On the Name Shishuo xinyu

Abstract

I came to Berkeley in 1949 to study with Professor Peter Boodberg. For someone embarking on a study of the Six Dynasties in the late 40s and early 50s of the last century, there was not much light to help one find one’s way, and there were any number of mysterious areas that beckoned but through which one made little headway. There was, for example, the matter of xuanxue 玄學 ,t he ‘‘Dark Learning,’’ which seemed to be an intriguing subject and of central concern in post-Han times. So one turned to the Shishuo xinyu 世說新語, for it seemed that the intellectual debates of that time were recorded in those pages, and questions that were addressed at that age would be better understood by reading the text. Attempts to gain some understanding by opening the pages of the Shishuo xinyu seemed only to confuse the issue, for the meanings of the passages were often rather opaque. It seemed best to steer around the whole subject and thus avoid ending up in some unrewarding and fruitless quest. This was a period when the mortality rate among students, as it were, was rather high. There was no funding for study, and jobs were almost impossible to find. There had been a few success stories, we were told: Richard Mather, before my time, was said to have found a post; we looked at him in wonder once when he appeared in the library on a rare visit.