Abstract:
Since the publication in 2001, The Bamboo Slips of Chu in the Period of Warring Kingdoms Collected by Shanghai Museum, especially Confucius’s Poetics in the work, caused a great sensation and lasting upsurge of investigative interpretation and research, which made it a noted school for some time and caused the appearance of large quantities of research results. However, the work presents several doubtful points that deserve to be considered seriously. First of all, the work differs from The Analects and The Book of Songs in many ways, such as theory, language, expressions, words and sentence patterns. Next, an instructor of The Poems of Lu, Han and Mao and the last Confucian master, Xun Zi chose to settle permanently in the kingdom of Chu and wrote Xun Zi in his late years there. However, there was no mention of Confucius’s Poetics. After the Incident of Burning Books in the Qin Dynasty, the court of the West Han Dynasty collected extensively the preQin classics, but not a word was mentioned about The Poetics in The Volume of Arts and Literature in The History of the Han Dynasty and in the works on Confucian classics in the West and East Han Dynasties. Moreover, not a lost Confucian work, such as The Book of Music, has ever been discovered in the unearthed silk manuscripts and bamboo slips. In fact, those pseudographs in the past were all related to the atmosphere of current society and trends of the time for the purpose of seeking money or fame. Then, Confucius’s Poetics offered no place of unearthing and appeared just in the surge of counterfeit, which is worth deep consideration and careful differentiation.
