Questions Of Inauthenticity:a Textual And Conceptual Analysis Of Mencius3a:5

In interpreting texts of more than two thousand years old, written, rewritten and edited by men whose train of thought might sometimes seem inexplicable to a modern reader, one finds many difficulties. During this process of interpretation questions of authenticity should be raised as well, making it all the more complicated. Recently, a lot of progress has been made in textual analysis in the field of ancient China, with a lot of research focusing on Confucius and The Analects论语.The focus of this thesis, the Mencius孟子, has been less an object of research, but poses some interesting challenges as well.As with other ancient Chinese philosophical works, the Mencius raises question about its authenticity. In this thesis I will be focusing on the authenticity of a certain passage in the Mencius, namely passage five of Teng wen gong shang滕文公上, or Mencius3A:5. In this passage Mencius debates with a Mohist named Yi Zhi through an intermediary, showing the Mohist how he abandoned the teachings of his school. My hypothesis is that this debate is a fabricated one, designed to shine a positive light on Mencius, and a negative one on the Mohists. I hope to support this hypothesis by falsifying the authenticity of this passage.To do so, a number of questions have to be answered beforehand. Firstly, what makes a text ’authentic’ in the first place? What criteria should be used to mark a text as unauthentic? Secondly, some general background information about the philosophical discourse in ancient China should be provided. When did each text appear? In what way did thinkers of different schools exchange ideas with each other? Were the texts we have available today already in circulation during the Warring States period? To provide such information I will be consulting the above-mentioned research about textual analysis in the field of ancient China. For questions about authenticity I will make use of Paul Fischer’s theories on authentication studies, as described in his article "Authentication studies(辨伪学) Methodology and the Polymorphous Text Paradigm".After doing so, I will shortly discuss the Mencius itself and see what ’problems’the text poses. I will be handling such questions as:-What problems do we run into when interpreting ancient Chinese texts?-How were ancient Chinese texts constructed?-How should we view the "various-masters"(Zhuzi诸子)and the so-called "master-texts"(子书)?-What can be said about ’authenticity’?Moving on, I will be applying Paul Fischer’s before mentioned methodology on passage3A:5itself, while at the same time discussing these questions:-How does this passage relate to the rest of the text? Any discrepancies?-How is the debate built up?-Who is this Mohist called Yi Zhi?-What does use of the phrase ai wu cha deng爱无差等,to love without difference of degree, mean?In my concluding remarks I hope to make some general remarks about the interpretation and authentication of ancient Chinese philosophical texts.