Military Thought in Early China by Christopher Rand

For understanding early Chinese "theories of language" and views about the relation of speech to a nonalphabetic script, a thorough analysis of early Chinese metalinguistic terminology is necessary. This article analyzes the function of ming 名 (name) in early Chinese texts as a first step in that direction. It argues against the regular treatment of this term in early Chinese texts as the equivalent of "word." It examines ming in light of early Chinese ideas about sense perception, the mythology about the origin or music and writing, and changes occurring in the writing system in the third century b.c.e. This lays the groundwork for a more informed response to Derrida's speculation about Chinese logocentrism. It is explained that, in early Chinese texts, certain concepts associated with logocentrism (e.g., reality/appearance, presence/absence) function in a way that is neither the same as, nor exactly the reverse of, the Western philosophical episteme. Thus, attempts to reconstruct attitudes toward "language" in early China should note the importance of sound in interpreting ming . Moreover, interpretations of apparent denigrations of writing in early Chinese texts should, before diagnosing logocentrism, consider the context of the reliability of the visual.

ABSTRACTThis article is directed against some Western scholars’ unfounded claim that early Chinese texts were predominantly transmitted orally (either through dictation or writing from memory), and discusses the importance of the scribe in the transmission of pre-Qin texts. Concrete evidence from excavated manuscripts suggests that early Chinese texts were primarily transmitted as copies that passed from hand to hand and text to text. The author then discusses, through handwriting analysis, examples of texts copied by a single scribe as well as multiple scribes, and how the copyists treated texts and scripts that originated from different states of the Warring States period. The article then discusses how scribes treated textual errors, omissions, and redundant graphs and texts arising during the process of textual transmission. Finally the author discusses the social status of the scribe in early China and hypothesizes that there may have already been bookshops in the Warring States period.

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...

Examining early Chinese ritual discourse during the Warring States and early Western Han Periods, this book reveals how performance became a fundamental feature of ritual and politics in early China.Through a dramaturgical lens, Thomas Radice explores the extent to which performer/spectator relationships influenced all aspects of early Chinese religious, ethical, and political discourse. Arguing that the Confucians conceived ritual as primarily a dramaturgical matter, this book demonstrates not only that theatricality was necessary for expression and deception in a community of spectators, but also how a theatrical ‘presence’ ultimately became essential to all forms of public life in early China. Thomas Radice illuminates previously unexplored connections between early Chinese texts, aesthetics, and traditions.

Modern Western convictions that freedom, equality, and personal autonomy are all crucial human goods structure both our thinking and our practice in deep and pervasive ways. Even when these values do not thoroughly shape our politics, we tend to judge this as a failing. While there is much to celebrate about these ideals and even their imperfect realization in various spheres of modern life, they also cast long shadows that confuse our self-understanding and muddle our interpretation of alien cultures and the possibilities they present. These shadows also obscure crucial ethical and political issues, notably regarding interpersonal authority and hierarchical social relations.1For instance, a dominant modern Western tendency, especially among intellectuals, is to exalt individual autonomy and to be suspicious of hierarchical relations, which are often conceived in terms of domination that is either direct and forceful or subtle and soul-crippling. This tendency to interpret hierarchy in terms of domination echoes and reinforces the attention given to justifying coercive authority in political theory. In other words, much contemporary political theory concerns the question of who might be justified in ruling, and thereby controlling the state's power to compel obedience (e.g., through military, legal, and penal systems). These tendencies, however, easily trick social critics into reading any sort of hierarchy as by definition an exercise in domination that is at best a necessary evil—something that needs to be tolerated but limited as much as possible. But certain sorts of hierarchy are not only necessary in the negative sense that we have not figured out how to live communally without coercive force; they are also necessary in a more positive sense, because human flourishing relies on certain forms of hierarchy. It would help contemporary Westerners to better understand these issues, both so that we are not tempted to attack one of the conditions of our own happiness, and so that we may also avoid the reactive temptation to defend too many kinds of hierarchical authority as good.The larger project from which this essay derives aims to explore the pursuit of mastery as a potentially compelling justification for hierarchical relationships, one that avoids certain pitfalls familiar from Western justifications and critiques of various kinds of social authority, including slavery and the subordination of women. Reflecting upon what it might mean to master an activity, art, or mode of being can show what sorts of hierarchical relations are necessary and constructive for creatures like us, with relatively adaptable instincts that are inevitably and dramatically shaped by culture, language, and practice.2 Human flourishing, it would seem, requires investment in the practice of mastery, both of self and of various activities.3Despite this, liberal political theory, which represents the mainstream of American political philosophy, has little interest in or sympathy with attempts to cultivate human potentials in any organized, public way. Such efforts are often seen as smacking of "perfectionism," the supposedly futile and destructive effort by government to demand a heroic level of virtue from the general populace.4 The fear behind these criticisms is of tyrannical government, a fear nurtured over centuries in the modern West through struggles against oppressive kings, religious leaders, and other elites, against slavery as a paradigm of unjust domination, and finally against totalitarianism. There are very real dangers here that should not be overlooked.In this essay I explore these issues by moving through a sequence of steps. First, I briefly expand and nuance the claims made above about "the modern West" and our suspicion of hierarchy, through historical arguments about the development of a view of people as free makers of contracts rather than as holders of birth-related statuses. The point of this first section is to make plausible the idea that contemporary Westerners need to rethink our understanding of authority and hierarchy. In the second section I argue, perhaps surprisingly, that ancient Chinese thought, especially a number of implicit and explicit early accounts of salutary teacher–student relations, offers important and underutilized resources for reexamining these issues. In the third section, I consider one influential early Chinese text, the "Inner Chapters" of the Zhuāngzǐ. This text might at first seem to fit poorly with the account of teaching relations discussed in the second section, but I argue that we should be suspicious of anachronistic readings of this text as advocating freedom and even liberation. Instead, the Inner Chapters seem to suggest that human beings need teachers to attain crucial insights into life, and that we should conform to at least some powers, forces, and authorities, but reject others as counterfeit.Needless to say, the history of the development of the modern world is so complicated that it is far beyond the scope of this essay to grapple with it adequately. Instead, I propose to briefly discuss the ideal of autonomy as a central feature of modern consciousness, one that is probably the most important cause of our difficulties in comprehending and properly evaluating relations of authority and dependence. Let us begin with a landmark in intellectual history, Sir Henry Maine's (1866) Ancient Law: Its Connection with the Early History of Society, and Its Relation to Modern Ideas.5Maine's book established the historical study of law as a worthwhile intellectual endeavor, and it was a classic and extremely influential version of world-spanning, evolutionarily inclined, nineteenth-century European comparative argument. Maine's central thesis was that human social history could be summarized as the move "from status to contract," with the invention of contractual relations and their attendant legal and institutional support system being a distinctively modern development. In contrast, ancient law, which mostly enumerated custom from time immemorial, reflected a society based on the status of various persons, such as wives, children, and slaves, within patriarchal households. Only the father could enter into legal contracts; all others were unfree dependents without the legal and property rights of the father. Maine's key motif is gradual emancipation: over time more social relations are conceived on the model of a contract entered into freely by equal citizens under the rule of law, and fewer relationships are defined by the status, with associated duties and prerogatives, of the parties involved.In this account, autonomous agents who can own property, control their own activity, and freely enter into binding contracts regarding, for example, their own labor, become the modern norm. Other relations, such as slavery or the dependence of wives on husbands, are marked as archaic. Maine thereby demarcates the modern liberal realm of the public and contrasts it with a private realm where ancient survivals lingered on, perhaps out of biological necessity. This mapping of social life continues to capture central features of the modern cultural imagination. A crucial consequence of these developments is a sense that hierarchical relations are somehow strange and questionable because they deviate from the model of autonomously chosen agreements between equals.6The political and moral appeal of autonomy as an ideal is found in the thought that domination of other human beings is wrong and should be prohibited to the greatest extent possible; protecting individual autonomy has seemed to many to be an essential, defining component of struggles against oppression. Suspicion of domination, even in seemingly benign forms, has very deep roots in the West, which are discernible in two large and complex historical trends: the repeated debates over the practice of slavery and the gradual growth of the "social contract" tradition of political theorizing, which takes the autonomous household head as its basic unit.The central place of slavery in classical Greek and Roman culture, including the formative era of Christianity, is historically indisputable; this heritage was the backdrop for both the growth and gradual dismantling of the transatlantic slave-based economy. Both the defense of slavery as natural (drawing primarily on Aristotle) and/or divinely ordained (drawing on Paul's epistles and other New Testament texts), and the criticisms of it as inhuman and evil, have shaped much Western thinking about subordination, authority, and obedience.7The social contract tradition served historically as a counterweight to conservative efforts to support slavery and other status-centered conceptions of social life, and helps to explain the broad appeal of Maine's narration of modern history. The social contract tradition is quite rich and complex in its own right.8 This variety matters because only some conceptions of autonomy, such as Kant's, make strong contrasts between autonomy and "heteronomy," designed to call into question any kind of obedience and submission as intrinsically degrading. Kant also roots this insistence on autonomy in equally strong assumptions about human nature as defined and constituted by rational agency, seen as true regardless of culture, history, individual effort, or any other empirical factor. However, some sophisticated liberal theorists, particularly in the philosophy of education, have recognized that liberal democracy itself constitutes a cultural tradition, with a set of norms and practices, which shape people and actively cultivate citizens' habits of autonomy, understood in various ways.9The basic idea of this work, with which I concur, is that becoming free and autonomous is not spontaneous or necessary, but a project of human training and formation that requires amazing investments of time, practice, energy, and resources.10 Autonomy is, in other words, a project of self-mastery, which partakes of a long tradition of practices of personal formation. Such projects are almost invariably social, relying on teachers, guides, and a community of aspirants. Thus, a defensible conception of autonomy will recognize the crucial importance of formation and even what might seem to be "paternalism" in the care and training of aspiring autonomous agents.At a deeper level, however, one can question whether a commitment to individual autonomy, whether nuanced and socially informed or uncompromising and Kantian, provides the best basis for thinking about relationships of authority, or even human relationships in general. Henry Rosemont in particular has argued that relationship-centered conceptions of the person in early China, especially in early Confucianism, provide a strong, helpful contrast to modern Western assumptions about "autonomous individuals."11 Though suggestive, Rosemont's work unfortunately oversimplifies and even caricatures Western advocacy of autonomy, and furthermore, it neither recognizes nor considers the subtle similarities between early Confucian accounts of self-cultivation and more nuanced conceptions of autonomy as a human achievement. A sufficiently sophisticated comparative engagement between modern Western accounts of autonomy and alternative traditions of ethics would be a book-length project, but we can pursue a preliminary exploration here.A number of strategies might suggest themselves to people trying to imagine other ways of thinking about hierarchy and authority. One could start from an abstract model of proper authority, a direct dialectical engagement with current ideas, or a historical retrieval of some past Western theory or tradition. However, I propose a careful engagement with early Chinese ideas about hierarchy, particularly as manifest in writings about teacher–student relationships. This might seem bizarre. Since at least the nineteenth century, many Westerners have seen China as a paradigm case of "oriental despotism," purportedly marked by a widespread culture of authoritarian leadership and alarming subservience among the populace. However, simple Western portraits of China often have more to do with observers' anxieties than any deep insight into the complex realities of East Asia.12 And while there are certainly authoritarian strands in Chinese culture, they hardly serve as the timeless essence of China; there are other aspects of Chinese civilization that can help us escape from dichotomies like authoritarian/liberating.For several reasons, reflecting on ancient China provides a particularly suitable opportunity for reevaluating these issues. First, the social order was in considerable flux for hundreds of years, and basic questions about ethics and politics were being actively debated, with numerous possibilities explored and tried. Second, one of the most objectionable justifications for hierarchy in the West was never used: no text suggests, as Aristotle does in the Politics, that different classes of humans possess different "natures," which justify their social roles, infamously including those apparent humans who are supposedly "natural slaves."13 Instead, justifications for social hierarchy were made on other grounds. Kingship, for example, was often based on familial lineage or divine favor (grounded in a positive but reversible judgment about a leader's moral character and ritual responsibility). Most notably, early Chinese thinkers invented the idea of meritocracy, a theory of government suggesting that those who are most talented and perform the most effectively should be systematically given greater power and responsibility, and various thinkers debated different versions of such a system as ideas of merit came into conflict. Not surprisingly, various hierarchical relationships, such as the lord–minister and teacher–student relationships, were socially problematic and contested, and hence widely debated.Teaching relationships are particularly relevant for comparative ethical analysis. Unlike in famously tense and dangerous lord–minister relations, teachers were not primarily concerned with a need to control the behavior of their subordinates. In lieu of the quest for control, such relationships could rely on other modes of interaction and seek other ends. The primary explicit end of such relationships was frequently the cultivation of dé 德, which is usually translated as "virtue," but which also has strong connotations of leadership and charisma. However, before examining depictions of teaching relationships in one such text, the Zhuāngzǐ, in greater detail, we should first introduce its social and intellectual context more fully.The most fertile period in early Chinese intellectual history is aptly characterized as the Warring States period (481–221 BCE). The previous era, known as the Spring and Autumn period (780–481 BCE), was characterized by the gradual collapse of efforts to defend a centralized Zhou empire, and the social system of familial, "feudal" methods of government. Old loyalties to the Zhou king were gradually replaced by self-interested efforts to gain power by a host of smaller states that engaged in increasingly fierce warfare in a contest for dominance. These problems were replicated within states as ministers, supposedly loyal to their local lord, would plot rebellion and seize states for themselves and their families. By the Warring States period, seven large states had emerged and were engaged in nearly continuous wars for territory and influence. Intense interstate competition on all fronts led to a market for educated men who could staff growing state bureaucracies, for skilled military strategists and diplomats, and for intellectuals who could provide compelling visions of good or at least effective government.14Relations between rulers and their ministers were quite fraught, and opportunities for treachery abounded. From blood oaths of fealty to careful specification of job requirements and performance that would yield either ample salary or harsh punishment, numerous novel arrangements to recruit, retain, and control loyal, hard-working subordinates were tried in order to replace older methods of enfeoffing relatives. In this context educated talent was in demand, and this stimulated a market in educational services, arguably started by Confucius himself (i.e., Kǒngzǐ, c. 551–479 BCE).Warring States texts appear to have developed in tandem with various teaching groups, and these writings provide ample evidence that "masters," shī 師, of quite various "arts" or "techniques," shù 術, trained students and consulted with leaders. Historian Mark Edward Lewis (1999, 53–97) sees the whole phenomenon of early Chinese extra-governmental writing as centered on "master" figures, whom he thinks are largely constituted by their respective textual traditions. Lewis focuses on the "teaching scene" that characterizes texts like the Analects and Mèngzǐ as the defining formal feature of such texts; he thinks these dramatic encounters between wise masters and aspiring learners expose deep commitments in these traditions about the character of true wisdom and sageliness, the limited adequacy of language, and proper methods of teaching and leadership.15Lewis overstates the sense in which famous masters like Mèngzǐ were constituted as characters in and through the texts that bear their names, which were written by their disciples and perhaps others. He also understates the power of particular theories, ideas, and practices in and the various early Chinese textual traditions. he is to point to the widespread formal especially in of the being as of the some this to a social in which older men set themselves as teachers and men as Early Confucian for example, relationships between a master and who seem to have or at least in for many textual traditions reflected different social and there is a crucial between textual traditions that or "virtue," dé 德, and those that such efforts with suspicion or dé texts written by the or as as texts such as the and the Zhuāngzǐ. of their that humans should possess one could call these texts the better the Other textual traditions show little interest in or are about its or These texts the and two have different hierarchical The texts that dé the ideal of and seem to to seek a realization of human the these texts the of the often hierarchical relationships within teaching as characterized by the of and and the of and for the or in these texts tend to with authority, relying on the and of their only thinkers also political would in the by of they recognized the between their ideals and the of their social contrast, the dé and methods of control that they are to political and military view human beings more often as to be than as agents to be A in these regardless of their is to attain effective and control of subordinates. this end these texts explore and various methods for including rule by of law, the of and and about and These in other words, care more about in the sense of the to compel others to a than they do about authority, and which they view as questionable that will under with most have written at on aspects of early texts that are relevant to these Most of the early seem to have personal of which they as not only good character but also skilled and moral The Analects and Mèngzǐ both their respective masters questions and and to most of whom are as loyal and even also relationships between masters and their and celebrate the of and personal formation as a of these will be often in the early text Zhuāngzǐ, to which I is a text usually as on the basis of tradition, in the It has and influential in East particularly in and traditions. The of the text is known as the "Inner Chapters" and to be mostly the work of one the historical BCE), the whole of the text, probably including the Inner I on this early other in the book is relevant to this central large number of in the Inner Chapters to the and of the are various sorts of "teaching which characters cast as masters and as as a of traditions about Confucius and It is to the number of such in the text, but probably at least of the Inner Chapters of these teaching These in an of with many sorts of people teaching in quite various ways. of master to are as the social in which much of life in the text to a about this and a but exploration of its And what is often characterized as the about in the second the Inner Chapters seem to be by questions of and questions about which characters from the past are and which in the should be and which to how thought about the possibilities of teaching various hierarchical relations, first discuss some of the the text to The most concerns what to make of the of of the of teaching relationships in by or such as Confucius and other historical whom for own In contrast to most other early where there is no question who the master questions is, one of the defining features of the is the variety of characters who some as or The do not seem to be but the do rely on of these characters and their example, Confucius and disciples seem to in different and most talented what appear to be about how to and with power holders but also as a when in he about and attempts to this into a for disciples in the in where to is cast as to the who it in some sense, but who has by to within the we are not here with an like one in the writings of where is to a certain sort of on life, or on Instead, different seek to make different in this sense the Inner Chapters are of the of Kǒngzǐ, the master of the who would to particular disciples on what they to at any given in judgment (e.g., it is perhaps a more version of that Thus, as we should not to by different or key or to into a The text is more like a than a and any at a reading will need to account of textual important consequence of this is a sense of about what to make of any given especially given the that the master might out to be more to the of as is, for example, in to or the is not by the of some or some he or is into a of the of insight a given character to this state of at least when to in one of the out for in as those of the and their the need to that the about teachers and students are above all rather than of behavior and even some can show what would have a account of behavior at the The nature of most of the in the Inner Chapters that the of particular may not be and given the of the with modern is often quite but it is in the of the time, especially in the of which the and as as several some are and many are quite but not all of The between and is a feature of the in the text seem to work on at about alternative while also various positive can begin to explore the various and in the about hierarchy, authority, and teaching relationships. In terms of general I suspicious of modern readings of the text as advocating freedom and from all Such seem to to be our own into a very different does suggest that certain people can beyond various this is of attack on various or of life, that were actively by others in and on the habits of and that he thinks they all But there is a more positive to the text as advocating what is often in as the or that from as a in with and its own I to provide however, is not a interpretation of the and of the Inner but rather an of the of various of and for authority, as as the repeated within the text of teaching relationships of various In I that humans need real teachers, who can help us the true nature of life and our place in the but that such teachers often in In the I the text as itself as a to and even for such teachers, should wise to I also argue that does not rebellion

This chapter examines the role of tools as a topos in the Huainanzi . The first and longest looks at a number of tool metaphors in the text shows that they exhibit such a wide range of meanings and applications that the text itself can fairly be summarized by means of the tool metaphors. The second part looks comparatively at tool metaphors in other Warring States and early Han texts, and shows that those texts vary greatly in the degree to which they employ such metaphors. The tool metaphors also shed some new light on the sources and formation of Liu An's text, revealing affinities with certain works that also employ them. The relationship between the Guanzi and the Huainanzi has long been recognized. It is part of the conventional wisdom about early China that the Mohist movement was largely defunct by the early Han period. Keywords: early China; early Han texts; Guanzi ; Huainanzi ; Liu An's text; Mohist; tool metaphors

It is commonplace to characterize the philosophy of Early China as attuned to interconnections and informed by the implications of situations and environments. This portrait of early Chinese philosophy encourages us to speculate about whether the same was true of concepts of “language” in Early China. Should we reconsider the habit of interpreting the foundational term of Chinese logic, ming 名, as “word,” as opposed to “name”? Whereas a word or “word-type” is an element of linguistic theory (static and uniform, regardless of its definitional criteria), a name is a means for labeling something. A word is the kind of thing that can be found in a dictionary, and it encompasses functional terms like “in.” By contrast, dictionaries generally omit most names because names simply refer to entities. If we mistakenly conceive of ming through the retrospective framework of a zi 字 (graph), a ming might look more like a word than a name. It is anachronistic, however, to think that early Chinese texts used the term “ming” to mean what is later meant by zi. Thus, I argue, a more promising starting point for understanding uses of ming in early Chinese texts is the idea of a name.

Reviewed by: Writing and Authority in Early China Lothar von Falkenhausen Writing and Authority in Early China. By Mark Edward Lewis. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999. Pp. vii + 544. Hardcover $92.50. Paper $31.95. Writing and Authority in Early China is a forceful and sparklingly original work in which Mark Edward Lewis explores the role of writing and texts in the transformation of political authority during the Warring States, Qin, and Western Han periods. Following in the footsteps of the author's well-received first book1 and his magisterial contribution to the Cambridge History of Ancient China,2Writing and Authority establishes Lewis as the premier Western historian of the crucial centuries surrounding the unification of China under a centrally administered empire in 221 B.C. The book's complex, comprehensive, and coherent argument is informed by a variety of Western theoretical approaches, but it principally emanates from a close reading of the full record of transmitted texts and recently excavated manuscripts on [End Page 127] bamboo or wooden slips. The inclusion of the latter class of sources, beset with treacherous problems of decipherment, is still unusual in mainstream sinological scholarship and indicates the author's supreme confidence in his philological skills. With a firm hand, undaunted by the multifarious nature of his materials, Lewis guides the reader to some fundamental themes in recent sinology, opening manifold novel perspectives along the way. Even when dealing with well-known texts, he often proposes striking reinterpretations. In his Introduction, Lewis enumerates six main functions of writing in ancient China: enforcing state authority; creating text-based communities and "public spheres"; transcending the confines of space, time, and human mortality; fashioning figures of authority in the past; standardizing specialized technical terminology; and encrypting secret meanings. In Lewis' own words, "the culminating role of writing in the period, and the key to its importance in imperial China, was the creation of parallel realities within texts that claimed to depict the entire world" (p. 4). This ultimately led to the formation of the Confucian canon as a "textual double of the polity" that could survive cataclysmic changes of regimes. In chapter 1, "Writing the State," Lewis points out that before the Warring States period Chinese writing occurred exclusively in religious contexts. After circa 500 B.C., written documents gradually came to be used in the administration of government and trade. Both in their details of formulation and in the implication that anything committed to writing was thereby supernaturally validated, these new types of documents exhibit pervasive continuity with the earlier kinds of texts used in ritual communication with the ancestral spirits. Such continuity is also reflected in the rise of religious beliefs in a netherworld governed by a bureaucratic hierarchy and administrative processes parallel to those of the world of the living. According to Lewis, "the most important modification in the shift to an administrative polity [in the Warring States] was the extension of writing to new elements of the population. The attributes of the Zhou nobility ... were transferred to the common people in the administrative documents of the new state. This widening range of inscription into the state order altered the social meaning of being recorded from a sign of power to one of subjection" (p. 13). Warring States rulers were cast in the role not of the authors of texts but of the authority behind them. Administrative and legal texts were concerned, ultimately, with the proper naming of phenomena, a process that had to adapt itself continually to the changes of the times. The authority of rulers came to encompass both human society and the natural world. "Whereas local and central administration were largely created through reworking and rewriting the ritual bases of the old Zhou order by means of a rationalizing cosmology, the re-invention of rulership drew on the contemporary religious realm and what is sometimes described as shamanism to provide images of cosmic power" (p. 42). Lewis illustrates the mechanics for applying these universal principles of rulership by a comprehensive analysis of the Zhou li (or Zhou guan), emphasizing the cosmological arrangement of the ideal government described therein and the dual administrative and religious dimensions of...

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...

This article presents an analysis and a typology of traveling sayings commonly encountered in Early Chinese texts. Building on examples from both excavated and transmitted texts, and focusing on the Guodian *Yucong 1–3 in particular, it argues that some of these sayings travel from text to text because they were more likely to be remembered and transmitted than others. Much like the Wanderanekdote and lines from the Odes, these traveling sayings appear in alternated form across a variety of early texts. They were remembered because they provide a brief, highly structured and esthetically pleasing expression of an important philosophical problem. As a common resource in the cultural memory of Early China, traveling sayings were adapted to meet different argumentative agendas and tapped into a wide network of remembered, intertextual, associations to imbue them with meaning. I argue that the different ways in which these sayings were integrated into arguments, either through adaptation or by using definitions, reveal differences in interpretive strategy and changes in the mode in which early authors engaged with cultural memory. The paper concludes with implications for the study of early collections and the conceptualization of authorship and audience in Early China.

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...

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.

This paper explores the concept of self-cultivation in early Chinese texts. Early Chinese texts describe many paths of self-development, but in this essay the focus falls specifically on the term xiu修, which is translated as ＂cultivation＂ or ＂development.＂ Here various texts are explored: works such as the Analects論語, the Zhuangzi莊子, the Mencius孟子, the Xunzi,荀子, the Guanzi管子, and the Mawangdui馬王堆corpus of texts on healing. This essay considers several questions.First, what exactly is it that is cultivated? The physical body? The question of the cultivation of the body must be further refined, for the body has many different valences in early texts. One must ask which aspect of the body is cultivated: the form (xing形), the living body or self (shen身), the corporal body (ti體), the public ritualized body (gong 躬), or the mortal coil (qu驅)? Or is it something less corporal that is cultivated, for example, something such as the more abstract self (ji己), which is the self that stands opposed to the ＂other＂? Or is it the mind-heart (xin心)? How do various texts discuss these phenomena in the context of cultivation?Second, how are body, self, and mind-heart cultivated? Are they subject to different kinds of cultivation? How are body, self, and mind-heart related? What practices does one follow in order to cultivate oneself? What behaviors or actions facilitate cultivation? What kinds of behaviors constitute obstacles to cultivation? How does the cultivation of the self affect one's relationships with others? How are these subjects discussed differently in various texts?Third, what are the goals of cultivation? If one follows cultivation practices, what qualities might one ideally develop? What happens if one does not attempt to cultivate oneself? How does one know one is actually practicing? What criteria determine whether one is achieving the goals of that practice? Are there any familial or social consequences of self-cultivation or of the lack of cultivation?

How do we know what Shakespeare’s plays sounded like in his time, or Sappho’s verses, or the tales of ancient Sumer? As they were written in phonetic scripts, modern historical linguists have largely been able to reconstruct the sounds of these works. Written Chinese has always been a logographic and not a phonetic script, and with the rapid pace of phonetic variation and change, many of the euphonic patterns in ancient Chinese texts of ritual and history have been lost for millennia. While very general categories of rhyme and correlations between characters based on ancient rhyming poetry have been proposed by Chinese scholars throughout the ages, until developments in Western historical linguistics were applied to Chinese over the past century, the sounds of this ancient language remained obscure. However, thanks to modern advances in computer database technology, digital texts and digital tools, a wide variety of phonological data for ancient Chinese (including several recently-developed systems for reconstructed pronunciations) can now be employed to provide empirical documentation and analysis of the lost euphony and phonorhetorical structures in these ancient texts for the first time. In this study I utilize a tripartite framework for philological inquiry, grounded in the equal consideration of semantics, metrics and acoustics. In general, over the past two millennia, most Chinese philological studies have focused upon detailed exegeses of the semantics of a word, passage or text. Metrical features and sentence prosody have also received some attention, as various forms of literary expression in Chinese have been governed by conventions of style and form; this is particularly true of poetry, but also of patterned and parallel prose. This study argues that analyses of the phonetic patterns in a text should also play a significant role in any significant philological study, as it is often in the pairing of acoustic devices with metric and semantic structures that the true breadth, depth and beauty of literary expression can be felt most acutely. This framework represents a methodological shift in Chinese philology: until recently it was extremely difficult to accurately assess phonetic and acoustic structures in early Chinese texts; this was particularly true for compositions from the distant past. However, thanks to modern technology and recent advances in the field of Chinese phonology, it is now possible for any scholar to efficiently evaluate the acoustic structures of any Chinese text with as much accuracy as the aggregate of available phonological evidence can provide and thereby gain a more complete understanding of its acoustic constitution, its aesthetic and performative features, and the more subtle aspects of literary artistry which informed its composition and transmission. The phonological foundation of this study has been facilitated by a digital suite of lexical tools which I designed and which are the first method by which the hurdles to large-scale Chinese lexical spadework in the service of phonological analysis can efficiently be overcome: The Digital Etymological Dictionary of Old Chinese (available online at edoc.uchicago.edu ), via which one can programmatically retrieve a wide range of phonological data, from both ancient and modern resources, for every character in any Chinese text. For this study, I used it to compile and evaluate proposed Old Chinese pronunciations for each graph in three of the earliest corpora of Chinese narrative texts: inscriptions longer than fifty graphs preserved on bronze vessels dating to the Western Zhou dynasty (1045-771 B.C.E.), the ten chapters of the Classic of Documents《尚書》 which scholars now generally believe were likely originally composed during the Western Zhou, and speeches of over one hundred graphs preserved in the Zuo Commentary to the Spring and Autumn Annals《春秋左傳》. From these results, I chose four representative inscriptions from the Western Zhou inscriptional corpus, two representative chapters from the Classic of Documents, and three representative speeches from the Zuo Commentary as the basis for the analyses in chapters two through four. In these case studies, complete charts of each text (including a full transcription in Chinese, an Old Chinese phonological reconstruction for each graph, and an English translation) are provided, followed by detailed evaluations of the euphonic patterns and phonorhetorical devices employed within each text. The concluding chapter presents a brief overview of the main types of euphonic patterns and phonorhetorical devices evidenced within each corpus followed by general remarks on the euphonic and phonorhetorical characteristics common to all three corpora, and finds that there are demonstrable commonalities yet each corpus exhibits a unique range of euphonic and phonorhetorical devices which distinguishes it from the others, and from other early Chinese literary genres.