Shiji (The Grand Scribe’s Records, 1994–2016) as well as studies of P’i Jih-hsiu (Pi Rixiu) and Liu Tsung-yuan (Liu Zongyuan), and the Biographical Dictionary of Tang Dynasty Literati (2022), in addition to more than 100 articles and reviews. Nienhauser was a founding editor of Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews (CLEAR) and served the journal until 2013 as co-editor. He has held grants from the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Japan Foundation, the Fulbright Program, the German Research Foundation, Committee on Scholarly Communication with China, the Center for Advanced Studies (Munich), and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. In 2003 he was awarded a Forschungspreis (Research Prize) for lifetime achievement from the Humboldt Foundation.

The HKBU Institute of Creativity Visiting Fellowship Scheme is sponsored by Hung Hin Shiu Charitable Foundation.
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