Impartial Comment On The Authenticity Of Kongzi Jiayu

Kongzi Jiayu is a classic book recording the words and thoughts of Confucius and his disciples.It is said that this book was written in the pre-Qin period,and was finalized by Kong Anguo who is the tenth grandson of Confucius.Wang Su,a scholar of Confucian classics in the Wei Dynasty annotated it.Since then,the book began to be questioned as a pseudograph.The contemporary of Wang Su,Zheng Xuan’s disciple Ma Zhao pointed out that it has been supplemented by other books.Yan Shigu,a master of classics in the early period of the Tang Dynasty,also believed that the handed down version was not the original.With the development of this viewpoint,Jiayu was thoroughly condemned as a fake forged by Wang Su in the Qing Dynasty.Since the 1970 s,a series of archaeological discoveries related with Jiayu have changed the status.Scholars who believed that Jiayu was not a pseudograph were sure of that it was a real ancient book with higher valve than Lunyu.In order to discern whether Jiayu is true or false,at first,this paper has analyzed the relationship between volume differences in each bibliography of historical records and contents to reveal that the key of the battle for authenticity is the circulating process from its completion to Wei-jin period.This mainly involves that how to understand Kong Anguo’s arrangement,Liu Xiang’s emendation and Wang Su’s annotation.Liu Xiang’s version has been be supposed to be the originally written of Jiayu on the basis of inspecting Liu Xiang’s style of emendation.Then,this paper has inspected the three preambles attached to Jiayu and found out that two of them were forged by others.This not only proves that Kong Anguo has not sorted out Jiayu,but also reflects that the contents belongs to other books has been added to the version before Wang Su annotated it.Finally,the unearthed documents have been compared with Jiayu and related ancient books to proves that Jiayu is not only later than Shuoyuan,Liji and other documents,but also has the traditional relationship with them.