The aim of these two papers is to highlight a cultural phenomenon of great significance - albeit of limited scope in quantitative terms - in the Chinese intellectual tradition, namely the use of canonical exegesis among certain great thinkers as a mode of self-expression - a mode in which one goes beyond basic hermeneutical methods by expanding on one's own philosophical ideas. There is no shortage of scholars in ancient China who developed their arguments in monographic treatises. Others, however, express themselves mainly - and in some cases solely - within their exegetical works. Hence the pun that forms the title of these two lectures. It is based on a locution frequently used in classical Judaic studies : the nossé kelim, whose literal meaning, the "weapon-bearing ", alludes to a commentator (usually a sub-commentator) who picks up the rhetorical spear and throws himself with all his might into the polemical fray.
Our account of these warriors of the mind in China begins by reviewing a parallel phenomenon observed in most of the great scholastic traditions of the ancient and medieval worlds, such as Homeric exegesis from Anaxagoras to the Neoplatonists and Stoics, the rabbinic tradition after the midrashim and the Talmudic corpus from late antiquity to Nahmanides and Gersonides in the Middle Ages, Ibn Arabi and Fakhroddîn Râzi on the Koran and Hadîth, the Śaṅkarābhāṣya on the corpus of the Advaita Vedānta and many others.
Turning now to Chinese exegetes of all persuasions, we shall attempt to elucidate the difference - sometimes quite subtle - between some, whose aim is to explain the canonical scriptures by borrowing a panoply of philological and interpretive methods, and others, whose hermeneutical analysis serves only as a point of entry into philosophical debate. This distinction becomes rather misleading in the realm of late-Empire Confucian discourse, where the range of controversy is reduced to a very limited number of topics, particularly the dividing lines between the fundamental dimensions defining man and his universe: his innate moral disposition(xing), the fundamental essence of his concrete existence(qing), the cognitive and emotional faculties of his consciousness(xin), on the one hand, and the complementary relationship between the material substrate(qi) and the structuring principles(li) constituting the paradigms of being, on the other. Given that most of these questions are formulated in phrases taken from the "Five Canons" and "Four Books" of the Confucian corpus, this lends a certain exegetical aspect to all the philosophical discourse of this period, highlighting even more strikingly the boldness of the intellectual approach of our textual knights.