A Recently Published Shanghai Museum Bamboo Manuscript on Divination*

Published Shanghai Museum Bamboo Manuscript on Divination 23

Chapter 1 A Recently Published Shanghai Museum Bamboo Manuscript on Divination*

Marco Caboara

1 Introduction

The manuscript here introduced and translated, with the title Bu shu 卜書 [Text on Divination] provided by the editor, Li Ling, can be dated between 350 and 300 bce and ascribed to the former state of Chu. It contains the earliest known methodological treatment of turtle-shell divination and crack interpretation and therefore represents a new fundamental piece of evidence in the history of Chinese divinatory practices. The manuscript consists of ten bamboo strips, four complete (1–2, 7–8) and six defective (3–6, 9–10), for a total of 256 characters. The complete strips con- sist of 32 to 34 characters and have an ordinal number at the end, and the last strip has a clear black mark signaling the end of the text. The order of the remaining strips can be established quite confidently by means of their physi- cal features and on the basis of textual coherence. In contrast to the better known Guodian manuscripts corpus to which this manuscript belongs, the so-called Shanghai Museum manuscripts from Chu, has not been excavated by archeologists. It has been bought on the antiquarian market in Hong Kong after having been taken out of China by unknown hands. Its provenance is therefore uncertain. However, everything points to its being entirely authentic material produced in a time and place very close to the Guodian findings (Hubei, former state of Chu, between 350 and 300 bce).1 This article is divided into two parts. In part one, I will briefly provide some background for the manuscript’s significance (1.1), then I will give an account of its reception (1.2), an analysis of its textual structure (1.3) and of its system of

* I thank Joachim Gentz, Linda Leung, Axel Schuessler, and Edward Shaughnessy for their com- ments. I wish to gratefully acknowledge the support of a Department Research Grant (DRG- ENGL, PolyU Project 4-ZZAG) from the Department of English, Hong Kong Polytechnic University for the project on “Nominalization in Old Chinese: Typological and Diachronic Implications of Its Referential and Non-referential Uses for Nominalization Phenomena in Indo-European Languages.” 1 See Shaughnessy, Rewriting Early Chinese Texts, 3–4 for a brief discussion.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2018 | doi 10.1163/9789004356788_003 24 Caboara crack interpretation (1.4). In part two I will provide a transcription and an annotated translation of the piece (the first translation of this text, to my knowledge). The translation presents my understanding of the text in the clearest and simplest form possible, while the paleographical and phonologi- cal annotations are meant to justify my transcription for the specialists as well as to give the general sinological public an idea of the multiple options avail- able in establishing and understanding the text.

1.1 Background: The Bu shu’s Place in Ancient Chinese Divinatory Literature Turtle divination has been the prevalent form of divination in Shang China, to be gradually substituted during the Zhou dynasty by yarrow stalk divination.2 Its concurrent usage with yarrow stalk divination has been widely attested in the received literature.3 Recent archeological excavations have provided new textual materials for the early Zhou4 and Warring States5 practice of plastromancy, while recent findings have shown its continued usage until the Tang.6 The new evidence on the continued relevance of plastromancy has stimu- lated a new interest for the oldest handbook of plastromancy, the Gui ce liezhuan 龜策列傳 [Treatise on Tortoise and Milfoil Stalks Divination]7, a compi- lation of materials of different origin edited by Chu Shaosun (ca. 104–ca. 30 bce) and combined with passages authored by Sima Qian to reconstruct the by then lost chapter 129 of the Shiji.8 The Gui ce liezhuan was previously generally dismissed as a dry apocryphal text of dubious value, but its extensive treatment on the divinatory interpretation of crack configurations has shown a strong relevance for the interpretation of newly excavated bamboo manuscripts and, as we will show, the system used in the first part of our text has remarkable similarities with the one used in the Shiji treatise.

2 See Vernant, Divination et rationalité; Keightley, Sources of Shang history; and Takashima, Studies of Fascicle Three of Inscriptions from the Yin Ruins. 3 Shaughnessy, “The Composition of the Zhouyi,” 66–69. 4 Shaughnessy, “Zhouyuan oracle bone inscriptions.” 5 Kalinowski, “Diviners and Astrologers under the Eastern Zhou.” 6 Between 1994 and 1998, three scorched and cracked plastrons—all pretreated with drilled hollows—were recovered from the Mingyueba 明月垻 site on the inner eastern rim of the Sichuan basin (Kory, Cracking to divine, 9). 7 Liezhuan 列傳 is normally translated, in the Shiji, as “biography” or “appended traditions,” but in this case “treatise” is closer to the nature of the chapter. 8 See Shaughnessy, “Biography of Tortoise and Rods,” Pu, Xian Qin bu fa yanjiu (an overview of pre-Qin turtle-shell divination), and Kory, Cracking to divine (an overview of turtle-shell divination from the Han to the Tang).