Brooks presents research at meetings in Oregon, Pennsylvania

Research professor of Chinese E. Bruce Brooks presented an informal talk on Lau Dan, the supposed author of the still wildly popular classical Chinese text, the Dau/Dv Jing, for a student and faculty audience at the University of Oregon, followed by a formal version at the annual meeting of the American Oriental Society, on March 15 in Portland, Ore. 

 

The paper argued that the enigmatic Lau Dan is recoverable historically, and that he was responsible only for the distinctive middle portion of that text. This placement relates Lau Dan more closely to contemporary events, most notably the Chi defeat in Yen in 314 (which drove Mencius from office in Chi) at the beginning of his tenure. In pointing out the dangers of war, both to those who wage it and those who suffer it, Lau Dan closely reflected that historical moment and its lessons. He was perhaps somewhat disappointed in his son Chung, who pursued a military career in another state. Lau Dan died at the advanced age of 80, and was succeeded by his grandson Ju, who had evidently seen through the promise of war and returned to the land and faith of his grandfather. The beginning of his tenure coincided with the disastrous defeat of Chi in Sung in 285, leading to the exile and death of the Chi King. Ju offered strategic advice in the cautious Dauist tradition, but from a position of thorough acquaintance with the military literature, and no longer concentrating on the meditative wisdom, ultimately Indian in its origins,  which had characterized the text and the school up to then.

 

Reporting on another aspect of the Warring States Project’s research into text formation in ancient societies, Brooks chaired a panel on early Christianity (“Paul and After Paul”) at the annual meeting of the Eastern Great Lakes Biblical Society in Erie, Pa. on April 4. He also presented an analysis of “Theological Tendencies of the Pauline Interpolations.” He suggested that the years immediately after Paul’s death saw both extension and mitigation of Paul’s doctrines, in interpolations in Paul’s letters when they were first edited for general circulation, and in separate deuteroPauline works such as Colossians and 2 Thessalonians. A major intention behind these works was the lessening of conflicts in the church caused by Paul’s too vigorous insistence on the distinctive but divisive doctrine of the Atonement. In this and other ways, said Brooks, Paul was brought into the next Christian generation, intact and usable, if also transformed.

 

“The research that leads to these results is somewhat like archaeology, except that it works with text strata instead of dirt strata,” said Brooks. “It consists in detecting differences in the texts, sorting them into layers, evaluating them as evidence, and using the result to reconstruct the constantly changing history behind the texts.