23
the ancients.‖)
11
Confucius and his followers see their task as preserving ancient Zhou ritual by
implementing it in the present, not by creatively adapting it but by carefully replicating it. Wen
and Wu are exemplary instances of this preservation, in which ―founding‖ as a generative
possibility is explicitly disavowed.
12
This is not to say that transmissive founding precludes innovation or change. Despite
Confucius‘ protestations, transmission is more than simply replication: by being linked so tightly
to an inaugural act, transmission is configured as transformative—it is an act that changes (or
perhaps precipitates change in) a community otherwise fragmented or wayward. In the Doctrine
narrative, this act consists primarily in the inauguration of certain orientations, worldviews, or
moral attitudes that then go on to support particular kinds of institutions, a task amplified by and
reflected in acts of transmission. Successful transmission implies the founder‘s exceptional
attunement to an existing situation; he or she must divine precisely those actions that will
resonate with an entire community, without resorting to violent or institutional impositions. It is
a reiteration of existing practices with an eye toward initiating new ones that themselves can go
on to generate new institutions and practices.
How does founding as a transmissive practice throw light on the tensions of Zhang‘s
founding narrative? Although the lineages Zhu constructs in his own story of transmission—
from Mencius in the Warring States period to the Cheng brothers in the early Song dynasty—
mean to authorize his own appropriations of the text, Zhang‘s insistence that ―creating
11
The Confucian tradition, in fact, is unique among canonical traditions for identifying scriptural redaction and
transmission as the quintessential work of its founder (Henderson 1991, 113).
12
Shortly before Zhang gained prominence in the early twentieth century, transmissive founding appeared again as
Chinese thinkers responded to the rise of Western hegemony in Asia. Chinese reformers, especially those associated
with the revisionist, philological Gongyang school of Confucianism, sinicized Western pasts and futures through
recourse to a transmission narrative. In the mind of these anxious Chinese elites, the very ―dao‖ that bound them to
the ancient sages and demanded transmission to the future also anticipated Western inventions and served as the
foundation for an as-yet unrealized Western heritage. Westerners, in other words, were seen as part of ―daotong‖
transmission (Wang 1995, 34).
Convention