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Chinese Perspectives On The Composition And Date Of Lunyu 17

Chapter 1 A Critical Overview of Some Contemporary Chinese Perspectives on the Composition and Date of the Lunyu

John Makeham

Over the past three decades, the discovery and publication of an important body of recovered texts—including many previously unattested texts—have stimulated debate about issues of authorship, transmission, and interpreta- tion. The manuscripts excavated from tombs at Mawangdui 馬王堆, Dingxian 定縣, Guodian 郭店, and the collection of Chu bamboo-strip texts purchased by the Shanghai Museum are of especial importance. A number of Chinese scholars have also used some of these texts to advance claims about the composition and date of the Lunyu. Some of this scholarship has been influenced by a paradigm shift over the last twenty years, which Chi- nese scholars themselves have referred to as moving from “doubting the past” (yigu 疑古) to “explaining the past” (shigu 釋古).1 The “explaining the past” attitude has been enthusiastically adopted by many Chinese scholars—and not just those on the mainland—to reaffirm traditional accounts of early ru 儒 intellectual history. For example, many mainland scholars assume that the Guodian corpus is, by and large, a corpus of ru texts and have sought to reaf- firm traditional/conventional accounts (which date from the time of Han Yu 韓愈 [768–824]) of a , , , lineage: the so-called Si- Meng (Zisi-Mencius) school (Si-Meng xuepai 思孟學派). With Mencius serving as the “spiritual” forebear of the New Confucians and those influenced by New Confucian writings on “the learning of the mind and the nature” (xinxing zhi xue 心性之學), it is understandable why many Chinese scholars should seek to find in the Guodian materials evidence to support the existence of a Si-Meng school and to identify certain texts with that school. Thus, although they would concur with Du Weiming that “with the excavation of the Guodian Chu tomb strips, the history of and the history of Chinese scholar- ship need to be completely rewritten,” attempts to date certain texts to a period

1 This reorientation was highlighted with the publication of 1994. For a discussion of the significance of these terms, see Makeham 2008: 210.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2018 | doi:10.1163/9789004382947_003 18 Makeham later than their traditionally accepted dates of composition are not what they have in mind.2 This last observation also applies to the case of the Lunyu, a text seen as foundational to the tradition of learning associated with the teachings of the historical Confucius. Over the past decade or more, however, there has been a difference in how recovered texts have been used with reference to the Lunyu. Essentially two trends can be discerned. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, when the Guodian materials were the focus of scholarly inquiry, there was a concen- tration of interest in how these materials could be used to identify the date when the Lunyu became a book. From about 2003 and onward, with the ongo- ing publication of the Shanghai Museum strips, there has been a shift in focus to issues of intertextuality. A related trend over this same period has been the gradual development of a hypothesis about a large proto-Lunyu corpus, com- piled by Confucius’s disciples, which underwent significant subsequent edit- ing. In what follows, I introduce some of the scholarship associated with each of these two trends and, where appropriate, comment on some shortcomings in that scholarship. I conclude with some broader methodological reflections on the distinction between a past that was once experienced and a reconstructed past, and the role that the historian/interpreter plays in that reconstruction.

1 The Guodian Materials and the Dating of the Lunyu

Example 1.1: The Guodian manuscript *Zi yi 緇衣 (Jet-Black Robes) and the Liji chapter “Fang ji” 坊記 (Embankment Record)

Liang Tao 梁濤 argues that the “Fang ji” passage in the Liji which cites a passage from the Lunyu (second half of 1/11 and again at 4/20) proves that the Lunyu existed sometime before 402 BCE. His argument is as follows: “Kongzi shijia” 孔 子世家 (Hereditary House of Confucius) in the Shiji 史記 records that Zisi wrote the “Zhong yong” 中庸 (); and the Suishu 隨書 “Yinyue zhi” 音樂志 (Treatise on Music) cites 沈約 (441–513), who states that the “Zhongyong,” “Biao ji” 表記 (Record of Models), “Fang ji,” and “Zi yi” were all pian 篇 (chapters) in the Zisizi 子思子. Because a version of “Zi yi” was discovered at Guodian together with the texts Mu Gong wen Zisi 魯穆公 問子思 (Duke Mu of Lu Asks Zisi), which features passages attributed to Zisi, and Wuxing 五行 (Five Phases), which many modern Chinese scholars

2 Du Weiming 1999: 2.