The Collation and Textual Variantions about Kongzi Jiayu

Kongzi Jiayu (孔子家語)was regarded as pseudograph since Wang, Bo (王柏1197-1274A.D.). People who quote or research this book are not many until the discovery about bamboo and silk materials from 1970s to present. Not until the bamboo and silk materials were discovered in the 1970s was Kongzi Jiayu revaluated. Kongzi Jiayu reserved a lot of stories about Confucius and his disciples and some of them were unique. Most studies of this field have been focused on bamboo and silk materials in the recent thirty years, just a few studies concerned about traditional materials. The aim of this essay is to collect and compare bamboo , silk, and traditional materials which are related to Kongzi Jiayu, such as Xunzi(荀子), Liji(禮記), Shuoyuan(說苑).
This thesis includes three parts: introduction, chapter one “the collation of Kongzi Jiayu”, and chapter two “textual variantions about Kongzi Jiayu”. Introduction includes problematic, research review, objective, three versions of Kongzi Jiayu, methods of compilation. Chapter one includes two parts. The first part illustrates every chapter of Kongzi Jiayu and related texts. The second part is a composition of textual variantions. Kongzi Jiayu is the main text, and the related materials are annotations. Chapter two compares many stories to discover the development, and recognizes the periods of some chapters.
The conclusion of this thesis is that most stories in Kongzi Jiayu were edited in the late Western Han dynasty. In the whole twenty-two stories, one was attributed to the warring state period, three were the early or mid Western Han dynasty, seventeen were the late Western Han dynasty, one was the Eastern Han dynasty. The stories about Confucius and his disciples derived from Confucianists’ words in the warring state period, some of them became bamboo and silk materials in the early Western Han dynasty. Compiling for a long time, these stories were not antetype anymore. Besides, the tracks of the transmission of these stories were different. The tracks include “single way”, “two ways”, and “three ways”. “Single way” appeared most frequently in Kongzi Jiayu , and it has a close relationship to Shuoyuan. Among the “single way”, Han Shi Wai Zhuan(韓詩外傳)- Shuoyuan- Kongzi Jiayu was the main transmission.