Text and Context: Mencius’ View on the Understanding of Poems of the Ancients

Chao-ying Chen
National Taiwan University

Mencius said to his disciple Wang Chang (V: B): “When one reads the poems and writings of the ancients, can it be right not to know something about them as men? Hence one tries to understand the age in which they lived. This can be described as ‘looking for friends in history.’” This inspiring statement forms an organic part of Confucian poetics on the one hand and involves some general principles of literary criticism on the other. From this it follows that the contextualization of the text, that is the understanding of the author and his age, is crucial to the reading of poems. This paper attempts to explore some hermeneutic implications of Mencius’ view on poems and to assess his concrete contributions to the formation of Confucian poetics.