Classical Chinese Texts
The Warring States Audience

In setting out to read the classical texts, it is helpful to have a general sense of the literary situation of which they are a part. One element of that situation is the audiences for the texts.

It is easy to assume that the writers of ancient Chinese texts were much like ourselves, and were part of a literary culture like the one in which we ourselves participate. But that assumption is dangerous. It emerges from our studies of individual texts that the milieu for the writers of these texts was not only different from ours, it was different from itself at different periods.

One point of difference is that the pre-Han texts were mostly written not for a literate public, but for an individual ruler, a particular court, a limited population segment, or the present and future members of some closely organized advocacy group. When the Age of Controversy begins, in the 04th century, the audience for theoretical writings could also include that group's doctrinal rivals. Literary works written for a larger public require a wider literacy. There are hints of such a social broadening in the middle 03c, but on present evidence it was not fully realized until the early Han dynasty.

The thing in which the typical WS audience was chiefly interested was how to govern a state, or how to bring all the states under one governance. Virtually all known WS texts, including recently discovered ones, address this question in one way or another. The chief exceptions are texts dealing with specific techniques (such as medicine) or documents from a governmental process (such as law).

Audiences, like text types, evolved during the Warring States period. For an overview, see Brooks Dynamics. We here summarize the major changes.

05th Century and Earlier

Bronze inscriptions, which typically memorialize an achievement, became notably less common after the Jou defeat in 0771 (see Mattos). Inscribed bronzes from earlier times were known in the Warring States period, but inscriptions were not an active medium of composition.

A more relevant literary model is the Chun/Chyou (CC) chronicle of Lu, which was maintained from the year 0722 by constant additions, and which at any given point served as an institutional memory for its sponsoring entity: the Lu court. The typical school text of the Warring States period, such as the Analects, seems to have had at first a similar function and nature. The primary audience for such a text was the sponsoring institution itself.

04th Century

Toward the middle of the Warring states period, that is, in the 04c, a new type of writing appears: the advocacy text. One early example is the Gwandz, which is composed not of school sayings, but of policy recommendations or position papers, which may originally have been presented at the Chi court. A variant of this pattern is the large Mwodz collection, whose earliest documents (for example MZ 17) are not merely advocational, but oppositional. The early documents in this series were apparently addressed not to a ruler, but to like-minded people discontented with government policies.

By the middle and late 04c, the school texts and the advocacy repositories acquired a partly public character, and so became controversialist documents, whose audience included the proprietors and users of other such texts. This marks the beginning of a literary culture that is not wholly court-centered; it defines the age of controversy which has been given the name "Hundred Schools." Dialogues between these texts, for instance that between the Micians and the Analects Confucians, might extend over as much as fifty years of mutual rivalry and mutual influence.

03rd Century

From the end of the 04c, and in greater quantity in the 03c, we possess a large number of utility texts, such as the legal records and guidelines which enshrined the expertise and recorded the actions of a professional group. These are neither literary nor advocational; they are functional. A further development occurring in the early 03rd century (it is implied in some Jwangdz anecdotes, though not exemplified by any extant text), is the spread of literacy to those outside the court circle, who were neither rulers nor advisors nor articulate outside critics of government. The beginnings of this development should probably be located in the late 04c, when it is first assumed by the advocacy texts that publicly displayed laws will be understood by the general populace. This is the beginning of a more general literacy.

None of these developments created a self-sustaining literary culture, in which texts could be written in the absence of an institutional mandate, and could survive without special custodianship. For the Warring States period, we assume that, to survive at all, texts needed sponsorship by some group giving institutional continuity over time. Many of the surviving Warring States texts are thus in some degree proprietary texts, both in their origin and in their dynamic of continuation and preservation.

Classical Chinese Texts is Copyright © 1993- by E Bruce and A Taeko Brooks

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