Some books were born with important topics and self-evidently significant sources. Readers will know that. The field expects the book and acclaims its contribution. The authors were lucky to work on them, mostly likely at the suggestion of their mentors or some wise people.
Unfortunately, the sources I worked with, for both of my books, can not be said to have any real significance at the first glance. And for the most time of my research, I didn't know what I was arguing for. Even the topics were blurring......religion? intellectual history? political history? I genuinely did not know until the very last moment of research and book making.
My first book Enlightenment in Dispute (Oxford, 2008) deals with Buddhist polemics in the seventeenth century. The sources are polemical essays written by monks. I will not recommend these sources to any one, including my students, because they are very dry, tedious, and tasteless, full of personal attacks and senseless accusations. Of course, the prominent Chinese historian Chen Yuan had worked on these sources. But the truth is that after he wrote his book Qingchu sengzheng ji 清初僧诤记, no one wrote anything significant on the topics and the sources and the knowledge and figures he introduced were so obscured that a Japanese scholar had to write an annotated translation of his book in the eightieth. This tells you how unattractive these sources are. Also, his grandson Prof. Chen Zhichao told me that when his grandfather wrote the book, he had an assistant going to the Forbidden City to copy for him the sources in Jiaxing Canon 嘉兴藏 which was stored there. (This edition is still there.)
My second book deals with a prominent Zen teacher whose collected work amounts to twelve volumes in modern binding. I confess I read all of them. But I have to say there are not of the best of a Zen collection. He was a poet and wrote about 5,000 poems. However, not all of them are of the high quality and clerical writing was always not well received in literary circles in China.
I finally realize that in the study of Chinese religion, history, culture there exist a large number of "garbage sources," especially in the area of religion. The same might be said about Korean and Japanese studies. Basically, they are numerous, boring, repetitive and we don't know how to make sense of them. No one what to touch them. One example is the first fascicle of local gazetteer which usually starts with "star constellation field" 星野. Another example in literature is the collection of "imperial decrees" in the beginning of hanlin literati's wenji collections. Most of them had been the officers 制诰 to draft these imperial documents. But a lot of them had lost their context and their meaning became obscure. In Chinese Buddhism, there are a lot of scriptural commentaries 注疏科判 awaiting for further exploration. If you want to find more, go the Chinese Buddhist canon 汉文大藏经, which is another topic I am working on, for "garbage." (A collection of essays co-edited by Lucille Chia and me will be published from Columbia University Press very soon.)
If you are the one of the unlucky researcher who happen to work on these "garbage sources," the tricky part is going to be how to read them and make sense of them. I believe that a selective reading of sources only with obvious significance might have obscured our understanding of history. Without fully processing these garbage sources, it is hardly true that we have a fair and objective view of the past.
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