Text Typology
Accumulated Texts

The Accumulated text arises through a process like that of the Accretional text, except that the result is a collection of different works rather than a single entity. That collection becomes the house repository, rather than the house text, of the sponsoring entity. If the pre-Warring States prototype of the Accretional text is the Chun/Chyou of Lu, as we elsewhere suggest, it may be that the prototype of the Accumulated text is the collection of inscribed bronze vessels, both made and looted, that seems to have been the treasure archive of Chi (see Gwandz, below).

Some school accumulations as we now have them are very diverse, and it is not always clear that Han editing (chiefly by Lyou Syang in his term as Palace Librarian) has correctly identified what does and does not belong in the group. The examples given below are listed in order of increasing internal organization, which happens to be also the order of the date at which they seem to have been begun, as well as the order of increasing "authorial" nature. The implied gradual emergence of the "authorial" concept, as distinct from the original "authority" concept, is an important feature of Warring States literary history.

A variant of the school accumulation is the family accumulation. Both are included here.

• Gwandz. The archive of what may originally have been several statecraft advocacy groups in Chi, beginning in the early middle 04c (very likely under the innovative and active reign of Chi Wei-wang) and extending into Han. If the Chi court archive did consist of distinct inscribed bronze vessels, rather than a single constantly updated written record, as in Lu, then it may be that the accumulation rather than the accretional single text was the natural form of school repository for statecraft thinkers operating in Chi, and thus familiar with the Chi court and its archive. The 86 texts composing the "Gwandz" (of which 76 are extant) all have separate titles. The earliest among them were not originally identified with the 07th century Chi statesman Gwan Jung. That claim was first made, and that label perhaps imposed on the movement, at the end of the 04th century, some 70 years after the movement's political theory tracts had begun to pile up. The label may have been given in imitation of contemporary practice; in particular, the name Gwandz may have been chosen not only because he was a Chi figure, but because he was earlier than Confucius. The set of seven GZ economics chapters have a collective title ("Ching/Jung") within the larger repository. Some early GZ chapters are individually accretional or juxtapositional in form; the later ones are largely integral. A few late ones, almost certainly of Han date, are identified as commentaries on selected early ones, showing that even toward the end, the sponsoring entity (about which nothing whatever is known) had a sense of institutional continuity with its early beginnings.
• Mwodz. The archive of statements issued by the little understood sub-elite Mician movement, whose founder or tutelary figure was Mwo Di. The Mwodz, unlike the Gwandz, thus made an authorial claim from the beginning (early 04c), but the authorial figure was at that time a contemporary figure, not some sage of earlier antiquity like Gwan Jung (07c, if not wholly fictional). There are well-defined areas within the Mician writings: (1) ethical position papers, MZ 1-39, (2) treatises on the laws of thought, MZ 40-45, (3) an anecdotal series, probably written by a branch of the movement in Lu and comprising a sort of Mician Analects, MZ 46-50, and (4) the defensive military treatises, MZ 51-71. Each of these subsets forms a corpus of its own, with its own typical module of accretion and characteristic formal gestures. The anecdotal chapter series in particular is Accretional in type.
• Han Feidz. Much of the bulk of this huge text, with its separately titled modules on the Gwandz model, was produced by an accumulation process during the Han dynasty, but that process was based on a core of unrelated earlier material. The text as a whole is thus entered in the Resumed Texts subset of the Layered category.
• Sywndz. The repository of Sywndzian writings differs from the above in that most of it can be regarded as proceeding from, and not merely as identified with, Sywn Kwang. Some chapters were probably finalized, or even composed, by members of Sywndz's staff during the period when he served Chu as Governor of Lan-ling. This period ran from 0254 until Sywndz's loss of Chu court patronage in 0238. The Sywndz material further develops the trend visible in the previous examples: it is a school repository, but it also has some of the character of an authorial repository (see following examples).
• Shr Ji. Though conceived as an Integral text by Szma Tan, and partly executed by him and his son and successor Szma Chyen on that plan, as a family enterprise, the work was left incomplete by the latter, and as we now have it, represents further work by at least four people (see Shr Ji Authorship). To that extent, it comes under the category of Accumulated texts, being the house record of a movement which, though not planned as such, turned out to extend over several generations.
• Han Shu. Like the Shr Ji, but with a tidier ending, HS was begun by a father (Ban Byau) and finished by a son, Ban Gu (an exact contemporary of Wang Chung, see next).
• Lun Hvng. The collected animadversions of the Latter Han writer Wang Chung. It takes the Sywndz school repository into new territory, by choosing to regard the lifetime essay output of one person not as a corpus or group of texts, but as a single named text. The next step in the process is to regard a life as itself a work of art; this point is reached by the early Six Dynasties eccentrics such as Rwan Ji.

It may be said that, overall, the centuries from Spring and Autumn to the Six Dynasties saw a steady increase of interest in the identity, and the personality, of the person who was seen as producing the text.

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

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