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The Nivison-Shaughnessy Debate on the Bamboo Annals (Zhushu Jinian)

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The Nivison-Shaughnessy Debate on the Bamboo Annals (Zhushu Jinian) The Nivison-Shaughnessy Debate on the Bamboo Annals (Zhushu jinian) 1. In 1979, Edward Louis Shaughnessy was a graduate student at Stanford. He had come to Stanford with a dissertation project already under way, on the Yijing. He was assigned to me as a person working on ancient texts, even though I had never worked on the Yijing. In November of that year our relationship became more meaningful: I was conducting a seminar on Western Zhou ritual bronze inscriptions, and Shaughnessy was participating. One Sunday evening in November, preparing myself for the next evening’s meeting, I discovered evidence that an ancient chronicle, the Jinben Zhushu jinian, which most schol- ars believed to be a fake (following the publication of work by Wang Guowei in 1917), was actually authentic. I discovered that the dates of the reigns of West- ern Zhou kings in the chronicle were systematically skewed in some way, and that the cause apparently was that bronze inscriptions and other materials in a reign could be dated either on the king’s succession year, or on a year two years later (the “accession” year), which I assumed to be the year after he had com- pleted mourning for his royal father. (The king’s reign-of-record was counted from the later yuan, omitting the mourning years.)* 2. Shaughnessy has accepted the two-yuan theory in dating inscriptions, and improved it by showing that the accession yuan began to be used only late in a reign. At first he accepted my view of the Annals as well. He from then on spent more than half his time exploring the consequences of this discovery. Five years later he produced a paper proving that a strip of characters near the end of the chronicle for the founding king Wu Wang had been lifted from the middle of the chronicle for the second king Cheng Wang, lengthening Wu Wang’s life by three years. The result was his article “On the Authenticity of the Bamboo Annals,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 46 (1985: he was now on the faculty of the University of Chicago). This he followed with an article in Early China 11–12 (1985–87), “The “Current” Bamboo Annals and the Date of the Zhou Conquest of Shang.” He takes this date to be 1045—following my article in the Harvard Jour- nal in 1983, “The Dates of Western Chou”—but just as my article was being pub- lished, I had found a mistake in my work, and quickly published a research note in Early China in 1984, arguing that the date of the conquest probably was 1040. BB 21 August 2014 Open Access. © 2018 Nivison/JAS, published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 License. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501505393-022 The Nivison-Shaughnessy Debate on the Bamboo Annals (Zhushu jinian) 5 Ed found my argument “unconvincing” (EC 11–12 p. 56) and still holds to 1045. In fact, he still defends the EC 11–12 article vigorously. In his book Rewriting Early Chinese Texts (Albany: SUNY Press, 2006, p. 202), he complains that scholars have paid less attention to his early EC article than to his earlier Har- vard Journal article, though he thinks his second article is more important. I will be arguing that he should be grateful to the community of scholars for this ne- glect. 3. The foregoing is the background for the following clip from my unpublished autobiography: In June of 2009, I had published my book The Riddle of the Bamboo Annals (Taipei: Airiti; hereafter Riddle). I had been delighted to learn, in April or May of 2010, that my friend Prof. Edward Shaughnessy (Chicago) had accepted an invitation to review the book in the Journal of Chinese Studies (Chinese University of Hong Kong)—a publication which has world-wide attention. The book had brought together my most important work over thirty years. Shaughnessy and I had agreed on issues that made the two of us leading critics of the work of the five-year “Xia-Shang-Zhou Chronology Project” in PR China; but we had stubborn disagreements on other details, and I had never been able to get him to engage me in argument on them. I had made these issues quite prominent in the book. Now, at last, I thought he would have to face up to them. Instead, in his long (21 pp.) review, he used half his space to restate and illus- trate our criticisms of the Project’s work, and the remainder to dismiss work of mine disagreeing with his as not worth reading. His one attempt at substantive argument was obviously invalid. I refer to his claim that a Zhou Xuan Wang half-strip had been displaced backward 278 years (815 to 1093) into the chroni- cle for Shang king Di Yi. Actually the part of the Di Yi chronicle that came from the Xuan Wang chronicle must have been a rewriting of only part of a half strip (wrong, but not evidence of disorder), at a time when the Di Yi chronicle was still 19 years long rather than 9. The account of the 1093 Zhou earthquake is accurate, and was always in the Di Yi chronicle, never in the Xuan Wang chron- icle. Ed’s review appeared January 1. I countered with a reply (30 pp.) in the next issue of the Hong Kong Journal published July 1. The conflict between us is actually quite interesting on a philosophical lev- el. Ed (perhaps without realizing it) has a visceral commitment to a one- problem-at-a-time Baconian historical method, and has no patience with any- thing else. I am guided by “inference to the best explanation” of total evidence, by Collingwood’s concept of “rethinking,” and Popper’s strategy of discovery by trying to refute far-reaching theories. Ed can’t stand it, and can only see me as “getting ahead of my sources.” (I must not forget that Ed has done much for me: 5 The Nivison-Shaughnessy Debate on the Bamboo Annals (Zhushu jinian) e.g., making and giving me photocopies of books hard to find.) This took most of my time in the first half of 2011. 4. This is the “Debate” (rather than the relatively trivial dispute about the Zhou conquest date, which is only a moment in that debate). In detail, it starts with Ed’s Harvard Journal article. In that article he announces his discovery that a strip of text now in the Wu Wang chronicle from the words “15th year” to the words “17th year” must have come from the Cheng Wang chronicle. In the Wu Wang chronicle the effect is to lengthen Wu Wang’s life by three years, having him die in year 17 rather than in year 14, five years after the conquest of Shang, rather than the two years after the conquest found in other early texts. In the Cheng Wang chronicle there is no subtraction of years: the moved text would exactly fill a gap between year 14 and year 18. 5. Further, the strip at year 15 mentions “an announcement to the city of Mei”; most commentators identify this with the “announcement” recorded in the Shang shu chapter “Jiu Gao” warning against drunkenness; and pre-Song com- mentary dates this chapter to the reign of Cheng Wang. Also, the strip text next has the words “In the winter, the nine cauldrons were moved to Luo”; but ap- parently Luo did not exist in Wu Wang’s time: the Shang shu “Luo Gao” implies that the site was first planned in the last year of Zhou Gong’s regency, hence seven years after Wu Wang’s death; and only then (Shang shu “Shao Gao”) did construction begin. So, again, Shaughnessy’s strip seems to belong in the Cheng Wang chronicle. So Shaughnessy concludes that the original text must have been in much disorder at this point. He thinks that his strip was loose, and the rest of the text broken up enough so that the Jin Dynasty scholars charged with the task of restoring it had the choice of inserting it in the Wu Wang chron- icle or in the Cheng Wang chronicle, and they chose the wrong place to put it in. The Jin scholars did this, Ed thinks, influenced by the (now mostly lost) con- temporary Di wang shi ji by Huangfu Mi, a well known third century historian. 6. The trouble with this analysis is a detail Shaughnessy did not notice in his Harvard article in 1985, or in its continuation in Early China 11–12: In the Cheng Wang chronicle as it is at present, there is a di 禘 ritual in the “Zhou Gong miao” (temple) for Zhou Gong in year 13, two years before the dates in Ed’s strip. The di rite (in effect an apotheosis rite), and his having a miao, imply that he is dead. But his death is recorded in year 21, and his burial in year 22. If the text is cor- rected, either by moving the di rite to year 23 or moving the death and burial to years 11 and 12, then the transposed strip text ceases to be in strip position. I The Nivison-Shaughnessy Debate on the Bamboo Annals (Zhushu jinian) 5 infer from this that the strip text must have been created and moved before the Zhushu jinian text was buried. The Jin restorers would not have dared to move Zhou Gong’s dates; they would have known that they couldn’t get away with that, and if the death-related dates were altered at some earlier time in Warring States, this would require an explanation which I haven’t seen.
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