...the present chapter argues, contra Yang (1971) and others, that Analects 16.13a is not in fact a recovered textual fragment but a deliberate twentieth-century fabrication, produced by a single individual of my close acquaintance acquaintance in or around the spring of 1959, and inserted into the scholarly literature by a route I will here decline to specify.
The grounds for the present argument are four: (1) the lexical anomaly noted by Liao (1989, p. 47), in which the verb-object structure of line three departs from documented pre-Tang patterns; (2) the manuscript’s sole survival in a single Korean witness, which by itself proves little but suggests the absence of an exemplar in the Chinese tradition; (3) the suspicious convenience of the passage’s content for a particular interpretive line that the alleged fabricator was, at the time of the alleged fabrication, actively advancing; and (4) my own personal recollection of the night the passage was composed, which I retain despite the alleged fabricator’s denial that it ever occurred.
I anticipate the obvious objection. The present author is unable to demonstrate (4) by any method acceptable to the historical-critical tradition; the alleged fabricator is no longer alive; and the alleged fabricator’s notes from the relevant period are held in a private collection to which I have been denied access. I acknowledge the difficulty. I nevertheless retain my recollection, and I retain it in part because the alleged fabricator was not in fact alive at the time he denied it.
The present chapter therefore proceeds on the working hypothesis that 16.13a is a fabrication, that this fabrication has been remarkably successful, and that the field of Confucian textual studies is, in this respect, easier to deceive than its practitioners are generally prepared to admit.