Lord Shang Revisited 3

3. Shvn Dau and the Rabbit

In SJS 26 occurs our next directionality problem: the rabbit story (handout, p2). That story in that chapter is simply told, it is not attributed to anybody. The story appears also in Lw-shr Chun/Chyou (LSCC) 17:6, where it is attributed to Shvndz, or Shvn Dau. A third version, attributed to Pvng Mvng, is in the Yin Wvndz. What is their relationship? I have previously suggested some improvements in text critical method. Proceeding cautiously, we might first ask, how does traditional text criticism, without improvements, approach such a question? This, as it happens, we can answer.

Shvn Dau is known today only in quotations. Those fragments represent the Han text of Shvndz, recorded in the Han Palace Library catalogue (which was compiled at the end of the 01st century). The question is whether the Han text has any claim to represent the thought of Shvn Dau, a figure active some 300 years earlier. Our only way of finding out is, in fact, the rabbit story, since only that fragment has text witnesses that presumably predate the Han Palace text, and can be checked against what the restored Han Palace text contained..

Paul Thompson has applied traditional text criticism to the Shvn Dau fragments, and has reconstituted the Han text from post-Han quotations. So far so good; this is what traditional text criticism is designed to do. But beyond restoring the Han text, Thompson realized that the value of that text in representing Shvn Dau depends on the three early witnesses mentioned above, the versions of the rabbit story. Only one of those versions is attributed to Shvn Dau. In Thompson's first comparison of the three versions, made in 1970, he includes only half the Yin Wvndz text. In half or in full, that version agrees with SJS against the presumably earlier LSCC. By the standard rules, this makes the Yin Wvndz/SJS version authoritative for the reconstruction of the Han Shvndz. This in turn leads to the unwelcome result that the earliest witness to Shvn Dau the person (namely, LSCC) is not the closest to the Shvn Dau text as reconstructed from post-Han testimony (chart, line 4). Then the text from which LSCC is copying is not the same as the Han Shvn Dau text. We thus are forced to conclude that continuity between the Han text of Shvn Dau and any historical Shvn Dau appears to be lacking. The standard reconstructive techniques Thompson is here using thus reach to the Han text, but they do not reach beyond it.

In 1979, Thompson returned to the question. On this second occasion, he eliminated the Yin Wvndz version altogether (calling it an "uninformative, paraphrastic adaptation"), dismissed the SJS variant as "inferior," made a general case for preferring post-Han to earlier evidence, and reconstructed Fragment 82 all over again, this time in a form closely agreeing with LSCC. After all this rebalancing of the evidence, he reached the following conclusion about the LSCC version:

"The relationship between LSCC and the mediaeval testimony can be accounted for perfectly plausibly by supposing no more than normal transmissional error in either or both the direct and the indirect traditions of the Shvndz."

In other words, the scribal error paradigm now suffices. But we surely do not have, in the three versions of the rabbit story, a series of failed attempts to reproduce an original saying. We have instead a series of literary and doctrinal adaptations of a story which, in its LSCC form, is not far from oral persuasion techniques, but which by late Han (line 4) has become worn down, in the usage of the literati, to a mere mnemonic recollection of itself.

As evidence of local adaptation in these variants, take the SJS reading ming-fvn for fvn elsewhere (Group 2). Is this a copying error? No; the term ming-fvn is the leitmotif of the following section of SJS 26. Its presence in the SJS 26 rabbit story is then a bit of local adaptation. SJS is not trying to preserve the memory of Shvn Dau, it is trying to use current story material to make its own point. So also with the other texts shown on p2. More is going on here than mere copying. The error paradigm does not after all suffice. And to this general type of situation, the standard scribal error paradigm does not apply.

In that series of adaptations, SJS comes after LSCC. The LSCC version is from the Lan section of LSCC, which as we have shown elsewhere, is most plausibly dated to just after 0221. SJS 26 must then be later than that.

Someone will say, why are we spending all this time on the Shvn Dau? Answer: in obedience to Rule 5. We cannot understand SJS until we know how it relates to other texts and thinkers. If Heaven gives us an opportunity to clarify that situation, it would be discourteous to decline. It is not a wild rabbit chase. What we get for accepting Heaven's invitation is a warning that much of our information about pre-Han thought is from works, like the Han Shvndz, that were at the very least reformulated in Han. We have already seen that the outer shell of SJS shows signs of just such a reformulating, or repositioning, in Chin. The relevance to the announced topic of the lecture is, after all, obvious.

 

17 Sept 2022 / Contact The Project / Exit to Lord Shang Index Page