{xl} Notes on the Translation

Brief Introduction to the Translations

This translation section is devoted primarily to that of the Journal of Wu Yubi, but also includes a selection of his letters and miscellaneous pieces.

As for the specific form the Journal took, it consists of 328 entries, dating from 1425 when Wu was thirty-three to the year of his death in 1469 when he was seventy-seven. It appears as juan 11 in his Collected Works. Very few entries are dated for the actual day and month. I have numbered the entries, although the original text does not. The bulk of them (201 out of 328) come from the middle period of his life, 1425 to 1436. There are no entries at all between the years 1437 and 1448, nor for the years 1450, 1458, and 1459. Indeed, the entries for the years 1449 to 1466 altogether are few in number. The number of entries picks up considerably for the last three years of his life, from 1467 to 1469. There are forty-nine entries for these final three years compared to seventy-seven for the seventeen-year period from 1449 to 1466. This increase no doubt reflects the fact that Wu had settled down in the last years of his life and, having stopped his travels, applied himself more faithfully to the keeping of this record.¹

As for the way I have gone about doing the translations, my greatest aim has been to make them readable and accessible. In so doing, I have taken some liberties. For one, I have added the word “today” in many of the entries to give more of a sense of a journal. I have also added extra phrases at times to give the non-specialist some of the context or background {xli} information without cluttering the text with detailed footnotes. (Glossaries of the names of people and book titles are included in the back of the book.) In making these additions, I have tried not to change the fundamental meaning of the passages. Since a journal is by nature a document of a personal and subjective nature, and, since classical Chinese is terse and allusive, a variety of readings are possible. What I have attempted is to offer one way of reading the text in which I take Wu at his word as much as possible and re-create his particular situation. My particular approach by no means exhausts the possibilities of other readings and interpretations.

The edition upon which I primarily rely for these translations is the Siku quanshu zhenben edition, series 4, vols. 335–36. Two other editions I have consulted include: Kangzhai xiansheng wenji, fulu (Collected Works of Master Wu Yubi, with Appended Sources), Gest Library photocopy of Naikaku Library 1526 edition; and Kangzhai xiansheng wenji, fulu, National Library of Peking Rare Books Microfilm of 1590 edition. There are few textual variations. Most involve a different word with the same meaning. These will be noted at the end of the translation section.

These translations, originally done as part of my doctoral dissertation, had the benefit of readings and corrections by four of the leading scholars of Neo-Confucianism of the 1980s: Wing-tsit Chan, Fang Chao-ying, Pei-yi Wu, and Wm. Theodore de Bary. Each in his own way made the final product more accurate and fluent. They did not always agree with me or with each other. The translations you see here have been revised in the meantime, mostly to make them read more smoothly and less literally. They incorporate responses I have received over years of classroom use with students in my classes.

1 Since there are a number of years for which there are no journal entries, the question arises as to what, if any, editing was done. If so, was it done by Wu himself, by his son, or by the editor? Were there self-revelatory passages that Wu or his son thought too embarrassing, too personal? As was mentioned in the previous section, the original collection of Wu’s writings had to be republished because parts of the original had been lost or had errors. So it could very well be that some of the missing entries were lost.