Some Observations on the Composition of the “Core Chapters” of the Mozi)

Abstract

A.C. Graham understood the “core chapters” of the Mozi as the collected literary remains of three independently evolving traditions of early Mohism. The present study makes use of the remarkable coexistence of parallel texts in a single book to get a clearer picture of how such traditions may have been formed. Examining textual recurrences and “marked” lexical and functional terms in the core chapters, the author argues that the “Ten Theses” may not all have been parts of some “original” teaching by the “master” referred to, but documents attesting to the very process of transmission within still living, competing traditions.These parts were, it is argued, summarily incorporated within three distinctive “documents” relatively late in the history of transmission, that is, just before or during early Han.