Text and Ritual in Early China (review)

Reviewed by: Music, Cosmology, and the Politics of Harmony in Early China by Erica Fox Brindley Pauline C. Lee Music, Cosmology, and the Politics of Harmony in Early China. By Erica Fox Brindley. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2012. Pp. xi + 225. Hardcover $75.00, isbn 978-1-438-44313-3. Paper $24.95. eBook $24.95. In Music, Cosmology, and the Politics of Harmony in Early China, Erica Fox Brindley further illuminates our scholarly understanding of the spiritual-religious, political, moral, psychological, and medical worlds of early China by carefully tracking the complex and ever-changing relationship between “music” (yue 樂) and conceptions of the cosmos. Her central analytical category is the concept of “harmony” (he 和). She provides evidence that texts (e.g., the Book of Documents, the Zuozhuan, the Analects, and early Mohist writings) preceding the late fourth century b.c.e. on the whole describe harmony as a distinctly human achievement, such as rulers choosing to act virtuously so as to bring harmony to the lives of those they govern or a master chef picking and choosing the right ingredients to create a particularly delicious broth. Harmony is not discovered in the cosmos, but rather is a good created by sages and kings. In contrast, in early Chinese classical writings that can be dated to roughly after 325 b.c.e. (e.g., the Zhuangzi, the Daodejing, the Mengzi, the Lüshi chunqiu, later Mohist writings, the Huainanzi, and the Shiji), a century and a half before the unification of China, Brindley boldly argues that one finds a marked change in descriptions of harmony. Harmony is now described as inherent within the cosmos; countless competing methods are articulated for achieving or discovering harmony, but generally speaking all involve an intimate working with the larger cosmos. Through the course of six chapters, Brindley carefully shows how changes in the role and status of music parallel transformations in views of the cosmos—a cosmos that is in close dialectical relationship with human beings, who affect and are being affected by this transcendent force. Developing themes that were introduced in her first monograph, Individualism in Early China: Human Agency and the Self in Thought and Politics (University of Hawai’i Press, 2010), Brindley concludes: The common saying “Heaven and human come together to form one 天人和一” … is often understood in terms of how humans should alter their behavior to conform to Heaven’s natural and inevitable laws. My analysis shows that there is no single narrative or assumption that humans are to “fit in” in such a way. Indeed, in many texts, humans are presented as integral agents who … might add to and change the course of the cosmos itself.” (p. 158; italics mine) [End Page 326] The conception of the cosmos that emerged after the fourth century b.c.e. is “creative” and “engendering,” rather than “passive” and “conforming” (p. 158). Brindley notes that there exists a handful of articles, book chapters, and books in English, Chinese, and Japanese on music in China. Her linking of music with sweeping spiritual-religious transformations in particular makes this book a unique and excellent contribution to our understanding of not only early China but also theories of music in general. Brindley’s work is an example of detailed, careful, erudite, creative, and bold scholarship. Both Sinologically sound and theoretically sophisticated, she examines a breadth of texts—including both well-studied classics and newly excavated works. Her translations are clear and lucid. Throughout she argues for her views through careful scholarship and then tests her conclusions regarding early China against common sense. The subject—changing concepts of music and its role and status in our human lives—is fascinating and of significance and interest across a breadth of fields including religious studies, literature, and philosophy, as well as intellectual and sociocultural history. At least two other philosophers have studied the role of music and moral cultivation in early China, notably Philip J. Ivanhoe in “Music in and of Our Lives,” a chapter in his Confucian Reflections: Ancient Wisdom for Modern Times (Routledge, 2013), and Kathleen M. Higgins in “Music in Confucian and Neo-Confucian Philosophy,” a 1980 article for the International Philosophical Quarterly...

Reviewed by: The Chinese Pleasure Book by Michael Nylan Andrew Lambert (bio) The Chinese Pleasure Book. By Michael Nylan. New York: Zone Books, 2018. Pp. 472. Hardcover $32.95, ISBN 978-1-942130-13-0. In this vast and ambitious tome, Michael Nylan aims to "trace the evolution of pleasure theories in early China over the course of a millennium and a half" (p. 17), roughly from 400 BCE to 1100 CE. This involves dissecting the discourse surrounding a single graph, le 樂, which Nylan translates as pleasure, and actively distinguishes from other states such as happiness and joy. Nylan understands such pleasure as "deeper satisfactions" realized in long-term commitments and often relational in nature (p. 18). In texts, pleasure (樂) is often associated with "objects of consequence" such as intimate friends (you 友), Heaven (tian 天), graceful and charismatic acts (de 德) and family profession or heritage (ye 業) (p. 35). Nylan believes that the importance of pleasure in understanding Chinese thought has been neglected by modern sinologists. Furthermore, the Chinese term involves connotations and practical implications that do not neatly align with accounts of comparable inner states found in "classical Greece and Rome and in modern philosophy" (p. 18). In Chinese thought, for example, pleasure is contrasted not with pain--as is common in European thought, including classical utilitarianism--but with concern or anxiety (you 憂), danger (wei 危) or grief arising from loss (ai 哀) (p. 35). The distinctive profile of Chinese pleasure thus invites a detailed study. This book-length study consists of seven chapters. The first introduces notable features of Chinese pleasure discourse. These include: the sheer range of pleasure-related terms in the texts; the relation of pleasure with theories of resonance (ganying 感應); insistence that the pleasure promoted was not hedonistic; and that all thinkers, from the Warring States period to the eleventh century, addressed how to "convert the consuming pleasures--those that expand vast time, wealth and physical energy--into sustaining pleasures that could support…the polity, the family or the body" (p. 33). Such transformation could ensure "a life of maximal pleasure and minimal distress" (p. 54). This wide-ranging theory of pleasure is unpacked in subsequent chapters. The second chapter examines two closely linked themes that illustrate the relational and more rewarding pleasures: music and friendship. Subsequent chapters then focus on the treatment of pleasure by particular texts or thinkers. [End Page 1] Chapters 3-5 focus on the treatment of pleasure in pre-Qin Master's texts: the Mencius, the Xunzi and the Zhuangzi. Chapter 6 focuses on Yang Xiong's conviction that pleasure is found in immersion in great writers of antiquity. The final chapter is a comparative study of pleasure in the works of Tao Yuanming and Su Shi. The first four chapters in particular develop a multi-faceted theory of how pleasure functioned in Chinese thought and social life. This integrates accounts of human nature with broader social and political issues. The chapters on Mencius and Xunzi outline how the early Confucians understood pleasure and the desire for it as part of human nature. People were bundles of desires, and desires could not be eliminated. Accordingly, pleasure was not to be dismissed or actively restricted, but was to be accommodated where possible (asceticism finds few backers in the tradition). At the same time, the metaphors of organic growth in the Mencius and of social conditioning in the Xunzi indicate that desires were to be refined through the shaping of personal character. Mencius encourages rulers to "recognize the essential humanity underlying their desires" with "ordinary desires" transmuted into desires for "community and cooperation." (p. 137) through sympathetic extension of feeling. For Xunzi, "the Way of ritual and music…constitutes the only conceivable path by which to provide reliable satisfaction for the jumble of desires and longings" (p. 177); such cultivation enables people to become virtual works of art, charismatic and a pleasure to emulate. The possibility of transforming desires, and the need to do so, gave rise to a rich discourse about the management of desires. A central theme of the book, and a topic Nylan has explored in previous articles, is that such management--as both giving and taking pleasure--was central to social and...

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.

Reviewed by: Literary Forms of Argument in Early China eds. by Joachim Gentz and Dirk Meyer Erica F. Brindley (bio) Literary Forms of Argument in Early China. Edited by Joachim Gentz and Dirk Meyer. Leiden: Brill, 2015. Pp. ix + 354. Cloth $163.00. ISBN 978–90-04–29160-7. Literary Forms of Argument in Early China examines the functions of rhetorical markers and devices as well as the patterns and larger modes structuring various styles of early Chinese argumentation. The nine contributors to the volume each present tight analyses of specific compositional or literary aspects of persuasion, hoping to demonstrate how an unabashed focus on the formal elements of philosophical writing might come to the aid of, or even more drastically alter and transform, philosophical interpretation. The volume includes essays by the following nine scholars, who are at once a mixture of philologists, textual and literary specialists, and intellectual historians: Rudolph Wagner, Andrew Plaks, David Schaberg, Joachim Gentz, Christoph Harbsmeier, Martin Kern, Michael Nylan, Wim De Reu, and Dirk Meyer. A quick glance over the names of the contributors reveals that eight of the nine contributors are male. I will speak more to the implications of such an arrangement later, but first it is important to outline the many insights presented in the volume despite this obvious lack of female voices. The book is organized according to what the editors identify as three dominant modes of analysis: 1) the analysis of specific markers in argumentation, 2) the analysis of structural patterns and their role in argumentation, and 3) the analysis of "macro modes of persuasion" wherein literary forms become woven into larger philosophical messages (p. 20). These are fine-grained distinctions that seem to rely on the relative size of the textual component being analyzed, proceeding from analyses concerning the smallest of textual units such as the initial fu, in Rudolph Wagner's piece, to analyses of entire chapters in the Zhuangzi by Wim De Reu and Dirk Meyer. The organization of the book, as with most of its chapters, emphasizes not philosophical meanings or their implications, but the formal structure of how arguments are presented in the textual corpus and what such a structure has to say about the hermeneutics of philosophical argumentation. The introduction is engaging and well-written. The editors, Joachim Gentz and Dirk Meyer, describe their work as largely formalistic, functionalist, and structuralist (p. 18), situating the volume within a broader context of structural linguistics and performance studies on the one hand, and the specific [End Page 1] contributions of scholars such as Herbert Fingarette, Rudolph Wagner, and Michael R. Broschat on the other. Gentz and Meyer also provide a very broad intellectual framework, background, and justification for the work. They highlight the well-known claim (to some, a complaint), that Chinese argumentation lacks the rigor of formal logic as understood in the West since ancient Greek times, and is more analogical and aesthetic in orientation, often invoking correlative rather than deductive reasoning. After a discussion of classical Greek debates involving the distinction between philosophy and poetry in Plato's works, the editors conclude by insisting that the so-called "poetic" elements of classical Chinese philosophy should be understood as an integral part of the philosophical texture and meaning of Chinese arguments. In other words, the aesthetic and literary elements of ancient Chinese philosophical writings cannot be discarded or ignored, as they are vital to the very essence of the arguments being made. This is an important claim that implicitly and justly criticizes certain philosophical approaches that artificially, and in many cases to the detriment of the arguments being made, discount the literary elements in philosophical writings. For lack of space, I will not discuss all the arguments presented by the nine contributors here. However, I would like to raise a few examples to underscore some of the ways in which the volume explores the performative and literary contexts of ancient Chinese philosophical argumentation. In David Schaberg's piece on Laozian tetra-syllables, we learn how tetra-syllables were common types of verses that extended well beyond the Daodejing itself. Such pithy phrasings were likely performed in an esoteric context (to a ruler) with only one...

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...

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...

ROME AND CHINA - †Michael Loewe , Imperial Institutions in Ancient Rome and Early China. A Comparative Analysis. Edited by T. Corey Brennanand Michael Nylan . Pp. xvi + 237, ills, maps. London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2025. Paper, £24.99 (Cased, £75). ISBN: 978-1-350-44512-3 (978-1-350-44511-6 hbk).

A wavenumber approach to analysing the active control of plane waves with arrays of secondary sources

This essay traces changes in the relationship between filial piety and loyalty in early China. During the Spring and Autumn and early-mid Warring States periods, a conflict existed between the two values. Confucian thinkers such as Confucius and Mencius put a priority on filial piety, while Shang Yang 商鞅 regarded it detrimental to the state. However, scholars later tended to reconcile the values, as is evident in the Xiaojing 孝經 (The Classic of Filial Piety) and the “Zhongxiao 忠孝” (“Loyalty and Filial Piety”) chapter of the Hanfeizi 韓非子. The two texts reconcile filial piety with political authority, and show that the two values are based on the same foundation. Ancient Chinese legal documents are in agreement with the same trend. Early Chinese governments made unfiliality illegal and permitted the head of a family to have very strong authority over other members of the household. Still, governments maintained control of individual households by putting the head of the family’s authority under political authority.

Religion played a pivotal role in shaping the political and cultural landscape of early China, particularly through the practice of relocating capitals (遷都). The relocation of capitals is an outstanding theme in early Chinese historiography, setting it apart from many other world traditions. In particular, this practice contrasts sharply with the early Mediterranean context, where the city of Rome transitioned from a modest city-state to a world empire and was celebrated as the “eternal city.” By contrast, early Chinese capitals were deliberately transient, their impermanence rooted in strong religious sentiments and pragmatic considerations. Religious and ideological justifications were central to these relocations. The relocation was not merely a logistical or political exercise; it was imbued with symbolic meaning that reinforced the ruler’s legitimacy and divine mandate. Equally important was the way rulers communicated these decisions to the populace. The ability to garner mass support for such monumental undertakings reveals the intricate relationship between political authority and religious practice in early China. These critical moments of migration offer profound insights into the evolving religious landscape of early China, shedding light on how religion shaped early governance and public persuasion. “Capital relocation” served as a means to rearticulate belief, reaffirm the centrality of worship, and restore faith in the ruling order. Drawing on recent archeological discoveries and updated textual and inscriptional scholarship related to the events of Pan Geng and the Zhou relocation to Luoyi, this article re-examines the motif of “capital relocation” as both a historical and historiographical phenomenon unique to early China.

Religious Studies ReviewVolume 47, Issue 1 p. 119-120 Short Reviews Of Recent Publications: East Asia LANGUAGE AS BODILY PRACTICE IN EARLY CHINA: A CHINESE GRAMMATOLOGY. By Geaney, Jane. SUNY Series in Chinese Philosophy and Culture. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2018. Pp. xl+309. Paperback, $33.95; Hardback, $95.00. First published: 30 May 2021 https://doi.org/10.1111/rsr.15151Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onEmailFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article. Volume47, Issue1March 2021Pages 119-120 RelatedInformation

Reviewed by: The Heir and the Sage: Dynastic Legend in Early Chinaby Sarah Allan Paul R. Goldin (bio) Sarah Allan. The Heir and the Sage: Dynastic Legend in Early China. Revised and expanded edition. SUNY Series in Chinese Philosophy and Culture. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2016. xvi, 202 pp. Hardcover $80.00, isbn978-1-4384-6225-7. The original edition of Sarah Allan’s The Heir and the Sagewas published in 1981 by the Chinese Materials Center (San Francisco), and has since become scarce and expensive on the used-book market. If you wanted to add it to your collection but could not find a copy, this reissue gives you another chance. As Allan explains in her new preface (p. ix), the revisions for this volume consist of corrections of unspecified minor errors, a new introduction, and the addition of her previously published article “The Identities of Taigong Wang in Zhou and Han Literature” (1972–1973) as an appendix. The occasion is the publication of her book Buried Ideas: Legends of Abdication and Ideal Government in Early Chinese Bamboo-Slip Manuscripts(SUNY, 2015), which contains extensive new material. The reasons for reissuing The Heir and the Sage, however, are not clear. The under-annotated and self-referential 1introduction (pp. 1–12) adds little in the way of justification. Allan not only declines to respond to any reviews of the original edition, but also ignores the considerable relevant scholarship that has appeared since 1981. Particularly dismaying is her failure to refer to Yuri Pines, who has offered trenchant analyses of many of the same sources. 2The introduction includes a brief reconsideration of structural anthropology, which was her predominant methodology in 1981 (pp. 2–4), but consists mostly of reminiscences of her research in graduate school and some of her publications thereafter. The text itself is virtually unchanged. Allan’s thesis is that Chinese dynastic legend reveals a tension between inheritance by birthright (“the Heir”) and inheritance on account of virtue (“the Sage”), which she correlates with a general social tension between obligations to one’s kinship group and obligations to the larger collective. (What is good for the Kennedy, Clinton, Bush, or Trump families is not necessarily what is good for the United States of America.) Examples of the former mode of succession are the Xia 夏, Shang 商, and Zhou 周 dynasties; examples of the latter include not only the two cardinal examples of abdication, namely Yao 堯 to Shun 舜 and Shun to Yu 禹, but also the ruptures that take place when one dynasty replaces another. (Remember that we are in the world of [End Page 99]legend.) The core of the book consists of analyses of five “legend sets” associated with these transitions (chapters 2–5). This was a useful contribution in 1981, but thirty-five years later, the details often appear inadequately defended. For example, the original study noted that the disapproving accounts of abdication in Han Feizi韓非子 are congruent with the assertion in the Bamboo Annals( Guben Zhushu jinian古本竹書紀年) that Shun imprisoned Yao—in opposition, that is, to the orthodox view that Yao freely and wisely abdicated (p. 133). In her new introduction, Allan has inflated this observation to declare that “the Annalswas a Legalist history” (p. 7), without devoting any space to considering the self-evident problems with this thesis (notably, that the Bamboo Annalsdo not advance a political philosophy even remotely resembling that of Han Feizi). Nor have all of the errors in the original edition been corrected. One painful example: Herbert Franke pointed out over thirty years ago 3that Allan misconstrued the name Liuxia Hui 柳下惠 4as “Liu Xiahui”—which one still finds in the present version at the same spot (p. 111 in the new pagination), as well as in the index. At a minimum, an academic author afforded the rare luxury of republishing her work ought to make the most of the opportunity by correcting errors cited by previous reviewers; ideally, the author would also revise the exposition by accounting for recent scholarship. As a nearly verbatim reprint of the original, however, this book goes down as a missed opportunity. Paul R. Goldin Paul R...

Libation ritual and the performance of kingship in early China

Reviewed by: Public Memory in Early China by K. E. Brashier Erica F. Brindley Public Memory in Early China by K. E. Brashier. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2014. Pp. viii + 511. $69.95. Public Memory in Early China provides a rich, exquisitely detailed, and important account of early Chinese strategies for creating and maintaining a shared, public memory. Guided by such questions as, “What things should we remember?” and “How does a society measure and mark what is important to it?” Brashier discusses how certain oral and literary cultures in early China sought to mark, preserve, and commemorate individuals and ancestors, as well as other aspects of the past. With nuanced, mellifluous, and meticulously organized language, Brashier transforms the cold bones of mortuary culture—in particular, stele inscriptions, which form the springboard for his inquiry—into a wide-ranging intellectual feast. In the introduction alone, this feast includes in-depth discussions about education, about orality and literacy, about the mechanics and performative aspects of remembering, as well as about the role of the classicists in creating a memorial culture, to name a few. The bulk of the book presents a neat, threefold approach to discussing public memory. Parts I, II, and III highlight names, age, and kinship respectively as prominent ways of marking one’s status and public value during life and during the afterlife in early Chinese society. Parts IV and V examine what Brashier calls “the tangible and intangible tools of positioning the self” (pp. 263, 317). Central to the discussion of the first three parts is how names, age, and kinship help position the self [End Page 456] so as to locate individuals within a web of culturally meaningful relationships both during life and after death. This manner of organizing the book is innovative and interesting; it sheds light upon some of the most important techniques used in ancient Chinese culture to situate individuals not just hierarchically but also laterally and in every conceivable, three-dimensional direction, according to a complicated and dynamic calculation of social worth. In part I, on names, we learn about the circumstances in which various names, such as familiar, courtesy, posthumous, family, and clan names, were bestowed, used, and tabooed. We learn how names served to position individuals according to a hierarchy of value and to link them to a particular region or plot of land. Indeed, one of Brashier’s most interesting points in this section is his discussion of the tight relationship between territory and ancestral cult: the surname could locate and associate individuals with specific areas on the map of the known world. In part II, on age, we learn about the various administrative systems of valuation and ways of honoring people during and after their lifetimes. We learn about the office of the “thrice venerable” (san lao 三老; p 175), about why early Chinese culture venerated their living elderly as well as their dead, and about the administrative seniority system (jue 爵) that was used during the Han period. The overarching comparative point that Brashier stresses in this section contrasts traditional, Western views of the arc of life—which allegedly rises to midlife only to decline thereafter—with a dominant ancient Chinese view, expressed through administrative grades as well as through religious attitudes toward the dead, of an “ever-climbing stairway” (p. 166) from birth through death and afterward. Brashier’s discussion of the shared symbols used in stele inscriptions demonstrates how this medium helped reduce the particular qualities of a person’s life to a common language of hyperbole and praise, despite stele inscriptions’ ostensible focus on individual traits and biographies. A significant point that Brashier makes in part II thus has to do with the reductionism associated with age-related positioning of the self. In his discussion of “The Age of the Afterlife” (sec. 11), he especially zeroes in on this point. Specifically, his discussion of the spatial arrangement of ancestor worship and sacrifice shows how one’s individuality eventually recedes into a cloud-like, “corporate, ancestral body” (p. 200), indicated by the vertical height of an ancestral tablet [End Page 457] located at the top of the sacrificial hall. Noting the direct relationship between...

Language as Bodily Practice in Early China: A Chinese Grammatology By J. Geaney (2018) Albany: State University of New York Press, 350pp.