| Sumario: | This third volume of the “Myriades d’Asies” series is the result of an international conference which was held at the Collège de France in 2018, and published in book form by Hémisphères Editions in 2021, the present digital edition being a revised and improved version of the printed edition. It intends to look afresh at the way ancient China progressively evolved into a ritualistic society, that is a world in which social interactions in times of peace were to be conceived of within the category of rites. If such a category remains difficult to define univocally, it has appeared to us that one possible approach was to study the canonization in the Han period of a compendium of texts which aim at regulating conducts, be it social behaviour, body language, speech, the relations between the living and the dead, as well as power relations and the agenda of human activities. We are talking more specifically about a cluster of three texts which soon came to acquire the status of “classics” and which are now known as the Ceremonial and Rites (Yili 儀禮), the Rites of Zhou (Zhouli 周禮), and the Book of Rites (Liji 禮記). The first objective of the volume is to examine the articulations between these texts and more precisely to inquire about the patterns of, and motivations for, the canonization of ritual in the first century of Han rule, about the rewriting effects, and about the incorporation of very heterogeneous texts in the establishment of the canon. This primary approach to “the world of ritual” is followed by a more specific study of the most composite text of the compendium, the Book of Rites. How did the ancient commentaries of this text contribute to model the interpretation of rites, and in what way did the classic never cease to be an open text, going through successive phases of deconstruction, desacralisation or reconstruction that allowed for the ritual order to be constantly recomposed as dynasties went by? And how did the text relate to ancient Chinese ritual…
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