Recent Directions in Western Scholarship on the Confucian Classics and Their Commentaries: A Review Essay

As the earliest texts to attract scholarly attention in the West, the Confucian classics were long the mainstay of European sinological interest, although in the period roughly from the First World War to the mid-1980's there was a marked decline of interest in this topic. However, in the mid-80's a renewed interest in the Confucian classics arose, initially centered on the old standbys of scholarly and popular Western interest, the Yijing 易經, together with its Daoist counterpart, the Daodejing 道德經.