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Preparing One’s Act: Performance Supports And The Question Of Human Nature In Early China
Abstract
Since the 20th century, Chinese institutions have been recovering a growing number of ancient objects, among which figure manuscripts produced during the Warring States (453–221 BCE) era. These are the protagonists of this dissertation. Chapter 1 articulates the overarching goal of my study: the importance of rigorous philological and intellectual engagement to promote the significance of these manuscripts in and beyond the study of early Chinese history. In Chapter 2, I analyze manuscripts produced around 300 BCE as what I call “performance supports,” rather than self-contained philosophical and historical essays. My notion of "performance supports" incorporates observations about the composite nature of early Chinese manuscripts, but better accounts for other textual features, such as errors, abrupt endings, list-like passages, etc. Chapter 3 discusses the implications of my thesis. I show how performance supports were used in practices of knowledge management that relied on, but went beyond, the written medium. I explore oratory, recitation, literary compositions, and writings used to organize and retrieve knowledge. Second, I compare performance supports to other Warring States texts, so as to highlight the peculiarities of both groups and confirm that the concept of performance support is not an ad-hoc solution. Chapter 4 focuses on the performance support *Natural Dispositions Come from Endowment 性自命出, and reconstructs ways in which this manuscript functioned as the basis for central philosophical debates on human nature during the Warring States period. The dissertation is completed by a new philological study of *Natural Dispositions.
The immense outpouring of archaeological discoveries this past century has shed new light on ancient East Asia, and China in particular. Yet in concert with this development another, more troubling, trend has likewise gained momentum: the looting of cultural heritage and the sale of unprovenienced antiquities. Scholars face difficult questions, from the ethics of working with objects of unknown provenance, to the methodological problems inherent in their research. The goal of this Element is to encourage scholars to critically examine their relationships to their sources and reflect upon the impact of their research. The three essays in this Element present a range of disciplinary perspectives, focusing on systemic issues and the nuances of method versus ethics, with a case study of the so-called 'Han board' MSS given as a specific illustration.
In this article we review the newly published fourth-century BCE manuscript of the Book of Odes (Shi jing 詩經) in the collection of Anhui University. We describe the preservation and material features of the manuscript, discuss issues of provenance, and compare the text with the received version of the Odes. We conclude that the text of the Odes was already fundamentally stable by the date of the manuscript, and that written versions like the Anda manuscript provided important support for the stability of the text. However, we also argue that the manuscript shows signs of having been produced from memory, rather than sight-copying from another manuscript. We suggest that the function of the Anda manuscript was to support the learning and memorization of the Odes.
A recent article argued that “texts can be used as tools for enacting identities in social settings” (Reading Research Quarterly 44.4 (2009): 416). Considering the multitude of manuscripts yielded by fourth through first-centuries BCE burials, such a statement seems pertinent for early Chinese society as well. What does it say about the self-concept of an individual when his ability to write and / or read assumed a prominent role in funerary rites?
This paper analyzes evidence of literacy that may be found in Chinese textual sources (received and archaeological) and tombs by applying identity concepts developed in anthropology and the social sciences to Chinese funerary data. It not only argues that the actual ability to write is palpable through certain kinds of texts that were associated with writing paraphernalia, but that literacy in particular was a crucial aspect of the self-representation of a particular group of people, namely the shǐ 史 (“scribes”).
This book explores a new model for the production, revision, and reception of Biblical texts as Scripture. Building on recent studies of the oral/written interface in medieval, Greco-Roman and ancinet Near Eastern contexts, David Carr argues that in ancient Israel Biblical texts and other texts emerged as a support for an educational process in which written and oral dimensions were integrally intertwined. The point was not incising and reading texts on parchment or papyrus. The point was to enculturate ancient Israelites - particularly Israelite elites - by training them to memorize and recite a wide range of traditional literature that was seen as the cultural bedorck of the people: narrative, prophecy, prayer, and wisdom.
Philosophy of action in the context of Classical China is radically different from its counterpart in the contemporary Western philosophical narrative. Classical Chinese philosophers began from the assumption that relations are primary to the constitution of the person, hence acting in the early Chinese context necessarily is interacting and co-acting along with others—human and nonhuman actors. This book is the first monograph dedicated to the exploration and rigorous reconstruction of an extraordinary strategy for efficacious relational action devised by Classical Chinese philosophers in order to account for the interdependent and embedded character of human agency—what the author has denominated “adapting” or “adaptive agency” ( yin 因). As opposed to more unilateral approaches to action also conceptualized in the Classical Chinese corpus, such as forceful and prescriptive agency, adapting requires great capacity of self- and other-awareness, equanimity, flexibility, creativity, and response, which allows the agent to co-raise courses of action ad hoc: unique and temporary solutions to specific, nonpermanent, and nongeneralizable life problems. Adapting is one of the world’s oldest philosophies of action, and yet it is shockingly new for contemporary audiences, who will find in it an unlikely source of inspiration to deal with our current global problems. This book explores the core conception of adapting both on autochthonous terms and by cross-cultural comparison, drawing on the European and Analytic philosophical traditions as well as on scholarship from other disciplines, thus opening a brand new topic in Chinese and comparative philosophy.
In September, 2019, Anhui University published the first volume of Warring States bamboo-slip manuscripts in its collection. The bamboo slips were purchased by the university in 2015 on the antique market. This volume contains ninety-three slips that correspond with all of or portions of fifty-seven poems in the Guo feng 國風 ( Airs of the States ) section of the Shi jing 詩經 ( Classic of Poetry ). The manuscript is written in the script of the ancient state of Chu 楚, and thus presumably was robbed from a tomb somewhere in the territory of that state. This preliminary study of the manuscript presents close readings of six representative poems, comparing the versions in the manuscript with those of the received text. It concludes with consideration of how to understand the textual variants apparent in the manuscript, and also the significance of the manuscript for the composition and especially the transmission of the Shi jing in the pre-Qin period.
The means by which the Shi jing was transmitted were, primarily, written texts as well as oral recitation and singing, and the textual features formed by these processes were often quite varied. During the pre-Qin period, written texts were frequently “open documents”; therefore, discrepancies among texts do not necessarily indicate distinctions of relative quality. Moreover, texts with different features do not necessarily belong to different textual systems. Therefore, one should adopt a holistic, open-minded attitude toward early textual forms of the Shi jing , and avoid hastily proceeding from discrepancies of format to rash judgments that they belong to different texts.
Based on the newly discovered Anhui University manuscript, the paper re-examines the controversy over the oral and written nature of the Classic of Poetry ’s early transmission. The paper argues that the Anda Shi jing serves to prove, first, that at the time of the manuscript (mid-Warring States period), or even earlier, the Shi jing was already not only an independent text, but had already been written down, and second, that the Anda Shi jing is a “manuscript,” and what is more there are various traces showing that it was a “copy,” such that it could not have been produced in an oral context.
Volume 8 of Qinghua daxue cang Zhanguo zhujian 清華大學藏戰國竹簡 contains a manuscript entitled by the editors * She ming 攝命 (* Command to She ) , which they argue is the original version of the ancient-script “Jiong ming” 囧命 (“Command to Jiong”) chapter of the Shangshu 尚書. I review the evidence for this and further provide a full translation of the text. I also consider possible implications of the * She ming for Western Zhou history, and how the text may have been transmitted from the time of its original composition, perhaps in the ninth century BCE, to the time that the Tsinghua manuscript was copied, probably in the fourth century BCE.
Volume 6 of Qinghua daxue cang Zhanguo zhujian, published in 2016, includes two copies of a text entitled by the editors * Zheng Wen Gong wen Tai Bo 鄭文公問太伯 (Duke Wen of Zheng Asks Tai Bo). The two copies of this single text are extremely similar, both in terms of content and in terms of calligraphy, but also display certain occasional differences and one systematic difference in the positioning of the “city” ( yi 邑) signific ( bushou 部首) within characters. This leads the editors to argue that they “were copied by a single scribe on the basis of two separate source texts.” This is the first time we have seen such evidence of scribal practice, and it is crucial for the question of manuscript production in early China. In the present study, I first present a codicological description of these two manuscript versions of * Zheng Wen Gong wen Tai Bo, followed by a full translation of their text. Then I consider their implications for the question of manuscript production in ancient China.
The “Chu shuo” 儲說 (Treasuries of illustrations) chapters of the Hanfeizi 韓非子, attributed to Han Fei 韓非 (d. 233 BCE), encompass an extensive collection of anecdotes. The jing 經 (classic, guideline) sections of these chapters are traditionally understood to be a set of “canonical” teachings, to be explicated by the anecdotes in the shuo 說 (discourse, explanation) sections. Eschewing this assumption, my analysis substantiates an alternative hypothesis that sees many of the jing texts as later superimpositions intended to serve as paratexts to existing anecdotal collections. By interpreting the jing and shuo sections as paratexts and main texts, respectively, this study reveals how early compilers sought to organize and inventory information, as well as to guide future users' understanding and memorization of the anecdotal materials. This approach not only facilitates the reconstruction of early frameworks of information management and knowledge acquisition, but also places the “Chu shuo” chapters in a comparative context. It also proffers new answers to several long-standing philological debates, such as the meaning and function of the label yi yue — 曰 (it is also said). In its conclusion, this study draws attention to potential continuities between the pre-imperial (before 221 BCE) and imperial periods' textual and bibliographical practices.
The manuscript carrying the title Zhuangwang ji Cheng 莊王既成, from the Shanghai Museum corpus of bamboo slips, bears two related anecdotes concerning the early Chinese monarch King Zhuang of Chu. In this article, we translate both stories and offer interpretations of them both as individual texts and as a composite narrative, situating both readings in a context of intertextual references based on shared cultural memory. Approaching the anecdotes together, we argue, generates an additional layer of meaning, yielding both a deep sense of dramatic irony and a critique of the value of foreknowledge – and, by extension, of the explanatory value of historiography. In detailing how this layer of meaning is generated, we explore the range of reading experiences and approaches to understanding the past enabled by combining separate but related textual units, a prevalent mode of composition and consumption in the manuscript culture of Warring States China.
While recent studies of early Chinese texts increasingly eschew the term “author,” the present article defends the utility of this term by proposing a generalizable framework for conceptualizing author claims. Using Qu Yuan as a case study, I demonstrate that the construction of the author, both historical and putative, uniquely contributes to the finalization—rather than the creation—of texts, transforming open and evolving textual traditions into closed and stabilized entities. The creation of the author thus stands at the threshold between textual production and reception, often serving as an indispensable condition for the latter. By applying this approach to the study of the Chuci zhangju, I offer a new definition of the textual strata within this compilation.
This article aims to illustrate the usefulness of analytical approaches to early Chinese writings which center on effects of textual memory. Due to a dearth of contemporaneous descriptions, concrete practices of oral transmission, dictation, performance, and interpretation in Early China largely lie beyond the ken of present-day scholarship. But recurrence of linguistic-stylistic elements testifies to the presence of these elements in an author's memory. Memory should thus, in principle, provide a comparatively accessible perspective on textual production. To demonstrate this point, the article investigates verbal parallels to a passage from Huainanzi 淮南子 15, “Bing lüe” 兵略 (An Overview of the Military). The internal and distributional patterns as well as the qualitative properties of textual overlaps with other extant writings suggest a composition process that involved a particular type of textual memory. Parallels are fuzzy and patchy; they rarely exceed one or two clauses; they display an irregular distribution across intertexts; the similarities between them cut across linguistic and stylistic categories and recombine in unpredictable constellations. This bundle of characteristics suggests not so much systematic exploitation of trained mnemonic capacities to reproduce long stretches of text verbatim, but instead, a reliance on the aptness of linguistic-stylistic elements of various kinds to spring to mind piecemeal in particular thematic contexts. These specificities are captured well by Boris Gasparov's notion of “communicative fragments.” To invoke an Aristotelian distinction, the resulting effects are close to those of unsupervised remembering rather than the deliberate, goal-directed cognitive activity of recollecting. Looking beyond the present study, it is hoped that future investigations of intertextuality will combine aspects of close reading—as in this article—and methods of digitally enhanced distant reading. This will likely help to elucidate distinct habits of text production and to devise more refined textual typologies, which might eventually feed into more nuanced literary, historical, and philosophical interpretations.
While research on Warring States, Qin, and Han manuscripts is flourishing, much less is known about the use of manuscripts during the earlier stages of Chinese history, for which material evidence has not been preserved. Based on the layout features and textual anomalies in the Western Zhou bronze inscriptions, this article explores the traces of use of perishable writing supports in the process of the production of bronze inscriptions in this period and reconstructs their functions and physical qualities. Based on the surveyed evidence, the article posits that two distinct exemplar manuscripts were used in the inscription-making process: an original “master copy” that was kept aside for proofreading purposes and a secondary “blueprint” that was employed directly in the technical process of inscription-making. A single blueprint would be used consecutively by several craftsmen to produce a set of inscriptions on different types of vessels. The word count and layout of many inscriptions were already carefully planned during the process of their composition, and any study of a bronze text should therefore begin with the evaluation of its visual qualities. Moreover, this probe provides unambiguous evidence for the use of tube-lining in the inscription-making process and reconstructs the complete chaîne opératoire of bronze inscription production in the Late Western Zhou period. The article also offers insights into the level of literacy and the division of labor in bronze workshops, and touches upon the display function of bronze epigraphy during the Western Zhou period.