Text Typology
Extended Texts

A text may be declared finished, by its proprietors or by the public, but the impulse toward growth in that direction may still continue. One way in which this can manifest itself is by renewed growth of the text itself, usually under other auspices; see Resumed. Another is by the appearance of closely associated texts outside the boundaries of the original text. One species of such growth is the commentary, and if the commentary literature should itself come to be regarded as closed, further extensions may occur apart from the generating text; such is the genesis of the Han apocryphal literature. The extended text is not a text nor a collection of texts, it is rather a textual penumbra around some core text.

• Yi Commentaries. The Yi text, which was finalized by the late 04c, tended from the early 03c to acquire commentaries or explications, which can be thought of as satellite associated texts, rather than as Layers. The primacy of the Yi proper within the group was never lost, and the commentaries never imitated its form. The production of commentaries was not entirely orderly, but at some point the process was terminated (by authority unknown). Some early commentaries were rejected at that time, a few of them have since been recovered from Mawangdwei. The remaining group (including a slightly extended version of the Syi Tsz commentary, which also turns up at Mawangdwei) was finalized as a central Yi flanked by ten commentarial "wings."
• Yi Apocrypha. After that point, certain further energies of Yi exposition were channeled into separate texts which were themselves later gathered into a repertoire of Yi Apocrypha (Yi Wei). It might be meaningful to identify the immense Yi enthusiast literature of our own time as constituting a crosscultural apocrypha. The difficulty with this or any other apocryphal corpus is that of defining the limits of what it includes; sometimes the point of the category is that it remains open to further growth.

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

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