The Dysfunction of Ritual in Early Confucianism

第一本研究《禮記》的英語專著

作者 Author：
Michael David Kaulana Ing

Publisher:
Oxford University Press

Publication Year:
2012

內容簡介 Abstract：

In The Dysfunction of Ritual in Early Confucianism Michael Ing describes how early Confucians coped with situations where their rituals failed to achieve their intended aims. In contrast to most contemporary interpreters of Confucianism, Ing demonstrates that early Confucian texts can be read as arguments for ambiguity in ritual failure. If, as discussed in one text, Confucius builds a tomb for his parents unlike the tombs of antiquity, and rains fall causing the tomb to collapse, it is not immediately clear whether this failure was the result of random misfortune or the result of Confucius straying from the ritual script by building a tomb incongruent with those of antiquity. The Liji (Record of Ritual)--one of the most significant, yet least studied, texts of Confucianism--poses many of these situations and suggests that the line between preventable and unpreventable failures of ritual is not always clear. Ritual performance, in this view, is a performance of risk. It entails rendering oneself vulnerable to the agency of others; and resigning oneself to the need to vary from the successful rituals of past, thereby moving into untested and uncertain territory. Ing's book is the first monograph in English about the Liji--a text that purports to be the writings of Confucius' immediate disciples, and part of the earliest canon of Confucian texts called ''The Five Classics,'' included in the canon several centuries before the Analects. It challenges some common assumptions of contemporary interpreters of Confucian ethics--in particular the assumption that a cultivated ritual agent is able to recognize which failures are within his sphere of control to prevent and thereby render his happiness invulnerable to ritual failure.

Table of Contents:

Ritual in the Liji --
Typology of dysfunction --
Coming to terms with dysfunction --
Preventing --
Inevitability of failure --
Whose fault is failure? Ambiguity and impinging agencies --
Ancients did not fix their graves --
Productive anxieties and the awfulness of failed ritual --
Concluding reflections: toward a tragic theory of ritual --
On the textual composition of the Liji.