The Embodied Text Studies in the History of Chinese Texts

Edited by Martin Kern, Princeton University Robert E. Hegel, Washington University, St. Louis Ding Xiang Warner, Cornell University

VOLUME 3

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/hct The Embodied Text

Establishing Textual Identity in Early Chinese Manuscripts

By Matthias L. Richter

LEIDEN • BOSTON 2013 Cover illustration: Characters “shi yue 詩曰” (‘in the Odes it is said’) from the manuscript *Min zhi fumu, from Ma Chengyuan (2001-11, vol. II).

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Richter, Matthias L. The embodied text : establishing textual identity in early Chinese manuscripts / by Matthias L. Richter. p. cm. -- (Studies in the history of Chinese texts ; v. 3) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-90-04-23657-8 (hardback : acid-free paper) -- ISBN 978-90-04-24381-1 (e-book) 1. Chinese classics--Criticism, Textual. 2. Chinese literature--Criticism, Textual. I. Title.

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2012038875

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This book is printed on acid-free paper. contents v

Contents

Acknowledgements...... vii

Introduction...... 1

PART one *MIN ZHI FUMU: EXAMINING THE MANUSCRIPT AND ESTABLISHING THE TEXT

1. The Context of the Manuscript ...... 19 2. Codicological Examination...... 25 3. Paleographic Examination...... 33 4. Presentation of the Text...... 48 5. The Extension of *Min zhi fumu...... 55

PART two The Divergence of Manuscript Text and Transmitted Counterparts: A Review of Homogenizing Readings

6. A Hierarchy of Criteria for Deciding on Disputed Readings . . . . 65 7. Variants of Little Consequence for the Content of the Text. . . . 73 8. Restoring Lost Manuscript Text...... 99 9. Variants Concerning the Central Ideas of the Text...... 112

PART three Comparative Interpretation of *Min zhi fumu and its Transmitted Counterparts: Differences in the Nature of the Texts and Their Ideology

10. The Core Text...... 127 11. The Evolving Role of the Odes in Ru Instruction ...... 134 12. The Conclusion of the Core Text...... 147 13. Later Additions to the Core Text: Indexical Text...... 157 14. Texts as Repositories of Didactic Material: Active vs. Passive Text...... 171 vi contents

Conclusion...... 188

Bibliography...... 193 Index...... 205 acknowledgements vii

Acknowledgements

This book is the outcome of several years of research and was for the most part written in the academic year 2011–12 during my membership at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, sponsored by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellowship for Assistant Professors. I wish to express my gratitude to the Institute and the Mellon Foundation for providing me such an inspiring intellectual atmosphere and generally ideal working conditions. Nicola Di Cosmo masterfully fostered a congenial and productive atmosphere among the group of scholars in East Asian Studies at the Institute. The friendship, inspiration and encouragement of these colleagues helped me very much to keep up the enjoyment and necessary pace of writing. I also wish to thank Michael Nylan for her unstinting hospitality in Princeton and for many stimulating conversations about the broader context of this book’s topic. Much of the research for this book was done during my time as a Creel Research Fellow at the University of Chicago in 2006–07. I am immensely grateful to Edward L. Shaughnessy and Donald J. Harper for making me feel at home in Chicago, for giving me the chance to participate in the many conferences, workshops and seminars on early Chinese manuscripts held there, and for being tremendously supportive in many ways. I owe special gratitude to several friends and colleagues for reading the entire manuscript and offering most valuable comments and criticism: the editors of the series Studies in the History of Chinese Texts, Robert E. Hegel, Ding Xiang Warner, and most particularly Martin Kern, provided many corrections and comments that helped me realize where my arguments were deficient or had not been conveyed with sufficient clarity. I particularly thank Martin for his hospitality in Princeton as well as his friendship and support over many years. Imre Galambos provided equally valuable comments. His enthusiasm for the subject and his straightforward, friend- ly criticism in many stimulating and challenging discussions have helped much to balance my arguments. My debt of gratitude to Paul W. Kroll extends much beyond his help in completing this book by ironing out countless blunders in my writing. He has been enormously helpful and supportive over the years as a colleague at CU Boulder. I also wish to express my profound gratitude to the editors at Brill’s, Albert Hoffstädt and Patricia viii acknowledgements

Radder, for their great cooperativeness and kindness. Patricia took care of the technical editing process with amazing efficiency and resourcefulness. This book project could not have progressed as it did without the coop- eration, help and friendship I have received from my colleagues at CU Boulder, among whom Terry Kleeman deserves special thanks for his warmly welcoming manner and guidance in the process of adapting to a yet unfamiliar educational system in my first years in Boulder. I also feel indebted to my students at CU Boulder and previously at the Universities of Chicago, Hamburg and Freiburg. Teaching classes on manuscripts discussed in this book and on early Chinese literature in general has been particularly helpful in realizing where arguments need to be structured more clearly and explicitly for a non-specialist audience. Special thanks are due to Heng Du for her work as a research assistant. I feel tremendously indebted to many colleagues and friends, whose manifold contributions I cannot possibly specify and whose names I cannot even enumerate exhaustively. To mention only the ones to whom I feel beholden the most: William H. Baxter, Wolfgang Behr, William G. Boltz, Chen Songchang 陳松長, Chen Wei 陳偉, Robert Eno, Feng Shengjun 馮勝君, Enno Giele, Paul R. Goldin, Lisa Indraccolo, Li Songru 李松儒, Lin Su-ching 林素清, Yuri Pines, Rudolf Pfister, Michael Puett, Charles Sanft, Axel Schuessler, and Oliver Weingarten have all given me invaluable help and advice in various ways. What I owe to my wife, Antje Richter, is immeasurable and too multi- faceted to express in an acknowledgement. list of illustrations ix

list of illustrations

1. Margins, writing space, and bindings in the manuscript *Min zhi fumu 29 2. Selected characters from *Min zhi fumu, *Kongzi shi lun, and Heng xian 35 3. Selected forms of 之 in *Min zhi fumu 36 4. Forms of the components 糸 in 樂 and 幺 in {幾} in *Min zhi fumu 36 5. Constant vs. varying thickness of brushstrokes in *Min zhi fumu 37 6. Kongzi {孔子} in *Min zhi fumu 39 7. Guodian characters with and without additional strokes 40 8. Additional strokes in characters of *Min zhi fumu 41 9. Characters for sang {喪} in *Min zhi fumu 42 10. Warring States forms of 喪 with 亡 as secondary phonetic (a–d) and 死 as semantic classifier (d) 43 11. correct vs. flawed forms of phonophoric sang 44 12. correct vs. flawed forms of 孔 in *Min zhi fumu 45 13. typical vs. atypical forms of 天 45 14. correct vs. erroneous forms of 聖 46 16. The character 皇 in *Min zhi fumu and *San de 83 17. Forms of 而 in *Min zhi fumu 87 18. 其 and 而 in *Min zhi fumu and stylistically related manuscripts 89 19. 而 in selected Shangbo and Guodian manuscripts 90 20. 天 vs. 而 in selected Guodian manuscripts and *Min zhi fumu 90 21. 系 and related graphs in *Min zhi fumu and 系 in a Baoshan document 92 22. ᰥ in *Min zhi fumu and other Shangbo manuscripts 104 23. All characters for the words wu {物} and zhi {志} in *Min zhi fumu 114 24. 志 in Zixia’s question vs. the characters for shi {詩} in *Min zhi fumu 115 25. Character forms for the words shi {詩} and zhi {志} 122 26. Section and text terminator marks in *Xing zi ming chu and *Xing qing lun 183 x list of illustrations list of illustrations xi

Table 1. Style of script of *Min zhi fumu in comparison

*Min zhi fumu, *Kongzi shi Zigao, section *Lu bang da han, Heng xian, section of slip #1 lun, section of slip #2 section of slip #5 section of slip of slip #7 #10

xii i ii iii list iv of illustrations v

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: initiator dots

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Table 2 , layout of the Shuihudi manuscript * Wei li zhi dao 51 ▁ ? ▁ ▔ light grey space: didactic text dark grey space: Wei Statutes white space: blank columns 1 through 51 / registers i v --- : position of bindings / Table 2. Layout of the Shuihudi manuscript *Wei li zhi dao introduction 1

INTRODUCTION

Chinese political thought, philosophy, and cultural self-identification has never ceased to take recourse to the literature of the Warring States Period (453–221 bce) as its classical period and ultimate source of all major philosophical and religious traditions. Present-day Chinese politics and media revive or reinvent especially the Ru 儒 tradition (outside China better known under the name “Confucianism”) with considerable vigor.1 Such forward-oriented, productive forms of engagement with the philosophical and literary heritage are naturally interested in texts with a clear identity and a clear message, which makes their precise historical source value a secondary concern. If the texts offer insight into the world and our place in it, if by formulating a moral philosophy they provide orientation, if they inspire, please, and enrich us, or even if they just pragmatically provide arguments, it may matter very little who exactly authored which parts of the texts, or when they did this and with what purpose in mind. In these circumstances, the purpose of the texts is to enlighten us in the present and not to throw light on the past. If, however, we approach the same texts as historical sources, if our interest is to understand the social reality from which they arose, how exactly they and the ideas expressed in them developed and were communicated, then we are facing rather severe obstacles. Until the recent discovery of a substantial number of early Chinese manuscripts, all knowledge of Warring States literature had to rely solely on transmitted texts, fraught as they must be with the effects of the mul- tifaceted vagaries of transmission, reaching from small accidental changes (scribal errors) or intentional modifications (observing taboos or modern- izing archaisms) to a fundamental rewriting of the entire text. The corpus of transmitted literature, moreover, provides us with only those texts that, for one reason or another, happened to be selected for transmission, and it presents them in the form in which they were reconstructed in the early empire. The popular narrative of the reconstruction of the Chinese literary heritage tends to reduce this phenomenon to an act of redressing the destruction of books by the First Emperor. The violent process of establishing the first Chinese empire, eliminating local power structures and imple-

1 For a critical review of this term and its history, see Jensen 1997 and Nylan 2001. 2 introduction menting a central administration and, more broadly, the political and cultural unification under the Qin dynasty must indeed have been a se- verely disruptive event in the transmission of Warring States texts. Nevertheless, the accounts that Han-dynasty historians give us of the burning of books and burying alive of scholars under the Qin are bound to be partisan, to some extent symbolical, and certainly exaggerated.2 For the present study of textual identity in early China it is more decisive when and how and by whom the Warring States texts were reconstructed, since this reconstruction was inevitably informed by the manuscript culture of the time, by current notions of what a text is, how it is to be fixed in writing, and what functions a written text had to serve. The late first century ce historian Ban Gu 班固 (32-92) describes the efforts to reconstruct the textual heritage from pre-imperial times as follows: Of yore, when Confucius passed away, his subtle words were cut off, and when his seventy disciples died the transmission of their profound meaning diverged. Thus, the tradition of the Springs and Autumns split into five and that of the Odes into four. Of the Changes there were traditions by several specialists. In the Warring States, vertical and horizontal alliances fought over true and false, and the words of the masters became increasingly dis- ordered. The Qin eventually regarded them as perilous, so they burnt writings to make the common people stupid. After the Han rose, it redressed the harm done by the Qin, collected documents on a grand scale, and widely opened up avenues for presenting writings. In Emperor Wu’s time the writings had become incomplete. The rites were ruined and the music degenerated. The Sagacious Emperor bemoaned this with the words: “We are greatly distressed!” Thereupon he established a scheme to collect and preserve writings and he established offices for writing down texts. [Writings of all sorts, even] down to the masters, traditions, and commentaries, filled the secretariats. As by the time of Emperor Cheng (32–6 bce) a considerable amount of writings were scattered and lost, the Imperial Messenger Chen

2 Jens Østergård Petersen (1995) emphasizes the selective character of the Qin suppression of the bai jia 百家 and destruction of literature, mainly targeting politically relevant didactic texts in private possession. Martin Kern’s study of the series of Qin stone stelae inscriptions has shown that there was less ideological discontinuity between the Qin and the Warring States and more continuity between the Qin and Han ideologies than traditionally assumed. He compares the selective suppression of texts in effect to a process of canonization not entirely different from the canonization of texts under the rule of the Han emperor Wu 武 (reg. 141–187 bce). See Kern 2000a. For the understanding of jia as experts in certain fields, rather than “philosophical schools” as traditionally conceived, see also Smith 2003; Nylan and Csikszentmihalyi 2003; as well as, for an application of the term “Masters Literature” building on the revised understanding of bai jia and zhuzi 諸子, Denecke 2010. introduction 3

Nong was sent out to retrieve lost books all over the Empire.3 The Counsel- lor of the Palace Liu Xiang collated canonical texts with their exegetical traditions, masters texts, poetry, and rhymeprose. The Colonel of the Infan- try Ren Hong collated military writings, the Chief Astronomer Yin Xian collated material on occult methods, the Physician in Attendance Li Zhuguo collated material on technical and medical matters. To the side of each of the writings, once it was completed, a tag naming the content of the pian was attached, an abstract of the content was recorded and submitted to the throne. Directly after (Liu) Xiang’s death, Emperor Ai (6 bce–1 ce) again let (Liu) Xiang’s son, the Palace Attendant and Commandant of Imperial Car- riages (Liu) Xin, finish his father’s work.4 昔仲尼沒而微言絕，七十子喪而大義乖。故春秋分為五，詩分為四，易有數家之傳。戰國從衡，真偽分爭，諸子之言紛然殽亂。至秦患之，乃燔滅文章，以愚黔首。漢興，改秦之敗，大收篇籍，廣開獻書之路。迄孝武世，書缺簡脫，禮壞樂崩，聖上喟然而稱曰：「朕甚閔焉！」於是建藏書之策，置寫書之官，下及諸子傳說，皆充祕府。至成帝時，以書頗散亡，使謁者陳農求遺書於天下。詔光祿大夫劉向校經傳諸子詩賦，步兵校尉任宏校兵書，太史令尹咸校數術，侍醫李柱國校方技。每一書已，向輒條其篇目，撮其指意，錄而奏之。會向卒，哀帝復使向子侍中奉車都尉歆卒父業。 Several aspects of this account of the decline, loss, and eventual resurrec- tion of pre-imperial literature deserve our special attention: First, Confucius is singled out as the fountainhead of the most precious ancient wisdom and implicitly even as the author of the Springs and Autumns, Odes, and Changes. Not only the choice of the canonical books named here is interesting but also their sequence. That the Springs and Autumns is placed first seems to indicate the commitment on the part of the authors to a certain exegetical tradition, at least the allusion to the claim of the New Script faction’s belief that Confucius had encoded profound meaning in subtle words (wei yan da yi 微言大義). In short, the approach to the literary heritage is overtly partisan. Second, the development of divergent interpretations and textual traditions is viewed as a sign of decline and increasing disorder. The true liter-

3 The translation of administrative titles follows Loewe 2000. For more comprehensive information about offices in the Han administration, see also Loewe 2004 and Giele 2006. See also the concise description of administrative offices throughout the Chinese empire in Hucker 1985, which, unlike Loewe’s and Giele’s works, does not incorporate the rich new information obtained from contemporary manuscripts discovered since the past century. 4 Hanshu 30.1701. 4 introduction ary heritage is here regarded as a closed corpus in a state of order and ultimately sanctified by the authority of Confucius. It has tragically experienced a period of disorder and destruction, going along with political disunity, and the task of the preservers of heritage is to reverse this process. As one of the manifestations of regained political unity, the restoration of the texts has to be a reunification as well. Diversity of traditions is recognized as a fact, but it is certainly not a goal. Of course, Ban Gu’s narrative is a hyperbolical brief account of a complex historical process, and his text is not meant to be taken literally. Nevertheless, the view of textual and interpretive diversity as a negative phenomenon is unmistakable and meant seriously. The same general judgment is deeply ingrained in traditional textual scholarship and is perpetuated even today in the persistent tendency to homogenize what is perceived as diverging versions of the same text—cases ranging from mere differences in phrasing to cognate but differently structured texts—rather than as texts in their own right and with their own respective source value. Third, when it comes to the restoration of texts, no mention is made of transcribing orally transmitted texts, as one might expect after a history of book burning. Transcription of texts from memory can certainly have played a role in the process, too. But at least for its first stage, Ban Gu solely refers to written materials, when he talks about collecting “documents” (pian ji 篇籍) and “writings” (shu 書).5 This raises the question of what texts were presented to the palace, and how we are to imagine the act of collecting, identifying, and storing the writings. To restrict ourselves to one of the texts that Ban Gu mentions so prominently, viz. the Odes, the question arises in what sense the palace collected an authentic ancient text or to what extent the text as it was eventually stored in the imperial library was a Han product. The individual odes were, as Martin Kern’s extensive study of the Odes in excavated manuscripts has shown, owing to their predominantly oral mode of transmission, “a canonical text that is as stable in its wording as it is unstable in its writing.”6 The element of stability, therefore, lies outside the written form. In terms of textual sequence,

5 The latter term is unambiguous. It refers to anything written, regardless of physical format. The former term, however, could theoretically refer to bundles of bamboo or wood manuscripts (pian) and registers (ji), possibly written on wooden tablets (du 牘). But since there was no unified use of this terminology, the reference of pian ji is not clear and should not be overinterpreted. The choice of expression is partly determined by the stylistic requirement of a balanced meter. There may not be any specific meaning attached to ji at all—hence the noncommittal “documents” in the translation. 6 Kern 2005a, 182. introduction 5 the excavated sources show a great degree of instability. The odes on bamboo slips from Fuyang Shuanggudui 阜陽雙古堆, dated to 165 bce, which is approximately the period Ban Gu refers to, do not accord with any of the four versions he mentions in his bibliographic catalogue.7 When the Odes were collected in the imperial library, a process of stabilization in the written form would have set in, in order to make the act of storing the text and remedying the lamented divergence after Confucius’ death successful. This stabilization could have been achieved in a bold act of recompila- tion and adaptation of the text to the higher degree of orthographic regularity than Warring States writing practices had to offer. The alternative would be to trust one version of the Odes (or a limited number of versions) and store this version precisely as it was collected, on the same material carrier and hence without any changes whatsoever. The latter is only a theoretical possibility. To submit one complete version of the Odes in a continuous wood or bamboo manuscript would have been virtually impossible. In a very conservative estimate and assuming a large format accom- modating around fifty characters per slip, the complete text of the Mao Odes would have required at least one thousand bamboo slips, probably many more. For a series of separate manuscripts of a more manageable extension, fixing the textual sequence would have required not only num- bering the slips but also indicating the sequence in which several bundles relate to each other. Such a practice has not yet been attested for any time prior to the Han dynasty. It is most probably a product of the very endeavor of ordering the textual heritage that Ban Gu describes. The only known example of a similarly complex system of indicating textual order is represented by the Yili 儀禮 manuscripts from Wuwei 武威, but these manuscripts were produced in the Eastern Han period, i.e., they postdate the library project led by father and son Liu.8 A continuous silk manuscript of as yet unattested dimensions would seem a possible way of fixing the sequence of a vast amount of text such as that of the Odes. But Ban Gu’s description explicitly refers to wood and bamboo manuscripts.

7 The four versions are the official new script versions of Lu 魯, Qi 齊, and Han 韓, as well as the private Mao 毛 version. For an overview of the textual history of the Odes, see Michael Loewe’s article in Loewe 1993, 415–423. For a concise account of the Fuyang find, see Pian Yuqian and Duan Shu’an 2006, 425. For a study of the Fuyang odes, see Hu Pingsheng and Han Ziqiang 1988. 8 The Yili manuscripts were published in Gansu sheng bowuguan and Zhongguo kexueyuan kaogu yanjiusuo 2005; for a short account and comparison with the transmitted Yili, see Boltz “I li” in Loewe 1993, especially pp. 241–242. 6 introduction

If we calculate the actual material conditions for securing textual identity for only this one example of a pre-imperial text that was collected and stored in the imperial library, it becomes evident that textual identity cannot possibly have been carried over reliably from a pre-imperial state of the text to the Han restoration project. This is not to negate the possibility that an earlier compilation existed but merely to acknowledge that the Odes in their present form had to have been established and fixed in writing in the early empire. Moving on in Ban Gu’s description, we hear that under Emperor Wu “the writings had become incomplete.” We probably do not have to take this information too literally in the sense that the writings collected earlier had indeed been complete and the physical damage had only set in between this first collection and Emperor Wu’s reign. The decisive point for the question of textual identity of pre-imperial literature is the information about loss, damage, and compromised textual order, which implies that emendations were made to the texts. Consequently, the wording of the text is inevitably in part a Han product whose degree of identity with its pre-Han original is impossible to gauge.9 Ban Gu explicitly mentions that Emperor Wu installed officials whom he entrusted with writing down books (zhi xie shu zhi guan 置寫書之官). The reported scope of literature copied in the secretariats (“secluded offices,” mifu 秘府) has become greater. A yet greater effort is said to have been made, again after renewed losses of text, beginning in the reign of Emperor Cheng to retrieve the wealth of texts from all over the empire and organize them in the imperial library. By that time, the texts which the librarians strove to reconstitute and preserve must surely have included Han texts as well and not only revered writings from before the imperial period, as the beginning of Ban Gu’s account suggests. Yet, the rulers of the new Han empire are not portrayed as builders of a new state but as restor- ers of an ancient, exemplary culture. Nevertheless, the actual textual identity constructed by the team of librarians clearly follows their ideas about texts, as it constructs texts in a hitherto unknown complexity. Neither the labelling of texts nor the adding of abstracts of their content have been attested by archaeological finds for

9 William H. Baxter (1991) has discussed this phenomenon in the context of using the Odes, which he calls “a Zhōu text in Hàn clothing” (p. 30) as a source for reconstructing the pronunciation of Old Chinese. He points out that not only the characters used to write certain words changed over time, often reflecting a sound change, but also that the text was changed, replacing earlier rhyme words by new ones that would rhyme appropriately in Han pronunciation. introduction 7 the pre-imperial period.10 The decisions of which textual units to discard as redundant and which, despite an apparent similarity of content, to compile in different books, was entirely that of the individuals working in the Han imperial library. It is very fortunate for us that both Liu Xiang 劉向 (79–8 bce) and his son Liu Xin 劉歆 (46 bce–23 ce) have left records of their work.11 As we see from the preceding discussion, the textual identity of transmitted pre-imperial literature was in effect constructed in the radically different political and social world of the early empire and in the context of a manuscript culture that had developed a degree of complexity unattested so far for any time before the Han. The texts were reconstructed by experts in particular areas, and we may assume that their ideas about content influenced the decision of what made a sensible text. This strong statement that the transmitted Warring States literature is an early imperial construct is not to be misunderstood as a wholesale declaration that every text must be an intentional fabrication, distorting the original “true text.” After all, it is a commonplace of textual criticism that the older witness need not be the more original text, and consequently a text excavated from a Warring States tomb is not necessarily more original than a transmitted counterpart. Moreover, all versions of a text are real and insofar “true.” They all deserve attention, but they do not all reflect the same historical background. Transmitted pre-imperial texts, even if they were given their present form in the Han dynasty, are not without source value, but we need to consider that their authenticity as witnesses of the Warring States period is limited, and we should not allow them to dominate the process of defining or shaping the textual identity of newly discovered manuscripts. Further reflecting on our own way of approaching ancient texts, we need to consider what it means for our perception of them that we usually read them in the form of modern printed books. Leaving aside all the influ-

10 The compendium Lüshi chunqiu 呂氏春秋 may be an exception, if indeed it existed already in the last years of the Warring States period in the same complexity and textual stability as we know it today. For a concise account of the complex structure of this work, see Knoblock and Riegel 2000, 27–55. 11 In an interesting analogy to what these texts describe, Liu Xiang’s Bie lu 別錄 (Separate Records) and Liu Xin’s Qi lüe 七略 (Seven Summaries) were reconstructed by Yan Kejun 嚴可均 (1762–1843) from fragments. They are included in Yan’s Quan shanggu Sandai Qin Han Sanguo Liuchao wen (Quan Han wen 全漢文 juan 卷 38 and 41). Shaughnessy mentions the famous example of Xunzi of which Liu Xiang, “after collating 322 bundles … retained only thirty-three, discarding (chu 除) the rest as redundant.” Shaughnessy 2006, 2. 8 introduction ences on a text that would inevitably have occurred in the history of its transmission from the Han library to the present day, major shifts also occurred in the embodiment of the text, in the physical shape which any specific instantiation as a written text exhibits. A comparison of manuscripts from the Warring States with those from the early imperial period or with medieval Dunhuang 敦煌 manuscripts or early print editions and eventually modern printed books shows the magnitude of changes in the visual representation of texts. These changes affected all aspects of the text: the general layout, most recently even the writing direction, the organiza- tion of textual units, punctuation, type of script, and orthography. When we read an early Chinese text in a modern print version, or even in the oldest available woodblock print, realizing that it could not possibly have had the same appearance when it was first written down over two millennia ago, we necessarily read it in abstraction from its physical form. To the extent to which we are able to abstract from the modern physical appearance and to read it independently of the influences that the materiality of any piece of writing necessarily exerts on the reader, we then read this literature as disembodied texts. Now that we have early Chinese texts available in their original manuscript form, we must strive to reverse this reading habit and do everything possible to recover the meaning embedded in the material features of the manuscript, to try to profit from all the historical information it has to offer, rather than letting our reception be controlled by transcriptions, which we need to a lesser or greater extent (depending on our paleographic competence) to access the text. Rochelle Altman aptly expresses the need to consider the interdependence of materiality and content of manuscripts in our interpretation: Scholars, understandably, concentrate on the content. There is no question that the content is important; it contains the semantic message. Content, however, also determines: 1) The choice of script, 2) the format, and 3) the size of a document. In turn, these three elements are constrained by political and religious affiliations. The importance of the relationship between these components of a writing system and a given culture cannot be over- emphasized. The correct script, format and size were required for the content to be accepted as authoritative or official.12 The more our attention is fixated on the text in its modern guise, transcribed in modern print characters, punctuated after modern fashion and

12 Altman 2004, 49. For a recent comprehensive overview of European manuscript culture though the ages, see Sirat 2006. introduction 9 annotated, the more we are prone to view it anachronistically through the lens of modern book culture, and overlook the information that the materiality of the text has to offer with regard to the social function and status of the text. If we make this mistake, the manuscript as an object appears deficient, as “the book yet to be.” Ultimately, this will affect our aproach to the text as well. Especially a manuscript with a transmitted counterpart can then easily be perceived in a teleological fashion as “the (transmitted) text yet to be.” Combined with an exaggerated assumption about the identity of such textual counterparts as instantiations of the same text, rather than as different texts in their own right, this will invite inappropriate readings of the manuscript text. The present study aims to demonstrate what can be gained if we establish textual identity based on close attention to the materiality of the manuscript and as free as possible from preconceived expectations of what the text “should be” in terms of its wording, its functionality, its logical consistency, and its ideology. Since establishing textual identity is the goal of this study and not its point of departure, no preconceived definitions of “text” and “genre” will be applied. Instead, in order to explore textual identity, some crucial methodological principles must be observed. Foremost among them is a rigorous distinction between language and writing, between word and character, and between the text as essentially non-material as opposed to the manuscript as its material carrier. The word “textual” is often used in English to refer to the written form of a text, and even scholarly publications use “textual” as an antonym to “oral.” But whenever the terms “text” or “textual” are used in this study, nothing is thereby im- plied about either a written or oral form of the text. Writing is here treated as part of the materiality of the text. Consequently, I shall consistently use the word “writing” to refer to the act of visualizing a text and not, as in colloquial usage, to the composition of a text. Whether or not the composition of a text in early China actually involved writing, and if so, to what extent, is no trivial question, and it would hence be injudicious to use “writing” loosely in the sense of text composition. Manuscript studies in the European tradition (comprising codicology, diplomatics, paleography, and historical criticism) offer invaluable stimu- li for the study of Chinese manuscripts. At the same time, even well-tested methodological principles may have to be adapted to the Chinese case. The material of the writing support, the soft brush as a writing tool, as well as the non-alphabetic writing system set different conditions for the study of Chinese manuscripts. What is needed most for developing a firmer 10 introduction foundation for the study of early Chinese manuscripts is methodological explicitness. Manuscripts must be approached without preconceived assumptions about their production and function. Information gained from the study of one case does not necessarily apply to another. All conclusions drawn about a particular manuscript should be primarily founded on concrete evidence from the case at hand, while information drawn from other manuscripts or from transmitted literature ranks lower as secondary evidence of an auxiliary nature. Now, textual identity is consituted by multiple factors. The provenance of the manuscript containing the text is the first aspect to be considered. Enno Giele stresses the importance of the archaeological context: Of all the considerations, the archaeological context of the excavated manuscripts is the most important, for it may tell us something about authenticity and date (usually terminus ante quem, if the site is undisturbed), completeness and the history of textual transmission, and the original use of the writings. On occasion, the archaeological context may also allow us to reconstruct a text from scattered fragments to its original state.13 All this is undoubtedly true, and since an archaeological context is not known for all manuscripts, this limitation has to be considered in the interpretation of any specific manuscript. For example, it is unwise to build a strong interpretation about the function of a manuscript as a funerary object if it comes from a collection of looted manuscripts, therefore rendering the assumption that the object comes from a tomb one that cannot be substantiated. On the other hand, caution is also advisable in the interpretation of known archaeological contexts. We can only tentatively assume how the texts found in a tomb relate to the tomb occupant and to each other. For example, the prominent ensemble of manuscripts found in the ca. 300 bce Chu 楚 tomb of Guodian 郭店 is a collection of texts, heterogeneous in genre and diverse in content, reaching from cosmogony, mythology, history, psychology, and ritual to apophthegms and moral precepts. Efforts to interpret such a diverse collection of texts as the expression of a consistent worldview of one person or a group of persons in fact presuppose such an unverifiable consistency; this is then read into the text. Edward Slingerland asserts that Combined with the degree of conceptual overlap between the “Daoist” and “Confucian” texts in the Guodian find, it is not unreasonable to treat the

13 Giele 2010, 114. introduction 11

Guodian corpus as a collection of texts intended by the deceased, or by the deceased’s executors, to be read as a consistent whole.14 When Slingerland adduces aspects of the texts’ physical existence to support his decision to read all Guodian manuscript as a consistent whole, he takes us to the next aspect of textual identity, namely the important distinction between manuscript and text: Many of [the] separations between the sixteen texts were originally created by the Jingmenshi Bowuguan editors on the basis of perceived content, but there is no reason to suppose that they in all cases represent entirely independent texts. For instance, the texts Cheng Zhi Wen Zhi, Zun De Yi, Xing Zi Ming Chu, and Liude were all written on slips of the same size and shape, with the same distance between bindings and similar handwriting styles … and might reasonably be considered portions of the same work.15 Here Slingerland evidently confuses the levels of manuscript and text. It is crucial to realize that the mere physical proximity of texts does not as such indicate any consistency in content. Whether the texts are written on the same piece of writing support (or on several such pieces that are physically combined to form one manuscript), or whether they were found in the same tomb or any other location, merely increases the likelihood of a connection. It does not ipso facto make them one text and it does not guarantee ideological coherence. Unambiguous cases of manuscripts bearing several texts of a vastly different nature are the two silk manuscripts from Mawangdui 馬王堆 that each contain a version of the Laozi and are hence commonly called the “Laozi A” and “Laozi B” manuscripts.16 The connections between several texts written on a manuscript can be of very different kinds. Some of these connections may be purely practical and entirely unrelated to the content of the texts, as, for example, the two Qin statutes which are surrounded on the same manuscript by several units of didactic text, which was summarily titled *Wei li zhi dao 為吏之道 (“The way of acting as a petty official”).17 No relation can be established between

14 Slingerland 2008, 240. 15 Slingerland 2008, 240, note 7. 16 Tomb three of Mawangdui in Changsha 長沙, Hunan, was sealed in 168 bce and excavated in December 1973 and into 1974. The tomb owner is assumed to be Li Xi 利豨, the son of Li Cang 利蒼, the Marquis of Dai 軑, who is buried in tomb two of the same site. The standard publication of the manuscript is Guojia wenwuju gu wenxian yanjiushi 1980. For details of the site, see the excavation report of He Jiejun 2004. A concise overview of the manuscripts found in tomb three is given in Pian Yuqian and Duan Shu’an 2006, 404– 412, and in more detail in Chen Songchang 2000. 17 This manuscript from the Qin tomb no. 11 of Shuihudi 睡虎地 will be discussed in more detail in chapter fourteen. 12 introduction the legal and didactic texts as such. The reason for uniting them on the same physical object must be sought in the practical circumstances of the production or use of the manuscript. If there is indeed a relation in the content of the texts found in one and the same manuscript, it can again be of different natures, ideological consistency being just one of several pos- sibilities. Moreover, the relatedness of such texts can not only be of different types but also of different degrees of closeness. Whatever ideological relatedness we argue for has to be demonstrated in the texts themselves, rather than inferred from their mere physical proximity. This is an extremely important point, since, as the present study will show, we cannot even take it for granted that all textual units explicitly indicated by the manuscript to form one text are related with the same degree of consistency. Consistency is a reasonable expectation we have of most modern texts; it is not necessarily something we always find in an ancient one. This brings us to punctuation as an important means of defining several aspects of textual identity. One such aspect is the extension of texts. Since no uniform standards of manuscript production existed in early China, and the limited standards that did exist are not known to us but have to be established through careful analysis in our study of the manuscripts, we cannot uncritically treat the text of a group of bamboo slips or the section of a silk manuscript as it is presented to us in transcription as one integral text. As Slingerland has observed correctly, the reconstruction of texts from a certain group of slips may be questionable. In the case of his example, a rearrangement of the slips originally published by the City Museum of Jingmen has been proposed by Chen Wei.18 In Chen’s arrangement, each of the texts he reconstructs is concluded by a text terminator mark, thus defining the extension of these texts more reliably.19 The question which of these texts may have been physically connected as one integral manuscript will probably remain unanswerable. Chen Wei has also given different titles to these groups of slips. Both his titles and those of the Jingmen editors are not original. In the present study, such titles are distinguished by a preceding asterisk (e.g., *Min zhi fumu 民之父母) from titles that are actually present in the manuscript (e.g., Zigao

18 Cf. Jingmen shi bowuguan 1998 and Chen Wei 2002, 83–207. 19 For a study of punctuation in early Chinese manuscripts, see Guan Xihua 2002 and Richter “Punctuation” (forthcoming). The classic study of punctuation in the European tradition is Parkes 1993. For a more general, functional approach to the topic, see Nunberg 1990. introduction 13

子羔).20 An aspect that should be emphasized more strongly in the discussion of not just manuscript texts but also transmitted literature is the varying nature of titles. Some titles refer to the text in a mere indexical manner, often using the first words of the text, which may or may not be representative of the content (e.g., Shenzi yue gong jian 慎子曰恭儉 or Heng xian 恆先).21 Other titles, however, characterize the content or refer to its greater significance (Bao Shuya yu Xi Peng zhi jian 鮑叔牙與隰朋之諫 or Nei li 內禮).22 The most significant aspect of a text’s identity, surely, is its wording. To establish the text, i.e., to identify and properly read the characters, certain assumptions must be made about the underlying orthography and scribal competence. It is crucial that these assumptions be not generalizing but take the specificity of each manuscript into account. This is done by giving greater weight to criteria derived from the manuscript under investigation than to criteria further afield, which may ultimately be needed as well. Closely related with the assessment of orthography is the observation of the calligraphic qualities of a manuscript and ultimately also codicological features, especially the degree of elaboration that went into the production of the writing support. These aspects of the materiality of a manuscript, together with punctuation and corrections, can also yield information about the intended use of the manuscript or perhaps traces of its actual use. Manuscripts may have been intended to transmit a text over time, or to provide an impressive visual representation of a text, which was possibly never read, or a manuscript may have been meant to serve a plainer pragmatic purpose and therefore noted down a text in a more casual manner. The assumed social function of a manuscript will affect the interpretation of details of writing and eventually influence how we read the text.23 The present study will focus on the ca. 300 bce manuscript *Min zhi fumu held by the Shanghai Museum. This text narrates a scene of instruction of Zixia 子夏 by his teacher Confucius pertaining to the qualities of an ideal ruler, in which both interlocutors refer to the Odes. The political topic, the dialogue, and especially the reference within the text to other texts (i.e., a number of particular odes) make this manuscript an especially suitable object for an investigation into the question of textual iden-

20 I owe the idea for this technical convention to Rudolf Pfister, of Basel. For the titles of these two manuscripts, see Ma Chengyuan 2001–11, vol. II. 21 See Ma Chengyuan 2001–11, vols. III and VI. 22 Ibid., vols. IV and V. 23 For a comparative study of two manuscripts with regard to this question, see Richter 2011. 14 introduction tity. What makes it also an ideal case to demonstrate how much depends on the path we take to approach the text, is the fact that it has counterparts in two different early imperial compilations, i.e., the Liji 禮記 and Kongzi jiayu 孔子家語. This book is a case study, yet its real objective is not confined to the particular case on which it centers. Rather, its significance lies in larger questions about textual identity in early China, the nature, functionality, and uses of texts before the editorial and cataloguing enterprises engaged in during the Han dynasty. This book does not propose a general answer to these questions but explores them for the one specific case studied here and thereby hopes to give an example of how a comprehensive study of an individual manuscript, which approaches textual identity from the concrete features of that text’s material instantiation, can bring us closer to a more realistic and historically reliable view of the text. In what follows I shall often emphasize methodology. Here, too, the hope is to contribute to the establishment of a better foundation for the study of early Chinese manuscripts, rather than to prescribe a firm set of methodological principles applicable to all cases. The study of early Chinese manuscripts is still in its infancy, and methods need time to develop, to be tested and adapted to different objects of study.24 On both levels, that of describing textual identity and that of formulating an explicit methodology, the findings of many such studies will have to be pieced together before generalizations can be useful. To emphasize the importance of methodology and demonstrate the reliability of the more general statements made toward the end of the book about different types of functionality of texts, this study is organized in the following three steps: the first part proceeds from manuscript to text and narrows down from the archaeological context, or lack thereof (chapter one), to examination of the manuscript as an object with regard to codicological features that may indicate a certain production standard and importance attached to it at the time it was written (chapter two). This leads us to a consideration of handwriting with regard to the same question but additionally with regard to scribal competence and care as well as to the consistency of orthography, since establishing the text relies on nothing as much as on orthography (chapter three). Following the presentation of the text (chapter four), the question has to be considered whether it is complete (chapter five), since incompleteness would naturally affect its

24 A comprehensive handbook for the study of early Chinese manuscripts is currently in preparation. See Behr et al. (forthcoming). introduction 15 interpretation. This question presents itself with particular urgency, since the textual borders in the two transmitted counterparts are not the same. Part two argues against methods of reading that, intentionally or not, assimilate the manuscript text to its transmitted counterparts, thus homogenizing the meaningfully different versions into one identical text. The underlying assumption of such assimilation seems to be that there can be only one true identity to the text and that the different versions do not in all points represent this identity properly. The logical conclusion of this would demand either that just one of the three texts can be the “true” text, or that the homogenizing reading creates a new hypothetical text. This second part of the book begins by placing the discussion in the greater context of the composite nature and variability of texts in early China. On this basis we may formulate a hierarchy of criteria for deciding on the reading of problematic characters, aiming to counterbalance the necessarily subjective element in making such decisions (chapter six). The remaining chapters of this part discuss the different types of such decisions made by other scholars in previous readings of this text. Variants of presumably little consequence for the content of the text (chapter seven), such as synonyms or equivalent function words, are often not recognized in their potential to reveal the history of a text or ideological differences. As these accumulate, relations between them may become visible that move these cases of variants out of the range of the coincidental and show them to be traces of redactional work. Restoring lost passages (chapter eight) is the aspect of reading manuscripts that entails the greatest risk of assimilating different versions. With a discussion of the disputed readings that concern the core ideas of the text (chapter nine), the wording of the text is sufficiently justified and the text can then be interpreted in comparison to its transmitted counterparts. Focusing on how we can get closer to a realistic picture of Warring States literature, as opposed to later reconstructions of it, part three concentrates on the difference between the manuscript and especially its Liji counterpart (as the text closest in time to the reconstruction project of the Han librarians). Differences between the two transmitted versions will not be treated in as much detail. The investigation follows the sequence of the text. Since the manuscript text already contains a diachronic dimension, the interpretation of content and the discussion of the functionality of the text in its different parts distinguishes a core text (examined in chapters ten through twelve) from a later addition (chapter thirteen). This non-homogenizing reading of the text reveals that the manuscript reflects a different 16 introduction practice of using the Odes in Ru instruction than the transmitted counterparts suggest, and it also shows a heterogeneity with regard to the functionality of text (chapter fourteen). It will be evident that the transmitted versions have added considerably complex redactional work to the text and have successfully made it an integral part of the greater compilations Liji and Kongzi jiayu, in which it has heretofore been transmitted to us. The Context of the Manuscript 17

PART one *Min zhi fumu: Examining the Manuscript and Establishing the Text 18 chapter one The Context of the Manuscript 19

Chapter one

The Context of the Manuscript

No other text figures as prominently in the newly discovered early Chinese manuscripts as the Odes (Shi 詩). Their diverse texts, ranging in genre from the Airs of the States (“Guo feng” 國風) to the solemn dynastic Hymns of Praise (“Song” 頌), were the foremost texts of the Ru 儒 curriculum since the Warring States period.1 A substantial number of Odes fragments are among the manuscripts discovered in the 165 bce tomb of Xiahou Zao 夏侯竈, Marquis of Ruyin 汝陰.2 Tomb three of Mawangdui, the burial site of a son of Marquis Dai 軑, Chancellor of the Changsha 長沙 kingdom under the early Han, contained a silk manuscript with a discursive text, named *Wu xing 五行 by its modern editors, which makes extensive use of Odes quotations to illustrate its rather abstract precepts of moral con- duct.3 A counterpart of the core text *Wu xing, but without the extensive commentary that follows it in the Mawangdui manuscript, was found among the manuscripts retrieved from the ca. 300 bce Guodian 郭店 tomb one.4 The same tomb as well as the Shanghai Museum (Shanghai bowuguan 上海博物館) collection of bamboo manuscripts both contain counterparts of the Liji 禮記 chapter “Zi yi” 緇衣, a text that makes similar use of the

1 For general information about the Odes, textual history, important editions, commentaries, and translations, see Loewe 1993, 415–423. For a history of Odes hermeneutics and uses of the Odes in teaching other texts and in Ru teaching practice, see van Zoeren 1991 and Nylan 2001. 2 Tomb 1 of Shuanggudui 雙古堆 in Fuyang 阜陽, Anhui, was excavated in 1977. For concise information on this find, see Pian Yuqian and Duan Shu’an 2006, 424–427. For a study of the bamboo slips with Odes fragments, see Hu Pingsheng and Han Ziqiang 1988. 3 Tomb 3 of Mawangdui 馬王堆 in Changsha, Hunan, was sealed in 168 bce and excavated in December 1973 and into 1974. The tomb occupant is assumed to have been Li Xi 利豨, the son of Li Cang 利蒼, the Marquis of Dai, who is buried in tomb 2 of the same site. The standard publication of the manuscript is Guojia wenwuju gu wenxian yanjiushi 1980. For details of the site, see the excavation report, He Jiejun 2004. A concise overview of the manuscripts found in tomb three is given in Pian Yuqian and Duan Shu’an 2006, 404–412, and in more detail in Chen Songchang 2000. For a detailed codicological study of the manuscript containing the text *Wu xing, see Richter 2011. 4 A translation of both *Wu xing manuscripts with text-critical and interpretive notes is contained in Csikszentmihalyi 2004. Other influential studies of the texts are Ikeda Tomohisa 1993 and Wei Qipeng 2000. 20 chapter one

Odes.5 (The Guodian and Shanghai Museum manuscripts will be discussed in more detail below.) The Shanghai collection also contains a manuscript, whose text the editors have titled *Kongzi shi lun 孔子詩論, relating Confucius’ normative teachings about the Odes, as well as a manuscript with Odes fragments.6 Especially the texts *Wu xing, *Zi yi, and *Kongzi shi lun have been extensively studied.7 Here we shall focus on another manuscript in which the Odes figure prominently. Its relatively short text, titled *Min zhi fumu 民之父母 by its editor Pu Maozuo 濮茅左, has excited less interest than the aforemen- tioned Odes appearances in manuscripts.8 It does not quote the Odes extensively, but by referring to them as didactic material in a scene of instruction given by Confucius to his disciple Zixia 子夏, it provides literary evidence of a particular use of the Odes. A comparison with the two transmitted early imperial counterparts of this text can give us new insights in the changing status of the Odes. The manuscript text is largely parallel to the Liji 禮記 chapter “Kongzi xian ju” 孔子閒居 (Confucius dwelt in leisure) and the Kongzi jiayu 孔子家語 chapter “Lun li” 論禮 (Disquisition on ritual).9 Whatever we may hope to learn from the manuscript, the first step must be to establish textual identity in a reliable manner. This includes the extension of the text: Does the manuscript text represent an integral

5 For a text-critical study of both manuscript versions and the transmitted text “Zi yi,” see Shaughnessy 2006. Since this is a study in textual identity, I will write *Zi yi in italics when referring to the manuscript text, but will use quotation marks for the title of the Liji chapter, in acknowledgement of the fact that it has come to be transmitted and interpreted as a chapter of this compilation rather than as an independent text in its own right. Shaughnessy (2006, 66) makes the same distinction. 6 *Kongzi shi lun is published in Ma Chengyuan 2001–11, I.3–4, 11–29, 119–168; the Odes fragments are published under the title *Yi shi 逸詩 in vol. IV.4, 23–30, 171–178. Of the numerous Chinese studies of *Kongzi shi lun the most prominent are Liu Xinfang 2003, Chen Tongsheng 2004 and Huang Huaixin 2004. For an edition of *Kongzi shi lun with a complete English translation, see Staack 2010. 7 Among Western studies of these materials, most notably those by Martin Kern, who has devoted a series of articles to the Odes in early manuscripts. Cf. in particular Kern 2005a and 2010. 8 Ma Chengyuan 2001–11, I.3, 15–30, 149–180. Apart from numerous articles, usually discussing individual characters or passages of the text, there are but few more extensive studies of the manuscript, e.g., the critical annotated editions of the text by Ji Xusheng in Ji Xusheng et al. 2003 and Nishiyama in Nishiyama et al. 2004; further, the comparative studies of the manuscript vs. transmitted versions by Xu Shaohua 2005 and Nishiyama 2008. Brief accounts of the manuscripts are included in Kern 2005b (pp. 321–325) and Shaughnessy 2006 (pp. 45–50). The former focuses on the Odes quotations in the text, the latter on its divergence from its Liji counterpart. 9 For dating and a general account of the textual history of these texts, see Jeffrey Riegel’s and R.P. Kramers’ articles in Loewe 1993, 258–262 and 293–297, respectively. The Context of the Manuscript 21 text in its entirety or only part of one text? How is it meant to be read? Is it a continuous and consistent linear text or does it consist of parts that are related in other ways, i.e., either with different degrees of coherence or in a hierarchical structure? Textual identity also concerns wording: Does the text differ from its transmitted counterparts, and how do we decide whether it does? And if we identify differences, what is their significance? Do they give us any new insights in intellectual history? For understanding a newly discovered manuscript text that closely resembles or otherwise relates to a known text—usually a transmitted one, less often another excavated manuscript—these related texts are of course an invaluable help, especially if the manuscript is defective or its characters are difficult to decipher. On the other hand, it is the very same potential of these other texts that can also obscure the identity of the manuscript text, if we allow this external evidence to dominate our interpretation of the internal information provided by the manuscript itself. Hence it is important that we first endeavor to understand the manuscript on its own terms, before we resort to external evidence to help us understand the manuscript as an object and the text it presents.10 Ideally, our study of the manuscript would begin with a description of how archaeologists excavated a tomb in the vicinity of the old capital of the state of Chu 楚 and found in this tomb a cache of manuscripts that formed part of a greater funerary ensemble, indicating the status of the tomb occupant as a member of the Chu elite, and so forth. Instead, we have to begin with another story.11 In the spring of 1994, a large amount of what looked like Warring States bamboo manuscripts from Chu surfaced on the Hong Kong antique market and were brought to the attention of Cheung Kwong-yue (Zhang Guangyu 張光裕), a professor of Chinese at the Chinese University of Hong Kong specializing in paleography. Based on his previous work with similar manuscripts, Cheung considered some of the manuscripts to be authentic and faxed some images of these to the director of

10 I have proposed a hierarchy of the different types of evidence with regard to establishing the manuscript text in Richter 2005b, 196. A comprehensive case study that employs this approach is Richter 2011. Enno Giele has also recently emphasized that the inquiry into aspects of “textual genesis and scribal habits, early ways of reading and punctuation, and literacy and orality, as well as other aspects of written communication” has to “start from analysing not the contents but the appearance and formatting of the manuscripts.” Nylan and Loewe 2010, 133–134. 11 For an account of the purchase of the Shangbo manuscripts as well as circumstances of testing and preservation in the museum, see Ma Chengyuan 2001–11, vol. I, Foreword (“Qian yan”). 22 chapter one the Shanghai Museum, Ma Chengyuan 馬承源. The Museum took im- mediate steps toward purchasing these materials, which comprised over 1,200 bamboo slips and arrived in Shanghai in May of the same year. In late autumn, new manuscripts appeared on the Hong Kong market. The then exhausted financial means of the Shanghai Museum were augmented by private donations to render possible the purchase of these additional 497 bamboo slips, some of which matched fragments of the previous purchase. The fact that some slips belonging to the same manuscripts went into other collections, such as that of the Museum of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, indicates that at least some of the manuscripts of the present Shanghai Museum collection (henceforth: Shangbo 上博) must be incomplete. How widely and in what exact manner the looted manuscripts were dispersed we will probably never know. The chief editor Ma Chengyuan’s foreword to the first of the eight vol- umes, in which the Shangbo manuscripts have been published, gives little information on the treatment of the bamboo slips and the methods of their preservation. We are told even less about tests and criteria applied to establish authenticity. Ma Chengyuan reports that, according to rumors, the Shangbo manuscripts were acquired through looting somewhere in Hubei. An exact place of origin cannot be established, but the close similarity of these looted manuscripts with others from controlled excavations allows us to establish an approximate provenance with a fair degree of confidence. Unfortunately, an awareness on the part of the editors that the full technical data have to be provided to the general public along with the publication of the manuscripts is growing only gradually. It is characteristic of the situation in 2001, when the first Shangbo manuscripts were published, that fuller details about their provenance and authenticity appeared in print only one year later in the form of an interview with Ma Chengyuan.12 Ma reported the result of two carbon dating tests that determined an age of 2,257 ± 65 years, which would place the manuscripts in the mid-third century bce. However, Ma also pointed out that carbon dating is better suited to testing much older objects and is, in his opinion, a less reliable indicator of authenticity than a combination of other factors, some of which relate

12 The interview titled “Mr. Ma Chengyuan talks about the Shangbo manuscripts” (馬承源先生談上博簡) was conducted by Zhu Yuanqing. See Zhu Yuanqing and Liao Mingchun 2002. In recent years, publications of new manuscript finds, particularly of looted manuscripts, give considerably more detailed technical information. The publications of the Qinghua University Chu manuscript collection and the Qin manuscripts in the Yuelu shuyuan in Changsha are good examples of this positive development. See Li Xueqin 2010, as well as Zhu Hanmin and Chen Songchang 2010. The Context of the Manuscript 23 to the text and others to the materiality of the manuscripts. His argument that the texts could not possibly have been forged is less convincing than his observation that the style of script and color of the ink are consistent with that of Chu manuscripts from controlled excavations. And finally, Ma also mentioned as an indication of authenticity the changes in color and shape of the bamboo slips, once they were taken out of the material in which they were preserved and were exposed to sunlight. Material of a later date would have reacted differently. An important indication of provenance is that the entire collection of Shangbo manuscripts is very similar in format, handwriting, and content to the manuscripts excavated from tomb one of Guodian. Two texts appear in only slightly different versions in both collections: a counterpart of the Liji chapter “Zi yi” as well as versions of a hitherto unknown text titled by the editors *Xing qing lun 性情論 (Shangbo) and *Xing zi ming chu 性自命出 (Guodian), respectively. What may be even more important is that the Shangbo manuscripts show a similar degree of diversity in formats and styles of writing, as well as orthographic variability, as the Guodian manuscripts. This complex pattern of similarities and dissimilarities is an important factor to take into consideration when it comes to assessing the authenticity of the Shangbo manuscripts. Tomb one of Guodian was excavated in October 1993 in a salvage op- eration after two partially “successful” attempts earlier that year at looting this tomb.13 The tomb, on which assumptions about the provenance of the Shangbo manuscripts are based, has itself been dated only indirectly. It is close to the location of the old Chu capital Ying 郢 in the Jiangling 江陵 area in Hubei 湖北, and its funerary goods are consistent with those found in dated tombs in the Jiangling area (several Yutaishan 雨台山 tombs and the Baoshan 包山 tombs one and two). Most notably the 730 text-bearing bamboo slips from Guodian are so similar in format and style of script to the manuscripts from Baoshan tomb two, which dates from 316 bce, that the Guodian tomb is by general consensus dated to around 300 bce.14

13 For a more detailed account of the excavation, contents, and dating of this tomb, as well as the initial treatment and ordering of the manuscripts, see Liu Zuxin 1995; Hubei sheng Jingmen shi bowuguan 1997; as well as the chapters by Li Boqian, Liu Zuxin, and Peng Hao in Allan and Williams 2000, 9–38. The manuscripts were published in their entirety in Jingmen shi bowuguan 1998. 14 For the Baoshan tomb, see Hubei sheng Jing Sha tielu kaogu dui 1991a–b and Cook 2006. Wang Baoxuan (1999 and 2000) has suggested dating the Guodian tomb at least several decades later. I concur with Sarah Allan’s (2009, 116–117, note 6) apt characterization that “his arguments do not include an impartial analysis of archaeologically excavated materials 24 chapter one

If we do not wish to read and interpret a decontextualized, disembodied text that is situated in an abstract intellectual history, we need to reincar- nate the text, as it were, by restoring its unique physical appearance and by understanding the verbal qualities of the text inseparably from its materiality. The study of a manuscript text, therefore, must begin with the codicological examination of its carrier. Format and layout of a manuscript may be indicative of its intended use and social status, both of which are elements of the identity of any concrete material instantiation of a text. From the study of the writing support we can then proceed to the paleographic examination, comprising calligraphic and orthographic aspects, which will allow us to establish the text. Based on such an approach that takes full account of its physicality, we can understand a text more reliably in its original historical context than we would if we established textual identity mainly based on our knowledge of early parallel texts or more broadly Chinese literature and intellectual history.

and are intended to support a preconceived historical sequence based upon the received literary tradition.” Yuri Pines has voiced similar criticism of Wang’s argument. See Pines 2002b, 695, n. 17. Codicological Examination 25

Chapter two

Codicological Examination

To understand the information potentially encoded in the format of a manuscript, we would need to know the production standards that existed in the historical context in which it was produced. Unfortunately, we do not have the kind of explicit information about format standards in the Warring States period that we do for the late Han dynasty, in which a format of two feet and four inches (ca. 55 cm) is said to have been used for particularly esteemed texts, whereas texts of lower status were written on material one foot (ca. 23 cm) in size.1 The original manuscripts recovered so far from the Warring States and early Han periods have vastly different formats.2 This shows the limited applicability to our manuscripts of the information given in transmitted texts. These texts may refer to a more

1 One Han foot (chi 尺) equals 23.1 centimeters, and one inch (cun 寸) measured one tenth of it (cf. Twitchett and Loewe 1986, xxxviii). The most explicit information on manuscript formats as indicative of the status of texts is found in several chapters of Wang Chong’s 王充 (27–ca. 100) Lunheng 論衡, e.g., “Bamboo is cut into hollow sections, which are then split into tablets. The traces made on these with brushes and ink form characters. Big tablets are for the canonical texts and the smaller ones for commentaries and records” 截竹為筒破以為牒加筆墨之跡乃成文字大者為經小者為傳記; “[the format of] two feet four inches is for the utterances of the sages … The affairs of the Han are not mentioned in the canonical texts. They are called ‘one-foot documents’ or ‘small writings’ and categorized as minor arts. A knowledge of these works is not appreciated by the Classicists” 二尺四寸聖人文語[…]漢事未載於經名為尺藉短書比於小道其能知非儒者之貴也; “[Matters of] Tang and Yu as well as the Xia and Yin dynasties are uniformly recorded on the two-foot four-inch format. The Classicists promote and recite these; they discuss and rehearse them day and night, whereas they do not look at the writings of Han times, calling the Han inferior and not up to par” 唐虞夏殷同載在二尺四寸儒者推讀朝夕講習不見漢書謂漢劣不若。(The translation of these passages from chapters 35, 36, and 57 of Lunheng is indebted to Forke [1962, II.72, II.77–78, and II.198]; the original text is cited after Huang Hui 1990, 551, 557, and 821; for a recent study of the Lunheng, see Kalinowski 2011). Further occasional statements on early Chinese manuscript formats as they occur in transmitted texts from the early imperial and later periods are cited in Wang Guowei’s 王國維 classical study Jian du jianshu kao jiaozhu 簡牘檢署考校注 (first published in 1914, see Wang Guowei 2004) and in Chen Mengjia (1980, 293–294). For a study in English, see Tsien 2004, 115–118. 2 For a systematic study of this issue, see Hu Pingsheng 2000 as well as Hu Pingsheng and Ma Yuehua in their introduction (pp. 1–39) and the rich annotations to Wang Guowei’s Jian du jianshu kao jiaozhu 簡牘檢署考校注 in their recent edition of this text (see Wang Guowei 2004). 26 chapter two recent practice of manuscript production or to a limited, special context; they may also be outright unrealistic, retrospectively idealizing the issue, or their intent may be prescriptive rather than descriptive. Yet the diversity of formats of excavated manuscripts probably does not indicate a complete absence of any production standards, but rather suggests that different standards were applied within smaller communities of scribes and producers of stationery.3 It seems that, just as with styles of script and orthography, conventions and standards had not yet been unified for larger areas. Nonetheless, it is safe to assume, also for the pre-imperial era, that larger format manuscripts were of a greater representational value and thus reflected a comparatively higher status of the manuscript as an object and probably also of its text. The distinction between the manuscript and its text is unfortunately not reflected in traditional Chinese discourse on the subject, but it is nevertheless an important one. Although the format of a manuscript can be motivated by the status of its text, the format is a property of the manuscript and thus primarily communicates the status of the physical object, only by extension conferring status on the text written on this object. The statement made by the format of a manuscript thus refers only to one particular material realization of the text and not necessarily to the general status of this text. We have multiple examples of the same text written on manuscripts of different formats—most famously perhaps the two Laozi counterparts of Mawangdui, one of which is written on a silk scroll of ca. 24 centimeters width, while the other is written on folded silk of double that width.4 Another case is the Guodian manuscript with a counterpart of the Liji chapter “Zi yi,” written on bamboo slips of ca. 32 centimeters’ length and the Shangbo version of the text on long slips of 54 centimeters.5 Interpreting the significance of a manuscript’s format is further compli- cated by the fact that the size of a manuscript is not determined by the status of the text alone. Another factor that influences the choice of format is the intended use of the manuscript. The largest of all bamboo manu-

3 Pian Yuqian and Duan Shu’an (2006, 38–50), who provide an excellent overview of manuscript formats from the fifth century bce through the fourth century ce, follow a similar approach. They also emphasize that the diversity of formats should not lead us to dismiss them as an insignificant factor. Rather, we need to interpret the formats within smaller ranges of period, location, and content (genre), beginning from the individual archaeological sites. 4 For a comprehensive codicological study of these manuscripts that considers their social status and uses, see Richter 2011. 5 For a detailed study of these texts, see Shaughnessy 2006. Codicological Examination 27 scripts found so far are tomb inventories (qian ce 遣策).6 Undoubtedly they are important documents, insofar as they were crucial to affirm and manifest the social status of the deceased both during the burial ceremony and in the netherworld. However, another likely reason why the slips are so large is that the use of this type of document is restricted to a ritual context, in which the greater visibility of this impressive format alone counted, while slips of a length of 70 centimeters or more would hardly be practical for a document that was meant for frequent perusal. On the other end of the scale, a particularly clear example of how there is no linear correspondence between manuscript size and status of text are the Guodian manuscripts which the modern editors titled *Yu cong 語叢, since they are apparently collections of apophthegms. All four manuscripts—ranging in size from only fifteen to seventeen centimeters—are by far the smallest of the entire “tomb library.”7 Yet, there are several indications that three of them, namely *Yu cong 1–3, were designed to signal the high status of their texts. The first indication of this special status is the number and position of bindings. These manuscripts have three bindings— a feature that usually occurs only in manuscripts of a very large size. Even the Guodian manuscripts of double the size, such as *Wu xing 五行 and *Xing zi ming chu 性自命出, were bound with only two strings, positioned at approximately one-third and two-thirds down the length of the slip, so that the slips are physically divided into three sections. The *Yu cong manuscripts 1–3 have one binding string in the middle of the slip and the other two at the top and bottom of the slips, leaving margins of only a few millimeters, thus lending the entire manuscript greater stability than two bindings would. This greater stability facilitated frequent reading of the manuscript and secured its text better against loss through breakage. The most frequent type of loss of text occurs in manuscripts that are not bound at the top and bottom ends but only further toward the middle of the slips. The longer the top and bottom ends of slips outside the bindings are, the more easily they can break off. In most manuscripts ∠-shaped notches are carved into the right (less often the left) edge of the slips. These notches secure the position of the binding strings and narrow the gaps between the bound slips, so that the finished manuscript appears as a more continuous

6 For example, the inventories of the tomb of Marquis Yi of Zeng (Zeng hou Yi 曾侯乙, interred in 433 bce) measure no less than 70–75 centimeters. See Hubeisheng bowuguan and Zhongguo shehui kexueyuan kaogu yanjiusuo, eds., 1989, vol. 1, 453 and vol. 2, figs. 169–231. 7 For an overview of the main codicological features of the Guodian and Shangbo manuscripts, see Feng Shengjun 2007, 1–42. 28 chapter two writing surface. At the same time, cutting into the narrow slips of typically only five millimeters width makes the slips more prone to break in these places. By using three instead of two binding strings, the producers of *Yu cong 1–3 created narrow margins on the top and bottom ends of the slips, so that even if any of these short ends broke off, no text would be lost. By this method these manuscripts secure their text most effectively. Another feature that bespeaks a high status of the *Yu cong 1–3 manuscripts is the generous use of writing space. Each slip contains only eight or nine characters with unusually large spacing between them. Finally, the style of the characters stands out in the corpus of Guodian manuscripts. They are written in a narrow and tall shape, often with elongated strokes of a decorative nature. Their close resemblance in style to weapons inscriptions lends them an air of elegance and authority. Presumably, the apophthegms of *Yu cong 1–3 were in these particular manuscripts accorded special importance. They were written on slips of such an exceptionally small size, so that they could be carried around easily in the manner of a pocket book, always available for citation or memorization, and relatively well secured against damage.8 Conversely, the similarly sized manuscript *Yu cong 4 lacks all indications of high status: it has only two bindings and is covered with writing from top to bottom, without any margin, written narrowly spaced in the same style of script as that of the Laozi counterparts and *Taiyi sheng shui 太一生水.9 The manuscript *Min zhi fumu consists of fourteen bamboo slips of 46.2 centimeters length.10 The upper binding divides 2.2 centimeters of margin from a writing space of 41.5 centimeters length, divided by the middle binding into 20.6 and 20.9 centimeters, respectively, and followed by the

8 Li Ling 李零 points out that the pocket-book format was used for texts as prestigious as the Lunyu, which he discusses as a case analogous to the Yu cong manuscripts. See Li Ling 2007b, 35–36. 9 For the classification of styles of script in the Guodian corpus, see Richter 2006b. For a more detailed study of these styles, see Li Songru 2006. 10 Naturally, some shrinkage occurs in the dehydration process after excavation. But since we can expect approximately the same shrinkage in all manuscripts, the resulting difference in size does not play a significant role for our interpretation of the manuscripts. A source of graver concern is the inaccuracy of information provided by the editors of some manuscripts. In the case of *Min zhi fumu, Pu Maozuo provides the measurements for the four sections of the bamboo slips in his description of the entire manuscript. These measurements add up to 46.2 cm. However, in his description of slip five, which these measurements are based on, he names a length of 45.8 cm (Ma Chengyuan 2001–11, II.151 and 161). Feng Shengjun (2007, 19–20) notices this discrepancy but inexplicably proposes to go by the smaller measure. Fortunately, for the study of this manuscript the four millimeters’ discrepancy does not seem to matter in any way. Codicological Examination 29

Fig. 1. Margins, writing space, and bindings in the manuscript *Min zhi fumu lower binding and 2.5 centimeters margin. The original number of characters per slip varies between thirty-one and thirty-five. The measurements are based on slip five, which is the only one that is preserved in its entire length. Of all other slips the top ends are broken off, and slips four and five are also damaged in their lower half. Except for slips nine and ten, of which the entire upper half is missing, the top ends were broken off near the binding. Thus, the missing parts of the slip are mostly the margin and no more than the first character or some part of it. This is a good example of how this binding technique, as described above, does effectively secure the manuscript against loss of text. Binding and layout of *Min zhi fumu thus suggest a superior production standard. As for the sheer size of slips, it is impossible to say whether this manuscript stood out in its context as particularly large or small, for the simple reason that its original context is not known. The Shanghai Museum collection of Chu manuscripts cannot be treated as a corpus like that of Guodian. It is possible that all of these manuscripts were looted from the same tomb, but it is just as possible that not all of them were ever together in the same environment. Controlled excavations such as that of Guodian show that it is not unusual that manuscripts found within the same tomb vary in size. The Shangbo manuscripts can be grouped in four 30 chapter two size ranges: 572–517, 475–426, 400–390, and 339–320 millimeters. *Min zhi fumu is in the upper range of the second largest group of all Shangbo manuscripts published so far.11 Hence, the size of the slips alone does not indicate any particular status of the manuscript. The shape of the slips does not indicate exceptional elaboration either. The slips are cut level at the top and the bottom and appear to have been shaved into a slightly rounded form, although not quite as elaborately as some other manuscripts of the Shangbo and Guodian collections. The slips of some Guodian manuscripts have tapered ends, and in some of the Shangbo manuscripts the ends of the slips were shaped very precisely into almost perfectly semicircular fashion.12 There must have been a reason for investing such extra effort in the production of the slips for these manuscripts. This elaborate format probably signaled a greater prestige of the manuscript and perhaps also a high status of its text. This exceptional feature, which has so far not appeared in any other manuscripts than those of the Guodian and Shangbo collections, has led Zhou Fengwu 周鳳五 even to surmise that “although the length of the manuscript slips is certainly important, the distinction between canonical writings and commentaries is determined by the shape of the end of the slips; the ones with tapered ends are canons and the ones with level ends are commentaries.”13 Feng Shengjun 馮勝君 points out that this cannot have been a universal standard. His observation is confirmed by cases such as the Guodian manuscripts *Zi yi 緇衣 and *Xing zi ming chu 性自命出, which have tapered ends, while their parallel texts in the Shangbo collection are written on slips with level ends.

11 The only exception is one manuscript with the short narrative text (601 characters) titled by the editors *Jian da wang po han 柬大王泊旱, written on 23 slips of only 240 millimeters length. Interestingly, apart from this one exception, the very smallest manuscripts of the Shangbo collection are as big as the largest ones from Guodian. The Guodian corpus shows three size ranges: the largest being 322–306 millimeters, a medium range of 282–264 millimeters, and the four *Yu cong manuscripts in sizes ranging from 174 to 151 millimeters. This could either reflect a difference in status of the manuscripts as representational objects or a different social status of their respective owners or different uses for which the manuscripts were produced. 12 The Guodian manuscripts published under the titles *Laozi A, *Zi yi 緇衣, *Lu Mu gong wen Zisi 魯穆公問子思, *Qiong da yi shi 窮達以時, *Wu xing 五行, *Cheng zhi wen zhi 成之聞之, *Zun de yi 尊德義, *Xing zi ming chu 性自命出, and *Liu de 六德 all have tapered ends, and the slips of the Shangbo manuscripts *Kongzi shi lun 孔子詩論, Zigao 子羔, and *Lu bang da han 魯邦大旱 are rounded. For photographic reproductions of these manuscripts, see Jingmenshi bowuguan 1998 as well as Ma Chengyuan 2001–11, Vols. I and II, respectively. 13 Zhou Fengwu 2000, 55. Codicological Examination 31

Additionally, Feng Shengjun cites Zheng Xiancheng’s interesting reflection that the tapered or rounded ends could protect the slips from breaking, which is why such formats were used to record particularly important texts.14 Unfortunately, neither author explains exactly in what way the shape of the ends could prevent breakage. The damaged state of the three groups of Shangbo bamboo slips with rounded ends, published as *Kongzi shi lun 孔子詩論, Zigao 子羔, and *Lu bang da han 魯邦大旱, does not lend any support to this view. This is not to say that it is counter-evidence either, since the damage may have been caused by forces that other manuscripts were never exposed to. Also it is not clear whether these three groups of slips belonged together as one manuscript. What is beyond doubt, however, is that the top and bottom bindings of these ca. 55-centimeter long slips were placed closer to the middle binding, more than eight centimeters from the ends of the slips.15 These longer ends outside the upper and lower binding could break off more easily, and since at least some of the slips had no margins, a greater loss of text occurred than in the case of *Min zhi fumu.16 In sum, none of the codicological features of the manuscript *Min zhi fumu, such as size and shape of slips or number of bindings, taken in isola- tion indicates an exceptionally high production standard.17 However, *Min zhi fumu does have some exceptional features that are found only in a minority of manuscripts, i.e., the position of the upper and lower bindings and, more so, the fact that no less than ten percent of the material is left blank as upper and lower margins to secure the text.18 This extra effort

14 Feng Shengjun 2007, 49, and Zhang Xiancheng 2004, 114. 15 Feng Shengjun 2007, 15. 16 Slips two through seven of *Kongzi shi lun have blank top and bottom ends. The blank space amounts to nearly one-third of the entire writing space and would be an unusually broad margin. The question of how these blank spaces are to be interpreted has not yet been settled. For an overview of the different arguments that have so far been brought forth, see Staack 2010, 864–867. 17 The majority of manuscripts in this size range have three bindings, but there are some exceptions: The 23 slips of the manuscript *San de were bound with only two strings. Only 22 slips are in the Shanghai Museum; one fragment of the manuscript is in the Art Museum of the Institute for Chinese Studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. For reproductions and annotated transcriptions of the slips, see Ma Chengyuan 2001–11, V.11–12 and 287; for the Hong Kong fragment see Chen Songchang 2001b, 13. 18 Other manuscripts of the same or even a larger size place these bindings farther towards the middle of the slip and use the material of the entire slip, also above the first and below the third binding, as writing space. In the Shangbo manuscript *Pengzu 彭祖, for example, the first and third bindings are placed ca. 10 cm from the top and bottom ends of the slips, the space between the first and the second binding is ca. 17.5 cm and between 32 chapter two invested in binding, combined with the liberal employment of material (as evidenced by leaving blank margins), must have been taken because the text borne by this manuscript was deemed important enough to warrant special protection. Codicological examination of an ancient Chinese manuscript can hardly lead to precise assumptions about the status of the object and its text, but the overall quality of this manuscript allows us at the very least to be certain that *Min zhi fumu is more than a casual nota- tion of an insignificant text. The fact that some importance was attached to this manuscript is reflected not only in the writing support but also in the quality of the writing it bears.

this middle and the lower binding 17.2 cm. See Ma Chengyuan 2001–11, III.303–308, Feng Shengjun 2007, 27–28. Paleographic Examination 33

Chapter three

Paleographic Examination

The quality of writing can be relevant to the interpretation of a manuscript in many ways. The style of script, including layout features such as spacing and alignment of characters, can communicate prestige or evoke associations of certain social uses of texts and thus genres. In close association with these aspects, the level of calligraphic elaboration or casualness may reflect the status of a manuscript and hence its text. Script features also allow us to make cautious assumptions about the degree and nature of the literacy of the person who wrote the manuscript, which is important when it comes to disputed readings of characters. Especially in the case of *Min zhi fumu, where the most interesting information the manuscript has to offer will depend on the correct interpretation of a few characters and thus on our assumptions about the orthography of the manuscript and scribal competence, we need to examine the script of the manuscript with the utmost care and in great detail. Calligraphic quality and orthographic unambiguity may to some extent reflect the intended use of a manuscript, which in turn relates to the social function of its text. The assessment of style cannot possibly be free from subjective judgment, and any inference from such stylistic features as to status and use of the manuscript can only be conjectural. However, since the visual qualities of a manuscript, and most notably script features, inevitably form part of the perception of the object, to include these features in the description and interpretation of a manuscript does not open the floodgates of uncon- trolled speculation. On the contrary, by including this subjective factor of the visual impression we get of the manuscript within the range of our conscious reflection we have the chance to check an inevitable subjective influence on our judgment. The entire manuscript *Min zhi fumu appears to be written in one hand.1 The type of script is characteristic of the Chu region in the Warring States period (Chu xi wenzi 楚系文字), as exemplified in various manuscripts

1 For the methodology of distinguishing hands, as well as the broader categories of type and style of script, see Richter 2006b, Li Mengtao 2008a, and Richter “Scribal Hands” (forthcoming). Important contributions to the study of handwriting and the problem of distinguishing hands have been made in recent years by Li Songru 李松儒 (2005, 2006, 2007, and 2012). 34 chapter three that were retrieved in controlled archaeological excavations and can reliably be identified as early and late Warring States Chu artifacts.2 Unlike some other manuscripts from Guodian and from the Shangbo collection, none of the characters in *Min zhi fumu show any features that have been identified as influences of other regional scripts.3 On the other hand, they are written in a style that is most unusual in the entire known corpus of Warring States Chu manuscripts, with the exception of three other groups of slips in the Shangbo collection:4 The characters in most of *Wu wang jian zuo 武王踐阼 are similar not just in their general morphology but even in the shapes of individual strokes to a degree that suggests they could be the writing of the same person, only executed with less care and elaboration.5 The writing in *Yan Yuan wen yu Kongzi 顏淵問於孔子 is rather less similar, and *Ji Gengzi wen yu Kongzi 季庚子問於孔子 still uses the same style of writing but shows a noticeably lower calligraphic quality and differs even in the morphology of some individual characters, which suggests that it was written by a different person. Li Songru 李松儒 also mentions the more casual (in her terms: liaocao 潦草) style of this manuscript, but does not seem to consider it related to *Min zhi fumu. She assumes, however, that *Min zhi fumu, *Yan Yuan wen yu Kongzi, as well as the

2 The earliest Warring States Chu manuscripts are those found in the tomb of Marquis Yi of Zeng (dated to 433 bce). Important finds for the later Warring States are, most famously, tomb no. 2 of Baoshan and tomb no. 1 of Guodian, the Chu Silk Manuscript (Changsha Zidanku Chu mu boshu 長沙子彈庫楚墓帛書, for a comprehensive study of which see Barnard 1972 and 1973; see also Li Ling 1985). For short summaries of other important finds of Chu manuscripts, such as those of tombs one and two of Wangshan 望山, Changsha Yangtianhu 長沙仰天湖, or Xinyang Changtaiguan 信陽長臺關, see Pian Yuqian and Duan Shu’an 2006, 392–394 and 387–389; for reproductions and transcriptions, see Shang Chengzuo 1995. Various lexica of Chu paleographs have been published, most notably Teng Rensheng 1995 (see also Li Ling’s emendations to this edition, Li Ling 1999) and the revised edition Teng Rensheng 2008, as well as Li Shoukui 2003. A compendium of characters of vols. 1 through 5 of the Shangbo manuscripts is Li Shoukui et al. 2007. For an account of the extension of Chu and various locations of its capital as well as an overview of important archaeological finds, see Blakeley and Xu Shaohua in Cook and Major 1999. 3 For a study of influences of other local scripts on Chu manuscripts, see Feng Shengjun 2007, 250–462. 4 Cf. Ma Chengyuan 2001–11, vols. V (*Ji Gengzi wen yu Kongzi), VII (*Wu wang jian zuo), and VIII (*Yan Yuan wen yu Kongzi). 5 Beginning in the second half (beginning with the 20th character, 君) of slip twelve of the altogether fifteen slips, a markedly different handwriting sets in. I agree with Li Songru’s judgment that this part of the text was written by a different person. Li Songru further assumes that the last three characters on slip ten were added by yet another person as a correction, after the original text on this part of the slip had been scraped off. Judging from the published photograph of the slip (Ma Chengyuan 2001–11, VII.24), this is probably the case, but one would have to verify this by looking at the original slip. See Li Songru 2012, 147–156. Paleographic Examination 35 greater part (slips one to middle of slip twelve) of *Wen wang jian zuo were written by the same person.6 The hand of *Min zhi fumu at first sight appears to be of a low calligraphic quality. It is neither as controlled and regular as that of *Kongzi shi lun, Zigao, or *Lu bang da han, nor does it have the elegantly curved, fine lines of Heng xian (cf. table 1 and fig. 2 below). Yet, what may at first sight appear to be a rather coarse style, at closer inspection shows signs of stylistic consciousness and elaboration in some graphic elements, particularly in the simultaneous descending and rotating of the brush (e.g., among the examples shown in fig. 2, in the upper strokes of 之 and the top ends of the two inner vertical strokes of 而), which are more typical of later cal- ligraphy, where shapes of dots and pronounced ends of strokes become important features of the composition of characters. 7

之也而不 *Min zhi fumu 1.24 7 6.24 6.27 6.19

*Kongzi shi lun 8.15 2.2 2.28 1.6

Heng xian 2.38 3.6 4.38 3.2

Fig. 2. Selected characters from *Min zhi fumu, *Kongzi shi lun, and Heng xian

6 The small differences between the characters of these three groups of slips she attributes in part to different character forms in the written models that these texts were copied from and in part to the change of a person’s handwriting that naturally occurs over time. She assumes the three groups of slips were written at different times by the same person—*Min zhi fumu somewhat further removed in time from the other two, which are closer to each other. Li Songru 2012, 147–156. 7 Character numbers follow the format X.Y (X = number of slip, according to the arrangement in Ma Chengyuan 2001–11; Y = number of character on this slip). 36 chapter three

*Min zhi fumu shows a considerable degree of variation in the shapes of even frequent characters (see the forms of 之 listed below in fig. 3), which are generally the most stable elements in an experienced hand. This variation, however, is certainly not caused by inexperience but is rather an intentional feature, written with much assurance by a skilled scribe.

1.13 1.24 5.4 6.4 6.29 11.2

Fig. 3. Selected forms of 之 in *Min zhi fumu

The regular, well-proportioned, elegant strokes of the components 糸 in 樂 and 幺 in (see fig. 4 below), which is the regular structure of the character for ji < *kəjʔ {幾} until well into Han times, could not possibly have been written by an inexperienced hand.

2.8 4.12 4.16 4.26 5.31 1.8

Fig. 4. Forms of the components 糸 in 樂 and 幺 in {幾} in *Min zhi fumu

The pronounced changes in the thickness of some strokes do not reflect insecurity but rather stylistic choice. The scribe of *Min zhi fumu had a remarkable control of stroke breadth, not just in horizontals as in 三 or 者 or in slanting strokes like those of 亦, but even in oval forms like the upper component of 君 (see fig. 5 below). The strong variation in thickness within the same stroke as in the vertical strokes of 又 or the inner verticals of 而 or the parallel S-shaped strokes in 民 (see fig. 5), or the curved strokes of the 幺 graphs in the examples in fig. 4 above are expressions of a dynamic, confident style of writing. Paleographic Examination 37

三者亦君又而民 2.17 3.25 4.4 1.10 2.26 6.27 1.23

Fig. 5. Constant vs. varying thickness of brushstrokes in *Min zhi fumu

Likewise, the scribe of *Min zhi fumu was apparently not concerned with uniformity in the general visual aspect of his writing.8 Neither the balance of graphic elements within the characters nor a uniform character size, regardless of their complexity, nor regular spacing seem to have been important goals in his handwriting (see the example of the simple character 之 in fig. 3 above). Understanding the degree of constancy vis-à-vis the nature of variation in a particular handwriting is not just relevant to a general assessment of the visual quality of the manuscript as an object. It can also be a factor that needs to be included in decisions we make about uncertain readings. We need to observe how much structural or purely stylistic variation occurs in the characters of whose reading we can be sure, in order to assess the likelihood of the scribe’s choosing what is usually termed a “loan graph,” i.e., a structural variant of the expected character for the presumed word.9 For this purpose, we need to distinguish between structural and stylistic variation of characters. The absence or presence of a component (pianpang 偏旁)—including different choices of components or significantly different relative positions of these components within the character—or of

8 In referring to the scribe of *Min zhi fumu, and other manuscripts that were presumably written by professional scribes, I do not intend to exclude the possibility that a woman could have written this or any other manuscript. Indeed, Michael Nylan emphasizes that “denied entrance into most ranks of the regular bureaucracy, women nonetheless participated in a range of other productive activities, including moneymaking, reading, writing, and ritual performance, in which they appear to have been judged according to much the same standards as contemporary males” (Nylan 2005, 5). Robin Yates and Anthony Barbieri-Low find indications in excavated legal texts and artifacts from the early years of the Chinese empire that female literacy extended in a limited way even to the lower strata of society (see Yates 2011 and Barbieri-Low 2011). Nevertheless, it is safe to assume by default that in the Warring States period the role of a professional scribe was, unless we have indications to the contrary, in all likelihood performed by a man. 9 Imre Galambos (2006) has convincingly shown that, given the absence of a universal orthographic standard in early China, the term “loan graph” (jiajiezi 假借字) is not an appropriate designation for graphic variation in early manuscripts. 38 chapter three individual strokes (bihua 筆畫) constitute structural variants. Differences that concern only the size or shape of a character or of its individual graphic elements, but not their absence or presence, are stylistic variants.10 The graphic variations in *Min zhi fumu occur almost exclusively on the stylistic level, which is to say that the manuscript is written in a completely regular orthography. The few cases of clearly structural variants that seem to be graphic-only turn out, on closer inspection, to be meaningful orthographic distinctions. These cases will be presented and discussed below, after my reading and translation of the text in the context of divergent readings by other scholars. To learn as much as possible about the conditions and the process of the production of a particular manuscript, its paleographic examination needs to establish what I have termed elsewhere a “profile of graphic variation,” i.e., it needs to consider not only the difference between structural and stylistic variants, but also where in the manuscript these variants occur.11 Interestingly, the most noticeable stylistic variation, i.e., the forms of the character 之 shown above, is stronger at the beginning, whereas toward the end of the manuscript the character form becomes increasingly uniform. Since multiple features strongly indicate an experienced hand, the reason for this decreasing variability in the shape of 之 cannot be that the scribe first needed to train himself in writing the intended shape. More likely, he intentionally varied the shape at the beginning and wrote more routinely in the later parts of the manuscript. A similarly conscious choice seems to underlie the way the name of Confucius is written. Usually, Kongzi 孔子 is written as a ligature (hewen 合文), i.e., the graph 子, which is already present in 孔 as a component, is omitted and this form of abbreviation is signaled by the ligature mark, a short double dash, under 孔.12 That the scribe of *Min zhi fumu writes the name Kongzi when it first occurs with the full two characters 孔子 and only then uses the ligature孔= consistently in all remaining five occur- rences of the name is an unusual practice. The theoretical possibility that the unabbreviated form at the beginning of the text could have been chosen for the sake of disambiguation does not seem very likely. If a text began

10 Structural variation may consist of (a) a difference between additional or missing elements, including graphs on the sub-component level, such as single strokes; (b) variation in one or more components; (c) different position of components; (d) difference in both identity and position of components; or (e) entirely different characters. I have provided examples for my classification in Richter 2005b, 174. 11 Richter 2005b. 12 For a detailed discussion of types of ligatures, see Richter “Punctuation” in Behr et al. (forthcoming). Paleographic Examination 39 with the statement that Zixia asks a person whose name is written with the common ligature for Confucius’ name, it is hard to imagine a reader would have mistaken the ligature to stand for anyone else’s name. Interestingly, in the first ligature 孔=, the scribe confuses the vertical stroke (亅) of the 子 component with the 乚 component of 孔 (see character 1.27 in fig. 6 below). This anomaly will be discussed below, together with other similar cases, in the context of an important orthographic feature.

1.4–5 1.27 3.16 5.23 8.3 10.6

Fig. 6. Kongzi {孔子} in *Min zhi fumu

In sharp contradistinction to the marked stylistic variation in the shapes of characters and the breadth of individual strokes, the manuscript shows a very high degree of consistency in the structural features of characters and thus orthographic regularity. The difference between the ligature and the non-ligated form of Confucius’ name does not constitute orthographic variation, in the sense that the identical character components are implicitly present, as indicated by the ligature mark. The two other words in the text that allow for analogous ligatures are written invariably either as a ligature (孫= for zisun {子孫}, which occurs only once in the manuscript) or in the non-ligated form (junzi 君子, which occurs three times in the manuscript).13 The structural regularity extends even to a feature of Chu characters that so far has not been shown to reflect any orthographic difference or have any other significance, i.e., the additional stroke parallel

13 In other manuscripts, the two common forms of writing 君子 as a ligature either move the 子 component into the space of 君, thus incorporating it in its structure, or omit the 口 component of 君 in order to accommodate 子 as a new component, replacing the 口. In either case a ligature mark is added. 40 chapter three to a horizontal top or bottom stroke of a character, or the dot or short horizontal stroke added to a vertical stroke, as, e.g., in 不 or the 弓 component of 強 (see fig. 7 below).

至天下上強

Guodian Guodian Guodian Guodian Guodian *Laozi A *Laozi A *Laozi A *Laozi A *Yu cong 4 34.12 5.7 5.8 4.7 25.4

Guodian Guodian Guodian Guodian Guodian *Laozi B *Laozi A *Laozi A *Laozi B *Laozi A 3.21 4.22 4.23 9.1 7.12

Fig. 7. Guodian characters with and without additional strokes

In the Baoshan and Guodian manuscripts these features vary freely, without any regularity whatever. The character 不, for example, which allows for both types of additional strokes, can be written in four ways: as 不, , , or . In *Min zhi fumu, however, absolute consistency is main- tained for each character in the absence or presence of this additional horizontal stroke. For example, for bù it always uses the form with two additional strokes. All other characters that would allow for these strokes are also written uniformly either with or without them throughout the entire manuscript: For example, the characters 之 [ㄓ], 五, 生, and 者 are never written with an additional horizontal on top or bottom of the character.14 The character 上, on the other hand, always has an additional stroke at the bottom, and 下, 正, 可, 天, 耳, and 聖 always have an additional top stroke. The character 而 has even two—an exceptional case in the entirety of Warring States manuscripts, only seen in *Min zhi fumu and the two other groups of slips (*Wu wang jian zuo and *Yan Yuan wen yu Kongzi)

14 The character forms used to write the word zhe {者} can differ vastly in Chu manuscripts. The form used in *Min zhi fumu has a horizontal bottom stroke (cf. fig. 4 above) and would thus allow for an additional horizontal. Paleographic Examination 41 identified above as written in the same style and possibly the same hand. This exceptional feature, too, is treated by the scribe of *Min zhi fumu with unvarying consistency.

天下耳而聖不可 6.12 6.13 6.15 6.16 6.17 6.19 6.20

Fig. 8. Additional strokes in characters of *Min zhi fumu

It is not surprising that a manuscript like *Min zhi fumu, which treats even a sub-component level detail like the optional horizontal stroke with complete consistency, applies a completely regular orthography and never writes the same word with different combinations of character com ponents, as other manuscripts of the same period do.15 Nevertheless, even in *Min zhi fumu there are some cases in which one character can stand for two different, even if phonetically close, words: The character <糸+白+木>, equivalent to the modern standard 樂, is used for yuè < *ŋˤrawk {樂} (‘music’) and lè < *rˤawk {樂} (‘joy’).16 In another case, the two semantically related words dé < *tˤək {得} (‘to attain’) and dé < *tˤək {德} (‘attained power’ > ‘virtue’), which are both written with the same character , are even perfect homophones. The character 可 is used for kě < *kʰˤajʔ {可} (‘may’) as well as for hé < *gˤaj {何} (‘what,’ ‘how’), and a character of the structure < ⼧+昏+耳> stands for both wèn < *C.mun-s {問} (‘to ask’) and wén < *mun {聞} (‘to hear’).17 Finally, the character 聖

15 In other Chu manuscripts, dao {道}, for example, is famously written as 道 or 衜 or 痟. The word qiang {強} is written as or , and an {安} as or , without any apparent orthographic distinction being involved. 16 That an orthographic distinction between these two important words was never introduced in Chinese writing, even to the present day, is probably owing to the fact that the inseparable connection between music and the emotional response it evokes, i.e., joy, plays a central role in ritual and thus in the dominant ideological discourse throughout two millennia of Chinese imperial history. The two words were usually easy enough to disambiguate in the contexts in which they were used; and in texts on ritual, where they shared the same context, the latent ambiguity was probably a desired effect. Some medieval manuscripts use a punctuation convention (termed po yin 破音) to distinguish between these two words. See Ishizuka 1993, 41 and 35, fig. 2; and Galambos (forthcoming). 17 The phonophoric 昏 [*ṃˤun] represents the Old Chinese pronunciation of the word better than the phonophoric 門 [*mˤən] would. 42 chapter three is used for both tīng < *ḷˤeŋ {聽} (‘to listen’) and shēng < *ḷeŋ {聲} (‘sound’).18—The degree of orthographic ambiguity that this practice of writing two words with the same character entails has nowhere led to uncertainty about the reading of these characters. The only question that has arisen exclusively concerns whether the same word was written with different characters in this manuscript. It is therefore important to emphasize that *Min zhi fumu always writes the same word with one character only and that there are only two exceptions from that rule. One is the word shi {詩}, one of the central terms of the text *Min zhi fumu. I shall discuss this case in detail below and shall argue that the difference in writing reflects an orthographic distinction and is therefore not a case of ambiguity but rather the reverse. The only other case of a word written with two differently structured characters is sang {喪} (see fig. 9). Both structures are well attested in several Chu manuscripts as common ways of writing sang. Most importantly for our assessment of orthographic ambiguity, either of the characters is used exclusively to write the word sang and none other.

6.5 7.32 9.2 11.10 12.23 13.12 14.1

Fig. 9. Characters for sang {喪} in *Min zhi fumu

The difference between these forms is not, as it might seem at first sight, one between two completely different characters. Rather, the form used on slips six, seven, eleven, and twelve is the more conservative structure— one that we might consider the “full form.” The word sāng < *s-mˤaŋ {喪} (‘loss,’ ‘bereavement,’ ‘mourning’) was originally written with the picto- graphically-derived character for the near homophone sāng < *sˤaŋ {桑}

18 In other manuscripts of the period, the same character also stands for the word shèng < *ḷeŋ-s {聖} (‘sagacious’ < ‘uncommonly perceptive’), but this word does not occur in *Min zhi fumu. According to Pu Maozuo’s reading of the text, which follows the transmitted counterparts in reading the phrase “以至五至” on slip 2 as “以致五至”, the character 至 is used not just for zhì < *tit-s {至} but in this one instance also for zhì < *trit-s {致}. (Ma Chengyuan 2001–11, II.157.) I read zhì < *tit-s {至} also in this instance. But even if we did follow Pu Maozuo’s reading, this would be in accordance with common orthographic practice in early China, when a graphic distinction between these two words had not yet been introduced. Paleographic Examination 43

(‘mulberry tree’).19 The upper parts of the ancient character 桑 that emphasized the leaves of the tree came to be separated from the tree as components in their own right. The dominant middle one of these components looked increasingly like the graph 九, which has the pictographic background of a bent arm (elbow), and the other two or more originally similar components developed into the form 口.20 The number of components varies; usually four or fewer 口 are grouped around 九.21 When they wrote the word sāng {喪} (‘bereavement,’ ‘mourning’), rather than sāng { 桑} (‘mulberry tree’), scribes often dispensed with the tree component at the bottom of the character. The remaining abbreviated form of the phonetic 桑 could be augmented in two ways: Two strokes were added to 九, resulting in a graph that looked like a fusion of 九 with the character for the word wáng < *maŋ {亡} (‘disappear’), which functioned as a secondary phonetic (see fig. 10).22 In exceptional cases, the graph 亡 was written at the bottom, thus “replacing” the tree. More typically, the graph for the word (‘to die’) was added as a semantic classifier in this position (see fig. 10). All these transformations of the original character 桑 obviously serve the purpose of semantic disambiguation.

九亡喪 (a) 喪 (b) 喪 (c) 喪 (d) 死 Shangbo Shangbo Shangbo Shangbo *Yu *Min zhi *Liu de *Zhou yi *Zhou yi *Zhou yi *Zhou yi cong 1 fumu 32.8 32.19 32.10 44.10 98.1 14.1 5.2

Fig. 10. Warring States forms of 喪 with 亡 as secondary phonetic (a–d) and 死 as semantic classifier (d)

19 Cf. He Linyi 1998, 706–707. 20 For the character 九, see He Linyi 1998, 164–165. 21 Four was probably an underlying standard form that was often abbreviated, as in Guodian *Laozi C, where the character is written with four 口 on slip eight, with three on slip nine and with only two on slip ten. 22 Schuessler explains sàng < *sˤaŋh (< *smˤaŋh) {喪} (‘to lose, destroy’) as an s-causative of wáng {亡}, but he considers sāng < *sˤaŋ {喪} (‘mourning’) as “probably not related to sàng 喪 … although these two words share the same graph due to similar sound and mental semantic associations.” Cf. Schuessler 2007, 450 and 507. The fact that Baxter and Sagart reconstruct both words with an ‘m’ sound, suggests to me that *s-mˤaŋ-s (‘lose’) and *s-mˤaŋ (‘bereavement, mourning’) may indeed both be derived from wáng < maŋ (‘disappear’). 44 chapter three

It is not clear why this manuscript, given its otherwise completely regular orthography, alternates between these two forms. The variation between the more conservative form 桑 (the full original character and phonophoric) and its abbreviated form, combined with the semantic classifier 死, further specifying the use of the word as related to death, clearly does not reflect a semantic distinction in the text *Min zhi fumu. All occur- rences of sang refer to bereavement and mourning in the same way. It is possible that the model from which the scribe copied used these different character forms, but there is no positive indication for this. As our reading of the most decisive passages in *Min zhi fumu, namely the ones that explicitly refer to the role of the Odes and to the aspirations of the Parent of the People, hinge on our assumption of orthographic consistency, this requires us to account for all inconsistencies in character forms and to show that indeed they do not constitute variation on the level of character structure. The scribe merely varies in how he executes the graphic elements that constitute the identical structure. The L-shaped angular graph that converts the curved-arm component of sang into the secondary phonophoric 亡 needs to be placed above that component to result in the form resembling 亡 (see fig. 11). On slip thirteen, however, the scribe has mistakenly connected the left part of the hand/arm component with that L-shaped graph, leaving the equally L-shaped “elbow” of the arm component unconnected below.

phonophoric of 喪 phonophoric of 喪 *Min zhi fumu 14.1 *Min zhi fumu 13.12

Fig. 11. correct vs. flawed forms of phonophoric sang

This is exactly the same type of flaw as that in the first ligature for the name Kongzi 孔子, where the upper part of 子 was connected with the right- hand 乚 component, leaving the lower vertical stroke (亅) of 子, which regularly slants to the left, unwritten (see fig. 12 below). The scribe com- pensated for this missing graph with the diagonal stroke crossing 乚 from right to left. This very likely did not happen in a controlled, slow process of detecting an error and correcting it in a way that comes closest to the correct character form. Rather, the resulting lower part of the character Paleographic Examination 45

孔= (1.27) suggests that the scribe absentmindedly confused one character component with another, in this case with the lower part of the component 戈, as for example in the name of King Cheng on slip eight.

correct form of 孔= flawed form of 孔 chéng {成}

8.3 1.27 8.14

Fig. 12. correct vs. flawed forms of 孔 in *Min zhi fumu

The highly dynamic ductus of the scribe of *Min zhi fumu renders such mistakes more likely. His brush strokes are mostly short and pronounced with thick beginnings. Longer strokes thin out early. Such a writing technique tends to segment characters more strongly than one that writes the components in fewer, continuous strokes (see fig. 12 above). The resulting higher complexity of structure weakens the sense of the integrity of the individual character components and consequently increases the likelihood of blurring distinctions between some graphic elements. Even if these elements are executed in a casual fashion that only approximates the con- ventional form, the structure of the character is still identifiable to the trained eye. Another example of the same phenomenon is the character 天 on slip six, whose two inner strokes are written asymmetrically to a degree that makes them resemble the component 人/亻/儿 (e.g., in the character 先, see fig. 13 below). The character almost looks like a ligature of 亓 and 人 {其人}. Yet, there is nothing wrong with the structural composition of the character, and the context—the phrase “于天下,” in which it is embedded—makes the reading unambiguous. The only other instance of the character in *Min zhi fumu at least approximates the symmetrical form in which it is usually written in Chu manuscripts of the same period. 46 chapter three

atypical form of 天先 more typical form of 天 typical form of 天

2.22 2.29 6.12 *Laozi A 24

Fig. 13. typical vs. atypical forms of 天

Finally, a clear case of structural variation is the erroneous form of the character 聖 (for the word sheng {聲}) on slip five (see fig. 14 below). However, this form was not intentionally chosen by the scribe of *Min zhi fumu to write the word sheng {聲}; it is therefore not an indication of the scribe’s general degree of orthographic flexibility but can be clearly identified as an error of perseverative assimilation.23 When the scribe is about to write the character 聖 for the first time in this text, he inadvertently begins to write it just like 所, the one character whose form most resembles that of 聖 and which he has written no less than four times on the preceding two slips. After writing the two horizontal top strokes, which both characters have in common, he continues with the lower left component of 所, which is vertically oriented in a similar way as that of 聖. He then realizes his mistake and writes the rest of the character correctly, leaving the erroneous lower left component unchanged. The intended word is still identifiable by the character’s lower right component 呈, which carries the phonetic information.24 From this point onward, the scribe writes all further instances of 聖 correctly in all components. It probably helped that the word er 耳 was written immediately before the next instance of 聖 (this time standing for ting {聽}).

23 This type of error (alternatively called “progressive assimilation”) results from “errors in the motor commands involved in writing”: a graphic element is written wrongly, because the hand either repeats an immediately preceding similar graph or produces a graphic element that it has become accustomed to writing due to its frequency in the preceding text or in the writing system in general. The opposite type of error is anticipatory (or regressive) assimilation, which occurs “when a character component about to be written appears prematurely, usually in part due to some visual similarity to the target component.” Moser 1991, 32. 24 He Linyi (1998, 802) points out that the phonophoric component in the character 聖 (regardless whether used for the word shèng < *l̥eŋ-s {聖}, shēng < *l̥eŋ {聲} or tīng < *l̥ˤeŋ {聽}) is not the combined graph 呈 [*lreŋ > chéng], as stated in the Shuowen, but rather only its lower part: [*l̥ˤeŋʔ > tǐng]. Cf. Shuowen jiezi zhu pp. 58b and 592a. Paleographic Examination 47

所 erroneous form of 聖 correct form of 聖耳

3.23 5.29 6.17 6.15

Fig. 14. correct vs. erroneous forms of 聖

In a similar way as the forms of 喪 discussed above, the form of 聖 on slip five is another case not of different choices of character components to write the same word, as we know it from other manuscripts of the time, but a case of inadvertent misrepresentation of a character component, which usually do not cause a confident scribe much concern. An error like this could easily be tolerated, since it made the manuscript no less readable. The calligraphic examination of *Min zhi fumu has shown that this manuscript was written by an experienced scribe who was able to produce very regular forms and design individual strokes in a highly aesthetic fashion. The writing is confident and dynamic, tending toward a strong seg- mentation of the characters. The scribe does not seem to have paid much attention to or been aware of the systematic aspect of the writing system. In several instances, similarly shaped, frequently occurring character components are confused or not distinguished clearly enough. Inconsistencies of this nature are typical for experienced writers and often go along with a confident, brisk pace of writing rather than the meticulous but not entirely successful endeavors of an inexperienced scribe. A small number of slips of the brush as they occur in *Min zhi fumu could be tolerated, as long as the scribe still managed to make the character approximate its general form so that it could be recognized spontaneously and would not constitute a serious obstacle in reading. The orthography of the manuscript is perfectly regular and unambiguous. 48 chapter four

Chapter four

Presentation of the Text

The following presentation of the manuscript text—preparatory to a later, more detailed discussion of representative problems involved in establishing the text—gives an interpretive transcription, that is to say, it presents the words of the text in modern standard orthography.1 In order not to mislead readers, an interpretive transcription, which reflects the text on the lexical level, must always be rigorously and clearly distinguished from a direct transcription, which reflects the text on the graphic level, i.e., which represents the original character forms appropriately, using their corresponding graphic components in the modern writing system. Such a direct transcription makes the manuscript orthography transparent for readers who for various reasons—e.g., lack of paleographic expertise or just the poor visual quality of the manuscript—are unable to decipher the original characters. For the present purpose of introducing the manuscript text the appropriate type of transcription is the interpretive one; a direct transcription would conceal rather than reveal the qualities of the text. Nevertheless, some readings require at least a brief explanation, which will be provided in the footnotes. Some characters and their disputed readings will be discussed in more detail after the presentation of the text. They have been singled out for detailed discussion, either because they are representative examples of important methodological issues in reading a manuscript or because the characters affect the understanding of central concepts and hence the general import of the text. These latter cases will be discussed further below, in connection with the interpretation of the text. Conjectured missing characters are here given in square brackets. Numbers divided by a slash indicate where the text continues from one slip to the next. E.g., “1/2” indicates the end of slip one and the beginning of slip two. The line numbers to the left of the text merely serve to facilitate

1 The most accurate direct transcription of the text is given by Nishiyama Hisashi (Nishiyama et al. 2004, 3–47). For the few existing explicit discussions of transcription principles, see Boltz in Allan and Williams 2000, 40–41; Richter 2003; and Xing Wen 2005. Presentation of the Text 49 reference in the later dicussion of the text. They will then be indicated by “#.” 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

1 [子]夏問於孔子 Zixia asked Confucius:2 2 詩曰幾俤君子民之父母 “In the Odes it is said: ‘The joyous and easy gentleman is a parent to the people.’3 3 敢問何如而可謂民之父母 I make bold to ask: What must one be like to be called Parent of the People?”4 4 孔子答曰 Confucius replied, 5 民1/2[之]父母乎 “The Parent of the People:5 6 必達於禮樂之原 He must penetrate the sources of rites and music,6 7 以至五至 in order to reach the Five Presences,7 8 以行三亡 to practise the Three Without,8 9 以皇于天下 and to attain supremacy in All Under Heaven.

2 The first character on top of the slip must have been zi 子, part of the name Zixia 子夏, the style (zi 字) of Confucius’ disciple Bu Shang 卜商. The first preserved character has the structure <日+它>. Its reading as xià < *gˤraʔ {夏} is undisputed. Characters of the same structure are used in the Guodian manuscript *Tang Yu zhi dao (slip 13), the Shangbo manuscripts Rong cheng shi 容成氏 (slip 47), and Bao Shuya yu Xi Peng zhi jian 鮑叔牙與隰朋之諫 (slip 1) for the name Xia 夏, as well as in the Guodian and Shangbo *Zi yi manuscripts for the word ya < *ŋˤraʔ {雅}. The fact that later in the text Confucius refers to his interlocutor by his personal name Shang 商confirms this reading beyond doubt. 3 In the manuscript, the binome kǎi-tì < *C.qʰˤəjʔ-ḷˤəj-s 愷悌 is written as 幾俤. The expression occurs in several transmitted texts in varying orthography (e.g., as 豈弟, 凱悌, or 愷悌). The phrase min zhi fumu occurs in several early Chinese texts, where it is often treated as an Odes quotation. In the Odes it occurs five times, but only once in connection with “kaiti junzi”, i.e. in the ode Jiong zhuo 泂酌 (Mao 251). 4 The use of 女 [*nraʔ] for rú < *na {如}, 可 for both kě < *kʰˤajʔ {可} and hé < *gˤaj {何}, as well as <⼧+昏+耳> for wèn < *C.mun-s {問} and wén < *mun {聞} (‘to hear’) and 胃 [*gʷət-s] for wèi < *gʷət-s {謂} is standard orthographic practice of the time and remains consistent throughout this manuscript. 5 The missing 之 can be conjectured with certainty, because of the terminological use of the expression “民之父母” in the text. The character 父 is damaged but still clearly identifiable. The particle hū < *gˤa {乎} is written as 虎 (with an additional short horizontal crossing the right stroke of the 儿/人 component), i.e., with the phonophoric 虍 [*qʰˤra], as is common practice also in other Warring States manuscripts. 6 In reading character #2.10 as yuan 原/源 (‘origin’), I follow Ji Xusheng, who refers to He Linyi’s analysis of the character as consisting of the components 竹 over an early character form of 原, i.e., <厂+ 泉>. Ji Xusheng et al. 2003, 5–6. 7 Pu Maozuo reads the character 至 here as zhì {致}, obviously aiming to assimilate the text to the transmitted counterparts, which both have 致 in this position. 8 The character 亡 in this and other manuscripts of the time is usually transcribed or explained as 無. The printed presentation of the manuscript text says “亡(無),” without making an explicit statement as to whether the editors assume that the character 亡 was used to write the word wú {無} or whether they merely want to point out that, as I assume is the case, the word wáng {亡} is here used in the sense of “not have,” which is typically expressed in Classical and Literary Chinese with the word wú. 50 chapter four

10 四方有敗必先知之 If there is calamity anywhere, he must be the first to know it. 11 其2/3[可]謂民之父母矣 Such a one can indeed properly be called Parent of the People!”9 12 子夏曰 Zixia said, 13 敢問何謂五至 “I make bold to ask: What is it that one calls the Five Presences?” 14 孔子曰 Confucius replied, 15 五至乎 “The Five Presences: 16 物之所至者志亦至焉 Where external things are fully present, there will also be present intentions.10 17 志之3/4[所]至者禮亦至焉 Where intentions are fully present, there will also be present rites.11 18 禮之所至者樂亦至焉 Where rites are fully present, there will also be present music. 19 樂之所至者哀亦至焉 Where joy is fully present, there will also be present grief.12 20 哀樂相生 [*sreŋ] Grief and joy generate each other. 21 君子4/5以正 [*teŋ-s] The gentleman takes them as a corrective. 22 此之謂五至 This is what one calls the Five Presences.” 23 子夏曰 Zixia said, 24 五至既聞之矣 “Having heard about the Five Presences, 25 敢問何謂三亡 I make bold to ask: What is it that one calls the Three Without?” 26 孔子曰 Confucius replied, 27 三亡乎 “The Three Without: 28 亡聲之樂 Music without sound,

9 In supplementing 可 for the missing top of slip 3 I follow Ji Xusheng. See Ji Xusheng et al. 2003, 2 and 7. Qí {其} is consistently written as 亓 (never as 丌) in this manuscript. 10 The character 勿 for wù {物} is standard orthography of the time, as is that of zhì {志}. Pu Maozuo’s mistaken reading of these characters as zhì {志} and shī {詩}, respectively, will be discussed below. The word yān < *ʔan {焉} is usually written as only 女 with an added dot or short stroke, less often as 安. The form used consistently in this manuscript, i.e., 安 over an equivalent of 匕, is rare. 11 The top of the slip that must have borne the character 所 is broken off. Yet, faint traces of two strokes are in their form and position consistent with the lower left part of the character 所, which can also on the basis of the parallel phrasing be conjectured without doubt. Lǐ {禮} is in accordance with general Warring States orthography written as 豊. 12 The word āi {哀} is usually written as 哀, or ♇ or ✺ (the ‘heart’ component always at the bottom rather than on the left). *Min zhi fumu uses the latter form. For interpretation of 樂 as “music” and “joy,” respecitvely, see the remarks on this character in chapter three. Li Tianhong (2002, 84–89) and Wang Zhiping (2009, 99–100) also point out this ambiguity. Presentation of the Text 51

29 亡體5/6[之]禮 rites without embodiment,13 30 亡服之喪 mourning without garb—14 31 君子以此皇于天下 it is by these that the gentleman attains supremacy in All Under Heaven. 32 系耳而聽之 One may listen and watch ever so attentively, 33 不可得而聞[*mun]也 they are beyond the reach and ken 34 明目而視之 of even the keenest ear 35 不可6/7得而見[*kˤen-s]也 and the sharpest eye. 36 而德既塞於四海矣 Yet, their virtue has pervaded all within the Four Seas.15 37 此之謂三亡 This is what one calls the Three Without.” 38 子夏曰 Zixia asked, 39 亡聲之樂 “‘Music without sound, 40 亡體之禮 rites without embodiment, 41 亡服之喪 mourning without garb’— 42 何志7/8是邇 which intentions come close to these?”16 43 孔子曰 Confucius responded, 44 善哉商也 “How excellent Shang is!

13 The word tǐ {體} is consistently written in this manuscript as 桊. The component 肉 being placed on the left of the horizontal bottom stroke, next to what looks like an equivalent of a modern 口. However, in this first occurrence of the word on top of the slip almost the entire right half of the character is missing, because the right edge of the bottom of this slip has got shaved off where, the 肉 component is placed in the top left corner, shifting the top component 曲 to the right. (A superficial observer might miss the 肉 component at the bottom and confuse the combination of 肉 and the left half of 曲 with the similar shape of the two halves of 曲, thus coming to the conclusion that the 肉 component is missing in this character.) Of 之 at the damaged beginning of slip 6, only the bottom stroke is preserved. Yet, the parallelism of the text allows a confident conjecture of this character. 14 The word fú < *bək{服} is uniformly written as 備 [*brək-s] in this manuscript. This reading is further confirmed by the fact that the *Zi yi manuscripts of Guodian (slip 16) and the Shangbo collection (slip 9) both write the word fu {服} in the phrase “衣服不改” with the character 備 (the transmitted Liji counterpart has “衣服不貳”). Cf. Jingmen shi bowuguan 1998, 18, 130, and 133; Ma Chengyuan 2001–11, I.183–182. 15 In reading “德既” I follow Chen Jian 2004. Lian Shaoming (2007, 258–259) reads “德氣.” He is one of several scholars who try to assimilate these two words to “志氣” in the corresponding line of the transmitted versions. Entirely unrelated texts are adduced to support this reading, while the fact goes unnoticed that 氣 is all but invariably written with a ‘fire’ component, in *Min zhi fumu as well as in other Chu manuscripts. The only exception is the occurrence of a form with the ‘heart’ instead of the ‘fire’ component in Baoshan divinatory texts, which certainly has no bearing on the reading in *Min zhi fumu. 16 I follow Lin Suqing (2004, 232) in identifying the last character of this sentence as a combination of the semantic classifier 辵 and the phonophoric 耳 [*nəʔ] and hence reading it as the homophonous ěr < *nəʔ {邇}. See also Ji Xusheng et al. 2003, 12. Pu Maozuo, however, reads ní < *nrəj 尼. Both mean ‘close.’ Cf. Ma Chengyuan 2001–11, II.165. 52 chapter four

45 將可教詩矣 He is now ready to be taught odes. 46 成王不敢康 ‘King Cheng did not dare to idle. 47 夙夜基命宥密 Day and night he consolidated the foundations of the mandate with meticulous care.’17 48 亡聲之樂 —Music without sound. 49 威儀遲遲8/9[不可選也 ‘My dignified demeanor has always been steady, [nothing can be held against me.’18 50 亡體之禮 —Rites without embodiment. 51 凡民有喪匍匐救之 When among others there was a death, I crawled on my knees to help them.]19 52 亡服]之喪也 —Mourning [without garb].” 53 子夏曰 Zixia said, 54 其在語也美矣宏矣大矣 “It is beautiful, magnificent, and great how this is put into words!20 55 盡9/10[於此而已乎 (Has this explanation) exhausted (the subject) [and ends here?” 56 孔子曰 Confucius replied, 57 何為其然猶有五起焉 “How could this be so? There are still the Five Evocations.” 58 子夏曰] Zixia asked,] 59 可得而聞歟 “May I hear about these?” 60 孔子曰(?) Confucius replied:21 61 亡聲之樂 “Music without sound: 氣志不違 [*gʷəj]10/11 ‘Qi and intention are not opposed.’ 62 [亡]體之禮 Rites without embodiment: 威儀遲遲 [*lrəj] ‘My dignified demeanor has always been steady.’ 63 亡服之喪 Mourning without garb: 內恕洵悲 [*prəj] ‘Inner empathy and sincere grief.’22

17 This translation of the quote from the ode “Hao tian you cheng ming” 昊天有成命 (Mao 271), is in part based on Legge 1871, 575. Qu Wanli (1983, 561) reads 密 as bì < *prit-s {毖} (‘cautious’), explaining it as “謹慎” (‘cautious,’ ‘circumspect’). 18 This is a quote the from ode “Bo zhou” 柏舟 (Mao 26). For the rationale of the conjecture, see the detailed text-critical discussion below. 19 The translation of this quote the from ode “Gu feng” 谷風 (Mao 35) is cited from Legge (1871, 57). Italics are used here and in the translation of the missing first half of slip ten to indicate that the assumed text is conjectured, entirely based on external evidence. 20 Assuming that 午 [wǔ < ŋuX < *m.qʰˤaʔ] is the phonophoric of the character <言+ 午+又>, I follow Liu Xinfang 劉信芳 in reading this character as yǔ < ŋjoX < *ŋaʔ {語}. See Ji Xusheng et al. 2003, 19. 21 The character after Confucius’ name remains unidentified. Pu Maozuo reads it as yue {曰} or a synonym of this word. The regular structure of the dialogue makes clear that it must have some such meaning. See Ma Chengyuan 2001–11, II.169–170. 22 Both “恕” and “洵” are tentative readings. The former is based on the transmitted text. The manuscript character is typically used to write the first person pronoun wú < *ŋˤa {吾}. Its phonophoric 虍 [*qʰˤra] seems less suited for shù < *ṇa-s {恕}. In reading Presentation of the Text 53

64 亡聲之樂 Music without sound: 塞于四方 [*C.paŋ] ‘Pervading all within the Four Quarters.’ 65 亡體之禮 Rites without embodiment: 日逑月相 [*saŋ-s] ‘Daily assemble and monthly assist.’23 66 亡<體>服之11/12[喪] Mourning without garb: 純德同明 [*mraŋ] ‘Pure virtue uniformly bright.’24 67 亡聲之樂 Music without sound: 施及孫子 [*tsəʔ] ‘Extend it to future generations.’25 68 亡體之禮 Rites without embodiment: 塞于四海 [*ṃˤəʔ] ‘Pervading all within the Four Seas.’ 69 亡服之喪 Mourning without garb: 為民父母 [*məʔ] “Act as a parent to the people.’ 70 亡聲之樂 Music without sound: 氣12/13[志]既得 [*tˤək] ‘Qi and [intention] are attained.’ 71 亡體之禮 Rites without embodiment: 威儀翼翼 [*grək]26 ‘This dignified demeanor is magnificent.’ 72 亡服之喪 Mourning without garb: 施及四國 [*kʷˤək] ‘Extend it over the Four Territories.’ the following character as xún {洵} I follow Yang Zesheng (see Ji Xusheng et al. 2003, 20). For other proposed readings (such as 巽, 皆, 饌, 選, 贊, and 遜), see Nishida 2004, 40. 23 The translation is intentionally arbitrary. As will be explained in more detail in the later chapter about uses of the Odes, the lacking context does not allow us to determine with certainty the underlying meaning of the line and its function in relation to the idea of “rites without embodiment.” Hence, any choice among the several semantic aspects of qiu 逑 and xiang 相 is inevitably arbitrary. The two words overlap in the area of ‘counterpart’—qiu emphasizing the aspect of getting together and xiang that of facing each other. It is better to lay open the impossibility of determining the precise meaning of the line than to smooth it over by a likewise arbitrary choice of meaning that is merely less conspicuous or by assimilating the line to its transmitted counterparts. The Liji counterpart has “日就月將,” a verse from the ode “Jing zhi” 敬之 (Mao 288), which Legge translates as “daily progress and monthly advance” (Legge 1885, 280; cf. also Legge 1871, 599). Ji Xusheng understands the manuscript passage as synonymous with the transmitted Odes verse. However, he also points out that 逑 [qiú < *gu] is not a loan graph for jiù < *dzuk-s {就}, nor is 相 [xiāng < *saŋ / xiàng < *saŋ-s] for jiāng < *tsaŋ {將}. (Cf. Ji Xusheng et al. 2003, 20–21.) A graphic error is equally out of the question for either 逑<>就 or 相<>將. We can hence be sure that the difference between the corresponding lines in the manuscript and transmitted versions is not accidental but reflects an intentionally different text. 24 The regularity of the entire passage makes clear that the scribe, instead of writing 服, inadvertently repeated the character 體 from the preceding line #65. 25 The ligature 孫= in early manuscripts typically stands for zisun <*tsəʔ-sˤun {子孫}. In this passage, however, the rhyme requires the reading sunzi {孫子}. 26 Baxter and Sagart name the form with the velar final -k as a dialect variant of what they otherwise reconstruct as labial *grəp. The regular rhyme of the entire passage suggests that the variant with the velar final was used here. On the other hand, this does not rule out the pronunciation *grəp for this text. Assonance is often considered sufficient to facilitate memorization of didactic texts. Especially words with Middle Chinese entering tones frequently occur as quasi-rhymes across the -p, -t, and -k distinctions. 54 chapter four

73 亡聲之樂 Music without sound: 氣志既從 [*dzoŋ] ‘Qi and intention are satisfied.’ 74 亡體之禮 Rites without embodiment: 上下和同 [*lˤoŋ] ‘Superiors and subordinates are in harmony and unified.’ 75 亡服13/14[之]喪 Mourning without garb: 以畜萬邦 [*pˤroŋ] ‘Employ it to support the Myriad States.’ The Extension of *Min zhi fumu 55

Chapter five

The Extension of *Min zhi fumu

The end of the text, directly after this long, monotonous catalogue, appears rather abrupt, which raises the question of whether the text is complete. The extension of a text is one of the crucial aspects of its identity, and before any interpretation of the text can be attempted, we must assure ourselves of its delineations and remember that the extension of a text and the extension of a manuscript are not the same thing. Especially for a text like *Min zhi fumu, which comes from an ancient manuscript reconstructed from disintegrated pieces, we cannot assume completeness of the text without explicit indications to that effect. In the presentation of the text given above, we could account for the lost top ends of most of the preserved slips, but we cannot be sure whether entire slips might be missing. It needs to be emphasized that completeness of the text and completeness of the manuscript are different issues that must be considered separately. That a long text stretches over more than one physical manuscript is a theoretical possibility, but it is not characteristic for early China; conversely, cases of one manuscript bearing more than one text have been attested repeatedly. As for the completeness of the manuscript, we cannot be sure what its extension was for several reasons. Even a controlled and fully documented excavation, in which all objects found in the tomb are accounted for, cannot guarantee completeness of the interred manuscripts. We must always reckon with the possibility that some slips had perished before excavation. A looted manuscript like the one bearing the text *Min zhi fumu is fraught with a yet higher degree of uncertainty. We do not have the information about the mud block from which this manuscript was extracted, which we would need, in order to ascertain whether or not bamboo slips in this block could have been separated from originally connected other slips in the same or an adjacent similar block that was not purchased by the Shanghai Museum. It is also possible that any number of slips belonging to the same manuscript may have been lost (or separated from those of *Min zhi fumu) somewhere on the way between its looting from an unknown tomb at an unknown time and the point where the fourteen slips containing *Min zhi 56 chapter five fumu were purchased by the Shanghai Museum and became part of a more or less well-documented process of treatment. Again, as students of the manuscript as it has been published by the Shanghai Museum, we must make do with the sparse information provided in the publications and sometimes with personal communication of uncertain reliability. We need always to stay aware of this limitation in our work with the manuscripts. Had the manuscript in question consisted of more than the fourteen slips we have now, this could mean either that the text *Min zhi fumu is incomplete or that it is complete but constitutes only part of a manuscript that contained more than one text. Manuscripts, after all, often contain several texts, sometimes even written in different hands. The other possibility—viz. that these fourteen bamboo slips alone did form a complete manuscript—does not intuitively appear likely, since these slips, bound together, would form a manuscript of not much over ten centimeters width but at the same time a sizeable height of 46 centimeters. Such a long, narrow object must have been awkward to hold and read.1 It would be interesting to know whether there was a practice of adding blank slips to the beginnings and ends of such small manuscripts, so that readers could hold the unrolled manuscript by these blank slips while reading it, instead of having to cover some of the text with their thumbs. So far, no evidence of such a practice has been reported. It has been argued that the text published under the title *Min zhi fumu was indeed only part of a more extensive manuscript, containing at least one other text. Li Ling 李零 has criticized the title *Min zhi fumu as inappropriate, since the the text, so he asserts, was copied together with three other texts, by which he apparently implies that the four texts were bound together as one manuscript. He specifies only one of these other texts unambiguously, i.e., *Wu wang jian zuo 武王踐阼, and describes the other two as related to Confucius’ disciples Yan Yuan 顏淵 and Zilu 子路.2 One of the latter two texts is apparently *Yan Yuan wen yu Kongzi 顏淵問於孔子, which has already been mentioned above in the context of the paleographic examination of *Min zhi fumu as written in a very similar style. Liu Hongtao 劉洪濤 argues confidently that *Min zhi fumu and *Wu

1 It is of course conceivable that manuscripts were unrolled and laid on a table for the purpose of reading. Various kinds of tables and stands are attested for early China (see Sun Ji 1990, especially pp. 220–224). Pictorial representations of readers from early China suggest, however, that written documents were usually held in two hands for perusal. See, for example, figs. 70-22 and 70-23 in Sun Ji 1990, 278. 2 See Li Ling 2007b, 46. The Extension of *Min zhi fumu 57 wang jian zuo originally formed one integral manuscript.3 This judgment rests on a correspondence between the two groups of slips in (a) format, position of bindings, and layout; (b) handwriting; and (c) state of preservation. Of these, the third argument is the most persuasive. As in the case of *Min zhi fumu, the slips of *Wu wang jian zuo are well preserved in almost their entire length. Only the tops above the upper bindings are damaged or broken off. Liu hence assumes that these slips must have been in the same mud block that also contained *Min zhi fumu. This makes it likely that the two groups once formed one manuscript but there is no way of establishing this with certainty. Laying aside the question of whether *Min zhi fumu alone is a complete manuscript as unanswerable, we can still confidently assert that the text *Min zhi fumu is complete. Its end is unambiguously indicated by a text terminator mark. Since this type of mark will play a central role in the following chapter, suffice to say at this point that we can identify the mark at the end of slip fourteen with certainty as one that indicates the end of a complete text, rather than that of a section of a longer text.4 The fact that after this mark the slip is left blank additionally confirms that the text ends here (see fig. 15). While text terminator marks or at least blank spaces provide clear indications for the ends of texts, their beginnings are not as easy to ascertain in Warring States manuscripts. The text of the first slip always begins either directly on top of this slip or after a margin, but always in exactly the same position as on the other slips of the manuscript. Indentations, i.e., leaving blank space and commencing the text further down in the first column of text is not a known practice in early China. In manuscripts with literary texts, the use of text initiator marks on top of the first column or in the margin begins only in the early empire.5 Even if there had been an initiator mark in this manuscript, it would have been lost with the missing top of the first slip. So in *Min zhi fumu, too, we have no explicit indication of the beginning of the text on a non-verbal level, i.e., in the materiality of the

3 See Liu Hongtao 2009. 4 These hook-shaped marks, recognizable by their larger size compared with other marks, are consistently used at the end of integral texts. In some manuscripts they are used in contradistinction to marks that indicate the ends of sections within one text (section terminators). This explicit distinction between the delineations of the main text from those of its subordinate parts is particularly noteworthy, since it constitutes evidence of a sense of textual hierarchy. For a comprehensive introduction to punctuation in early Chinese manuscripts, see Richter “Punctuation” (forthcoming). 5 See Richter “Punctuation” (forthcoming). Fig. 15. 58 chapter five manuscript alone. Nonetheless we can be sure that the name of Zixia on top of slip one and his question, which opens his dialogue with Confucius, are indeed the beginning of this text. But this assurance rests on a combination of both material and textual factors. To start with the material factors, were we to assume that this passage is not the beginning of the text, this would imply that Zixia’s question, which triggers Confucius’ mention of the Five Presences and Three Without, foreshadowing the entire rest of the text, by pure happenstance coincides with the beginning of a new slip. This might appear less coincidental if we further assume that Zixia’s question is the beginning of a new section of a longer text, and the individual sections of this longer text begin with a column break, i.e., on top of a new slip, as is common practice in other contemporary manuscripts, most famously the Guodian Laozi counterparts. However, if this were the case, we would expect to see the same practice of marking section divisions elsewhere in the extant fourteen slips of this manuscript. But the text on these slips is written continuously without any marks or spaces indicating the structure of the text. We can therefore exclude the possibility that an entire section of text is missing. In terms of the textual factors, the words “Zixia asked Confucius” (子夏問於孔子) at the beginning of *Min zhi fumu are perfectly satisfactory opening words for a text composed in the form of a dialogue. Similar didactic dialogues in early Chinese literature often begin with such a short phrase, merely naming the interlocutors, without placing the dialogue in any narrative context. Yet, to a reader who recognizes *Min zhi fumu as a counterpart of two transmitted versions in the Liji and Kongzi jiayu, respectively, the beginning of the manuscript text may appear somewhat abrupt. It lacks the short narrative passage at the beginning of the text, which in the transmitted versions sets the scene for the subsequent dialogue. The Liji version begins as follows: Confucius dwelt in leisure. Zixia attended. Zixia said, “I make bold to ask: It is said in the Odes ‘The joyous and easy gentleman is a parent to the people.’ What must one be like to be thus called Parent of the People?” 孔子閒居。子夏侍。子夏曰：敢問詩云凱弟君子民之父母。何如斯可謂民之父母矣？6

6 Liji zhuzi suoyin 138.3–4. Here and in the following, Liji and Kongzi jiayu are cited after the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Institute of Chinese Studies Ancient Chinese Concordance Series. The Extension of *Min zhi fumu 59

The narrative introduction consists of three separate elements, which name, however briefly: first, Confucius’ situation (“Confucius dwelt in leisure”); second, the attending disciple (“Zixia attended”); and third, the disciple addressing his master (“Zixia said”). The Kongzi jiayu merges these three into one sentence: “Zixia sat attending Confucius and said” (子夏侍坐於孔子曰). The reason for this seemingly insignificant discrepancy lies in the different redactional strategies of the Liji and Kongzi jiayu. Both compilations present two separate scenes of instruction in the same sequence. However, the Liji places each in a separate chapter. The first scene takes up the entire chapter “Zhongni yan ju” 仲尼燕居 (‘Confucius dwelt at home’), and the second scene, which is parallel to *Min zhi fumu, constitutes the shorter chapter “Kongzi xian ju” 孔子閒居 (‘Confucius dwelt in leisure’).7 Kongzi jiayu, on the other hand, molds these two scenes into one continuous chapter, titled “Lun li” 論禮 (‘Disquisition on ritual’). The titling practice alone betrays interesting differences between the manuscript, Liji, and Kongzi jiayu versions.8 The manuscript has no original title, and Pu Maozuo appropriately chose the three words “min zhi fumu” from the text as representative of its main topic and thus qualifying as a thematic title. The two Liji chapters do have titles, but these are of a pragmatic, indexical nature, merely using the opening words as a means of reference to the text, about whose content they give no information. It is not known whether these titles were given by the time the texts entered the compilation Liji or at a later point in time or, perhaps, even before. Kongzi jiayu, on the other hand, uses a programmatic title, which explicitly names ritual as a common denominator of these two scenes, lending them greater ideological consistency and suggesting to the reader a similar interpretive approach to their otherwise significantly different content. The title as an interpretive key shifts the focus in the Kongzi jiayu version from the accomplished ruler, a Parent of the People, to the more general topic of ritual. That these two scenes, which Kongzi jiayu transforms into parts of one text, were originally two different texts in their own right becomes apparent on several levels. Although both are related to the topic of ritual, they

7 This traditional interpretation of the opening phrase “Zhongni yan ju” 仲尼燕居 is based on Zheng Xuan’s 鄭玄 (127–200) comment 退朝而處曰燕居, cited by Sun Xidan 孫希旦 (1736–1784) in Liji jijie p. 1267. The phrase yan ju is used in the same sense in Lunyu 7.4: 子之燕居，申申如也，夭夭如也 (rendered by D.C. Lau as “During his leisure moments, the Master remained correct though relaxed.”), Lau 1992, 57. 8 On text titles in early Chinese manuscripts, see Lin Qingyuan 2004 and Zhang Xiancheng 2004. 60 chapter five nevertheless ultimately treat different subject matters: the discourse on ritual in the second scene, which is the counterpart of *Min zhi fumu, is narrowly focused on the ruler and on the role of the Odes. The first scene is much more concrete, and it has a broader scope, embracing more diverse subjects. In its first part, Confucius discusses specific types of ritual and relates them to the appropriate areas of social life whose order they are designed to preserve. In a second part he talks on a fundamental level about the indispensability of ritual for all walks of life, and in the third and last part he describes an unnamed ritual in detail, as a sequence of nine elements, rounded off by concluding general statements emphasizing the mutual dependence of ritual and music. This scene of instruction about different aspects of ritual practice is opened in the Liji with the following narrative introduction: Confucius dwelt in leisure. Zizhang, Zigong and Yan You were attending him. When the discussion got to the topic of ritual, Confucius said, “Sit down, you three. I will tell you about ritual and make you apply ritual all around so that there is nothing it does not reach.” 仲尼燕居，子張子貢言游侍，縱言至於禮。子曰：「居！女三人者，吾語女禮，使女以禮周流，無不徧也。9 The first two elements—i.e., Confucius’ situation and attending disciples— are identical to those in the following chapter. The third, however, is less abrupt and portrays the following dialogue as part of a more extended discourse. The narrative language in “Zhongni yan ju” zooms in, as it were, to the very part of this longer discourse (“when the discussion got to the topic of ritual”), where the didactic content begins. This introduction— besides the fact that it leads to the teacher beginning the instruction rather than Zixia opening the dialogue—presents a more natural flow of narrative language than the staccato “Confucius dwelt in leisure, Zixia attended, Zixia said” in “Kongzi xian ju.” The quality of the text following the introduction is also more narrative in “Zhongni yan jiu”: The disciples take turns asking their master questions. The narrator describes how they approach the master to ask their question and how they then, when he has concluded his discourse on the topic, step back and the next student comes forward. All of these descriptive elements, in which the interlocutors are shown in visually evocative language in a certain situation, are absent from the second scene, which merely names the interlocutors and is otherwise strictly confined to direct speech.

9 Liji zhuzi suoyin 136.22–23. The Extension of *Min zhi fumu 61

Considering the fact that the manuscript counterpart does not have the first two of the three elements and begins directly with the question, it becomes evident that this scene of instruction must have been without a narrative frame, before it was associated with the longer scene narrated in “Zhongni yan ju.” The first two form elements (Confucius’ situation, attending disciple) were added to the beginning of “Kongzi xian ju” as a means of creating greater coherence between these two subsequent chapters in the compilation Liji. A similar coherence is achieved by concluding both scenes with the narrator’s voice describing the students as impressed with the words of their master. “Zhongni yan ju” ends with the words: “When the three disciples had heard these words from their master, they were enlightened, as if awakened from blindness” 三子者，既得聞此言也於夫子，昭然若發矇矣.10 The end of “Kongzi xian ju” is even more dramatic: “Zixia agitatedly jumped to his feet, stood with his back against the wall and said, ‘Would your disciple dare not to respectfully receive this (instruction)?’” 子夏蹶然而起，負牆而立，曰：「弟子敢不承乎？」11 While the Liji creates coherence by constructing and emphasizing par- allelity between the two chapters, Kongzi jiayu, in order to fashion these two into one coherent chapter has to make these features less conspicuous, thus reducing the obviousness of two parallel narratives and creating a smoother transition from the first scene of instruction to the second, as if the latter were the former’s continuation. This treatment as a continuation of the first scene results in a different interpretive bent of the second: The reader is more inclined to read it as an aspect of the broader topic of ritual, rather than as the description of the high standard of qualities of a ruler. These standards are illustrated by Odes quotations and achieved through ritual, in which the Odes play a prominent role. Having considered the textual framing of the transmitted versions, we can now combine the textual and material aspects involved in the question of whether the extant manuscript text *Min zhi fumu is complete. Based on the textual features, we can confidently place the three versions in a historical sequence of three stages of development of this text, leading from the manuscript version via Liji to Kongzi jiayu, of course without implying that the three texts are related in a direct line. This development makes the absence of a narrative introduction in the manuscript very likely. But even if we were not convinced by the textual evidence alone and assumed

10 Liji zhuzi suoyin 137.32. 11 Liji zhuzi suoyin 139.6–7. 62 chapter five that such an introduction must have existed and somehow been lost in the manuscript, the combination of textual and material evidence excludes this possibility. The only evidence of narrative introductions to this text would, even in its longest attested form, consist of but half a dozen words and would take up less than a quarter of the writing space of one slip. Among the excavated manuscripts from early China with literary texts, there is none that begins with only a few characters on the first slip, leaving the rest of this slip blank. Thus we can confidently assert that the fourteen published slips contain the complete text *Min zhi fumu, and that this text indeed begins and ends more abruptly than its transmitted counterparts. As a result of the above discussion we see that even the apparently simple question of determining the beginning and end of a manuscript text can, if examined with due thoroughness, reveal important qualities of the text; and, when parallel texts are involved, it can reveal processes of textual accretion, transmission, and reinterpretation. While didactic texts that are closely tied to a social context can do without explicit textual means of contextualization, the same textual material, when it has become part of a more substantial literary text, tends to be embedded in introduc- tory language providing an interpretive key as well as with summarizing or definitory phrases at the end. The redactional work, the process of craft- ing literary prose out of plainer didactic texts that we can observe in this one example, is representative for the history of other early Chinese texts as well. Moreover, it is important for us to bear in mind how meaningfully the three versions differ from each other when, in the following, we move on to discuss individual words of the text and argue that some readings that have previously been suggested unduly aim to assimilate the manuscript text to its transmitted counterparts. Criteria for Deciding on Disputed Readings 63

PART two The Divergence of Manuscript Text and Transmitted Counterparts: A Review of Homogenizing Readings 64 chapter six Criteria for Deciding on Disputed Readings 65

Chapter six

A Hierarchy of Criteria for Deciding on Disputed Readings

The manuscript text *Min zhi fumu differs from its transmitted counterparts not only in its extension and in the employment of various narrative elements that in the transmitted versions serve to better integrate this scene of instruction into a greater text and to lend the compilation a certain degree of coherence. The very text within these boundaries differs, too, and these differences are just as revealing with regard to changing concepts of texts and modes of literary composition, as well as in terms of intellectual history. However, the extent to which we are able appropriately to identify and interpret the actual divergence between these parallel texts, and hence what we can learn from comparing them, depends on the methodology we apply to reading them; and our methodological approaches are naturally informed by general assumptions about early Chinese textual culture. The various suggested readings of the manuscript text reflect the incli- nation of scholars either to accept divergence or to homogenize the parallel texts and make the newly discovered manuscript text consistent with the existing literary heritage. We can certainly assume that scholars do not wilfully deny the texts a diversity that they actually recognize, just because they deem it undesirable. Thus, their homogenizing readings must be based on an implicit assumption that the divergence of the texts is a surface phenomenon, concealing rather than revealing the “true” text. They consider the texts in question to be fundamentally identical and understand the apparent differences between them as accidental rather than intentional, which leads to the conclusion that the divergent elements reflect distortions of an original text, which they then aim to correct. However, we have become increasingly aware that such a concept of fixed texts, whose written representations we can expect to be identical, is not generally applicable to early China. Even before the last decades brought to light a great number of original manuscript texts from that period, transmitted literature had already provided us with ample evidence of a general fluidity in the early history of texts, i.e., patterns of divergence that cannot be explained simply in terms of transmission errors. Rather, these diver- 66 chapter six gences reflect a general praxis of free, creative use of existing texts and the absence of authors who jealously protect their own creations as private intellectual property, which they hope to pass on unharmed to future generations. As a rule, the relation between texts is complex and impossible to establish in every detail. Early Chinese literature abounds with examples of parallel texts (i.e., entire texts that are identical in structure and wording to an extent that cannot be coincidental) or textual parallels (genetically related smaller units of text, ranging from short phrases to entire sections of text); these parallel textual units occur in different compilations and were usually adapted to their different uses in these host texts, in particular to the respective ideological orientations and goals of the social groups in which these compilations originated.1 Bearing in mind that only a small portion of the texts that must have existed in early China have been transmitted (or recently discovered), it is unrealistic to assume that one of two or more parallel texts available to us is the original and the other a variation, if not a distortion, of it. Hence, any attempt to remedy the divergences by emendations or interpretations that make the texts more identical or consistent with each other can only result in producing an artificial new text that never existed before and is of no historical source value. We must take the divergent texts as related, yet different texts in their own right and must attempt to understand the processes that produced these differences. A further factor that needs to be considered is that even readers who are aware of textual fluidity and hence prepared to accept differences between parallel texts may be influenced by preconceived ideas about which kinds of differences are to be expected and which are unlikely. This requires us to reflect on what we understand by textual fluidity. Li Ling describes this phenomenon in rather broad terms: The majority of books from the early period were composed as the occasion demanded by combining together short textual units. As they circulated, they generally lacked a unified structure, and hence there was a great chance that they were rearranged and additions and alterations were made to them. There was no stability in how these textual units were divided up or combined with each other, and what got lost or survived was subject to chance.

1 For an extensive analytical study of two parallel texts (Yi Zhoushu 逸周書 58, “Guan ren jie” 官人解, and Da Dai Liji 大戴禮記 72, “Wen wang guan ren” 文王官人) and their numerous textual parallels in other early Chinese texts, including an inquiry into the historical origins of this textual tradition, see Richter 2005a. Criteria for Deciding on Disputed Readings 67

Authors and readers alike could take great liberties (作者的自由度比較大, 讀者的自由度也比較大).2 Li Ling does not, of course, claim to give a precise, detailed description of the nature of textual fluidity, but it still needs to be emphasized that the dichotomy of authors and readers that he uses in this brief statement is not representative of the complexity of early Chinese textual culture. The broader term “users” seems better suited to accommodate the various roles that recipients of texts could have played. These users may have made their first acquaintance with the text through a written version of it, either by reading it themselves or by listening to someone else reading aloud. More likely, they may have heard the text from someone, e.g., a teacher, who spoke the text from memory or even composed it while speaking. Once acquainted with the text, users may have recited the text themselves on some occasion. They may have put the text down in writing—either copying a written version or writing from memory or after someone else’s dicta- tion. Each of these modes of using a text has a potential to generate textual changes of different kinds. This includes even the mere acts of reading or hearing a hitherto unknown text. Reading and hearing errors are, after all, known sources of textual change. More interesting than inadvertent changes to the text is the fact that, as Li Ling suggests, the users of a text often took considerable liberties in reproducing it—in the act of copying just as much as in recitation. It is impossible to draw a clear line between, on the one hand, reproducing a text with some intentional or inadvertent alterations and, on the other hand, producing a new text that is intended to convey the information of the previous text in a different way or to convey different information altogether. The difference between these two is gradual, and our decision about which of the two is the case will depend on how we assess the nature of the changes and the intention behind them. To identify precisely which changes were made to an existing text in the act of reproducing it—or producing a new text from it—in a particular instance, we would need both the source text and the resulting text, i.e., two witnesses that are related directly, without any intermediary steps. The only chance to reliably establish such a relationship is between two written texts of which we can be sure one was copied from the other. Aside

2 Li Ling 2008, 214. 68 chapter six from very few exceptions we do not have such material.3 Hence, we can only compare texts that represent frozen moments in a history of textual fluidity. Hardly ever are we able to date an early Chinese text precisely, but we can often place the texts in a fairly broad approximate time-frame. If we are able to establish which of the related witnesses are earlier and which are later, we can at least identify tendencies of textual history, even if we cannot attribute the changes to a particular author or redactor. When Li Ling problematizes the notion of an author for early China and discusses the classical terminology relating to authorship and book production, he points out that the creation of new ideas and the perpetuation of existing texts are inextricably intertwined and that, when it comes to the production of written texts, the author function can hardly be detached from that of a redactor or editor.4 This implicitly presupposes that texts are not only, as described above, freely altered in the process of their transmission but that wholly new texts are composed, using pre-formed textual units. William Boltz has referred to this phenomenon as “the composite nature of early Chinese texts,” and he asserts “that this composite structure is more of a norm than an exception in the periods before the empire.”5 Based on the finding that the correspondence between the transmitted texts of the Zhou yi 周易, Laozi 老子, and the Liji chapter “Ziyi” 緇衣 and their manuscript counterparts is much closer within the several distinct units of these texts than the correspondence in the order of these units, Boltz finds that transmitted texts that have manuscript counterparts … typically show themselves to be constructed out of individual textual units of about a ‘paragraph’ in length … and the order in which these building blocks come, together with whatever other, nonmatching passages may have been introduced, is a consequence of the vicissitudes of a text’s compositional history.6

3 The Mawangdui silk manuscripts *Xing de A and B are one of the few known cases of two manuscripts that are directly related as model and copy (see Kalinowski 2005, 152–163). In another case of copy and model, i.e., the Shangbo manuscripts *Tianzi jian zhou 天子建州 A and B, no changes of the text whatever are involved (see Richter 2009). This pair of manuscripts, published in volume 6 of the Shanghai Museum Chu manuscript collection, as well as three more pairs published in volume 7 (i.e., *Zhengzi jia sang 鄭子家喪 A and B, *Jun ren zhe he bi an zai 君人者何必安哉 A and B, Fan wu liu xing 凡物流形 A and *Fan wu liu xing B), are most probably writing exercises and thus not representative of the general history of textual transmission. See Ma Chengyuan 2001–11, VI–VII. 4 Li Ling 2008, 210–213. In a similar vein, William Boltz (2005, 60) refers to the Laozi as “as much an editorial enterprise as it is an authorial one.” 5 Boltz 2005, 51. 6 Boltz 2005, 58. In addition to this article, Boltz has also discussed the relation of the Guodian Laozi counterparts to the received text in an earlier study (Boltz 1999). For the Criteria for Deciding on Disputed Readings 69

The three transmitted texts and their respective manuscript counterparts on which Boltz bases his discussion of the movability of building blocks all share the feature that their textual units, which we recognize as building blocks, are not related in a hierarchical order, and this non-hierarchical relation between these units is the condition for their movability. Such texts are indeed typical, especially for the pre-imperial period. We can find a similar composite structure in other texts—most famously in the Lunyu, but also, if perhaps less obvious, in other Liji chapters besides “Zi yi,” in parts of the Da Dai Liji 大戴禮記, the Guanzi 管子, certainly the Shuoyuan 說苑, Yanzi chunqiu 晏子春秋, and other compilations. However, a great number of other texts build their originally independent and still recognizably distinct textual units into an explicitly meaningful order that then makes their sequence more stable. This order can be motivated in different ways: it may be a systematizing approach, with even a claim to cosmo- logical significance, as in the structure of Lü shi chunqiu 呂氏春秋, or it may be a merely pragmatic indexical pattern as provided by the jing 經 catalogues that structure the “Chu shuo” 儲說 chapters of Hanfeizi 韓非子.7 More commonly, the redactional techniques used to integrate such smaller pre-formed textual units into larger texts are yet more diverse; this material may be used as elements in logically consistent argumentative texts or it may be converted into prose texts by building them into simple narrative frameworks (the minimal form being a dialogue) or by using additional paratextual elements (e.g., catalogues of didactic items are numbered or given a name that can serve to refer to all the items collec- tively elsewhere in the text). These paratextual elements can have an indexical function and facilitate memorization. Naturally, such creative uses of pre-formed textual units in more extensive texts stabilize their order (or at least impose restrictions on their movability) by lending the text a basic structure that governs the arrangement of the individual units, but they also occasion changes within these “building blocks.” We will hence have to expect different patterns of variability in texts of this kind.

Mawangdui and Guodian Laozi counterparts, see also Henricks 1989 and 2000 (specifically on the question of chapter division in Laozi, also Henricks 1979 and 1982). The study of the Mawangdui Zhou yi which Boltz refers to in the article cited above is Shaughnessy 1996. For studies of the Guodian and Shanghai Museum Zi yi manuscripts and their relation to the transmitted text, see Boltz 2002, Kern 2005b, and Shaughnessy 2006. 7 Heng Du (2010) interprets the “guidelines” (jing 經) prefacing the anecdote collections in these chapters as an indexical device superimposed on an existing collection, rather than an original underlying structure that guided the later arrangement of anecdotes. 70 chapter six

Once we acknowledge the composite nature and variability in early Chinese texts, we have to reject homogenizing approaches to parallel texts, since by concealing rather than revealing differences between the texts they squander much of the valuable information that the manuscripts have to offer, subjugating these original sources from early China to the authority of existing traditions. If we hope to learn something new about the past, we need to allow the new sources to speak for themselves and only then relate the information they yield to our previous knowledge. This means that when we identify and interpret the manuscript characters to establish the manuscript text, we need to rank internal criteria before external ones, in the following order:8 Internal criteria: (1) manuscript orthography; (2) logical coherence in the manuscript text. External criteria: (3) orthography in closely related other manuscripts; (4) textual parallels in other manuscripts or transmitted literature; (5) general usage in Classical Chinese language and script. The first and most potent criterion for deciding on the reading of a particular character has to be the specific orthographic regularity that can be observed in the manuscript in question, rather than a general assumption that words could be written with any character associated with a pronunciation that is close enough to make it a viable loan character. One might object that this principle creates a hermeneutic circle, since any observation of orthographic regularity is already based on reading the characters; but fortunately this is only a theoretical problem. In practice most manuscript characters are perfectly unambiguous in their graphic identity, and their reading can be established beyond doubt. Discussions of early Chinese orthography are often phrased in terms so general that they suggest an unrealistic degree of orthographic flexibility. This leads scholars to believe a character can stand for any word as long as its standard phonetic value is sufficiently similar to use it as a possible loan graph. However, in practice there is much more consistency in a particular manuscript or within a certain corpus of manuscripts, and the patterns of variability are not the same within such limited scopes of inquiry than they seem to be if we define the range of graphic variation based on all accumulated variants over centuries of manuscript production in a wide geographic area.9 The actual irregularities with which we have to struggle tend to be so much in

8 I have first suggested a similar hierarchy of criteria in Richter 2005b. 9 For studies of orthography that follow a corpus-based approach, see Galambos 2005 and 2006. Criteria for Deciding on Disputed Readings 71 the foreground that it is easy to overlook the equally real dependable regularities. Therefore, it is important to emphasize strongly that many words, especially frequent ones, are written in perfectly regular orthography. To name just a few examples, words written today as 也, 夫, 然, 之, 易, 異, 用, 出, 人, 民, 馬, 必, 先, 相, 自, 曰, 眾, 言, 虛, 行, 為 are always written with the same, easily recognizable character, although this character may differ in shape, less often in structure, from the modern one. The orthography is still unambiguous in cases of characters that may or may not have additional parallel strokes outside their top or bottom horizontal strokes (e.g., 上, 下, 而, 不, 天, 虛, 至). There are even cases of different degrees of abbreviating a character that do not result in orthographic ambiguity. For example, the characters 其, 亓, and 丌 indubitably always stand for the word qi {其}.10 Thanks to this high degree of orthographic regularity, a large portion of manuscript texts can be established fairly reliably. The uncertain readings of a manuscript text usually concern a very limited number of characters. On the basis of the undisputed readings we can therefore determine the orthographic regularities within a manuscript and then closely examine the cases that deviate from this pattern. Assuming that a scribe who usually writes a word {A} with the character is not likely, without any apparent reason, to write the same word in a singular case with the character , and also that a scribe who regularly uses a character to write the word {X} and maybe also the word {Y}, is not likely to suddenly use the same character for the word {Z}, we can reexamine those readings that contradict the orthography of the document in question. If an alternative reading that accords with the orthographic regularities we observe elsewhere in the manuscript (criterion 1) results in a logical text (criterion 2), we will have to accept it, even if the resulting text differs from a parallel text (criterion 4) or from the ideology that the text supposedly represents or from what we have come to know, based on other sources, as the typical language of the time (criterion 5).

10 Paleographic dictionaries (wenzi bian 文字編)—especially those that collect all instances of a certain character in the corpus whose script they represent—make the existing element of constancy in the writing system impressively obvious. For the Shangbo manuscripts, e.g., see Li Shoukui et al. 2007. A limitation that needs to be remembered when using such paleographic dictionaries is that they do not always make explicit whether an entry contains all forms of the same character or the characters used to write the same word. 72 chapter six

Only if the reading that is based on the general manuscript orthography (criterion 1) is unlikely, because it would lead to a logically inconsistent text (criterion 2 negative), must we conclude that internal criteria do not suffice to establish the reading, requiring us then to consider other readings, based on external criteria. Among these, orthographic regularities in closely related manuscripts (criterion 3), starting with manuscripts that share the same production standard or come from the same site, will rank before textual parallels in other manuscripts or received literature (criterion 4) or—the least potent of all criteria—general usage (criterion 5). Scholars who aim to homogenize manuscript texts with other manuscripts or with transmitted literature or with presumed ideological affiliations obviously rank the criteria for deciding the reading of manuscript characters differently. In the following, we shall review different types of such homogenizing readings in *Min zhi fumu and demonstrate how important information is lost through such homogenization. variants of Little Consequence 73

Chapter seven

Variants of Little Consequence for the Content of the Text

Before we discuss those readings of great consequence for the general import of the text, we shall review a number of cases in which homogenizing readings have been suggested that would leave the content of the text almost entirely unaffected and are therefore frequently treated in a non- chalant fashion. What makes precision in these cases nevertheless important is the fact that such seemingly insignificant acts of assimilating the manuscript to its transmitted counterparts create a false sense of identity between different versions and ultimately let other readings that argue for differences in the central ideas of the respective texts appear more surprising or even unlikely than they really are.

(1) wáng < *maŋ 亡 (or wǎng < *maŋʔ) vs. wú < *ma 無: In Warring States manuscripts from the Chu area, the second most frequent negation—next to the negation of verbs by bù 不—is one that expresses the meaning ‘not have,’ ‘not exist,’ ‘be absent’ and is written as 亡 (the manuscript character more closely resembles the old form 亾, which has become almost obsolete). Pu Maozuo’s transcription (shiwen 釋文) of *Min zhi fumu consistently writes “亡(無),” declaring 亡 at its first occurrence to be interchangeable with 無.1 This statement does not specify whether the two characters 亡 and 無 are interchangeable in the sense that they can equally be used to write the same word and, if so, what word this is. Presumably it would be the word wú < *ma {無}, commonly used in Classical Chinese to express the meaning ‘not have.’ Most transcriptions of Chu manuscripts, not just of the text *Min zhi fumu, routinely use the same representation “亡(無)” without any annotation whatever, apparently assuming this too obvious a case to require comment. Nishiyama treats the problem in a less laconic way and devotes an entire paragraph to the issue, explaining that 亡 and 無 are frequently used interchangeably, in transmitted literature and manuscripts alike, as loan graphs.2 This may

1 Ma Chengyuan 2001–11, II.157: “「亡」，通「無」。” 2 Nishiyama et al. 2004, 12. 74 chapter seven appear to be an inconsequential issue that does not merit discussion, since the meaning of the word represented by 亡 is entirely clear and undisputed. However, if we examine the rationale behind the decision to read either wú {無} or wáng {亡}, it has important implications for the assumptions we make about the production of manuscripts and the history of texts. If we assume that the character 亡 was indeed used to write the word wú {無}, this would invite the speculation that the character 無, which we know as the regular representation of this word in Classical and Literary Chinese, was not an element of the Chu writing system. However, the Warring States Chu manuscripts available to date contain dozens of instances of 無. The possibility that within certain scribal schools the character 無 was used, while other groups of scribes used the character 亡 for the same word, does not seem to apply either, because both characters are found in manuscripts that are so closely related in their general production standard and style of writing that they must have been produced within the same milieu. In some cases, both characters appear even within the same manuscript.3 If both characters, 亡 and 無, indeed stood for the same word, the pref- erence for 亡 could be motivated by the economy of writing, since it has merely three strokes (e.g., in Guodian *Laozi A slip 32: ), whereas the Chu form of 無 (e.g., in Guodian *Laozi A slip 31: ) requires a minimum of twelve, possibly more, strokes. Abbreviated and full forms (e.g., 丌, 亓, or 其 for the word qí {其}) or different degrees of abbreviation of a character (as in the various characters for wéi {為}) frequently alternate within the same manuscript without any recognizable pattern. What is different in the case of 亡 vis-à-vis 無 is that the two characters are unrelated. Aside from economy of writing, another reason why a scribe might choose to write different characters for the same word is that he adheres to the orthography of different models that he copies, which also applied these different orthographies.4 The randomness in which the characters 亡 and 無 appear in the manuscripts makes such a scenario extremely unlikely. Especially for such frequent words we can expect a relatively stable orthography: the full form and different degrees of its abbreviation

3 For example, the group of Guodian bamboo slips titled *Laozi A has one 無 versus seven 亡; *Yu cong 語叢 4 also has multiple instances of both; and the Shangbo manuscript Rong cheng shi has eight of each. 4 For a case in which this can be established with certainty, see Richter 2005b. variants of Little Consequence 75 may alternate, while it is also possible that a variation in character components occurs, with or without apparent reason. An example where a choice of character components was obviously intended to enhance the semantic specificity of the words is the Guodian counterpart of Laozi chapter 44 (*Laozi A slips 35–37): 名與身孰親？身與貨孰多？得與亡孰病？是故，其愛必大費，多藏必厚亡。知足[*tsok]不辱[*nok]，知止[*təʔ]不殆[*lˤəʔ]，可以長久 [*kʷəʔ]。 Name or person, which is closer? Person or commodities, which is more? Gain or loss, which is the greater peril? For this reason, one’s parsimony must lead to great expense, and hoarding much must lead to massive loss. Know contentment / and you will not be disgraced. / Know when to stop / and you will not be endangered. / Through these measures one can last long.5 The manuscript writes not only the words huò {貨} and fèi {費} (the latter has the phonetic 弼 over 貝) with the component 貝, as is common in Chu orthography. It also includes this semantic classifier, which pertains to material (especially monetary) wealth, in the characters for cáng {藏} (‘store’), dé {得} (‘gain’), and wáng {亡} (‘loss’). The form for cáng occurs also in the Guodian manuscript *Tai yi sheng shui 太一生水. However, for dé, instead of the usual , and for wáng, instead of just 亡, are unique forms. This additional semantic component lends the graphic representation of the entire textual unit greater consistency and in the case of wáng also helps to distinguish the meaning ‘loss’ from the more general meaning of wáng {亡}, as it is used on the following slip of the same manuscript in the phrase “有生於亡” (‘existence is brought forth from non-existence’, cf. Laozi chapter 40).6 Considering such practices of variation, systematical or not, especially in the use of semantic classifiers, as well as the frequent slighter, non- structural variations in characters used for the same word, it is not unreasonable to assume that the negative wú could be written with different characters even within one manuscript. What is not conceivable, however, is that two entirely unrelated characters are used for the same word by the same scribe without any recognizable reason, and that this same alterna- tion should occur in different manuscripts that were recognizably produced in different scribal milieus.

5 For the manuscript text, see Jingmen shi bowuguan 1998, 6 and 113; the translation is in part indebted to the rendering of the transmitted counterpart by D.C. Lau (2001, 64–67). 6 Lau 2001, 60–61 and Jingmen shi bowuguan 1998, 6 and 113. 76 chapter seven

Hence, the phenomenon of the frequent use of 亡 in Chu manuscripts obviously calls for a different explanation: the character 亡 is here not only used for the word wáng < *maŋ {亡} as we know it from transmitted Classical Chinese literature in the verbal sense of ‘to disappear,’ ‘to die.’ The manuscripts use it even more frequently for the homophonous negation in the sense of ‘not have,’ which is in transmitted texts usually expressed with the word wú {無}. When used in this sense, the character 亡 is traditionally interpreted as standing for this latter word and accord- ingly pronounced wú. We may note that Hanyu da cidian even has an extra entry under the character 亡 that specifies its pronunciation as wú. This is an example of the unfortunate ambiguity caused by a practice in common modern Chinese to refer to words as “zì 字,” i.e., literally as characters, rather than words. This creates an area of fuzziness even in the greater part of scholarly discussions of paleographic issues, which we need to be aware of when we work with published transcriptions of manuscript texts.7 The Nestor of Chinese linguistics Wang Li 王力 (1900–1986) states explicitly that the pronunciation wú for 亡 is neither confirmed by the rhyme dictionaries Guangyun 廣韻 or Jiyun 集韻, nor by the Jingdian shiwen 經典釋文; he also mentions the rhyme with sang 喪 in the Mao Ode 35 (“Gu feng” 谷風) as evidence of the pronunciation wáng.8 Pulleyblank mentions that the word wáng when used in the sense of ‘not have’ in Lunyu and Mengzi is not accompanied by an object, while in instances where an object follows, the word wú {無} is used.9 Possibly, the use with or without object in Lunyu and Mengzi is, if not coincidental, a regional particularity. The facts that this negative 亡, aside from the Chu manuscripts, mainly occurs in pre-classical texts and that in the manuscripts it is not restricted to cases without explicit object, seems to confirm Schuessler’s suggestion that it could in fact be identical with the pre-classical wǎng < *maŋʔ {罔} ‘not have,’ which can take an object. This would mean that the orthographic distinction wáng 亡 vs. wǎng 罔 simply did not exist yet and

7 For example, Nie Zhongqing discusses 無 and 亡 as “loan graphs” for two phonetically close words. He indicates correctly that 亡 is more typical for earlier texts, but he never states clearly which of the two words the respective characters represent. Instead, he discusses the phenomenon in terms of “the meaning of the characters (zi yi 字義).” Based on the different distribution of the characters in the Guodian “Laozi A–C” manuscripts, he argues that A predates B and C. See Nie Zhongqing 2004, 80–83 and 97–98. 8 Wang Li 2000, 12. Cf. Hanyu da cidian II.293. 9 Pulleyblank 1995, 109. See, for example, Lunyu 3.5: “The Master said: ‘Even if the Yi and Di have a ruler, they do not yet compare to the various Xia without one’” 子曰夷狄之有君不如諸夏之亡也. Cf. also Lunyu 7.26, 11.7, 12.5, 15.26, 19.2, and 19.5. variants of Little Consequence 77 that both words were written with the same character 亡. Since, despite the phonetic reconstructions that linguists have been able to offer us, we cannot be entirely sure of the exact sound-value of early Chinese words and hence must have recourse to modern Chinese pronunciations to read texts from early China aloud, it may seem convenient to pronounce the unfamiliar negative wáng as wú. But using such an “interpretive pronunciation” can be seriously misleading, since it is not consistent with any practice of transcribing other characters. It is just as unacceptable as if one were to transcribe or read a Classical fú {弗} as bù {不} or a zhī {之} as de {的}. At least the latter replacement would be immediately recognized as an anachronism, amounting to translating the text into a different language. In sum, the widely used representation of the negative 亡 as “亡(無)” in transcriptions of Chu manuscripts obscures an important feature of these manuscripts. The use of the negative wáng (or wǎng?) {亡} is probably due to the fact that these texts were written in the periphery of the area over which Classical Chinese texts were disseminated and that the use of this negative was still more prevalent in the use of this language in that area—or that at least some of the producers of manuscripts in this area took a conservative attitude toward the texts they wrote down. Unfortunately, we do not have manuscripts from that time from further north that would allow us to observe whether in the text of the same genre the use of wang was just as prevalent as in the south. If that were the case, we would have to conclude that the dominant use of wu in transmitted Warring States literature is due to a modernization introduced when the texts were reconstituted at a later point, e.g., by the team of experts working under the direction of the imperial librarian Liu Xiang 劉向 in the late first centuy bce.

(2) yú < *gʷa {于} vs. yú < *ʔa {於}: The characters 于 vs. 於 reflect a historical dimension of the text as well, albeit not in the same manner as 亡 vs. 無. The distribution of 于 and 於, respectively, indicates different textual layers. *Min zhi fumu, like other early Chinese manuscripts, observes the orthographic distinction between the words yú < *gʷa {于} and yú < *ʔa {於}, which are both most frequently used as “locative link verbs,” largely comparable to a preposition in the English language.10