Textual Authority in Pre-Han and Han

Abstract

a big book like Mark lewis’s Writing and Authority in Early China comes along in our field about once every ten years, providing a benchmark against which the rest of us measure our own efforts, inviting us to recast our own views of the past in unforeseen ways. More often than not, these books assert that much if not all of what happened in the area we now know as China can best be understood through a single dominant concept reflected in and reinforced by a unitary institutional framework. In a previous influential work by Lewis, the concept was sanctioned violence. Here it is writing’s authority. According to Lewis, from early Western Zhou (ca. 1050 b.c.), if not earlier, the written word enjoyed unparalleled authority—so much so that opponents of the state who chose the brush as the instrument by which to skewer the state survived, usually, unscathed and even admired. Of this exalted status, Lewis says, “[E]ven as they increasingly wrote for kings and included kings within their teaching scene, their claims to direct the conduct of kings remained an assertion of ultimate authority” (p. 63). At the same time, the capacities of the written word to expatiate and expound at great length prompted the eventual creation of works of truly encyclopedic nature, which only enhanced writing’s already considerable thrall. Then, at one specific point in time, 134 b.c., a corpus of texts, the Five Classics and their attached traditions, and most especially the Gongyang 公羊, came to put a sharper impress on the shape of the contemporary body politic than either the ruling dynasts or their bureaucratic functionaries, all of whom had to acknowledge its unchallenged sway. Throughout the remainder of Han, according to Lewis, writing functioned as “textual double of the polity” and as “the imaginary realm . . . against which actual institutions were measured” (p. 4). Lewis locates in writing itself a wonderfully potent site, thereby departing from more