Warring States Problems: Notes

These notes are linked from the Warring States Problems lecture page. Click on the bar Sample Bar at the end of a note to return to that part of the lecture.

1. For a translation of Hilbert's lecture, see Reid, Hilbert, pages 74-83. Return to Lecture

2. This partnership was fully recognized by French historians at the time Hilbert delivered his lecture in Paris. See for example the then standard work of Langlois and Seignobos (1897; Eng tr 1908), which devotes an entire section of 140 pages to the various aspects of source criticism and interpretation. Return to Lecture

3. The question of text typology is fundamental to the solution of the Warring States problem. For a more detailed current statement of the Warring States text formation processes as we understand them, see now the Text Typology section in our on-line feature Classical Chinese Texts. Return to Lecture

4. My preliminary overview (Lu Mu-gung, WSWG Note 274, 2 Jun 2003) indicates that we must recognize the possibility that persons originally associated with the Analects school of Lu, such as Dzvngdz (see Problem 23, below) and Dz-sz, had by the early 03c acquired their own epigonous text producing schools, and that the output of those schools was affecting the assumptions of the Mencians and others, whose writings happen to have been better preserved to our own time. Return to Lecture

5. The question of Sun Wu has been further clarified by my discovery that the ambiguous term "Sundz" ("Master Sun") always implies "Sun Bin" in Warring States or early Empire texts, including the Lw-shr Chun/Chyou and the conflated Jan-Gwo Tsv. See Brooks: Sun Bin (WSWG Note 253, 31 May 2002). Return to Lecture

6. Vera Dorofeeva-Lichtmann, the next speaker on the ICANAS panel, in a paper distributed rather than read, noted the difficulties in treating information in the Shan Jing as descriptive. Her paper will be published in Don Wyatt and Nicola di Cosmo (ed), Political Frontiers (Curzon). Return to Lecture

7. The task of separating Szma Tan and Szma Chyen from each other has been begun with my paper on the Han Fei account in Shr Ji (SJ 63). See the version in Mrs McMillan's Shr Ji module. Return to Lecture

8. Two schematic views about possible LSC contributors (those of Chyou Syi-gwei and Andy Meyer) will be found diagrammed in the LSC entry in Classical Chinese Texts. This is the older view, according to which only an expert in the Jwangdz could have contributed material from the Jwangdz, and similarly for all other major viewpoints represented. The detailed mutual awareness shown by several texts from the first half of the 03c argues against the inevitability of this assumption. There seems to be little effect in taking only the Ji section (LSC 1-12), and not the entire LSC, as a witness to the text history of the Jwangdz. The effect on the evidence for other texts, hoever, is substantial. For LSC issues, see further below. Return to Lecture

9. The dates of the three sections of LSC, and the general theoretical line taken by its compilers and contributers, were clarified in papers given at AAS/2003 by myself and Taeko. D C Lau (not then seen) was wrongly cited in the preceding section as dating the Lan and Lun sections of LSC to the unified Chin dynasty. He does not do so. Taboo evidence noticed by ourselves, however, makes that placement inevitable. The general outook of the Ji section (LSC 1-12, c0240) might be called eclectic but expedient Confucian. That of the Lan (LSC 13-20) is identical at points with the known views of certain members of the Chin Academy, and seems to reflect the resurgent antiquarian Confucianism of the Academy following the unification of 0221. This result agrees with that of Robert Eno on the antiquarian Confucian character of the Academy. What is not presently clear is whether any of the members of Lw Bu-wei's staff as of 0235 were members of the Academy as of 0221. The Lun section (LSC 21-26) can be firmly dated to the reign of the Second Emperor, beginning in 0210. It reflects both the capricious and autocratic nature of that reign, and the general gloom of manifest dynastic decline. Return to Lecture

10. The present presumption is that he may well have been involved in the transfer, but perhaps less likely in the refurbishing of the text to meet the Chi intellectual fashions and political ambitions of the time. Work on this question continues. Return to Lecture

11. A break in the long-standing Jan-Gwo Tsv impasse came in 2003 when the work of Kennedy Research Fellows Amy Potthast and Pamela Tuffley showed that (1) the Shr Ji authors did not have available to them precisely the six texts Lyou Syang saw a century later, nor (2) did they have precisely the quite different clusterings of material that are documented in the Mawangdwei text of JGT type. They further showed that the predominance of Su Chin in the JGT materials known from Mawangdwei and those seen by Lyou Syang cannot be carried back to the earliest examples of the type, which are reflected in the Ji section of LSC and thus predate c0241. The tradition at that time made Tyen Wvn (Mvng-chang Jywn), not Su Chin, the leading figure in the creation of an anti-Chin alliance. This work too continues, especially on aspects of JGT more directly relevant to the period just before the Shr Ji. Return to Lecture

12. The story of our prediction of essentially the Gwodyen 1 state of the DDJ text, and what became of that prediction in scholarly discourse, may be glimpsed in the Project's Newsletter 13 (1999), an updated copy of which is available at the DDJ section of Classical Chinese Texts. Return to Lecture

13. For an extended exposition of the parallel-school theory of the Mencius, see Brooks Nature (the final version of our Singapore 1999 paper). Return to Lecture

14. It has been suggested that the sponsorship of the Gwandz enterprise migrated from the late 04c Ji-sya circle in Chi to the mid 02c Hwai-nan circle in what had been Chu. This is merely to drape the text across available institutions, and not to provide it with an institution of its own. Institutional continuity is strongly shown by the late chapters which comment on, and sometimes update, certain early and by then "classic" chapters. It is beyond question that the first home of the work was in Chi. Its influence on distant traditions may now be seen in the closeness of the restored text of the early essay Shang-jywn Shu 10 to the relatively early GZ 6. Of proposed identifications, some version of the Ji-sya suggestion is clearly the more attractive, though its initial difficulties have so far not been overcome. Return to Lecture

15. For the attribution of the lurid tales about Han Fei's death in Chin to the second, not the original, author of the Shr Ji, see now the demonstration in the first section of Mrs McMillan's Shr Ji module, itself an expansion of a paper delivered at the AOS Annual Meeting of 2001. Return to Lecture

16. Some clarification of the relations between the "little traditions" making up the so-called Inner Chapters of the Jwangdz, and the way in which those traditions converged over a period of time, was achieved by Taeko in her paper at AAS/2002. Return to Lecture

17. A beginning was made in my AOS paper of 2002, which showed that if interpolations are removed from SJS 10 (perhaps the earliest portion of that text), a political theory essay emerges which has strong resemblances to the rather early Chi text GZ 6. What appear to be later parts of SJS seem to have similar lateral links with probably later parts of GZ. This relationship, along with several other results of recent analysis, tendds to put the formation process of the SJS in a somewhat new light. An attempt will be made in a lecture at WSWG 17 (Leiden, 17 Sept 2003) to revisit the Duyvendak analysis. Return to Lecture

18. For a brief analysis of the Han Fei as a parasitic text, of Han rather than Warring States date, see my Prospects review article (1994), 17-30. Return to Lecture

19. Our investigation of the two chapters leads clearly to the conclusion that SJS 13 is primary, that is, that the order is SJS 13 > HFZ 53. This is of immediate interest for the history of the Han Feidz in that the material added in HFZ 53 refers back to HFZ 27, but in a way which shows that the HFZ 53 writer did not understand HFZ 27 in the sense in which it had probably been written. The nature of this difference rules out the interpretation "work of the author in old age," and requires the assumption of a considerable lapse of time between HFZ 27 and HFZ 53. This is further evidence for the "parasitic" and also accretional view of HFZ taken in the Prospects article (see previous note). Return to Lecture

20. David Pankenier's paper on the date of the Gwo Yw was given at the WSWG 6 Conference (1996) and is currently being prepared for publication in the Project's Journal. Return to Lecture

21. The separate Dzvngdz text and its associated tradition are the subject of my paper The Dzvngdz Text (revised from a note of 1996) which will appear in v1 of the Project's journal. Return to Lecture

22.. Here is a portrait of Hilbert, under which will be found the above promised link to his 23 Problems of the year 1900. Return to Lecture 

Calligraphic Separator

Postscript. Our best current conclusions about these texts, and other works of the period, may be consulted at the on-line feature Classical Chinese Texts.

 

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