Aural-mnemonic Architectonics of Ancient Chinese Philosophical Texts

Abstract

Taking inspiration from Soviet scholarship and South Asian parallels, this article proposes a new interpretation of the compositional regularities in certain philosophical texts from ancient China. It argues that such texts are underpinned by mechanisms of aural and mnemonic reinforcement that contributed to the fixation of textual compositions and facilitated the creation of stable discursive spaces for communities distributed in space and time. The sophisticated structural patterning can be seen as a technological alternative to writing and literacy, providing another platform for advanced textuality. Visualisation of the non-linear compositional structures pioneered by Vladimir Spirin, a Soviet scholar of ancient Chinese texts, makes them more comprehensible to the contemporary reader, and this approach holds much potential if combined with modern dynamic hypertext technology.