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focuses on enduring sustenance, rather than a single felicitous intervention sandwiched between
a sudden moment of rescue and an equally unforeseen exit.
In fact, the Doctrine of the Mean is only one of many narratives in the Chinese corpus
that read political founding in terms of ritual transmission or organization by exceptionally
attuned sages, rather than innovative imposition by an external lawgiver. In his extensive survey
of early Chinese political and cultural creation narratives, the Sinologist Michael Puett identifies
a persistent bias in proto-Confucian and classical Confucian texts against deliberate innovation,
which, when it appears at all, is usually associated only with bandits, rebels or other unworthies.
―Despite the many differences between these texts, they all share an attempt to develop a
framework wherein creation is denied altogether, and sages serve simply to organize correctly
that which was found originally in nature‖ or, sometimes, to reappropriate and transform the
negative, violence-rooted creations of unsavory characters (Puett 1998, 476). Creation was
explicitly associated with violence and disruption; ―founding‖ work, then, had to be done by
other means.
The founding event(s) of the Doctrine passage, appropriately, turn in large part on
transmission, and so too does Zhu‘s own appropriation of them. By delineating a genealogy for
the text, Zhu locates its authenticity and authority in its transmission. He goes on to see this
narrative as an important component in the ―transmission of the Dao‖ (道統) which Zhu
identified as the true but long-neglected heritage of those Confucians who would oppose the
incursions of Buddhism (Zhu 1983 reprint, 14-16). Many contemporary sinologists (e.g.,
Makeham 2003) trace these transmission narratives and the practices of textual analysis that
embody them to Confucius‘ own insistence that his scholarly accomplishment lies not in creation
but transmission: “述而不作，信而好古”(―I transmit but do not create; I believe in and love
Convention