This study traces the origins and development of the concept of Li 理 (Pattern) in early Chinese Cosmology, locating its foundation in the root metaphor derived from the natural lines or veins along which a block of jade can be split by a skilled artisan. From this relatively concrete image, li comes to eventually represent in Daoist cosmology the more abstract quality of the natural patterns or structures within the universe along which all phenomena move and interact with one another without the interference of human beings. After examining how early Confucian works emphasize the more abstract and derivative qualities of order and structure, we see that the likely Yangist authors in the Lüshi chunqiu return to the original metaphor of veins in jade but, instead, apply this to the veins through which the qi circulates through the human body.

We then see how this metaphor is expanded beyond the human body in the classical Daoist texts to come to represent the natural guidelines both within all phenomena and those that guide their movements within the cosmos. Within phenomena these include such varied things as the structures for the generation and expression of emotions within human beings as well as the natural lines along which the butcher's chopper passes in order to cleave oxen. In Daoist inner cultivation literature it is these patterns with which sages accord so that their spontaneous actions are completely in harmony with the greater forces of the cosmos. Only after long practice of the apophatic contemplative methods that include concentrating on one breathing and emptying out the normal contents of consciousness can the sage be able to accomplish this goal of “taking no action yet leaving nothing undone.” Thus the concept of li as these natural guidelines comes to serve as an explanation for why this classical Daoist dictum is effective in the world.

Finally, the Huainanzi contains the most sophisticated and sustained usages of the concept of li as the natural patterns and guidelines in the cosmos arguing that complying with them is the key to a genuinely contented life.

When several versions of a text display variations, it is necessary, for a correct understanding of the text, to determine which variant best reflects the original. These variations can be categorized into graphic, lexical, vacant, and transpositional variations.

The graphic variants display different graphs but represent a single word which is the proximate or most likely original. The variation is not significant since the word is known.

To handle the other types of variation, one powerful method is to discover the transmission lineage for three or more versions of the text and detect alterations that were made in later versions. When the lineage method does not determine the proximate original, each variation must be approached independently. For lexical variation, the lectio difficilior is more often the proximate original than the lectio faciliior. A taboo character that was later avoided may also represent the proximate original, or the proximate original may be disguised as a dialectal word. For vacant variations, trends toward adding, deleting or altering certain words in a version of the text help to determine the proximate original. When transpositional variation creates differences in the meaning of the text and the lineage method is not of help, judgment must be applied through a careful examination of the context.These methods provide systematic solutions to textual problems that would otherwise require independent analysis.

Traditional studies of Western Zhou bronze inscriptions have long centered on the issue of dating, but have ignored technical aspects regarding the creation of the inscriptions. In these studies, scholars generally considered bronzes with “identical” inscriptions to have been produced simultaneously. This article demonstrates, with the example of the newly excavated Ke lei and Ke he, that an inscription could be reproduced during the Western Zhou. The Ke lei was cast at the outset of the Zhou dynasty to celebrate the granting of the state of Yan, while the Ke he was probably cast somewhat later, with inscriptions imitating the original inscriptions. This article also demonstrates that “identical” inscriptions can display different calligraphy, the calligraphic styles corresponding to sets in the original composition of bronzes. For example, the thirteen “identical” inscriptions on the extant eight Ci gui and three Ci ding vessels were inscribed in three different calligraphic styles; the ornamentation and size or weight of these eleven bronzes show them to have belonged originally to three different sets, corresponding to the three calligraphic styles. These cases of “identical” inscriptions not only provide solid evidence for the contemporary co-existence of different calligraphic styles within the Western Zhou period, but also provide critical information on the organization of technology and labor in the creation of Western Zhou bronzes.

Early Chinese texts make us witnesses to debates about the power, or lack thereof, that humans had over the course of events, the outcomes of their actions, and their own lives. In the midst of these discourses on the limits of the efficacy of human agency, the notion of ming 命 took a central position.

In this article, I present a common pattern of thinking about the relationship between the person and the world in early China. I call it the reifying pattern because it consisted in thinking about ming as a hypostasized entity with object-like features. Although external and independent, ming was not endowed with human qualities such as the capacities for empathy, responsivity, and intersubjectivity. The reification of fate implied an understanding of ming as an external, amoral, and determining force that limited humans without accepting intercommunication with them, thereby causing feelings of alienation, powerlessness, and existential incompetence.

I first show that the different meanings of ming hold a sense of prevailing external reality, and hence can be connected to the overarching meaning of fate. Then, I offer an account of the process of reification of fate in early China and its consequences, theoretical and practical, through cases study of received (Mengzi 孟子) and found (Tang Yu zhi dao 唐虞之道) texts. I end with some reflections on the implications of ming as a nonpersonal and nonsubjective type of actor for both early Chinese and twenty-first-century accounts of agency.

There is no more salient figure in early Chinese literature than Kongzi and yet he remains a figure about whose beginnings we know very little. The present essay explores this paradox of bibliographic salience and biographic silence through an in-depth examination of the principal narratives of the Kongzi legend from the Shiji and the Kongzi jiayu, paying particular attention to the language of their respective accounts of the birth of the sage. Finding a distinct lack of fit between the form and content of these these stories, I propose a narrative alternative drawn from the early Han weishu accounts of Kongzi's beginnings. Finding in this alternative a more coherent fit between language and narrative structure as well as recurrent themes such as divine visitation, infertility, jiaomei sacrifice, and cranial disfigurement, vestiges of which are also found in the accounts of Wang Su and Sima Qian, the essay suggests that the weishu texts preserve a fuller popular legend of fertility sacrifice by the childless coordinated with the winter solstice also present in the very name Kongzi and resonating with the charter myth of the Zhou, “Sheng min.” The evident implication of this finding is that the historicity of Kongzi is arguable. The name is more like a mythic literary fiction and probably began, as did that of Hou Qi, as a symbolic deity that was made historical in one of its many Warring States incarnations, that one transmitted to us exclusively through the normative biographical tradition.

The influential Chu ci zhangju 楚辭章句, the earliest received edition of the foundational poetry anthology Chuci 楚辭, performs a distinct gender bias in its exegesis of deities, and this bias accords with the Eastern Han ideology of the editor Wang Yi 王逸 (2nd c. CE) more than with immanent features of the original Warring States texts. The gender bias is an essential feature of Wang Yi’s canonization of the Chuci, and it lays the groundwork of the allegorical tradition of interpreting the Chuci. This paper analyzes the zhangju presentation of archetypal Chuci texts to elucidate the hermeneutic transformation of gender and religion in early China, comparing the Eastern Han exegeses with earlier and later interpretations, immanent textual features, and fresh perspectives on Warring States and Han culture that have emerged from archeological evidence. The analysis demonstrates that the Chuci zhangju treats the male deities more literally than the female deities, reflecting the reduction in status of goddesses in late Han discourse. The history of gender ideology is an essential critical lens for understanding the Chuci and the tradition that emerged from it.

In a previous article in these pages (EC 7.1981-82:2-37) I reported on the discovery in the jinben version of the Bamboo Annals of verifiable records of the planetary conjunctions of 1576 and 1059 B.C. I argued that literary and chronological evidence drawn from a variety of Zhou and Han sources indicates that the two celestial events were taken at the time to signal Heaven's conferral of legitimate right to rule on the new dynasty, first Shang and then Zhou.

If this view is correct, the discoveries not only establish the historicity, and indeed the great antiquity, of certain chronological and atronomical records in the Bamboo Annals, they also prove that a concept akin to the Zhou “Mandate of Heaven” must have existed as early as the founding of the Shang in the midsecond millennium B.C., just as implied in the Shangshu. Equally noteworthy is the finding that numerous Zhou and Han works, including those of a notoriously “soft” variety such as the apocryphal “weft” commentaries of mid-Han date, contain mythicized though recognizable accounts of the same celestial phenomena.

Twelve years after Professor Keightley published The Ancestral Landscape, which was a fascinating, elegant summary of decades of investigations of the Bronze-Age Late Shang dynasty, he has now published another wonderful book on the same era, under the title Working for His Majesty. As the title suggests, and as he recounts in a highly personal preface looking back at the origins of this work, he returns in this book to the topic of his doctoral dissertation on Shang labor (Public Work in Ancient China: A Study of Forced Labor in the Shang and Western Chou, Columbia University, 1969).

Contra the consensus view of the Shi jing 詩經 (Classic of Odes) and Chu ci 楚辭 (Verses of Chu) as the products of two distinct literary cultures, one northern and one southern, this article argues on the basis of intertextual analysis that the Chu ci developed in direct response to the Shi jing. The foremost poem in the anthology, the “Li sao” 離騷 (Parting's Sorrow) emerges as a metadiscursive journey through various Shi jing archetypes, the goal of which is to authorize its hero to say farewell to his ruler and homeland—a possibility denied by Shi jing poetics. A final section explores the relationship between the oppositional poetics of the “Li sao” and the rest of the Chu ci. The article concludes with some reflections on the limitations of the north–south model for historians of early Chinese literature.

The silk manuscript texts of the Yijing and Comtnentatires — “Xici” “Yi-zhiyi,” “Yao,” and “Ersanzi Wen” — though excavated more than twenty years ago were published, albeit incompletely, for the first time in 1993. The physical state and the organization of these versions of the classic and commentaries were described by Edward Shaughnessy in Early China 19 (“A First Reading of the Mawangdui Yijing Manuscript”), and it is my intention in this article to begin to explore in some depth the differences between the silk manuscript Commentaries and the received text of the Xici to determine what they tell us about our understanding of the Zhou yi tradition. Even with our partial scholarly understanding of these texts it is possible to venture some preliminary judgments on the structure of the Commentaries, on the differing content of the silk manuscript version, on the enigma of the recurring phase “Zi yue” and on the date of its composition. Three main differences can be identified: discrepancies in characters, in sentences, and in chapter sequence. Nevertheless, the structure of the silk manuscript Xici and that of the received Commentaries are largely in agreement and what differences are in evidence, such as the scattering of certain parts of the received Xici in the heretofore unknown Yizhi Yi and Yao commentaries, may be explained by Qin discrimination against ru tradition following the conquest of Chu in 278 B.C. One of the principal discoveries resulting from comparison of the excavated and received texts is the presence of numerous loan graphs in the silk manuscript text, and it is through a better understanding of the function of such loans that a satisfactory explanation of the age-old enigma of “Zi yue” that occurs frequently and in the same places in both texts may be obtained.