Paul Rakita Goldin
University of Pennsylvania

An ongoing topic of debate in modem scholarship involves the interpretation of the Shijing (Canon of Odes). Whereas most traditional commentators sought to elucidate the abstruse moral and political import of the collection, some twentieth-century critics, both in China and the West, have dismissed their efforts as ?xegetical debris? obscuring the supposed simplicity of these rustic songs of passion. Herbert A. Giles, for example, complained:

Early commentators, incapable of seeing the simple natural beauties of the poems, which have furnished endless household words and a large stock of phraseology to the language of the present day ... set to work to read into country-side ditties deep moral and political significations. Every single one of the immortal Three Hundred has thus been forced to yield some hidden meaning and point an appropriate moral.

Presumably, the "early commentators"—whom Giles declines to identify more closely -are to be understood as the author or authors of the so-called xiaoxu ??? (Minor Prefaces) preceding each piece in the canon. The attribution of these prefaces is another matter of scholarly dispute, but it is generally accepted that the later portions of these prefaces (the houxu ??? ) were written by "Master Mao" ?? who is either Mao Heng ??? or his son Mao Chang ? (both 2nd century B.C.), or perhaps by Wei Hong ?? (A.D. 1st century). The fact that all of these figures lived during the Han dynasty raises a crucial point that is rarely made: revisionist commentators like Giles, who fault earlier interpreters of the Odes for reading too much into what appear to be straightforward poems, seem to view this hermeneutic tradition as an objectionable phenomenon of imperial times. The general idea is that the ancient poems were originally mere "country-side ditties," which the ancients understood as such, but which imperial commentators, for political or perhaps doctrinal reasons, distorted and misrepresented.

One important area of research that has been neglected is the reception of the Odes in pre-imperial times. While no complete and systematic interpretation of the Odes like that of the Prefaces has been transmitted from Zhou times, the extant texts still contain many interpretations, both implicit and explicit, of particular pieces. On the basis of such works as the Analects ?? Mencius ?? , Xunzi ?? , Zuozhuan ??? , Guanzi ?? , and Wuxing ?? (a long lost text recently discovered in tombs at Mawangdui ??? and Guodian ??), this paper will argue that the Odes were normally interpreted in Zhou times in a manner very similar to that of the Maos and the tradition following them. These Zhou texts, which contain the oldest readings of the Odes available to us, do not always agree with the later Prefaces on specific details, but there is overwhelming evidence of a general consensus that a thoughtful and persuasive interpretation of a canonical ode was one which revealed its moral or political dimensions. If we are to believe that the traditional commentators have misunderstood the Odes, then we must acknowledge that this kind of "misunderstanding" goes back to high antiquity -perhaps even as far back as the time of the Odes themselves.