Studies in Chinese Manuscripts: from the Warring States Period to the 20Th Century
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BUDAPEST MONOGRAPHS IN EAST ASIAN STUDIES 4 STUDIES IN CHINESE MANUSCRIPTS: FROM THE WARRING STATES PERIOD TO THE 20TH CENTURY EDITED BY IMRE GALAMBOS STUDIES IN CHINESE MANUSCRIPTS: FROM THE THE FROM MANUSCRIPTS: CHINESE IN STUDIES WARRING STATES PERIOD TO THE 20TH CENTURY 20TH THE TO STATES PERIOD WARRING STUDIES IN CHINESE MANUSCRIPTS: FROM THE WARRING STATES PERIOD TO THE 20TH CENTURY BUDAPEST MONOGRAPHS IN EAST ASIAN STUDIES SERIES EDITOR: IMRE HAMAR STUDIES IN CHINESE MANUSCRIPTS: FROM THE WARRING STATES PERIOD TO THE 20TH CENTURY EDITED BY IMRE GALAMBOS INSTITUTE OF EAST ASIAN STUDIES, EÖTVÖS LORÁND UNIVERSITY BUDAPEST 2013 The present volume was published with the support of the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation and the Foundation of the Hungarian Sinology. © Imre Galambos (ed.), 2013 ISBN 978-963-284-326-1 ISSN 1787-7482 The manuscript image on the cover page is from Or.8210/S.5645, a copy of the Diamond Sutra from Dunhuang. Image reproduced by kind permission of © The British Library. CONTENTS Preface ............................................................................................................. vii William G. Boltz: Why So Many Laozi-s? ...................................................... 1 Françoise Bottéro: The Qièyùn Manuscripts from Dūnhuáng ......................... 33 Takata Tokio: On the Emendation of the Datang Xiyuji during Gaozong’s Reign: An Examination Based on Ancient Japanese Manuscripts .......... 49 Irina Popova: Tang Political Treatise from Dunhuang: “Heavenly Instructions” (Tian xun) ........................................................................... 59 Imre Hamar: Huayan Texts in Dunhuang ........................................................ 81 Gábor Kósa: A Correction to the Chinese Manichaean Traité ........................ 103 Christoph Anderl: Was the Platform Sūtra Always a Sūtra? – Studies in the Textual Features of the Platform Scripture Manuscripts from Dūnhuáng 121 Costantino Moretti: Visible and Invisible Codicological Elements in Manuscript Copies of Commentaries on the Yogacārabhūmi-śāstra from Dunhuang ........................................................................................ 177 Imre Galambos: Correction Marks in the Dunhuang Manuscripts .................. 191 Sam van Schaik: Ruler of the East, or Eastern Capital: What Lies behind the Name Tong Kun? ............................................................................... 211 Kōichi Kitsudō: Liao Influence on Uigur Buddhism ...................................... 225 Raoul David Findeisen: Towards a Critical Edition of Feng Zhi’s Last Poem: Considerations Drawn from Three Draft Manuscripts ............................ 249 Index ................................................................................................................ 273 PREFACE Preface Archaeology is a discipline concerned with the material culture of the past. Yet, as is the case with most academic subjects, it is influenced by a series of economic, political and ideological motivations. History can ob- viously never be an exact and impartial record of what happened at par- ticular times and places in the past; instead, it is constructed anew by each generation, and this inevitably involves the projection of a range of cur- rent preconceptions and attitudes onto what on the surface aspires to be an accurate image of the past. China is a country where the motives shaping the development of archaeology and historiography have undergone par- ticularly dramatic changes over the past century or so. Starting with exca- vations conducted by foreign explorers at the beginning of the 20th cen- tury, from the late 1920s, as a result of nationalistic sentiments struggling to reassess the country’s historical past and to define a new identity for it, archaeology increasingly became an issue of public concern. The collec- tions of artefacts and manuscripts that had been taken out of the country were from then on regarded as lost national treasures, and foreign explor- ers, once admired for their determination, became rebranded as thieves and imperialist spies. Subsequently, the turmoil of war and decades of internal political struggles put a halt to large-scale excavations until the 1970s, when we again witness the start of what has become a stream of startling new developments in the field. What is more, China’s spectacular economic growth has created an entirely new academic and cultural at- mosphere in which the significance of archaeological artefacts has changed once again. No longer simply accidental discoveries of things buried in the ground, many of the finds have surfaced at politically opportune mo- ments, providing much needed ideological support for key public figures. Manuscripts represent a special case among archaeological materials. The reason for this is that they contain writing, and in the Chinese context writing has always been regarded as symbolic of civilization. It is an es- sential element of the fabric of history, an extremely powerful cultural vii PREFACE metaphor that connects the past with the present and shapes time into a co- herent narrative. The Chinese script was one of the greatest inventions of Chinese culture and remains a key aspect of national identity today. Thus manuscripts and other written materials – steles, seals, inscriptions on mir- rors and other bronze objects – have long been the primary targets of ar- chaeological excavations. They serve to fit sites and artefacts into an exist- ing historical narrative or to allow the re-interpretation of that narrative in new ways. The past forty years have yielded an unprecedented amount of early Chinese manuscripts. Written on wood, bamboo and silk, they date from the late Warring States period through the Qin and Han dynasties. Many of them are administrative documents, but it has been those texts, in par- ticular, with parallels in transmitted literature that have ignited public in- terest, showing that the ability to demonstrate the continuity of traditional civilization is indeed one of the main reasons why archaeological finds matter to contemporary society. The discovery of Han dynasty copies of the Laozi 老子 and Zhouyi 周易 manuscripts in 1974 at Mawangdui was one of the highlights of the decade for the entire field of early China studies. While there were a number of other important finds in the follow- ing years, it was the discovery of a Warring States version of the Laozi in 1993 that became the next sensational find. Other texts unearthed in the meantime, albeit important for researchers, captured the public’s attention to a significantly lesser degree. Alongside archaeologically excavated texts, several important collections of manuscripts have been acquired by insti- tutions from the antique market through dealers. While the provenance of these is understandably open to question, many have been judged by lead- ing specialists to be genuine, and have come to be presented alongside the archaeologically excavated material as authentic sources from early China. These judgments, however, are disputable in some cases and the motiva- tions behind them are also worthy of investigation. The most spectacular of these collections is the large group of Warring States bamboo slips acquired by the Shanghai Museum in 1994, which included another ver- sion of the Zhouyi. Very recently, in 2008, a large collection of Warring States bamboo slips were acquired by Qinghua University, and these in- clude, among others, texts parallel with or related to the Shangshu 尚書. All of these finds probably came from looted tombs and thus lack archaeo- logical context, yet they are rapidly becoming part of the main stream cor- pus of early Chinese manuscripts. The study of medieval manuscripts has also significantly advanced over the past decades. Although the Dunhuang manuscripts were discov- ered over a century ago, they subsequently became widely scattered and viii PREFACE remained largely inaccessible in libraries and museums around the world. Even if some holding institutions boasted liberal access policies to pro- mote research, travel costs, visa regulations and language barriers effec- tively prohibited access to them for most researchers. One major steps for- ward in this regard was the publication of the 140 volumes of the Dun- huang baozang 敦煌寶藏 which began in 1981. Even though the facsim- ile copies of this edition were based on microfilms, and consequently their quality was less than ideal, they made tens of thousands of manuscripts from major collections available to the general public for the first time. More recently, Chinese publishers such as Shanghai guji chubanshe have begun publishing high quality facsimile copies of Dunhuang manuscripts, significantly improving the legibility of many manuscripts and making others readable for the first time. But perhaps the most important step for- ward was the establishment of the International Dunhuang Project (IDP) based at the British Library, which has been digitizing manuscripts from Dunhuang and other sites in Western China since 1995. Although the dig- itization of the complete corpus will require many more years, a sizeable portion of the material is already accessible over the Internet free of charge to anyone with a computer terminal. Manuscripts from ongoing discover- ies in the region of Turfan are also being rapidly made accessible both in printed and digital form, which has led to the rapid development of a new academic field called Turfan studies. These advances are taking the study of Chinese