0:14

Hello and welcome to The History of Philosophy

0:16

in China, by Peter Adamson and Karen Lai,

0:18

brought to you with the support of the

0:20

Philosophy Department at King's College London and the

0:22

LMU in Munich, online at

0:25

historyofphilosophy.net. Today's

0:27

episode, going paperless,

0:30

ancient Chinese texts. Imagine

0:33

you want to write something down, like

0:36

maybe a shopping list or a groundbreaking

0:38

philosophical treatise. Unfortunately, you

0:40

don't have any paper. Actually,

0:42

the situation is even worse, paper hasn't even

0:44

been invented yet because you live in the

0:47

ancient world. What would you do? Well,

0:50

it would depend a lot on where you lived. In

0:52

Mesopotamia, you might produce a clay tablet

0:55

covered with little wedge-shaped marks which we

0:57

call cuneiform. If you were

0:59

in Egypt, or at least able to trade with

1:01

Egyptians, you could write on papyrus, which was made

1:03

from the plant of the same name that grew

1:06

near the Nile River. Another

1:08

alternative for Mediterranean shoppers and philosophers

1:10

would be to write on carefully

1:12

prepared animal skins, which is what

1:14

we refer to as parchment. For

1:17

more on these options, you can check out episode 317 of

1:19

the history of philosophy

1:21

without any gaps, which talked at

1:23

length about manuscripts, that is, handwritten

1:26

texts, in ancient Greece and Byzantium.

1:29

But of course our current concern is China,

1:31

where paper was in fact invented, but only

1:33

in the second century or so well into

1:35

the Han dynasty. What did Chinese

1:38

people write on until then? Again,

1:40

there were several options. Our

1:42

earliest substantial examples of written material

1:44

come in the form of inscriptions

1:46

on hard materials like stone, bone,

1:48

and bronze. From the

1:51

Shang dynasty, there survived oracular texts

1:53

that were incised onto turtle shells

1:55

and the scapulas of oxen. Sometimes

1:58

outcomes of divination. using the

2:00

Yi Qing, were recorded in these ways. But

2:03

you'd need to write pretty darn small

2:05

or find a truly enormous turtle to

2:07

fit your philosophical treatise onto a turtle

2:09

shell. So it's just as well that

2:11

they came up with another idea. Two,

2:14

actually. In the time that

2:16

the classics of Chinese philosophy were first

2:18

being written and copied, texts were written

2:20

either on silk or more cost-effectively on

2:23

strips of bamboo or sometimes wood. The

2:26

pieces of bamboo we're talking about here,

2:28

which scholars call slips, are

2:30

long and thin. The shape is more like

2:33

a ribbon than a piece of paper. Thus,

2:35

scribes would write a vertical column of characters

2:37

running down the length of the slip rather

2:40

than along a horizontal line. The

2:42

individual bamboo slips would then be tied together

2:44

to make a scroll. Even

2:46

when writing on pieces of silk or later

2:49

on paper, the same format was used. The

2:51

vertical columns were read top to bottom with the

2:53

columns read from right to left. The

2:56

text as a whole could be rolled for

2:58

storage and then unrolled for reading, though it

3:00

seems that silk manuscripts were at least occasionally

3:02

folded and not rolled. As

3:05

you probably know, printing, like paper, was

3:07

a Chinese invention, but didn't come until

3:09

even later. So for the whole

3:11

period we're tackling in this podcast series, texts

3:13

were written by hand. As

3:16

writing materials for these manuscripts, bamboo and

3:18

silk had plenty of advantages over stone

3:20

or bronze inscriptions. They were

3:22

more portable, and you could write on them with

3:24

an ink and brush, which is relatively easy and

3:26

fast. On the downside, they

3:28

were less durable. Even aside from

3:30

the problem that it can rot, a wooden

3:33

or bamboo scroll is fundamentally just a bunch

3:35

of sticks bound with string or leather. It

3:38

was easy for individual slips or parts of

3:40

scrolls to become detached from the rest. When

3:43

manuscripts have been found in the modern day, the slips

3:45

need to be put back in order like a jigsaw

3:47

puzzle, and a similar problem

3:49

could face ancient authors. In

3:51

principle, a whole scroll or yuan would

3:54

be made up of chapters, pian, which were

3:56

in turn made up of smaller blocks of

3:59

text called zang. which we might

4:01

translate as section or paragraph. But

4:04

in practice, editors were often faced with

4:06

fragments of text, even a single bamboo

4:08

strip freed from its original context. But

4:11

that was no reason to discard it. Any

4:13

bit of writing from an authoritative source was considered

4:15

precious, and editors would try to find a place

4:18

for it in the overall text. All

4:21

this helps to explain why many ancient

4:23

Chinese philosophical texts looked more like compilations

4:25

of brief remarks or stories rather than

4:27

treatises. That is exactly what they were.

4:31

Our earliest evidence of proper text goes

4:33

back only as far as the warring states

4:35

period, and this evidence suggests that scrolls

4:37

were often put together by collecting material that

4:39

had no fixed order or structure. It

4:42

was only in the Han dynasty that texts started to

4:44

take a more stable form. Especially

4:46

authoritative texts attained the status of a so-called

4:48

qing, as in the titles of the Yi

4:51

Jing and Tao Te Jing. A

4:54

major event in this process of

4:56

canonization was the systematic organization of

4:58

the imperial library holdings, undertaken by

5:00

Liu Xiang and his son Liu

5:02

Xing, who died respectively in 6

5:04

BCE and 23 CE. Their

5:07

method was to gather texts and edit

5:09

them on bamboo, then recopy them onto

5:11

silk as a final, or fair, copy.

5:14

It's been said that prior to such developments

5:16

in the Han period, Chinese texts were like

5:19

a gas, whereas later works on paper are

5:21

like a liquid, and still later printed texts

5:23

are like a solid. The

5:25

nebulous nature of early Chinese writing and

5:28

textual transmission means that it is not

5:30

always clear when we are dealing with

5:32

a proper work as opposed to an

5:34

anthology or even a compilation of parts

5:36

or fragments. A work

5:38

like the L'n Yu, which we call

5:40

the Analects in English, is really just

5:42

a compilation of stories and remarks associated

5:45

with kangzi, and the same

5:47

goes for other important philosophical texts like

5:49

the Taoist classics, Tao Te Ching, and

5:51

shuangzi. We obviously shouldn't

5:53

think of these as books that respected

5:56

figures such as kangzi, mozi, or zangzi

5:58

sat down and wrote. In

6:00

fact, the sages are referred to in the third person.

6:03

Nor are they books that just one disciple set down.

6:07

Already in the Han period, it was well

6:09

understood that the Analects was put together by

6:11

numerous editors. So it is

6:13

not really single authorship that unifies early

6:15

Chinese texts, but the themes and questions

6:17

that are under consideration. Individual

6:20

blocks of texts, the smallest units confronting

6:22

the reader, might be demarcated by rhymes

6:25

at the end or introductory phrases like,

6:27

I have heard it said that. With

6:30

time, editors increasingly made use of textual

6:32

cues, like punctuation marks at the beginning

6:35

or end of a section. Or

6:37

the bottom of a bamboo slip might be left blank

6:40

to show that the text at the top was the

6:42

end of a section or paragraph. At

6:44

a larger scale, some ancient manuscripts indicate at

6:46

the end how many characters are contained in

6:48

the whole work, which would help users to

6:51

keep track and ensure that they had the

6:53

whole text at their disposal. But

6:56

these helpful editorial interventions should not distract

6:58

us from the fact that what we

7:00

call books or works may have originated

7:02

as collections made up of many smaller

7:04

bits of material. The

7:06

mere act of juxtaposing sections of text

7:08

or anecdotes and sayings or of putting

7:11

them together into a single scroll suggested

7:13

that there was some kind of unity

7:15

between them. For instance,

7:17

putting two originally unrelated ethical remarks next

7:19

to one another would give the reader

7:21

a strong steer as to how they

7:23

should be interpreted. In

7:25

that context, we can understand the act

7:27

of bestowing a title on a given

7:30

collection of written material or associating it

7:32

with the name of a great sage

7:34

as a powerful unifying gesture. As

7:37

the historian Mark Edward Lewis has

7:39

written, even the physical characteristics of

7:41

writings, texts were invariable social

7:43

creations passing through numerous hands.

7:46

The notion of authorship was weak or absent.

7:49

By contrast, the role of reader or transmitter involved

7:51

a more active role than that assigned to someone

7:54

who picks up a modern book. But

7:57

this raises another question. What was

7:59

the status of this book? smaller textual units,

8:01

like the sayings or anecdotes, before editors and

8:03

readers put them together. Here

8:06

we enter into rather controversial territory because

8:08

we need to talk about the relationship

8:10

between oral and written culture. Obviously,

8:13

ideas and traditions that were passed

8:15

on orally, through recitation and memory,

8:18

rather than through manuscripts, are beyond

8:20

our direct historical reach. But

8:23

we can speculate that behind our oldest

8:25

surviving written texts, including philosophical texts, there

8:28

were what you might call oral texts.

8:31

It's a process we can still engage in today. Imagine

8:34

writing down anecdotes about your grandparents and

8:36

how much the written versions of those

8:38

anecdotes might vary if the recordings were

8:40

done independently by several members of your

8:43

family, especially if it were done

8:45

across more than one generation and each person

8:47

wanted to say a specific thing about the

8:49

grandparents. We might think

8:51

of the references to kong fu in the

8:53

Analects or similar texts about other sages as

8:55

being the result of that sort of process.

8:58

Now, there is no doubt that oral traditions

9:01

did feed into our written record. One

9:03

sign of this is the use of repeated

9:05

formulas or terms of phrase which would have

9:08

aided memory, something we also see in the

9:10

most ancient texts of other civilizations, like the

9:12

Upanishads in India or the poems that the

9:14

Greeks ascribed to Homer. For

9:17

example, in the Yiqin, a text used for

9:19

divination, which we have heard about in an

9:21

earlier episode, there is a repeated invocation for

9:23

the success of the divination, which goes In

9:28

the later Confucian tradition, the formula was given

9:30

a different significance, as each of those four

9:33

words was taken to represent a key virtue.

9:36

Another striking feature of the Yiqin are

9:38

the line diagrams, which could have provided

9:40

a way to organize and remember the

9:43

divinations using visual cues. Again,

9:45

that would make sense in an oral context. Furthermore,

9:48

and also as in those other ancient

9:50

civilizations, oral culture would only gradually have

9:53

given way to a culture of writing.

9:56

So for quite some time, we have oral

9:58

and written transmission happening in parallel. and

10:00

influencing one another. None

10:03

of this is really controversial. The

10:05

trickier questions come when we try to

10:07

evaluate the extent and nature of the

10:09

oral transmission, especially in relation to specific

10:11

texts. Some are skeptical about

10:13

the extent of writing up through the Warring

10:15

States period and think that up until the

10:17

Xin and Han dynasties, we are mostly dealing

10:19

with an oral culture. Clearly,

10:22

they were writing things down in the Warring

10:24

States time since we have manuscript evidence of

10:26

that in the form of works excavated from

10:28

burial sites. In fact, the

10:30

so-called clerical script, standardly used by

10:32

Han scholars, first emerged in the

10:34

Warring States period. But

10:36

one might suppose that books were still very

10:39

rare and that even the learned class would

10:41

mostly have been relying on memory. Indeed,

10:43

texts may first have been set down primarily

10:45

as an aid to memory for people who

10:48

were mostly accustomed to passing on their ideas

10:50

in unwritten form. But

10:52

then there is some evidence against this notion. For

10:54

example, Huizi, a figure who will later

10:56

meet as the arguing partner of the

10:59

Taoist sage Chuangzi, is said to have

11:01

produced enough words for a book collection

11:03

that filled five carts. This

11:05

doesn't need to be true, of course, but if

11:07

the story was told, then it was at least

11:09

bound plausible in antiquity. More

11:11

persuasively, there's a nifty trick that philologists

11:13

can use to determine whether a text

11:15

was transmitted orally or in writing. They

11:18

look at errors in the text and think

11:20

about whether the mistake is more likely to

11:22

have come from a mishearing, as if someone

11:24

dictated the name Caring to you and you

11:26

wrote Caring, or from

11:28

miscopying, as you might see the name Peter, misread

11:30

the last two letters and copy it as petal.

11:34

Since we find mistakes of the latter kind in

11:36

excavated texts from the Warring States period, it is

11:38

clear that there was already a good deal of

11:40

transmission going on from one piece of writing to

11:42

another. The question

11:45

of orality has played a role in

11:47

debates over the genesis of individual philosophical

11:49

texts, for example the Mo'uzu, the foundational

11:52

text of Moism. As

11:54

it happens, this is also one philosophical

11:57

text that alludes specifically to the challenges

11:59

of transmitting texts. text and antiquity, as

12:01

it remarks at one point that valuable

12:03

information has sometimes been written down on

12:05

metal or stone, for fear that it

12:07

would be lost if recorded only on

12:09

bamboo or silk. It's

12:11

rather appropriate, then, that the story of

12:13

its own composition and transmission should be

12:15

controversial. In the 1980s, the scholar

12:18

Angus Graham, arguing that the Mozart,

12:20

as we have it, combines independent

12:22

essays from three schools of Moists.

12:25

He assumed that these schools had existed

12:28

as rival groups whose contrasting interpretations were

12:30

pursued in an oral context and only

12:32

then written down in these sections of

12:34

the Moist. Against

12:37

this, Eric Mater offered a still

12:39

more complicated analysis. In

12:41

an evocative analogy, he said that

12:43

early Chinese texts were like moose-leaf

12:45

ring binders for combining disparate materials

12:47

that were already written. His

12:50

own philological work on the Moist suggested

12:52

that a process of editing and compiling

12:54

lay behind what look at first like

12:57

well-defined unitary sections of the work as

12:59

a whole. Of course,

13:01

this does not show that Moism was

13:03

always tied to written books, but if

13:05

Mater is right, then our work, the

13:07

Moist is more than one step away

13:09

from oral disputation. Ancient

13:12

Chinese texts then frequently began life as

13:15

compilations and selections of material which were

13:17

then re-edited and re-combined to reach their

13:19

extant form. There was always

13:21

a double, if not triple or quadruple, process

13:24

of selection, a choice of what

13:26

to write down from the oral traditions, and

13:28

then a choice of which written records would

13:30

be preserved and put into newly invented structures

13:33

and constellations. In

13:35

addition, the very physical constraints of

13:37

writing encouraged brevity and led to

13:39

loss, corruption, or fragmentation. No

13:42

wonder that, as we said last time, ancient

13:44

readers felt the need to compose and consult

13:46

commentaries to make sense of the works that

13:48

came down to them. Again,

13:51

this is a pattern we see

13:53

in other civilizations, notably in India,

13:55

where the compressed and enigmatic authoritative

13:57

works known as sutras received common

13:59

sense. commentaries called Vashias, without

14:01

which they were pretty well incomprehensible.

14:05

So here in China, too, foundational writings

14:07

like the Confucian and Taoist classics have

14:09

always been studied with the aid of

14:11

subsequent commentary. As John

14:13

Macom has pointed out in his study of

14:15

the Confucian exegetical tradition, commentators who

14:18

believe that they can somehow interpret

14:20

the Analects without being influenced by

14:22

earlier interpretations are deluding themselves. And

14:26

there's a further twist. The commentaries, too,

14:28

were texts and could also undergo

14:30

complicated vagaries of transmission. We

14:33

can see this from Macom's study of

14:35

a commentary called Luanyu Qiqie, or collected

14:38

explanations on the Analects. It

14:40

was supposedly written by Hu Yan, but

14:42

Macom argues that it was likely a collective

14:44

effort by the five scholars who presented it

14:46

to the Han throne in the two forties,

14:48

Hu Yan being only one of these five.

14:52

So this commentary reflects the complex priorities of

14:54

a group who did not always see eye

14:56

to eye. In a

14:58

further complication, Hu Yan and his colleagues

15:00

did not so much write the commentary

15:02

as compile one, drawing on what they

15:04

deemed to be the best insights from

15:06

the earlier commentaries. Here

15:09

we have yet another process of selection,

15:11

one guided by certain exegetical goals. For

15:14

example, the team liked to use other

15:16

classical works, especially the Yi Qing, as

15:18

a key to interpret the Analects. They

15:21

were also determined to absolve Kong Tzu of

15:23

all faults, and in particular of lacking the

15:25

favor of heaven. Thus, they

15:28

were at pains to find an explanation for

15:30

his prevails as an itinerant scholar who faced

15:32

poverty and settled on the idea that facing

15:34

such hardships could be part of following the

15:37

Tao, which is why Kong Tzu said

15:39

that one should not try to escape them.

15:43

The approach taken by the compilers of

15:45

the collected explanations on the Analects shows

15:47

their devotion to the Confucian tradition in

15:49

another way, too. I remember

15:51

that Kong Tzu himself said that he was

15:53

a transmitter of tradition, not a creator, To

15:57

interpret a text by reworking and excerpting

15:59

other interpretations. There's was to follow his lead

16:01

in this respect. Yet transmission

16:03

can also create is. A

16:05

good deal of the intellectual originality

16:07

in Ancient Chinese tax is almost

16:10

invisible because it consisted of the

16:12

selection, editing, and interpretation of still

16:14

early x done by so called

16:16

scribes. Then to

16:18

those earlier tax are now often last and

16:20

it's hard to appreciate the choices made by

16:22

the scribes when you don't know what was

16:24

left out. As the

16:26

self effacing compilers of be collected explanations

16:28

put it, By. Transmitting antiquity yet

16:30

not developing one's own account of

16:32

that antiquity by assuming a position

16:35

among and symbol gathering that not

16:37

seeking to distinguish oneself from that

16:39

assembly one so guide be in

16:41

the way. When. May therefore

16:43

be without a person presence. Hopefully

16:47

this discussion of the nature of has given you

16:49

some insight into the sort of material will be

16:51

dealing with going forward. But. There's

16:53

no substitute for hearing from someone who is

16:55

work with them directly. So next time we'll

16:57

speak to a scholar who has been working

16:59

extensively with manuscript evidence that has been excavated

17:02

in China over the past decades. Join.

17:04

Us for our interview with Franklin Perkins and

17:06

you'll never have to show and. Our. History

17:12

of Philosophy. And to eat.