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New Incarnations of Old Texts: Traces of a Move to a New Book Form in Medieval Chinese Manuscripts

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New Incarnations of Old Texts: Traces of a Move to a New Book Form in Medieval Chinese Manuscripts New incarnations of old texts: Traces of a move to a new book form in medieval Chinese manuscripts Imre G ALAMBOS Abstr act : The Dunhuang manuscripts represent the richest collect ion o f、 me dieva l Chinese manuscripts that survives today. Although the form of earlier manuscripts in the collection is usually in the scroll, those from the ninth-tenth centuries also com­ monly feature a variety of other book forms. These new forms are believed to be the result ofTibetan and Central Asian influences and their spread can be attributed to the intensification of contacts between Chinese and other cultures in the Dunhuang region. Rather than analyzing the characteristics of such book forms, this paper attempts to look at cases when manuscripts contain traces of the physical fonn of earlier copies of the text, thereby evidencing the shift to a new book form. Such cases typically occur when the copyist made a kind of mistake that was in some way indicative of the form of the manuscript from which he was copying, or when a structured text ( e.g. the verses of a glit!/{/ in a Buddhist s 日tra ) was presented in an anomalous and inconsistent manner‘ revealing the difficulties the copyist encountered while trying to fit the regular layout of the text to a new book form. O t h 巳 r conspicuous cases are when orthographic peculi­ arities that can be tied to a specific time period ( e.g. imperial taboo characters, Empress Wu characters ) appear on manuscripts the physical form of which evidences a much lat­ er date. The examples presented here generally corroborate our understandin g of the history of the Chinese book , includ ing a stro ng Central Asian innuence durin g the ninth-tenth centuries. The argument is that appreciating the materiality of manuscripts helps us to understand their social function in contemporary society. |嗣键前: 中 国窍 本， 敦煌文献 ， 提 I I歧， 苦籍 史， 叫 1 11 日 Keywords: Chinese manuscripts, Dunhuang, book for m 、 h i s t o ry of the book, Central Asia Although the Dunhuang manuscripts were discovered over a century ago、d iffi c u l ­ ties with access ing the manuscripts scattered around the world has been a limiting fac­ tor for those working on the material. l Initial studies tended to concentrate on individu- I I am gratefu l to my colleagues Sam van Schaik‘ Peter Komicki. Costantino Moretti and Gabor Kosa for their valuable suggestionsand insights at various stages of this study. All images are reprod uced 叭ith kind pennissionof (c) The British Library. 369 Ncw incarnations of old texts: Traces of a movc to a ncw book fonn in mcdicval Chincsc man uscripts al texts rather than addressing the social fun cti on of those o r interp reting the entire co llection as a single body oftex tua l material. As microfilm s and facsi mi le publicati ons gradua lly becam e avai lable from the 1960s onward, scho lars we re able not only to read the texts but also see the physical form in whic h they were writte n. With time, the qu al­ ity of pub licat ions s ig ni fica 川y improved and by now the maj ori ty of the co 叩 us IS ac­ cessible either online or as good qu al ity facs im ile rep ro du cti on s 、 en a blin g researchers to study the texts in their pr imary form. As a result‘there has been a growing aware­ ness of the significa nce o f the materi ality of manuscripts, and th ere has been a shift from looking at texts dev oid of physic al form towards re lying on the physical attributes of manu scripts as a means of gaining insights into how they were produced and what purpose they served in c ontemp oralγ society . A pa r t 白o m admi nistrative and eco no m ical d ocum ent s 咱m o st of the texts in th e Dunhuang corpus comprise co pies o f ex isting texts, such as Buddhist or Daoist scrip­ tures, Co nfuc ian classics, primers, coll ection s of poem s or works of popular literature. Thus the majority of manuscripts we re created by co py i 吨 tex ts fro m ea rlier manu­ scripts, whic h in most cases them selves had been co pied fro m yet earlier copi es. At the same t llne 、i t is obvious tha t even t ho ug h 什o m our mod ern point of view thi s proc ess suggests an interest in preservin g texts for future ge nera tions, the co ncept of textual tra nsmiss ion is largely a retrosp ective co nstr uct based on text s th at survive d to our days, rath er than the social ci rcums tances respon sib le for the product ion of manuscript co pies.' The dist incti on is important becau se th e latt er approach puts the peopl e and their co nte mporary ac tions into the focu s of enquiry as opposed to seeing text s in ab­ strac t textu al space largely disassociated from social con cern s. In thi s shift, the physi­ ca lity of texts naturally ga ins significance, since manuscripts often preserve traces of how the y were created and used . The ph ysical features of a manuscript can ofte n pro vid e additiona l information that is not available in the text it s el 仁The s e features can at tim es help us with dat ing the manuscript or int erpreting its social background. Yet it is not always clear wh ether these paratextual eleme nts reflect the situation of the manuscript at hand or the y had been co p , This docs not contradicl Ihe facl that Buddhisl slllras were ollen copicd lor the sake of gaining mcril. ralher than lor Ihe purpose of rcading thc Icxls 370 such cases are the taboo characters that mayor may not indicate the date of the actual manuscript. Similar cases are the Empress Wu charact ers which are historically tied to the fifteen-year reign of Empress Wu Z eti an 武则天 ( 6 9 0 - 7 0 5 ) ， yet they occas ionally also appear in later material. This paper looks at cases when manuscripts contain traces of the physical fonn of earlier copies, either in the form of mistakes that can be linked with an earlier fo rm 、 or as an inconsistent layout that indicates a shift to a new one. In either case, the word ‘ traces ‘ means that there is something irregular about the manu­ script and it deviates 仕o m what we would consider usual or ordinary. I am primari ly interested in book forms, that is, wh 巳t her we can leam something about the form from which the text was copied to the existing manuscript. Rather than trying to compile an exhausting list of all possibilities, my aim is rather to show a few representative exa m 四 pies to initiate further research into this topic. 1. From scroll to scroll In the process ofcopying, in most cases the new reproduces not only the text itself but also its physical form. This is especially apparent in the case of Buddhi st siitras where the line length in standard scrolls was set at seventeen characters per line. This tradition goes back to before the Sui-Tang period, even though this rule was not always strictly adhered to.3 Thus the number of characters per line in the earliest known dated Buddhist manuscript written in Chinese, an incomplete copy of the Zhufo yaoj i ji咆 藉 佛 要 集 程 ( T 8 1 0 ) dated to AD 296, varies between sixteen and eighteen characters: The silk scroll of the Jinguongllling jing 金 光 明 程 ( T 6 6 3 ) 仕o m AD 471 , the oldest dated manuscript at the Pelliot collection of the Bibliotheque nationale de France ( Pel­ liot chinois 4506 ), consistently has nineteen characters per line.s But the paper copy of the Za Api/an xin jing 雄阿毗去: 心程 d a t e d to AD 479 from the Stein collection at the 3 Already in 1924 Paul Dem icville (1924: 15) commented that by th e Tang peri od seventeen characters constituteda standard for writing sfl tras. , This manuscriptwas found in 1908 inToyoq nearTurfan by the second Otani expedition. Following the pub lication of good quality ph otographs in the illustrated catalogue of the Otan i collec tion in 191 5 (Kagawa 1 9 1 纱 ， the manuscript became lost and its whereabouts are still un known. Recently Milani Mazumi (2006) i d e n t i 日 c d fragments in the collection of the Liish ul1 Museum which once belonged to the same manuscript , and also reconstructed the layout of the original manuscript, includi ng its lin e len!!th. ; Foranana lys isofthis manuscript, seeJao 1981 . 371 N e 叭 ， in carnations ofold texts: Traces ofa move to a n e 叭b o ok fonn in medievalChinese manuscripts British Library ( Or.8210/5.996 ) is already using the seventee n-character norm , eve n though this is not adhered to strictly. The numb er of characters in a Buddhi st slitra is mentioned in manuscrip t Or.82 1O/S.2 180, which contains a Buddhist text called Xian­ zai sh阶咆q iw 此稻扬 言者佛 功 德、 经由 卷 成 合 五十 五 抵 半 ， 主氏 有 二十 五 行 ， 行 有十七 字 。 T his copy of the Cb l'llg)'llllg 动物 go咆dejil也 c o n s i s t s of two j llllll on a total of fifty­ fiye and a half sheets of paper.
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