The Dingzhou Wenzi 23

The Dingzhou Wenzi 23 Chapter 2 The Dingzhou Wenzi Some 277 bamboo fragments of the Dingzhou find have been identified as remnants of a manuscript entitled Wenzi. A description of the manuscript was published in the August 1981 issue of Wenwu. Despite its brief nature, the description was greatly appealing to scholars. This is because the Wenzi is a controversial text in its transmitted form (the only form in which it was known at the time), and it was hoped that the manuscript would shed light on the controversy. However, their patience was tested as the transcription of the excavated Wenzi manuscript was not published until fourteen years later, in the December 1995 issue of Wenwu. That publication drew even more scholarly attention to the Wenzi, for it enabled access to the transcribed text of the earliest known Wenzi manuscript to date. 2.1 The Manuscript Judging by the handful of tracings published together with the transcribed text of the excavated Wenzi, the 277 bamboo fragments vary in length from barely 2 cm to just under 21 cm, and in width from circa 0.4 to 0.8 cm. When still in the hands of their Western Han dynasty reader, the strips probably measured circa 21 by 0.8 cm, the length of which approximates nine “inches” (cun 寸) in Han dynasty standards.1 This means that the Wenzi bamboo strips were distinctly longer than those of other manuscripts found in the tomb, such as the Rujiazhe yan (11.5 cm) and the Lunyu (16.2 cm).2 If the lengths of the fragments discov- ered are representative of the buried manuscripts, then their different lengths may point to a hierarchy of texts, with longer bamboo strips reserved for texts 1 For an overview of Han dynasty weights and measures, see Denis Twitchett and Michael Loewe, eds., The Cambridge History of China. Volume I: The Ch’in and Han Empires, 221 B.C.– A.D. 220 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), xxxviii. 2 While the measurements for the bamboo strips of the Rujiazhe yan and Lunyu manuscripts are given in the introductions to their respective transcriptions, no measurements are given for the Wenzi manuscript. I reached the sizes of the Wenzi bamboo strips by measuring the few tracings published with the transcription in the December 1995 issue of Wenwu. The shortest measures 1.8 cm and the longest 20.7 cm. The accuracy of these measurements de- pends, of course, on whether the few published tracings are representative of the entire group, and on whether they reflect the actual length and width of the bamboo fragments. © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2018 | doi 10.1163/9789004365438_004 24 Chapter 2 of greater importance. However, this remains hypothetical as the earliest known references to a correlation between the importance of a text and the measurements of the material on which it was written dates from the Eastern Han dynasty.3 On the charred and fragmented Wenzi bamboo strips, specialists have dis- tinguished 2,790 graphs, some of which are said to represent words that are written with a different graph in modern orthography. Some of the graphs found on the bamboo strips are currently written with an added classificatory semantic component, or radical. For example, the person who inscribed the bamboo strips used the graph 兆 zhao < *lr[a]wʔ to express the verb “to flee.”4 This verb is now written with the graph 逃 tao < *lʕaw; that is, with an added semantic component 辶 at the bottom, which indicates movement. Table 2 compares a selection of graphs as they appear on the Wenzi bamboo strips with their modern counterparts, and lists the difference between the two in the final column. Other graphs on the bamboo strips have semantic components that differ from their modern counterparts. For example, the graph 適 shi < *s-tek, with the semantic component 辶, indicating movement, is used on the bamboo strips to represent the verb “to oppose.” Today, possibly more logically, this verb is written as 敵 di < *[d]ʕek, with the semantic component 攵 that means “to beat, to strike” (Table 3). Some words in the manuscript are represented by more than one graph. The graph 謂 wei < *[ɢ]ʷə[t]-s is normally written in full, but six times it is only written as 胃, that is, without the 言 “word” element on the left. The graph 歡 huan < *qwhʕar appears without the 欠 “breath” element on the right, but with either a 馬 “horse” or a 言 “word” element on the left instead. The graphs 無 wu < *ma and 毋 wu < *mo, which both mean “to lack,” are used interchangeably in similar expressions, once even on the same bamboo strip. Finally, the manuscript contains graphs that differ structurally from their counterparts in modern orthography. For example, the word bei < *m-pʕək-s (“back”) is not written with the graph 背, as in modern orthography, but with the graph 倍, which is used today to write the word bei < *[b]ˤəʔ (“double, -fold”). 3 Tsuen-hsuin Tsien, Written on Bamboo and Silk (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1962), 116. 4 The graph is followed by the modern pronunciation in pinyin transcription, and the Old Chinese (OC) pronunciation as reconstructed by William H. Baxter and Laurent Sagart, “The Baxter-Sagart Reconstruction of Old Chinese,” Version 1.1, Updated January 10, 2016, <http:// ocbaxtersagart.lsait.lsa.umich.edu>..

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