Semantics and Hermeneutics

The native approach to the study of Chinese centred on the written word and looked at it from three angles: form, sound, and meaning. During a long history of serious scholarship, the Chinese amassed a wealth of relevant information and developed schools of philology which differed in their methodology and interpretation.

Being trained in both traditions, the Western and the Chinese, I see integration as the only path to advance Chinese scholarship without discarding the past. Thus the course on semantics and hermeneutics tries to familiarize the students, many of whom have no philological background whatsoever, with their own traditions and give some additional input.

In terms of semantics, a rough outline of the traditional lore of meaning (or xunguxue) was provided. As to hermeneutics, we covered traditional ways of scriptural exegesis, especially but not only within the Buddhist cultural context. To give the students a sense, for example, of the complexity into which Christian theological thought has developed I introduced them to John Ashton's article on "The woman at the well" in The Cambridge Companion to Biblical Interpretation. And in order to broach one major Buddhist tradition not found in the Far East, we worked through George Bond's "The Gradual Path as a Hermeneutical Approach to the Dhamma" in Buddhist Hermeneutics which discusses important relevant Theravada sources.

Part of the semester is, of course, set aside for the students reports. This time I asked them to read the first fascicle of Zixuan's "Suramgamasutra" commentary and then to compare it with the corresponding section in several old exegetical works explainign the same scripture. Some of these commentaries date, like Zixuan's, to the Song Dynasty (960-1279 CE), and one was written during the Mongolian Yuan Dynasty, (1271-1404 CE) but most were composed in the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644 CE) or even as late as the Manchu Qing Dynasty (1644-1911).

Just to avoid confusion: I choose commentaries on the "Suramgamasutra" not because I am particularly fond of this apocryphon but because there is a healthy amount of Chinese exegetical literature on it available. This makes it easier to entertain the students with a more colourful range of material to work on.

This page was last updated on December 2nd, 1999.

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