In this review article, I have located the trajectory of development of the notion of literary archeology and the third relation of comparative literature, compared to influence and parallel ones, expounded by him in his newly published book in 2016, The Third Notion of Comparative Literature: the Possibility of Literary Archeology. My research shows that he has conceived this notion more than a decade ago and it’s the result of his lifetime endeavor on comparative literature in East Asia. I have employed almost all his monographs to trace the gradual formation of his ideas with two books as the focus, The Third Notion of Comparative Literature: the Possibility of Literary Archeology and The Image of Willow: The Material Exchange and the Ancient Chinese and Japanese Literature. The former aims to construct the theory of literary archeology as a renovated subject matter and the latter is composed of the case studies on willow which provide abundant evidence to illustrate his point.