Pamela Tuffley and Amy Potthast
University of Massachusetts at Amherst
LSCC and the Jan-Gwo Tsv
Panel: Aspects of the Lw-shr Chun/Chyou
AAS Convention, New York City, 29 March 2003

Abstract

The quotations of other texts in the Lw-shr Chun/Chyou (LSCC) have long been used as evidence for the existence of those texts in the period prior to 0239, the accepted date of LSCC. In the first part of this paper, we will analyze six stories which exist in closely parallel form in the LSCC and the later compiled Jan-Gwo Tsv (JGT), in order to determine if possible whether those stories are original to LSCC, or were borrowed by it from some precursor of one of the six known JGT sources.

The indications as we read them are that the six stories are outside material, and not composed by the LSCC compilers. Given the range of possible dates for the various LSCC sections, those stories are earlier than the earliest directly known precursor of JGT, namely the Mawangdwei silk manuscript of c0168 (see Crump rev 1996, 47f). We then go on to ask what can be said, from this evidence, about the nature and extent of the JGT precursor sources as of the late Warring States and/or the Imperial Chin period. One major conclusion is that the Su Chin saga, which is so prominent in the JGT as we have it, and also in the Mawangdwei fragment recently discovered, did not yet demonstrably exist at this time (the figure of Su Chin is mentioned in passing only in LSC 17E6). The literary elaboration of Su Chin's career may thus be a development of early Han, when nostalgia for pre-Imperial ways exerted a strong influence on both political and cultural developments.

 

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28 Sept 2003 / Contact The Project / Conferences Page