ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author tries to suggest in his paper title "Messenger of the Ancient Sages," there are some important comparative concerns scholars should consider before focusing on hermeneutic traditions in Chinese culture. The most elemental problem in the hermeneutic project of all post-classical Confucians was overcoming the gaping hiatus separating the ancient sages from their own day. Edward Ch'ien observes that Song-Ming Confucians employed the term "heterodoxy" to refer to intersystemic differences and to intrasystemic divergences, that is, Confucians who reputedly held false beliefs as determined by the dominant ideology of the time, particularly those who imported Buddhist or Daoist teachings into a Confucian framework. The function of transmuting the unintelligible into a form within human comprehension in Biblical hermeneutics is rare in Confucian hermeneutics. According to the rules of canonical hermeneutics, the reader was expected to experientially realize the author's meaning as a means to apprehending the Dao and applying it to his own life.
