This original and methodologically sophisticated study approaches Tao Qian's poetry from what might seem the margin, namely its interaction with the Lunyu and with Six Dynasties Xuanxue strategies of reading the classics. The basic strategy is one probably pioneered in Leo Strauss's work on Machiavelli: to find out how to read a writer, find out how he reads others. Having successfully narrowed the angle, Robert Ashmore then follows every lead. As a result, he manages to make a vast and convincing contribution to the very central question of the proper methodology for reading works of literature and scholarship, as well as for understanding practices of life and performance, between the end of the Han and the beginning of the Tang dynasty. In a simple numerical statistic of terms and full quotations in Tao Qian's works, the Lunyu ranks far below the Laozi, Zhuangzi, and Liezi. If the relative weight of allusions within a poem as well in the self-presentation of the poet is taken into consideration, however, a different story emerges.

In order to reconstruct Tao Qian's reading of the classics, Ashmore takes, in good hermeneutical fashion, a close look at interpretive practices current at the time. Six Dynasties reading practices focused on the Lunyu have been written out of the history of bona fide Ru scholarship. The main source for this interpretive tradition, Huang Kan's (488–549) Lunyu jijie yishu, was not transmitted in China, but was retrieved from Japan during the late nineteenth century.

Ashmore justly anchors his analysis of Huang Kan's excerpted Lunyu commentaries in the enduring discussion about the use of language by the sages of antiquity. Taking a hint from the Xici appendix to the Book of Changes, Xuanxue scholars following Wang Bi (226–49) argued that the sages were aware that language was unequal to the task of expressing what they wanted to say; that the sages nonetheless saw language as a crucial device for leaving “traces” behind for later ages bereft of men of equal understanding; but that they also made full use of other forms of communication, such as the hexagrams of the Book of Changes as well as acta et gesta. A literal reading of the classical texts thus misses the very meaning that is lodged in them and to which their words only point.

In a first step, The Transport of Reading establishes a manner of reading—both credible and historically anchored—as the context for Tao Qian's own reading practices, as well as for the manner in which he wanted to be read. The book does so with a sovereign dismissal of the historically ungrounded doxography with its “schools” of Confucianists, Taoists, Neotaoists, Buddhists, and so forth. In a second step, it moves from the text to the author. Tao Qian inscribes himself explicitly into a long tradition of hermitage, with all the accoutrements of living far away from the palaces of the rich and mighty, of plowing his own field, of poverty, of devotion to the study of the ancients, and of the ensuing claim to elevated moral stature. This living performance shares with the classical texts the jarring discrepancy between the surface—namely the impoverished marginality of the human being and the triviality of the text—and the purport. Ashmore thus reads Tao Qian within the rich context shared by Tao's contemporaries. This context is itself historical, and consciously so. The time when sage kings ruled the world is past, and even an uncrowned sage such as Confucius has not been seen for a thousand years. The best that these late times can produce is worthies, and the best these worthies can do is spread the disposition of the sages through their own reading and their own lives, and even this option becomes tenuous as the layers of literal misreading grow ever thicker with the passage of time. Eremitism is a living, mostly silent remonstrance against the inability of these late times to live up to the old ideals. As living reenacts earlier practices, it also contributes to establishing the ongoing fame of these obscure figures, who trust that historical justice will cause their name to be transmitted through ten thousand generations.

The Transport of Reading thus extracts from the way in which Tao Qian and his contemporaries read the classics and the personae of earlier hermits the way to read Tao Qian's own work and persona. Its greatest contribution lies in its anchoring of this reading strategy, not in general modern assumptions about the “essence” of literature or of literati culture, but in a historically grounded and historically specific practice.

Poetic composition and the very public performance of a hermitic lifestyle are bona fide, independent platforms of articulation. They are, one might add, not the only such platforms, and this study might draw the intellectual lines sharper than the historical record allows. Besides the poetic interaction with the classical texts, there is the Xuanxue philosophical commentary that “translates” the often anecdotal or aphoristic sagely bequests into explicit political philosophy. The strategies deducted from this philosophy are designed to allow even mediocre rulers, assisted by equally mediocre advisors, to calculate the outcome of their actions in the dynamics of the relationship between high and low, and achieve a modicum of acceptable governance. Thus instructed, the court and its officials can claim that in their own modest way they try to follow the way of the sages of old.

In its combination of bold questions and close reading, in its knowledgeable integration of literary scholarship, intellectual history, and social history, and in the economy of its presentation, Robert Ashmore's Transport of Reading deserves the highest praise.