Additional Notes
The Dingjou Analects

A partially burned copy of the Analects, written on bamboo slips, was recently recovered from a Han royal tomb of c055, at modern Dingjou.

Despite claims made in and for Ames/Rosemont, the first Analects translation to take account of the the Dingjou Analects is not Ames/Rosemont, which eventually appeared in November 1998, but rather TOA, which appeared in February 1998 (see TOA p202 n11). The much ballyhooed Dingjou find turned out to be of very slight philological interest. It was not, as had been long announced, the lost Chi Analects. It was instead a copy of the Lu Analects, with the extra Gu passage 20:3 written in at the end, in smaller characters. Most of the useful Lu variant readings which the Dingjou text reflected had long been available to scholarship, having been known from early commentaries or from the Tang work Jing/Dyen Shr-wvn; a few of them had been archaeologically confirmed by the surviving fragments of the [Latter] Han Stone Classics Analects text of c175. The Dingjou version is of interest chiefly because it contains what look like late variants, introduced for pedagogical or explicatory reasons, into what was apparently a "study" text, made for a member of the Han Imperial family.

TOA took note of previously known Lu variants at several places, and of a unique Dingjou variant in 13:1. In this Supplement we add notes on the Dingjou text variants in 2:17 and *15:30. None of these variants is of philosophical importance. The 2:17 variant may add a note of literary finesse to the previous understanding of the passage; it may well be a tutor's improved text, rather than a sign of the Analects original manuscript. The Dingjou find, while giving new and welcome information about the circulation and acceptance of the Analects in Han, leaves knowledge of the Analects text as such almost exactly where it had been.

For the Ames/Rosemont use of this material, see our review at the Publications page.

This Supplement is Copyright © 2001- by E Bruce and A Taeko Brooks

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