Dirk Meyer Documentation and Argument in Early China Library of Sinology Editors Zhi Chen, Dirk Meyer Executive Editor Adam C. Schwartz Editorial Board Wolfgang Behr, Bernhard Fuehrer, Anke Hein, Clara Wing-chung Ho, Marc Kalinowski, Maria Khayutina, Marina Kuznetsova-Fetisova, Michael Lackner, Wai-yee Li, Yuri Pines, Hans van Ess, Shawn Wang, Nicholas Morrow Williams Editor responsible for this volume Zhi Chen Volume 5 Dirk Meyer Documentation and Argument in Early China The Shàngshū 尚書 (Venerated Documents) and the Shū Traditions The publication of the series has been supported by the HKBU Jao Tsung-I Academy of Sinology – Amway Development Fund. ISBN 978-3-11-070841-7 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-070853-0 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-070860-8 ISSN 2625-0616 DOI https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110708530 The work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution – NonCommercial- NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. For details got to http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0. Library of Congress Control Number: 2021936289 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2021 JAS, published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston The book is published open access at www.degruyter.com. Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck www.degruyter.com Für Flann und Nele Acknowledgements The journey that finds its conclusion with this book began when I took up the Bernhard Karlgren Fellowship at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study (SCAS) during Autumn 2014. My sincere thanks go to the amazing team at SCAS and its Founding Director, Björn Wittrock, whose incredible enthusiasm made for a stimulating and productive year. My thanks are due to both Christoph Harbsmeier and Michael Puett for their support. Of the many SCAS Fellows who enriched my time at Uppsala, I would like to single out Anthony Lappin with whom I often discussed aspects of the book and who proofread its final manu- script. The Fellows of The Queen’s College granted me a year of leave to take up the fellowship in Sweden, as did my colleagues at the China Centre. Special thanks go to Margaret Hillenbrand, Hú Bó 胡波, Henrietta Harrison, Robert Chard, and Rosanna Gosi of the China Centre, and to Angus Bowie, Jim Reed, Charles Crowther, Jenny Guest, and Richard Parkinson at Queen’s for their collegiality and friendship over the years. Many friends and colleagues helped to make this a better book. I would like to thank in particular Wén Tǎo 文韜, Ondřej Šcrabal, Adam Schwartz, Michael Nylan, Andy Meyer, Martin Kern, Rens Krijgsman, Guolong Lai, Yegor Grebnev, Joachim Gentz, Stefano Gandolfo, Billy French, Chén Zhì 陳致, Scott Cook, Uffe Bergeton. I am particularly endebted to the two anonymous reviewers who pro- vided extremely helpful suggestions and corrections. My family energises me day in day out. Flann joined us when the project be- gan, Nele as it ended. I dedicate the book to them. And to Á, as ever, thanks for bearing me, and for everything else! Dirk Meyer Oxford, 25 November 2020 Open Access. © 2021 Dirk Meyer/JAS, published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 License. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110708530 -202 Contents Acknowledgements VII Introduction 1 Shū traditions and philosophical discourse 33 . The Past is a Foreign Text 39 . Shàngshū 43 . Instantiations of Shū 45 . Texts relating to Shū (and other foundational resources) 46 ." Conclusion 59 " Archiving cultural capital 63 . “Zīyī” 64 . Shū in “Zīyī” 70 . Conclusion 90 & The materiality of meaning networks 100 . Genre 101 . “Hòu Fù” 104 . Meaning Networks in “Hòu Fù” and Shū Genre 110 . Conclusion 116 * Moulds of discourse 120 . Text Presentation in “Gù mìng” 顧命 and “*Bǎo xùn” 保訓 121 . “Gù mìng” 124 . Speech and Ritual in “Gù mìng” 125 . Text Analysis of “Gù mìng” 126 ." “*Bǎo xùn ” (Prized Instructions) 134 .: Recontextualisation and Memory Production 141 .; Conclusion 153 - Shū traditions in narrative 158 ". The Duke of Zhou and King Wu 159 ". “Zhōu Wǔ Wáng yǒu jí” and “Jīn téng” 160 ". Text and Fabula 162 ". Structure and Thought 165 "." Conclusion 180 X H Contents 0 Shū genre in manuscript cultures 185 :. Old Wine in New Bottles 186 :. “Wén Hóu zhī mìng” 187 :. The Extended Event and the Making of an Argument in Shū Genre 200 :. “*Yǐn zhì ” 尹至 201 :." “Fù Yuè zhī mìng” 傅說之命 207 :.: Text Stability and Warring States Thinking 221 :.; Manuscript Cultures and the Literarisation of Shū Traditions 223 :.Q Reading Shū 228 :.R Writing Shū 230 :.S “*Mìng xùn” 命訓 231 :. Dialectics of Rule: The Political Philosophy of “*Mìng xùn” 232 :. Writing Shū – again 233 :. Conclusion 235 1 Conclusion: the Shū and political argument in early China 236 ;. The Material Basis of Shū Genre 238 ;. Evolving Shū 240 ;. Shū Genre and Political Argument 241 ;. Xí Jìnpíng’s Shū 243 Bibliorgraphy 5 249 Introduction exegi monumentum aere perennius (more durable than bronze … / … is the monument I have made) 1 When Johan August Strindberg (22 January 1849–14 May 1912) left his homeland for Grez-sur-Loing, just south of Paris, a well-known artist community that at- tracted the likes of Carl Larsson (1853–1919) and Anders Zorn (1860–1920), 2 so as to write in French and become a truly European author, 3 probably no-one ever thought that one day this highly controversial figure, then tired of Sweden, would become Sweden’s foremost national author. 4 But in the late 1970s, a towering project of historical dimensions was launched that would outdo many of the most daring projects in the humanities. Determination, institutional support, and fi- nancial might came together to erect a real monument of Swedish identity, the National Edition of Strindberg’s Collected Works (Nationalupplagan av August Strindbergs Samlade Verk – short ‘ Samlade Verk ’) in seventy-two sizeable vol- umes, bound in linen covers. All in all, it took some thirty-five years to see the final volume of this testimony to Swedish memory and pride into print, in 2016, just four years after the centenary of Strindberg’s death. 5 The problems faced by the team of Swedish scholars when putting together Samlade Verk were immense, beginning with the simple question: what actually is ‘Strindberg’? Take the example of his Inferno . Originally written in French, it CC 1 Horace 1964: 206–207. 2 Larsson and Zorn are Sweden’s foremost painters; they were well acquainted with Strindberg. 3 ‘I write in French as Swedenborg and others wrote in Latin: because it is a universal language’, Strindberg once pointed out. ( Letters 22 Nov. 1897) (Cited from Gavel Adams 2015) 4 That Strindberg was tired of Sweden and wished to become a truly European author instead appears from his letters. (Personal communication with Gunnel Engwall, chair of the board of National Edition of August Strindberg’s Collected Works , Uppsala, 3 February 2015.) 5 For decades to come, Samlade Verk will be the authoritative text of Strindberg’s work. As Vi- klund 2013: 515f asserts, the title Nationalupplagan (National Edition ) indicates that Samlade Verk , financed in full by the government and at the outset planned as a project in seventy-two volumes, was created for the ‘benefit of the entire Nation’. As such, it was initially conceived as the ‘exhaustive and definite edition of the works of our great author’ (as stated in the dust jacket of Samlade Verk ; the translation is my own). At the time, the project was launched by the Strind- berg Society and later organised as a department of Stockholm University, nobody assumed that it would take some thirty-five years to complete. I thank Elena Balzamo (Paris) for directing me to Jon Viklund 2013 where illuminating insights into the projects are given. Open Access. © 2021 Dirk Meyer /JAS, published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 License. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110708530 -001 1 Introduction was translated into Swedish by a close friend. 6 But Strindberg disapproved of the translation, thinking that some words were ‘pompous’ or overly ‘feminine’, and so he introduced a number of changes to the text in 1897. 7 Does that constitute le bon manuscrit ? Or is the French edition of 1898, changed independently by Mar- cel Réja (1873–1957) 8 to improve the Swedish composer’s poor French, a good candidate for an authoritative text? 9 Or, rather, is ‘Strindberg’ perhaps something that neither he nor his friends ever produced: an ‘ideal’ text, so to speak, one that acknowledges the various flaws and strengths of the different manuscript texts and that introduces a version—based of course on the best of scholarly knowledge—that Strindberg might have wanted to produce? Does that mean a text such as Inferno needs later scholarly invention to be—or become—a ‘good’ Strindberg? Do we need to ‘heal’ the text? Or none of the above? Does this edito- rial institutionalisation therefore mean that we have produced our own Strind- berg, a national monument in the ideology of memory, used to frame, and there- fore construct, an imagined community? 10 The underlying issue of the above questions relates to the problem of what actually determines the textual boundaries of a work. But this is not just relevant for Strindberg’s work. Similar questions apply to nearly all texts that are repeat- edly rearticulated in new contexts to inform—and therefore also structure—their relevant text communities. How do we determine what belongs to such a text, and what not? What are the processes that control how a text changes? What does textual development tell us about the communities and their institutions in- volved in such changes? And how do the relevant text communities negotiate the conflict of text fluidity on the one hand, and text authority on the other? When for a contemporary work such as that of Strindberg these questions are so relevant, how much more is this true for ancient and highly layered text CC 6 The translation was produced by Eugène Fahlstedt (1851–1935).