Competing Systems 6

The Dzwo Jwan Problem

I have assumed above that the Dzwo Jwan (DJ) was not only written in, but itself at many points reflects, the middle and late 04c. That assumption brought the DJ into conjunction with several works of similar tendency, some of which, like the early Mencius, must be dated to that general period. It follows that the DJ is not a reliable source for the preceding Spring and Autumn period which it purportedly describes. The authors may have known, from their colleagues in other 04c states, a good deal about the lineage histories or administrative traditions or lore traditions of those states. If so, that perhaps more accurate material is blended, in the DJ, with Warring States perceptions and political agendas in a way that invalidates the DJ as a record of the earlier period.

The Chun/Chyou text, however, seems on examination to be a very plausible Spring and Autumn period court chronicle. Let me briefly contrast it and the Dzwo Jwan in places where a direct comparison is possible.

(1). The CC shows grammatical evolution over its extent; the DJ shows none.

(2). The CC shows evolution in ritual, in diplomacy, and in social structure; it indirectly documents such processes as progressive deforestation, various agricultural innovations such as double cropping, and an overall change in climate pattern, which in turn links up smoothly with earlier research on the process of desiccation in the Asian land mass. The DJ shows evolution in some categories, but not in others, which is on its face anomalous. The categories in which it does show evolution turn out to be those which would have been of interest to 04c scholar-bureaucrats and ritual experts. The conclusion is that the seemingly plausible DJ developments are constructs, put together in the service of that text's advocational agenda. They thus cannot validate the DJ as a contemporary record of developments occurring at the time, in all areas. The DJ is selective, and for that reason it can only be retrospective.

(3). The CC has a very few seeming interpolations, all brief, and all explainable as added by later Lu court officers who wished to insert false precedents for policies which were new at a later period. The DJ, on the other hand, contains frequent anachronisms, some of them obvious and some of them subtle. An obvious one is the Jau 29 story about a proposal to cast a law code on huge iron ding vessels. On the evidence of the rest of the text record, there could not have been enough literacy in the northern states at that period to make such a public act meaningful. More subtly, though iron was known in the north at the end of the 06c, we know from archaeological evidence that it was only wrought iron; cast iron was unknown. The 04c writer of this passage may be said to have had a vague idea about the metal industries of the late 06c, but not an exact idea. The iron ding story is then a piece of historical invention, rather than a piece of historical reportage.

(4). The CC and DJ use different vocabulary for the same things, and on the whole the vocabulary of the DJ is later in time. One conspicuous case is the military forces of the state when mobilized for a campaign. The CC uses the older term shr, which normally implies the small, elite chariot force. The DJ, when not repeating a CC passage, tends to use instead the later term jywn, which suggests the mass infantry army.

(5) The DJ has a view of Chinese culture as occupying the center of its world, with less cultured tribes surrounding it, and threatening it, on all four sides. The term jung-gwo ("the central states") is used in the DJ for the centrally placed and embattled Chinese culture. That term never occurs in the CC. There is in the DJ a system of names for these threatening peoples: the Yi in the east, the Hu in the north, and so on. These terms are not used in this way in the CC, which treats them and many others rather as ethnonyms than as general geographical terms. It was noticed by Lattimore, and by Chyen Mu before him, that most of the military confrontations in the CC between "Chinese" and "non-Chinese" peoples occur within, and not at the edges of, the eventual "Chinese" area. This can only mean that in Spring and Autumn times the "Chinese" inhabitants of the land had not yet completed their subjugation of the "non-Chinese" inhabitants (that subjugation process in Lu is reported in considerable detail in the CC). By DJ times, that is, in the 04c, the internal threat had been overcome, and a confrontation had developed between a fairly homogeneous "Chinese" center and an also militant "non-Chinese" periphery. The DJ century is also when the border walls began to be erected.

More examples might be cited, but these will suffice to suggest that the CC appears to be a genuine product of the 08c-06c, whereas the DJ is a retrospective and partly constructed interpretative history of those centuries, bearing at many points the imprint of the material and social world of the 04c. The two texts inhabit different worlds. For the world of the Spring and Autumn, we should rely on the CC text, and not contaminate that evidence at the outset by mixing it with the testimony of the later DJ.

 

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