DJ Concordance
Why Concordances?

No special reason, if in your youth, following the path of Tang historian Lyou Jr-ji and thousands before and after him, you had committed to memory the entire Dzwo Jwan. The problems with this method are: (1) it takes a long time; (2) it tends to suppress the intellect per se, so that you no sooner possess the text than you can think of no index-like questions to ask of it; and (3) in our century, this knowledge no longer leads down the path to official position and income. In addition, the memorization method has to be repeated for every other early text in which you are interested. And if you have serious intentions of doing work in early history or culture, you have no choice but to be interested in all of them, including the fragmentary and the recently discovered ones.

When William Hung was taking charge of the Harvard-Yenching indexing project, his father chided him, "This will give the foreigners equal access to the texts, without doing all the work." Exactly so. Indexes get the mindless work out of the way fast, in order to leave time in people's lives for mindful work.

For the choice of the Dzwo Jwan as the text to index, little apology is needed. The Dzwo Jwan is the foundation of the self-perception and indeed self-concept of Chinese civilization; it defines the embattled-center us/them paradigm which still dominates Chinese foreign policy; and it is at the same time a major literary text, and the chief evidence for the dates of many other literary texts. Establishing its own date and nature is thus vital for all serious questions about the formative Warring States period (see the DJ entry in Classical Chinese Texts). For many purposes, the Dzwo Jwan is the Warring States text.

That importance has been variously recognized in the Sinology of the last century or so. Here is a summary.

Legge

In transmitting the Chinese classics to the Western world, James Legge viewed the Dzwo Jwan for what it purportedly is: the ranking commentary on the Chun/Chyou or Spring and Autumn chronicle. He translated it almost entire in his volume on the Chun/Chyou, but as a supplement to the chronicle entries, not as a work requiring scrutiny in its own right. As was his custom, he included at the end of his Chun/Chyou volume a complete vocabulary for the Chun/Chyou, complete with sample citations for the meanings given, but confessed his inability to do the same for the Dzwo Jwan, as requiring "more time than I could command." Instead, he appended a list of the characters found in the Dzwo Jwan but not included in the Chun/Chyou vocabulary, leaving it open for later scholars to research and record the meanings of those characters, and also the meanings of Chun/Chyou characters that are found only in the Dzwo Jwan. Both groups bear directly on the claim of the Dzwo Jwan (strongly urged in recent years) to be not a later commentary, but a primary record coming direct from the pre-Warring States centuries.

Fraser

So matters stood as of 1872, when Legge completed his Chun/Chyou volume. In 1880, Everard Fraser became a Student Interpreter in China, thus entering upon a career that led to the Consul-Generalship at Hankou (1901) and Shanghai (1911). He died in Shanghai in 1922. It was apparently in his Hankou period, when he used to argue fine points of meaning with his Chinese opposite, Viceroy Jang Jr-dung, that he compiled his Index to the Dzwo Jwan, completing the work for which Legge had not found time. Stewart Lockhart, whose own term in the British consular service ran from 1879 to 1921, prepared the index for publication in 1930. It has since remained a valuable aid for Dzwo Jwan students. It not only gives meanings and sample occurrences (in terms of page, column, and word numbers in the Legge text of DJ), but distinguishes those meanings, and identifies proper names and their many variants, with a care which equals or surpasses that of Legge himself. Its only faults are those which it shares with all Legge's vocabularies: it gives only instances of each meaning, not the complete inventory of occurrences. It is thus an excellent guide to proper names in particular, but it cannot support the study of stylistic questions, which are based as much on the commonest as on the rarest words. Karlgren's pioneering 1926 Authenticity study used ten common words and their alternates to discriminate the style of the Dzwo Jwan from that of other early texts. More widely based attempts were obviously indicated, but could not be conveniently undertaken without full indexes, that is, concordances, to the works in question.

Harvard-Yenching

In 1937, the Harvard-Yenching concordance enterprise, under the direction of William Hung, issued their Dzwo Jwan concordance (actually a union concordance to the Chun/Chyou and all three of its traditional commentaries: Dzwo Jwan, Gungyang Jwan, and Gulyang Jwan). It had been compiled by hand, each phrase being written on as many cards as it contained words, and each card being then filed with the appropriate word. Errors of transcription and also of filing occurred in the process. Some of the HY volumes, which quickly went out of print at the Harvard University Press, were later reprinted in Japan. Those reprints were revisions which corrected some of the compilation errors. Other reprints from that concordance series (including the Dzwo Jwan volumes) in Taiwan and later in China were uncorrected ones.

Hong Kong

It was one great merit of the HY concordances that they distinguished proper names and compounds, and treated them separately in the entries. Thus, those looking for the politically sensitive term "tyen-sya" will find those occurrences not mixed in with the many pages of tyen "Heaven" listings, but grouped together at the end of the entry. This feature was sacrificed in the Ancient Chinese Texts Concordance Series undertaken by the Institute of Chinese Studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, where the concordance entry is simply a dump of the relevant portion of the database; those in search of compounds or proper names will have to identify them by eye, and sort them out by hand, from within the sometimes long word entry. The Dzwo Jwan concordance in this series appeared in two volumes in 1955 (the Gungyang and Gulyang concordances were issued separately, also in 1995). Like other volumes in the series, it presumably eliminates hand and eye errors but marks in these other respects a retreat from the position reached by the earlier HY concordance.

The Fraser Index thus continued to give a more nuanced access to the Dzwo Jwan than did either of the concordances later issued. The problem was still that the Fraser Index was a sampling of occurrences, not a complete inventory of them. Completing the Index, and thus upgrading it to the status of a functioning concordance, thus loomed as an enterprise which would be of great value to Sinology. It is this which the Digital Index texm at the Colegio de México has accomplished. The Warring States Project is pleased to have played a role in that achievement.

2 Sept 2005 / Contact The Project / Exit to Reference Page