ABSTRACT
The article explores the conceptual nexus of Chinese exegesis and Western hermeneutics, including their commensurability, commonality, and concordance on the one hand, and divergence, difference, and dissonance, on the other. Such an exercise throws into relief the import of the act of reading in varying cultural contexts, while bringing to light the imperative of reading-cum-understanding as an englobing universal human pursuit, especially the apprehension of the lessons and truths that seem to inhere in the oldest and most precious of our cultural capital: the classics. Comparative readings of the Chinese classics may generate a new Chinese theory of reading while ensuring their plural cultural significances in a global world. Such is the basis and raison d’être of hermeneutics, or in this case, intercultural hermeneutics, which is the commerce between different cultural traditions of reading, an encounter that cannot elide the Eurotropic orientation that is, from our vantage point in the West, an epistemological component of transcultural inquiry.
