[
    {
        "id": 212267,
        "series_id": 26,
        "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine",
        "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊",
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        "document_key": "RAS-1990",
        "page_number": 209,
        "title": "RAS-1990",
        "content_text": "186\n\nany religious or intellectual opposition, seeking to hold up the purity of their truths by disdaining any claims to truth which arise from other ideological positions. Their statements are, therefore, at best suspect. Certainly, there are historical examples of missionaries who operated under cultural prejudices which clearly obstructed their understanding of China.\n\n14\n\nA case in point is the study of the translation of a Chinese Classic by David Collie (d. 1828) written by William Bysshe Stein in 1970. Stein, at the end of his study, leaves the impression that missionary translations, including Collie's, were incompetent, biased, and unsophisticated works. This evaluation came in part as a result of Stein's reading of Collie through the eyes of the American philosopher, Henry David Thoreau, who had preferred the translation of Guillaume Pauthier, a non-missionary, which had appeared in 1840.\n\nCollie certainly included some very insensitive comments in his footnotes and, at times, made translation errors. However, Stein made his judgement on the basis of a casual reading of Collie, assuming both the wisdom of Thoreau's judgements against Collie and the superior quality of Pauthier's renditions. In fact, Collie's work was a vast improvement over those of his Protestant predecessors, Morrison and Marshman. Providing a more complete translation of The Four Books than either of his predecessors, Collie made far fewer attacks on Confucius and Confucianism than Stein suggests. Although his translation was at times uneven and even simply wrong, much of it was worthwhile, including the helpful translations of classical commentaries in the footnotes.\n\nHaving assumed the worst regarding Collie, Stein's presumption of Pauthier's superiority, supported almost solely by the inclinations of Thoreau, can be shown to be terribly misguided. Pauthier's style of translating included, at times, great verbosity and an extreme liberty with the text. His exegesis involved reading into the Confucian text the values of the French Revolution; this made the text more immediately appealing to his audiences, while being all the more distorted because of the freedoms taken in rendering the Confucian worldview.\n\nMore thorough scholars than Stein, however, also stand in",
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    {
        "id": 212292,
        "series_id": 26,
        "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine",
        "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊",
        "series_use_hku_proxy": false,
        "document_key": "RAS-1990",
        "page_number": 234,
        "title": "RAS-1990",
        "content_text": "211\n\n11\n\nCritical positions in this debate are found in the following articles: Herbet A. Giles, **The Remains of Lao-tzu**, China Review 14 (1885-1886), pp. 231-281, with replies to Legge in China Review, 16 (1887-1888). pp. 238-241 and 17 (1888-1889), pp. 299-300; T. W. Kingsmill in articles in ibid., 17 (1889-1890), pp. 305-310 and 23 (1898-99), pp. 265-270. Legge's own work and response appears in ibid., 16 (1888-1889), pp. 195-214, and \"The Tao Teh King\", The British Quarterly Review (July 1883), pp. 41-59.\n\n12\n\nRecent editions of The Four Books in the Chinese Classics include critical notes of translation errors by Arthur Waley. (Originally from \"Notes on Mencius\", first published in Asia Major ns 1:1 (1949), pp. 99-108.) A Taiwanese scholar has also published some helpful corrections of translation errors in Legge's Analects, but has many times included as errors the same kind of criticisms which Kühnert had made: preferring Zhu Xi's renderings to Legge's, even when Legge's disagreements with Zhu Xi were justified. See Yen Chen-ying, (MHkk) Li Ya-ko shih Ying-shih Lun-yu chin yen-chiuZU (A Study of the English Translation of the [Analects] by James Legge) (Taipei: Commercial Press, 1971). A more recent study of Zhu Xi's interpretation of The Great Learning includes some criticism of Legge's position, cf. Daniel K. Gardner, Chu Hsi and the Ta-hsüeh: Neo-Confucian Reflection on the Confucian Canon (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1986), esp. p. 107.\n\n27\n\nKranz, Pastor P, ed, \"Some of Professor J. Legge's Criticisms on Confucianism\", The Chinese Recorder 29 (June 1898), pp. 273-282; (July 1898), pp. 341-343; (August 1898), pp. 380-388; (September 1898), pp. 440-445.\n\n24\n\nCf \"Professor J. Legge's Change of Views concerning Confucius\". The Chinese Recorder 35:2 (February 1904), pp. 93 ff. “Some New Dimensions in the Study of the Works of James Legge (1815-1897): Part II', Sino-Western Cultural Relations Journal XIII (1991), pp. 33-46.\n\n25\n\nHelen Legge, James Legge: Missionary and Scholar (London: Religious Tract Society. 1905).\n\n34\n\nSoothill, W. E. The Three Religions of China (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1923). Lindsay Ride tells how a group of sinologists, meeting in Oxford at the Orientalist Congress of 1928, visited the gravesite of the Legge family, leaving a wreath with a card proclaiming: \"To the immortal genius of the great master, James Legge, from the sinologists assembled at the 17th Congress of Orientalists at Oxford, August 31st, 1928\"*. Ride provides no source for this information.\n\n17\n\nRide, op. cit., p.10.\n\n28\n\nCf. The Famine in China (no publisher's details, 1878). Oxford University Gazette 1876-77, pp. 309, 368; 1879-80, p. 421. The Religions of China: Confucianism and Taoism described and compared with Christianity (Spring Lecture of the Presbyterian Church of England for 1880, delivered in the College, Guilford Street, London) (London: Hodder and Stoughton 1880); Christianity and Confucianism compared in their teaching on the Whole Duty of Man (London: Religious Tract Society, 1883); also Christianity in China: A Rendering of the Nestorian Tablet at Si-An-Fu to Commemorate Christianity (London: Trübner and Co. 1888).\n\nZV\n\nStein's study appears as an introduction to the re-publication of a translation of The Four Books by David Collie. William Bysshe Stein, ed., David Collie, trans. The Chinese Classical Work Commonly Called The Four Books (Gainesville, Florida: 1970, reprint Malacca 1828), Introduction. I have chosen Stein's comments as an example because it is relevant to the understanding of Legge's efforts. Collie began teaching at the Anglo-Chinese College in Malacca in 1824, produced a translation of most of The Four Books, and died four years later while in Malacca. Although Legge never met Collie, he did discover his work and studied it carefully during his first years in Malacca and Hong",
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