Textual transmission is viewed in the West typically as a destructive process that results in ever greater corruption and error in a text, and the enterprise of textual criticism in correspondingly seen as the task of restoring the damaged text to a form as close to its original as possible. In China such a negative view of the process of textual transmission does not normally obtain, and textual criticism therefore does not carry the image of being primarily a rehabilitative procedure.

An important part of the reason for the different perception of the consequences of textual transmission and of the goals of textual criticism lies with the nature of the writing systems involved. Western texts in alphabetic scripts directly reveal errors at the level below that of the word, e.g., spelling errors, grammar errors, pronunciation errors, etc., for which no interpretation is available save that of seeing them as mistakes. Orthographic errors in Chinese texts, written in logographic script, are not prone to such immediate identification as mistakes. All variants in a text written in a logographic script have the potential to be meaningful and therefore are perceived as different, but are not stigmatized automatically as wrong.

There is no more salient figure in early Chinese literature than Kongzi and yet he remains a figure about whose beginnings we know very little. The present essay explores this paradox of bibliographic salience and biographic silence through an in-depth examination of the principal narratives of the Kongzi legend from the Shiji and the Kongzi jiayu, paying particular attention to the language of their respective accounts of the birth of the sage. Finding a distinct lack of fit between the form and content of these these stories, I propose a narrative alternative drawn from the early Han weishu accounts of Kongzi's beginnings. Finding in this alternative a more coherent fit between language and narrative structure as well as recurrent themes such as divine visitation, infertility, jiaomei sacrifice, and cranial disfigurement, vestiges of which are also found in the accounts of Wang Su and Sima Qian, the essay suggests that the weishu texts preserve a fuller popular legend of fertility sacrifice by the childless coordinated with the winter solstice also present in the very name Kongzi and resonating with the charter myth of the Zhou, “Sheng min.” The evident implication of this finding is that the historicity of Kongzi is arguable. The name is more like a mythic literary fiction and probably began, as did that of Hou Qi, as a symbolic deity that was made historical in one of its many Warring States incarnations, that one transmitted to us exclusively through the normative biographical tradition.