Scholar’s Corner: A Critical Rereading of Ancient Classics: The Harmony between Excavated and Transmitted Texts

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

I. A Brief Overview of the Studies on the Excavated Texts from Early China At the center of the debate between “doubting the past” (yigu 疑古) and “explaining the past” (shigu 釋古) in the study of Chinese ancient history, which emerged after the end of the Qing dynasty, there was a methodological difference as to how to interpret transmitted ancient Chinese texts. However, the debate entered a new phase in the twentieth century as a large number of paper documents dating from the Northern and Southern dynasties to the Tang dynasty were discovered in Dunhuang, a town in northwest China. Since most of China’s transmitted texts date from the Song and the fol lowing dynasties, when woodblock printing became affordable and wide spread, a comparative study between the newly excavated texts and the trans­mitted texts would be of great academic value. Unfortunately, however, the period when the Dunhuang documents were written is quite distant from the Spring and Autumn and the Warring States periods and the Qin and Han dynasties, when most of the Chinese classics originated......