Debating the Spirit in Early ChinaTo Become a God: Cosmology, Sacrifice, and Self-Divinization in Early China. Michael J. Puett

Philosophy or Bamboo:The Reading and Writing of Warring States Manuscripts Edward L. Shaughnessy (bio) Dirk Meyer. Philosophy on Bamboo: Text and the Production of Meaning in Early China. Studies in the History of Chinese Texts 2. Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers, 2012. 395 pp. Hardcover $182.00, isbn 978-90-04-20762-2. Dirk Meyer’s Philosophy on Bamboo: Text and the Production of Meaning in Early China is the revision of a doctoral dissertation titled “Meaning-Construction in Warring States Philosophical Discourse: A Discussion of the Palaeographic Materials from Tomb Guōdiàn One,” presented to Leiden University in 2008. The new title is perhaps intended to accentuate the physical nature of the texts that Meyer discusses. Meyer begins by stating that “[r]ather than focusing primarily on the ideas expressed in texts, my analysis starts by dealing with the texts themselves as meaningful objects in their own right” (p. 1). He contrasts this approach to “traditional analysis,” which “customarily sees texts from the distant past as mere vessels of thought” (p. 245). This is consistent with a great deal of current scholarship on early (and later, for that matter) Chinese textual materials, stimulated in large part by the discovery of actual examples of early Chinese texts, among which the Guodian bamboo-strip manuscripts are particularly well known. Of course, the question of what texts are will necessarily influence the way one studies them: Are they primarily the instantiations of writing, especially as realized on some material medium (be it paper or bamboo), or are they the intellectual expression of [End Page 199] thought, regardless of the medium? Despite the expressed starting point of his analysis, Meyer seems to vacillate between these two approaches. On the one hand, he says “conventional treatment of texts as mere repositories of ideas does not suffice to establish a sound and historically valid reconstruction of early thought. Hence, my approach is to look at the philosophical texts from early China as meaningful objects in their own right” (p. 31). On the other hand, elsewhere he explicitly differentiates between the text and a manuscript: To explore the habits of composing and using philosophical texts in early China calls for a methodological distinction between text and manuscript. I define “text” as the textual matter transmitted. It is the formulation of an idea that can take both oral and written form, and so it is abstracted from any material carrier. A text can therefore travel orally and so independently of material contexts, either with teachers, experts, or advisors or via trade routes or at markets, from person to person. “Manuscript” is the material textual representation, that is, the physical manifestation of a text on silk, bamboo, wood, or the like. (p. 8) In a note attached to the second sentence of this passage, Meyer “defines text in a sense that comprises the everyday mundane category but in such a way that it does not need to be (entirely) written in nature. Text can also appear in oral form or, as Martin Kern puts it, ‘co-exist in both.’” Despite the title of his book, Philosophy on Bamboo, it seems clear that Meyer is more concerned with philosophy, as he defines it, than with bamboo. In particular, as we will see later in this review, he is particularly concerned with discerning the oral form of texts within their written nature. The iconography displayed on the book’s cover is perhaps revealing of this concern. It features a portion of five strips from the Guodian manuscript Zi yi 兹衣 (i.e., 緇衣), but the photograph has been manipulated in such a way as to render all graphs but two out of focus; the two graphs in focus, in the very middle of the photograph, are zi yue 子曰 “the Master said.” I will return at the end of this review to consider Meyer’s concern with the oral form within the written texts. However, first I will try to summarize the kind of form criticism that he brings to a few Guodian texts, and discuss the conclusions he draws from it. In a narrowly focused study, restricted to just five of the texts from Guodian—“Zhōng xìn zhī d...

In Text and Ritual in Early China, leading scholars of ancient Chinese history, literature, religion, and archaeology consider the presence and use of texts in religious and political ritual. Through balanced attention to both the received literary tradition and the wide range of recently excavated artefacts, manuscripts, and inscriptions, their combined efforts reveal the rich and multilayered interplay of textual composition and ritual performance. Drawn across disciplinary boundaries, the resulting picture illuminates two of the defining features of early Chinese culture and advances new insights into their sumptuous complexity. Beginning with a substantial introduction to the conceptual and thematic issues explored in succeeding chapters, Text and Ritual in Early China is anchored by essays on early Chinese cultural history and ritual display (Michael Nylan) and the nature of its textuality (William G. Boltz). This twofold approach sets the stage for studies of the E Jun Qi metal tallies (Lothar von Falkenhausen), the Gongyang commentary to The Spring and Autumn Annals (Joachim Gentz), the early history of The Book of Odes (Martin Kern), moral remonstration in historiography (David Schaberg), the Liming manuscript text unearthed at Mawangdui (Mark Csikszentmihalyi), and Eastern Han commemorative stele inscriptions (K. E. Brashier). The scholarly originality of these essays rests firmly on their authors' control over ancient sources, newly excavated materials, and modern scholarship across all major Sinological languages. The extensive bibliography is in itself a valuable and reliable reference resource. This important work will be required reading for scholars of Chinese history, language, literature, philosophy, religion, art history, and archaeology.

Anthropologists of contemporary Chinese religion have often pointed out that the lines between spirits, ghosts, and ancestors are highly permeable. Indeed, the primary difference between them is to be found in food—both in the types of food offered and the ways in which it is given. Ghosts are dead humans who are not fed by living descendants (and thus become hungry and highly dangerous, but also objects of offerings by individuals outside of more established avenues of worship); ancestors are fed by their living descendants (and thus are not dangerous and may even be helpful to the descendants); and spirits are fed by larger numbers of people than just simply their descendants (and thus become far more powerful than ghosts or ancestors). Moreover, each of these can become any of the others if the food offerings are changed: a ghost can become an ancestor, an ancestor can become a ghost, a ghost can become a spirit. In other words, it is living humans, through the act of feeding, who define the differences between spirits, ghosts, and ancestors.1

Reviewed by: Military Thought in Early China by Christopher Rand Mark Metcalf (bio) Christopher Rand. Military Thought in Early China. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2017. vii, 240 pp. Hardcover $85.00, isbn 978-1-4384-6517-3. Explaining the development of first millennium b.c.e. Chinese military thought on the basis of roles of the civil (文 wen) and the martial (武 wu) in governance is not a new approach. Many early China specialists, including Mark Edward Lewis, Lisa Raphals, Robin Yates, have clearly identified the importance of such a wen/wu tension in their writings.1 Where Military Thought in Early China differs from its predecessors, however, is in the way that it frames such a development in a manner that allows the reader to closely follow the development of military thought from the establishment of the Western Zhou through the divergence of ideas during the late Spring & Autumn and Warring States periods to the eventual consolidation of views during the Western Han. Initially written as a Ph.D. dissertation in 1977, after a 40-year career in government Christopher Rand revised his original work to incorporate new insights from research and discoveries during the intervening years. The result is impressive. The book is particularly noteworthy for its extensive use of primary sources to trace this development and the meticulous manner in which such references are documented and commented on in the endnotes. Each chapter also includes a very useful conclusion section that summarizes the key points discussed in the chapter and their significance in the development of early Chinese military thought. Rand's basic premise is that early Chinese views regarding social stability and political order have, at their core, the goal of answering "the Wen/Wu problem"; determining the appropriate roles for the civil and the martial. Presenting examples from the early Chinese literary corpus, he demonstrates the ubiquity of military thought in early Chinese texts and argues "Repeatedly one finds in pre-Qin writings the notion that war is a natural, evolving attribute of the human community, and that martial activity allowed, paradoxically, for the advancement of civilized life . . . the sages of Chinese [End Page 94] antiquity, according to tradition, did not exclude violence but rather stipulated it as an outlet for hostile feelings, much as those manifested by armed beasts. War was perceived as an impetus for positive change rather than a negative feature of social life." (pp. 5-6) Chapter 1, "The Emergence of the Wen/Wu Problem," begins with a discussion of the idealized role of wen and wu in government as evidenced by the actions of the eponymous Kings Wen and Wu in the establishment of the Western Zhou. The world was to be governed by the civil (wen) and the awe inspiring influence of a virtuous ruler was deemed sufficient, in most cases, to maintain order in the world. On the rare occasions when a state threated such order with inappropriate behavior, however, it was appropriate for and incumbent upon the ruler to use military force (wu) to return the world to its proper state. Rand meticulously analyzes several excerpts from early Chinese texts, particularly the Odes, to support this assertion. This peaceable state gradually, yet inexorably, unraveled over the next four centuries and with it the traditional roles of wen and wu. The first chapter concludes with the introduction of three "solutions" that were developed during the Warring States period in response to the "wen/wu problem." The first, militarism, "placed high value on martiality, as opposed to civility" (p. 22). Next, compartmentalization, which argued for "a clear separation between martial and civil" with "martial activity . . . subordinate to civility and . . . applied only in extremis" (p. 25). Finally, syncretism, which "attempted to refocus the wen/wu debate on the need for balance and reciprocality between martiality and civility" (pp. 26-27). Rand also identifies three perspectives, metaphysical, pragmatic, and ethical, which were used to implement the three solutions. These six terms are italicized throughout the text to highlight their significance as de facto technical terms; a very effective way of helping the reader to follow the individual threads of solutions or perspectives as they are woven throughout the narrative...

Through the process of sanctification over generations, Bo Yi and Shu Qi, the two adherents to Shang, have, to some extent, become the moral models in Chinese cultural memory. While their starvation to death for the sake of the Right Way has been extolled by non-imperial and imperial scholars, it must not be neglected that the account of Bo Yi and Shu Qi is naturally marked by an inescapable contradiction: their sage allegiance to the Shang Dynasty was, in fact, a very dismantling of the legitimacy of Zhou in the sense of Heavenly Mandate that the Zhou had constructed. Scholars of ancient China had shaped and presented the two as models for their times and future generations, but almost none of them showed direct interest in boldly discussing the contradiction. By focusing on how Chinese classics in an early stage dealt with the dilemma of judgment between the moral paragons and the legitimacy of an ideal era in accounts of the Bo Yi allegory, this paper demonstrates the changing process from the abstract and general narration of Confucius and Mencius to the comprehensive, paradoxical, and dialectical narration of Sima Qian, reflecting Confucianisms progression in maturity in early China.

Book Reviews 143 Food, Sacrifice, and Sagehood in Early China ROEL STERCKX. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. vi, 235 pages. ISBN 978-1-107-00171-8. £55.00, US$90.00, hardcover. Roel Sterckx’s new book is a welcome addition to the growing volume of publications on early Chinese history. Sterckx explores aspects of food culture in early China, primarily— albeit not exclusively—in the context of sacrificial activities; this focus allows him to address manifold issues concerning the philosophy of sacrifices, conceptualization of human senses, and early Chinese economic history and political thought. This rich and well written book will become indispensable to everybody interested in China’s food culture, in early Chinese religious history, and also to many students of early Chinese philosophy. References to food and food-related metaphors are ubiquitous in early Chinese texts, and this very richness of sources may have impeded systematic research on these topics in the past. In facing this challenging task, Sterckx relies on his awesome erudition, which was fully visible already in his first magnum opus, The Animal and the Daemon in Early China.1 In Food, Sacrifice, and Sagehood Sterckx utilizes, even if inevitably briefly, most of the received texts from the Springs-and-Autumns (770–453 BCE), Warring States (453–221 BCE), and the Han (206 BCE–220 CE) periods; these, in addition to occasional references to the paleographic sources and to archeological discoveries, allow Sterckx to present a panoptic view of Chinese sacrificial culture. The scope of the book is impressive both in terms of the periods covered (Sterckx expands his discussion at times both backwards, to the Western Zhou period [ca. 1045–771 BCE], and forwards, toward the post-Han sources) and in terms of topics covered, which include food habits of the elite, food as philosophical and political metaphor, nature of the human interaction with the deities, the economics of sacrifice, and aspects of sagehood and of rulership in pre-imperial and early imperial China. While not all of these topics are covered with equal density, and while the discussion on many issues may require further fine-tuning and modifications, overall the position of the Food, Sacrifice, and Sagehood as a standard for any future exploration in the field seems to me undeniable. The quasi-encyclopedic nature of the Food, Sacrifice, and Sagehood allows a reader to select a chapter close to his/her field of interest and read it as a separate essay; yet it is also possible to discern a few common ideas that underlie Sterckx’s discussions. Among these, the most interesting to the present reviewer is the author’s emphasis on multiple tensions that accompanied almost any imaginable aspect of food and sacrificial culture. Food and drinks were the source of nourishment and high joy, but also potentially of self-destructive overindulgence; deities had to be fed much like the humans, but the most exquisite offering was, paradoxically, the tasteless stew; sacrifices were essential for the community well-being, 1 Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2002. 144 Journal of Chinese Religions but also potentially damaging due to the waste of resources; and, while the sage rulers were supposed to be all-hearing and clairvoyant (congming 聪明), their ears and eyes had to be covered to prevent direct contact between their senses and their environment. By highlighting these tensions, Sterckx adds another dimension to our understanding of the deeply contradictory nature of China’s sacrificial, and, more broadly ritual culture with its embedded tension between the ritual and reality, between the image of perfect order generated through elaborate ceremonies and the imperfect sociopolitical situation; between persistent appeal to divine support and a somewhat equivocal belief in its efficacy. Speaking of tensions, one may identify some of them in the book itself. Perhaps the most significant one is between Sterckx-anthropologist and Sterckx-historian. The first tends to depict Chinese food consumption and sacrificial practices as if they were uniform throughout the six to ten centuries under discussion, perpetuating, inadvertently, the long bygone image of changeless China. The author frankly explains why he eschews chronological treatment of the topics under discussion: given the notoriously unreliable dating of major texts, most notably of ritual compendia...

LANGUAGE NOTE | Document text in Chinese; abstract also in English. 本文從文獻與古文字資料出發，探討了孝這一先秦儒家重要概念的來源。本文首先探討了孝、老、考、ㄎ諸字的來源，認為孝字本義類享，是指以酒食奉養父母。通過將《詩•小雅•楚茨》與《禮記•郊特牲》、《儀禮•少牢饋食禮》以及金文中所見西周孝享之禮的比勘研究，本文試圖勾勒出一個早期的孝享活動基本儀文制度和禮節。本文的結論是孝之本義生於事生，然後擴而為事死。其初或為簡單的醴餼之獻，而其後事死之禮愈隆，终於與祭天地神祇之禮並重。《孝經》中分天子、卿大夫與士庶之孝，《論語》中所説的孝的具體原則（不失禮、不辱親、敬親和愛親），於是乎隨着時代的發展而產生。一個日常生活中的孝，擴而為宗敎行為，又進而赋予豐富的倫理內涵。The present paper seeks to explore the origin of the concept of "Filiality" in early China in light of documentary examination and paleographic analysis. It discusses the etymology of a few characters in early writing, such as xiao 孝, lao 老, kao 考 and kao ㄎ, and argues that the original meaning of xiao depicts a son presenting food and wine to his father. In this paper, I have also compared the "Chuci" 楚茨 (Dense Is the Tribulus) poem in the Book of Odes, the "Jiaotesheng" 郊特牲 (The Single Victim at the Border Sacrifices) chapter of the Records on Ceremonial, the "Shaolao Kuishi li" 少牢饋食禮 (The Food Presentation and Lesser Offerrings) chapter of the Book of Etiquette and Ceremonial, with some description of food and wine presentation in bronze inscriptions of the Zhou dynasty, attempting to draw a picture of the content and precedure of xiao activity in Western Zhou. My conclusion is that the concept of xiao originated from a concrete picture of a son presenting food to his father (serving his living elders), and was extended to describe serving the dead. As the time went by, the presentation to the dead became more important and ceremonious. The concept of xiao, therefore, underwent a course of abstraction from the presentation of food and wine to elders to an important value Filiality in Confucian ethics.

This article looks beyond the dichotomy between silence (mo 默) and speech (yan 言) and discusses the functions of and attitudes toward silence in the Yanzi chunqiu 晏子春秋 as a case representing the variety of ideas of silence in early China. In the West, silence has been widely explored in fields such as religion and theology, linguistic studies, and communication and literary studies. The consensus has moved away from viewing silence as abstaining from speech and utterance—and therefore absence of meaning and intention, toward seeing it as a culturally dependent and significant aspect of communication. However, beyond a number of studies discussing unspoken teachings in relation to early Daoism, silence has received little attention in early China studies. This article approaches the functions of silence by pursuing questions regarding its rhetorical, emotive, political, and ethical aspects. Instead of searching for the nature of silence and asking what silence is, this article poses alternative questions: How do ancient Chinese thinkers understand the act of silence? What are the attitudes toward silence in early China? How does silence foster morality? How does silence function as performative remonstrance? How is it used for political persuasion? How does silence draw the attention of and communicate with readers and audiences? How does silence allow time for contemplation, reflection, and agreement among participants? How is silence related to various intense emotional states? These questions lead us to reflect on previous scholarship which regarded silence in early China as the most spontaneous and natural way to grasp the highest truth, which is unpresentable and inexpressible through articulated speech and artificial language. In this sense, the notion of the unspoken teaching is not only understood in opposition to speech, but also as a means to reveal the deficiency of language and the limits of speech. However, through a survey of dialogues, stories, and arguments in Yanzi chunqiu, I show that silence is explicitly marked and explained within the text, and is used actively, purposefully, and meaningfully, to persuade, inform, and motivate audiences. In other words, silence is anything but natural and spontaneous. Rather, it is intentionally adopted, carefully crafted, and publicly performed to communicate, remonstrate, criticize, reveal, and target certain ideas. That is to say, silence is as argumentative as speech and as arbitrary as language. Finally, an awareness of and sensitivity to silence provides a new perspective to engage with other early Chinese texts.

Reviewed by: The Politics of the Past in Early China by Vincent S. Leung Lothar von Falkenhausen The Politics of the Past in Early China. Vincent S. Leung. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. xii + 202 pp. Hardcover US $100, ISBN 9781108425728; Paperback US $30, ISBN 9781108443241; E-book US $80, ISBN 9781108619196. In his introductory chapter, Leung forcefully dismantles the essentializing notion, pervasive in older Sinological writings, that references to the past in early Chinese texts were overwhelmingly didactic in their motivation. He instead proposes to focus on the “deliberate mobilization of the field of the past as ideological capital toward the construction or deconstruction of various political arguments and ethical ideas” (p. 13). So far, so good, but can anyone come up with a new and truly superior understanding? As one reads on, such initial doubts are quickly dispelled. Chapter by chapter, Leung carefully builds a compelling and, as far as I am able to judge, quite original argument that does justice both to the diversity of the texts and the agency of their authors in their historical and sociopolitical circumstances. The textual loci adduced in support of this new narrative are judiciously chosen and conscientiously translated. Rather than attempting to cover every pertinent text, Leung deliberately restricts himself to a limited range. The result is a slim but intelligent volume that is eminently worth reading. Chapter 1, by far the longest in the book, ranges from the Western Zhou bronze inscriptions to the Confucian Analects and the Mozi. In contradistinction to the protagonists of the Bronze Inscriptions, who dwelled upon their genealogical links to illustrious ancestors in ritual settings, Confucius—in what strikes one as an astonishingly modern gesture—was the first to treat the past as a veritable smørgåsbord of precedents available to all comers, regardless of background, to help them determine their course of action as autonomous moral agents in the present age. The authors of the Mozi, while sharing a similar outlook on the past, flipped Confucius’s vision by treating the past as a series of negative examples illustrating the chaos that would ensue if individuals were to exert their autonomy instead of submitting under the discipline of an orderly régime imposed by a sage ruler. Chapter 2 juxtaposes the Laozi (as represented in the manuscript text excavated at Guodian, Jingmen [Hubei]) and the Mengzi. According to Leung, these two approximately contemporaneous texts both implicitly deny the relevance of any historical reference: the Laozi by initiating a “cosmogonic turn” and tracing the origins of the world way back to a patently mythical female figure; and the Mengzi by insisting that it is only one’s inborn moral nature, rather than any precedent from history, that will determine human action in concrete situations of the present. Chapter 3 treats the attitudes to the past espoused in the writings of the Warring States-period Legalist thinkers and the imperial Qin ideologues. While the former constantly referred to the past as a way of emphasizing that times had changed and historical precedent was useless in dealing with new circumstances, the latter proclaimed [End Page 485] the end of all history. The Qin world order was intended to work like mechanical clock-work, creating a never-varying pattern that accommodated all conceivable situations and events, and that, if successfully imposed, would have removed all need to account for individual cases; in other words, it would have assimilated human life to natural history. In chapter 4, Leung describes how the early Western Han thinkers Jia Yi and Lu Jia reacted to the failure of Qin by reviving, in Jia’s case, a Confucian vision of autonomous agency guided by historical precedents (which now included the failures of the Qin), or anchoring, in Lu’s case, a new view of the world in the study of the Confucian classics, which were now reinterpreted as revealed knowledge transmitted from the sages of the past. Chapter 5 zeroes in on two chapters in the Shi ji that deal with economic issues. Leung juxtaposes the anarchist model of a natural economy that works best without any institutional interference presented in the “Huozhi liezhuan [Biographies of the money-makers]” chapter against...

In the context of deepening globalization, the importance of cross-linguistic and cross-cultural communication has become increasingly prominent. As a key criterion for both language comprehension and translation quality, discourse coherence faces theoretical and practical challenges posed by cultural differences. Most current coherence theories are based on English corpora and fail to account for the implicit coherence mechanisms widely found in Chinese literature. Drawing on Kehler’s theory of coherence, Asher and Lascarides’ Segmented Discourse Representation Theory (SDRT), and other relevant models, this study analyzes Chinese and English literary texts, including Honglou Meng and Pride and Prejudice, to explore differing strategies for constructing coherence. Through comparative analysis of ellipsis, imagistic linkage, and topic shift in Chinese texts, the study highlights the limitations of English-based models in explaining coherence in Chinese discourse. It argues that Chinese coherence relies heavily on shared knowledge and metaphorical structures rooted in high-context culture, whereas English discourse coherence depends on explicit logical relations and grammatical connectives. The study proposes a strategy of “cultural coherence transformation” for translation and advocates for the incorporation of cultural pragmatics into coherence theory to build a more cross-culturally applicable analytical framework.

A comparison of ancient parasites as seen from archeological contexts and early medical texts in China

This paper focuses on the Chinese term dao 道 and illustrates how the way metaphor was used in Chinese texts that were composed between the fourth and second centuries BCE. It explores the cognitive and communicative roots of the way metaphor and concludes with an ambivalent outcome. On the one hand, it demonstrates that the way metaphor generated religious meaning in a very strong sense from a historical—and thus genealogical—perspective. Specifically, it provided a label for social self-reference—the “person of the Way” or daozhe 道者—nearly four centuries before the traditionally recognized beginning of “religious” Daoism: the emergence of the Celestial Masters communities in the second century CE. On the other hand, the paper also highlights that this early religious meaning did not involve the development of refined arguments based on complex metaphorical clusters. Quite the opposite: the elaboration of such arguments belongs to what might be called the backstage of the religion — a thematically diverse domain that will be addressed in two parts. First, the “way that can be way-ed,” and second, the “Way that cannot be way-ed.” This backstage is also the key to the way metaphor itself—an intensely anthropocentric linguistic device that effectively bridged the divide between the religious and the non-religious.

In examining wares discovered from the cultures of Sanxingdui and Jinsha and from the former site of the ancient kingdom of Dian in Sichuan and Yunnan provinces, this article highlights a number of shared features and trends that suggest a continued artistic, technological and cultural transmission through time and space. The article aims to supplement established theories on the rich material culture of this region. It will look in particular at the development of its striking bronze metallurgy, largely deriving from the established traditions of the Yellow River valley in China’s Bronze Age. It highlights the function of a dense network of trading routes, referred to in modern scholarship as the “Southwest Silk Road”, as an important facilitator of cultural and artistic exchange and reciprocation from ancient times.

110 Journal of Chinese Religions Early Chinese Religion: Part One: Shang through Han (1250 BC220 AD) Edited by JOHN LAGERWEY and MARC KALINOWSKI. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2009. 2 volumes. Handbook of Oriental Studies, Section Four: China, Volume 21-1. xvi, 1256 pages. ISBN 978-90-04-16835-0. €249.00, US$369.00 hardcover. Reading through these two massive tomes evokes pleasant memories of a highly stimulating conference held in Paris in December 2006, during which the majority of the twenty-four studies assembled therein, most of them still in very preliminary draft form, were discussed under the benevolent gaze of the portrait bust of the great Fustel de Coulanges.12 At the time, the task of pulling them together into a book appeared sisyphean if not hopeless, and skepticism seemed in order as to whether the planned compilation would be ready for publication while its contents were still up to date. But John Lagerwey and Marc Kalinowski have achieved the impossible: the work under review—the first part of what Lagerwey has informally dubbed the “Paris History of Chinese Religion”—has come out after less than three years; and it is a masterpiece. Despite the rapid turnover, it shows no signs of haste. The texts are expertly edited, with just enough unity imposed on the rendition of Chinese terms while the substance of the authors’ often conflicting interpretations is left untouched; the translations of those chapters originally written in French,13 Chinese, and Japanese are competently done and often elegant; typos and mistaken characters are few and inconsequential; and an ample index (v. 2, pp. 1213-1256) facilitates accessing the heterogeneous contents making it possible to use the work as the handbook it is intended to be. The level of scholarship is almost uniformly excellent, as indeed one would expect from the roster of authors included—a virtual Who’s who of leading Sinologists in Europe, North America, Taiwan, and Japan (none, alas, from mainland China). In spite of the diversity of the approaches taken by the authors, the work, at least for the most part, carries the scholarly authority the reader expects from a handbook, justifying its formidable price. In short, Early Chinese Religion: Part One stands as a triumphal achievement. Even the briefest digest of the contents would exceed the space allotted to this review; providing such a digest would also be superfluous as the editors in their long introduction (v. 12 I participated in this conference as a discussant. For full disclosure, I should reveal that I was invited to contribute to the handbook, but to my great and enduring regret felt unable to do so due to overcommitment. 13 The French versions of the chapters by Thote, Kalinowski, Lévi, Bujard, and Pirazzolit ’Serstevens are published, together with three other chapters concerning the period covered in Early Chinese Religion: Part One, as well as a group of papers concerning the period between Han and Tang, in John Lagerwey (ed.), Religion et société en Chine ancienne et médiévale (Patrimoines— orientalisme—Chine; Paris: Éditions du Cerf, Institut Ricci, 2009). The latter work is reviewed in the present issue of the Journal of Chinese Religions by Barbara Hendrischke. (See pp. 123-127) Book Reviews 111 1, pp. 1-37) lucidly summarize each of the chapters and point out the connections among them, thus placing them in a wider context of synthesis. Meritorious above all for bringing out the breaks and transitions in the long and tortuous development of religious phenomena in early China, as well as the methodological problems involved in their study, this introduction is an extremely impressive summation of the state of the field that any student of Chinese civilization should read. Rather than repeating what is already stated in it, I will limit myself here to a more general characterization of the work—both of what it delivers and of what, for perfectly justifiable reasons, it does not. Anyone expecting a systematic presentation of deities, beliefs, rituals, and associated priestly personnel in early China will be frustrated by this work. Coherence is not a goal, and the nature of the subject matter, inasmuch as it is even knowable today, would not...

ABSTRACTInspired by the British bibliographer Donald F. McKenzie’s “sociology of texts,” this article explores the material form of early Chinese manuscripts and its impact on the production, circulation, reading habits, and the relationship between literary and administrative texts in the Warring State, Qin and early Han periods. Because the material format of early Chinese texts was scrolls (“juan”) of bamboo or wooden strips, the basic unit for circulation is often “pian,” a unit smaller than a “book.” The fluidity of early China texts was the consequence of the material media and the ways of transmission (both oral and written copying) in early China. The article also argues that the canonization process in early China tried to control the accuracy of textual production and transmission, such as double checking the copies, the increasing notion of organization of a book, the use of table of contents and preface, and character count at the end of a text. The article finally calls for the integration of the studies on excavated literary manuscripts on one hand, and administrative, personal documents, and technical manuals on the other.