SOURCE: "Some Uncommon Assumptions," in Thinking Through Confucius, State University of New York Press, 1987, pp. 11-25.

In the following excerpt, Hall and Ames comment on distinctions between Confucius's original teachings and later interpretations of them.

In this essay we have been bold enough to challenge both the principal understandings of Confucian thought and the traditional methods of articulating them. It behooves us, therefore, to begin by discussing certain of the fundamental background assumptions which characterize what we consider to be an appropriate interpretive context within which Confucius' thought may be clarified. The primary defect of the majority of Confucius' interpreters—those writing from within the Anglo-European tradition as well as those on the Chinese side who appeal to Western philosophic categories—has been the failure to search out and articulate those distinctive presuppositions which have dominated the Chinese tradition.

The assumptions we shall be considering are precisely those...