Competing Systems 4

The Hundred Schools

Proceeding in this way, and applying similar methods to other texts of the period, we eventually find that a group of interrelated texts cluster together in the general vicinity of the middle and late 04c. This result is important for social history. I will have give a very brief outline of some of the major connections.

(1) The ideology of the LY 12-13 segment which is in contact with the Gwandz, is also strikingly similar to the thought of the interviews of Mencius with rulers of his time, as preserved in MC 1. It is generally considered that Mencius had studied in the school of Lu, the group with which the Analects text is surely to be associated. It would seem that the basic ideas revealed in his interviews are in large part his heritage from the school of Lu. As to chronology, D C Lau has shown that Mencius's independent career began not earlier than 0320. Then the LY 12-13 material, representing his intellectual antecedents, should date from before, but not long before, 0320.

(2) Mencius also shows strong affinities to the viewpoint editorially expressed in the Dzwo Jwan (DJ) text. For astronomical reasons, the compilation of that text should be somewhat later than the Mencius start date of 0320, but still within the late 04c.

(3) The Gwo Yw (GY) is generally recognized as being somehow related to, but also as later than, the Dzwo Jwan. David Pankenier, on astronomical grounds, dates it to the very late 04c or very early 03c. This finding agrees with the general opinion about the text, and is consistent with the above conclusions.

(4) The Dau/Dv Jing (DDJ) has already been noted, on Gwodyen evidence, as an accretional text which was nearly but not quite complete by c0288. Its compilation period probably reaches back well into the 04c, where it overlaps in time with all the texts or text strata so far mentioned.

(5) The Sundz Bingfa, the classic Art of War, has affinities in thought and in terminology with the DDJ, and in a general way its tactics may be said to be in the minds of the authors of many of the Dzwo Jwan battle scenes. Like those texts, and also like the early Gwandz chapters, and like LY 12-13, and above all like MC 1, it is much concerned with the question of how the common people, not the chariot elite but the ordinary common people, may be motivated to risk death by service in the new-style mass infantry army. This theme occurs with variants in many texts of this period, and was evidently one of the great public questions of the time - one of the standard issues on which the Hundred Schools thinkers tended to have an opinion.

The prominence of this question in the texts shows that it was an important issue, and also a new one, since the texts are for the most part (see in particular MC 1B12) making recommendations about how it can be achieved, and not reporting real or mythical solutions from a former time. The military and social changes that the issue implies must then have been in progress during the same period or slightly earlier, namely, the middle and late 04c.

We find, then, that study of the texts results in our identifying a group of interrelated ones that can, as a group, be referred to a period centering on the late 04c, and that this clustering of text references in turn implies a major social development which must have been occurring at that time.

This development, from an elite or chivalric stance (of which a surviving echo is visible in MC 1A5) to a people-centered or populist stance on the part of government (compare MC 1A3), and from a peasant role to something much more like a citizen role on the part of the larger population, has often been dated to earlier periods. That dating rests almost exclusively on taking the Dzwo Jwan stories, and those of the related work Gwo Yw, as being earlier than my present conclusions allow, - as being, in fact, true or at least representative of the earlier centuries which those two works purport to describe.

Here is one of the central arguments in the historiography of pre-Imperial China. Since I am asking for a reorientation of view on this issue, let me take a moment to contrast these two interpretations.

 

All lectures and abstracts posted on this site are Copyright © by their authors.

 

24 Sept 2000 / Contact The Project / Exit to Lectures Page