Text Typology
Accretional TextsThe Accretional text is the basic variety of Growth text. It is composed by gradual addition to the previous state of the work, the process being under the guidance of some ongoing author or proprietary entity, and the result at all stages of the process being regarded as a a single text. Additions may be made to either the head or the tail of the previous text. The latter is the normal or default procedure; material preposed rather than postposed tends to imply a special authorial intention, such as doctrinal emphasis.
Accretional texts may grow by entries or by chapter modules. If the module of growth is an independent text, we are into the zone of what we prefer to call the Accumulated type.
Accretional texts are not numerous among Warring States texts as a whole, but they bulk large among those texts that are still frequently read, most of which are in some sense "philosophical." They tend to be the product of schools in the strict sense, whose ideas are often still of interest, rather than of advocacy groups, whose agendas have lost force along with the period in which they arose. Many of the extant accretional texts were historically connected during their period of composition. The Chun/Chyou was undoubtedly the precedent for the accretional continuation of the Analects, and the Analects in turn was evidently the model for the 04c Mician Analects and the the 03c Jwangdz cell groups, with both of which it was in adversative contact, and also for the Mencius, which was historically a splinter movement of the Analects group. It is likely that the Dau/Dv Jing is connected with one or more of these instances as well.
- Chun/Chyou. The chronicle of Lu, to which material was constantly added, from its inception in 0721 to at least 0479, and probably until the fall of Lu in 0249. Only the first of these two portions is preserved, thanks to a copy which was probably made by the head of the Lu Confucian school in the early middle 04c. The module of addition in the CC is the single entry recording an event, and the entries are organized in terms of the four-season year. Headings for the season are sometimes given even when no events are recorded for the season. The CC provided the model for a proprietary text which was continually kept up to date by its sponsoring institution (here, the Lu court). It apparently served the court as a sort of institutional memory for certain classes of event.
- Analects. The house record of the Confucian school of Lu, preserving and extending the ideas and influence of Confucius from his death in 0479 to the fall of Lu in 0249. The module of addition is the single saying or anecdote of Confucius, and those modules are typically grouped into chapters, with a standard (though not invariable) groundplan of 24 sayings grouped in 4 thematic sections. In abstract terms, the Analects can be seen as the transfer of the Chun/Chyou precedent to a private rather than a governmental sponsoring entity. In that sense, it is importantly true that the Analects is "the first private text" in early China. The link with the calendrical model (the structure based on the calendrical number 12) and accretional form of the Chun/Chyou is obvious, and the Chun/Chyou prototype would have been well known to the people in charge of the Confucius movement in its early days, who also had standing at the court of Lu. The first Analects core, the present LY 4 (c0479), does not yet exhibit the accretional feature; for the nature of that unit as a text in its own right, see under Assembled.
- Mwodz 46-50. This sequence within the Mician corpus might fittingly be called the Mician Analects. Uniquely in the Mician writings, it has the form of sayings by the founder Mwodz, arranged (in the order originally composed) into chapters. It casts Mwodz himself as a school head, very much in the manner of Confucius, and implies a Lu origin for him. In content, these chapters parallel LY 12-18 (see Brooks Original Appendix 3), closely at the beginning of the sequence (the high Hundred Schools period) and dwindling to very little at the end (mirroring the disorganization which Tswei Shu detected in the Analects school and its text). The formal model for this accretional sequence was obviously the Analects itself, and information it seems to contain about Mwodz must be scrutinized in light of the text's obvious wish to present Mwodz to an Analects audience as a sort of counter-Confucius..
- Sundz. The early chapters are variant versions of a unit containing a topographical checklist at the beginning and a leadership memo at the end. These variants occupy the middle chapters of our Sundz. On both sides of them occur later chapters of a different sort, which have more nearly the character of integral compositions. Framing devices in SZB 1 and 12 suggest that the accretion process was ended, and text intentionally rounded off, at 12 chapters. The 13th chapter, a uniquely coherent treatise on Spying, was an afterthought or later layer. For the resumed growth of the Sundz in Han, which puts the text into another category altogether, see under Layered.
- Shang-jywn Shu. Statecraft essays by a group of Chin Legalist thinkers, which at one point (probably c0250) intentionally if fraudulently identified itself with the remembered Chin general and statesman Lord Shang (Shang-jywn). The person or persons responsible for the SJS core material cannot presently be identified. Recent work on the text has changed the conclusions under which it was originally listed as a Montréal Problem.
- Dau/Dv Jing. A long series of short modules added by the proprietors of an 04c meditation group which gradually transformed itself into a governmentally-connected statecraft group. Additions were at first added to both the head and tail of the previous text; later on, all additions were postposed. The emphasis of the text, and of the school which produced it, change over time in a statecraft direction, but there is no evidence of a discontinuity in the sequence of authors who produced the text. For the subsequent history of the DDJ as a component in other constructions, see under Juxtaposed.
- Mencius 4-7. The house text of one branch of the Mencian movement. The common core for all Mencians was a series of interview transcripts from the years 0320-c0310, now preserved (and expanded by an equal number of later additions) as MC 1. The posthumous Mencian movement early split into two branches, each with its separate record, continuing in operation down to the extinction of Lu and neighboring states in 0249; these two house texts are reunited in our present text. MC 4-7, which were added in roughly that order, was the accretional house text of the northern branch of the Mencian movement (the southern branch, who inherited the MC 1 common core texts, are represented by MC 1-3). For the sequence of the two house texts when first combined, see Rearranged.
- Jwangdz 4. This single chapter, like a number of other Jwangdz units, is itself an accretional production. It appears to be the text record of a small and not long-continued early 03c protest movement. Like the Analects (with which at one point it was in adversative contact), JZ 4 adds material both to the head and tail of the previous core. If the Mencians were an Analects splinter group still compatible with their point of origin, as suggested above, the Jwangdz 4 group and some of its neighbors may perhaps be seen as Analects splinter groups of renegade tendency.
Classical Chinese Texts is Copyright © 1993- by E Bruce and A Taeko Brooks
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