Book highlights philosopher's thoughts

On Oct 28, an academic seminar to discuss Zhu Xi's thoughts was held at Tsinghua University to mark his 890th birth anniversary. Even after 890 years, the thoughts of Zhu, a Chinese philosopher and Confucian scholar who lived in the Song Dynasty (960-1279), are still influential.

After studying Zhu's works for more than two decades, Guo Qi and Yin Bo, professors at the Institute for Ancient Classics and Archives of Sichuan University, recompiled A Collection of Official Documents of Zhu Xi, and published a 13-volume book called Zhu Xi's Collected Works in Chronological Order (Zhu Xi Wen Ji Bian Nian Ping Zhu) recently.

According to Guo, of Zhu's representative works, Quotations of Zhu Zi's Remarks is his disciples' record of his remarks, which is not reliable enough compared with A Collection of Official Documents of the scholar, in which articles were written by Zhu himself. Another work, The Four Books: The Classic Texts of Confucianism, records Zhu's philosophical thoughts, and is not as readable as the collection which covers his thoughts on diverse things, including economics, law and literature.

"Modern scholars' organization of this book started from the 1990s, but there are some problems-detailed dates and background information of Zhu's writings are not clear. People's comments on Zhu's writings are scattered in documents since the Southern Song Dynasty (1127-1279), but they have never been organized in a systematic way," says Guo.

As a result, Guo and Yin decided to recompile the book. Since ancient books like the collection, passed down over the past nearly 1,000 years, often have different versions, they first compared more than 20 versions of the book to judge which have the correct words.

Then they collected Zhu's scattered articles, provided background information and explanatory notes about the articles, identified the time of writing for each article, gathered comments about this work, and added all the information to the new collection.