The Orthodox transmission of the Way and the differentiation of schools in Chinese intellectual history

The differentiation of schools in Chinese intellectual history is deeply entangled with the theory of the orthodox transmission of the Way. Late recent scholars are inclined to approach the traditional scholarship by following the line of schools after building such an interpretative framework of narrating intellectual history. Yet, the criteria of defining a school, such as the founding master, shared doctrines, methodologies, the geographic origin, and generational transmissions were largely inventions of contemporary observers or later generations. Use of these genealogies to trace the development and transition of Chinese academic tradition may suffer from teleology. A better way of understanding the origins, trends, and directions of Chinese scholarly research in history requires transcendence of the entrenched differentiations and labels.