COMPTES RENDUS - AFEC

Comptes rendus
System, but perhaps for rather différent reasons. In Zhang's sociopolitical
vision the élite would be morally cultivated, to be sure, but it would also
become largely hereditary, something quite at odds with Wang Anshi's
New Policies and its extensive investment in the school and examination
system. Given the choice between blaming the surfeit of officiais on either
the examination System or the continued défense of yin IS privilège, it
sounds to me like Zhang was a defender of hereditary privilège.
Hon's discussion of Cheng Yi's commentary focuses on what it tells
us about Cheng's response to the factional politics of his day. As we might
expect, given Shao Bowen's recollection mat Cheng was the intellectual
leader one of the three factions in the anti-New Policies coalition, he finds
in the commentary a défense of factionalism. But he takes this further to
argue that Cheng saw "no need to distinguish the genuine faction of great
men from the 'false factions' of petty people" (p. 133). Ail officiais were
entitled to form their own factions as their own power bases as corulers of
the empire. This is a strong claim - it would imply that the political course
would be determined by party politics and that there existed no ultimate
standard by which to choose. I can see how this fits with Cheng's vision of
the universe as dynamic, but not how it rhymes with his commitment to
moral cultivation. There is évidence for reaching a différent conclusion. In
contrast to Su Shi, who saw yin and yang as relative, Cheng Yi equated
yang witii the good, thus the hexagram revealed a battle between good and
bad, between yin and yang Unes. The battle apparently would continue,
but this did not mean that humanity was condemned to cycling through the
hexagrams. Rather, I tfûnk we should suppose that Cheng was intent on
showing literati how to learn correctly so that they could gain the yang
position and triumph over evil.
This interesting book raises a methodological issue in the use of
commentaries in the study of intellectual history. A commentary exists
within a cumulative yet changing tradition of commentaries on a given
text and this tradition can be studied on its own terms and for its own sake.
Indeed reading a commentary requires knowledge of the protocols of the
tradition and earlier works. At the same time commentaries are texts
which historical actors created to accomplish something; we can distin-
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