Other Laozi Parallels in the Hanfeizi - Sino-Platonic Papers

More documents

Recommendations

Info

Tae Hyun KIM, “Other Laozi Parallels in the Hanfeizi” Sino-Platonic Papers, 199 (March 2010) be a fabric sufficiently precious to deserve to have a canon written on it, as attested in Wang Chong 王充's Lun Heng 論衡. 3) In MWD B De and Dao, there are relatively fewer sentences retouched and corrected than in MWD A PL. 60 Observing that the historical direction was toward an increasing ideological specification, 61 Matthias Richter finds that the MWD B has a strong uniformity in the visual representation of the text, from layout features down to orthography, and even a stylistic regularity of character forms, but that this is different in MWD A. He argues that the orthography that changes from text to text suggests that the individual texts were copied from models produced according to different standards. 62 These suggestions necessitate consideration of the possible philological changes between the two manuscripts during the transitional times. As in the case of the GD PL, the MWD A De and Dao PL do not bear the titles, respectively De and Dao, in themselves. It is in the MWD B that the title is recorded, and it is noticeable that MWD B is textually and stylistically more refined than MWD A. Considered rigorously, this implies that we cannot be sure that MWD A De and Dao PL were recognized as bearing the titles De and Dao. In addition, it is not clear that the texts were respected as canons (jing 經), since they do not have the character in their titles and the only text in MWD B that bears “jing” in its text title is Shi Liu Jing 十六經. As Richter correctly points out, the fact that Shi Liu Jing is explicitly entitled “jing” seems to imply that none of the other texts was understood as a jing. Otherwise a manuscript that is so unusually explicit about the precise 60 See his Dōka shisō no shin kenkyū – Sōshi wo chūshin to shite, 73–76. However, Matthias Richter points out that Wang Chong’s statement is an example of information that that cannot directly and consistently be applied to earlier text production. (This is made in a personal correspondence with me.) According to Richter, the Xing zi ming chu 性自命出 of the GD and the Xing qing lun 性情論 of the Shangbo offer a good example because, while they have different formats, they are both in the largest format in their respective corpuses. 61 For this, see Matthias Richter, “Gudai wenxian de yanbian: Mawangdui boshu jia ben Laozi di ba zhang wei li” 古代文獻的演變: 馬王堆帛書甲本老子第八章爲例, in Jian Bo 簡帛 3, (Shanghai: Shanghai Guji, 2008), 421–431. 62 See Matthias Richter, “Textual Identity and the Role of Literacy in the Transmission of Early Chinese Literature.” In Writing and Literacy in Early China: Papers from the Columbia Early China Seminar, edited by Li Feng and David Branner (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2010), 209–247. He emphasizes that the textual differences between MWD A and B show the different production standard of the manuscripts, rather than a textual development. 30
Tae Hyun KIM, “Other Laozi Parallels in the Hanfeizi” Sino-Platonic Papers, 199 (March 2010) identity of its texts would have added “jing” to whatever else was understood as a jing, too. Based on these circumstances, it seems unjustified to entitle the MWD PL “Laozi,” “Dao De Jing,” or “De Dao Jing,” as does the GD PL, in light of serious philological concerns. Instead, it is preferable to call them, more neutrally, “MWD Laozi Parallels” or “MWD De and Dao Parallels.” Furthermore, the findings suggest that, possibly even in the early Western Han, the extant text Laozi was not yet completely established and that there was needed some additional momentum to incorporate the two textually individual texts into one coherent text, and that the conscious endeavor to create one complete text and assign to the text as sole author Lao Dan had been made even at the time that Sima Qian ambiguously attempted to write a biography of Lao Dan. 2-2-4. What makes the Guodian and Mawangdui finds intriguing No particular attention has been given to comprehensively researching the Laozi PL’s textual or philosophical relationship with the non-Laozi texts of the GD or MWD. For example, the discovery of the two MWD silk manuscripts of the Laozi parallels was followed by the finding of other lost texts given titles by contemporary Chinese scholars. In the case of manuscript A, there were four lost texts: the Wuxing 五行, the Jiu Zhu 九主, the Ming Jun 明君, and the Sheng De 德聖, which precede the De and Dao parallels that have uncritically been taken for granted to be one book, Laozi. Manuscript B included the four lost texts as well, i.e., the Jiang Fa 經法, the Shi Liu Jing 十六經, the Cheng 稱, and the Dao Yuan 道原. If it is acknowledged to be invalid to employ the conventional classification of the early school and identifying the De and Dao PL in MWD A as pure Daoist texts and the other four texts in the same silk manuscript form as Confucian or Huang-Lao texts, one may come seriously to question why the four other texts could be accompanied by the so-called Daoist Laozi PL, and what this means in the text establishment of the Laozi and in early Chinese intellectual history. While the four lost texts in manuscript B have been paid concentrated attention by Eastern and Western scholarship, the textual and philosophical relationships within manuscript A, or between A and B that share a common text, the Laozi, have not been questioned. 63 In this article, which 63 This is also the case with the Guodian slip documents. The fixed categorization of the GD texts into “Confucian” 31
Page 1 and 2: SINO-PLATONIC PAPERS Number 199 Mar
Page 3 and 4: Other Laozi Parallels in the Hanfei
Page 5 and 6: Tae Hyun KIM, “Other Laozi Parall
Page 31: Tae Hyun KIM, “Other Laozi Parall
Page 49 and 50: 3-2. Preliminary reflection Tae Hyu
Page 79: Since June 2006, all new issues of

Other Laozi Parallels in the Hanfeizi - Sino-Platonic Papers

You also want an ePaper? Increase the reach of your titles

Delete template?

Save as template?