Warring States Project Summary
What problem is the Project addressing? How does it approach that problem? What solutions it has reached, and how accurate are they likely to be? For the European scholars attending the WSWG 17 Conference (hosted by Leiden University in September 2003) Bruce wrote a short summary of our answers to those questions, by way of introducing ourselves. Here is a revised version of that summary.
The Problem
The problem is that traditional ideas about the classical Warring States period are often wrong, and never more so than with the texts on which our knowledge of that period is based. It follows that we don't really know very much about the formative period preceding the creation of the Chinese Empire in 0221.
If we read the Warring States texts as unitary compositions, we immediately encounter difficulties. Shown above are the opening words of the Analects. If all of that text reflects Confucius, who died in the early 05th century, why does it contain (in LY 12-13) whole lines also found in the 04th century chapters of the Gwandz, or (also in LY 12-13) a political theory identical with that argued by Mencius beginning in 0320? How can it respond (in LY 17:19) to the Mician school's critique of the three-year mourning custom, when Mwodz, the supposed founder of that school, is supposed to be, at earliest, a disciple of one of Confucius's disciples? Why does it duplicate almost exactly (in LY 18:5) a typically Dauist paragraph from the Dauist text Jwangdz? This continual anticipation of ideas, and even stories, known to be later than Confucius is most disturbing.
And to take a point first noticed by Lyou Dzung-ywæn in the Tang dynasty, Why does the Analects refer to Dzvng Shvn as Dzvngdz ("Master Dzvng"), when Confucius is supposed to have been Dzvng Shvn's master? This is the language, not of Dzvngdz's teacher, but of his own disciples.
Again, some WS texts seem to be aware of each other, in both directions. Thus, the Micians (in MZ 48:8) had criticized the Confucian custom of the three year mourning. Not only does the Analects respond to the Micians in LY 17:19, but the Micians answer back, in MZ 48:12, by holding the Analects argument up to ridicule, and deriding the Confucians as no more intelligent than a baby. The Mwodz must be at once earlier than, and later than, the Analects. This is logically impossible if the Mwodz is a unitary text.
In these and in many other ways, we can easily notice relations within one text, and between two or more texts, that the integral theory of those texts is powerless to explain.
A first step in understanding such texts is to separate them into constituents, and purge them of later additions. An example from the Analects is given on our Philology page.
Our Approach
What do we do once late material has been identified? One solution has been to assign a late date to the whole work (thus, Lyou Dzung-ywaen assigned the whole Analects to the generation after Dzvngdz). Another is to reject only the problem passages as intrusive, and continue to maintain the traditional early date. But after the locally intrusive passages have been eliminated, the remaining material may still remain internally inconsistent. The typical situation with the Warring States material is that the purified text is still a combination of early and late material, but arranged in a systematic way, sometimes with the early material in front and the later material at the end, and sometimes with material added on both sides of an original nucleus. That is, the purified material may itself suggest a growth process, spanning both early and late stages.
A first approach to the perception that a text can grow over time and still be "genuine," in the sense of relating to the same sponsoring group, began with Hu Yin (1098-1156). He saw that separating the Analects into earlier and later regions (LY 1-10 and 11-20) gave a better explanation of some internal differences. This approach was later taken up by the Japanese scholar Itô Jinsai (1627-1705; his residence in Kyoto is shown above), who recognized the same two layers in the Analects, and by the Chinese scholar Tswei Shu (1740-1816), who identified a still later section within the Hu/Itô second layer. There was also Arthur Waley (1889-1966) in the 20th century, who similarly distinguished early and late portions of the Hu/Itô early layer.
None of these suggestions was widely accepted. Tswei Shu, whose work had been lost, was rediscovered in the early 20th century, but only briefly, and the efforts of the group around Gu Jye-gang (1893-1980), which were part of that revival, were abruptly ended by World War Two. Their work, and the analytical approcah in general, have continued to be held in contempt, as unpatriotic, by majority Chinese opinion.
The work of the Project amounts to resuming and extending this promising minority approach, with methodological support from the European tradition of text criticism. For some texts, the Analects being one, the correct solution turns out to be a continuous accretion model. According to that model, the Analects was the record of the Confucian school, as had already been suggested by Jang Sywe-chvng (1738-1801). We add to Jang's suggestion the idea that the record was maintained over time, and extended by successive heads of that school. This accretion model, the model of a school text rather than an authorial text, turns out to apply to several of the other classical texts.
Like Tswei Shu and Gu Jye-gang, we also accept responsibility, not only for the Analects, but for the early texts in general. The result of our researches is thus not a theory of the Analects, but a system of relative dates for that and many other texts or layers of texts. That interconnected system of dates now includes most of the important pre-Imperial texts, and is linked at several points to historical events, this providing an absolute date for the whole corpus. For a sample of what this looks like, see our two Chronology pages, starting with the introductory Chronology #1 (those who wish may skip direct to the more complicated and more realistic Chronology #2).
The system as a whole meets two crucial tests: (1) its datings are mutually consistent (we do not solve a problem at one place in a way that creates a new problem at another place), and (2) they together suggest a plausible historical development, over the pre-Imperial centuries. Here are some of the events and tendencies which make sense if the evidence is read according to our dating of the texts:
It is very difficult to imagine any of these developments running the other way. It is likely that a mass infantry army will be replaced by a small elite force of chariot archers? Will a complex bureaucratic state dwindle to a small palace society? Will a denuded mountain to reforest itself? Will the image of Confucius develop over time from a cultural icon to a not very successful courtier of Lu?
We answer, No, it is not likely. And we note that the direction in which these things move according to our dating of the texts thus provides a strong historical confirmation to the results reached, in the previous stage of work, by philological analysis.
A Reality Check
It thus turns out that the Project theory, alone among competing theories, is philologically grounded, internally consistent, and historically plausible. That is already a very strong position. But one always wants more, and it would be nice to have external confirmation of some strand in that interconnected theory. Ideally, the confirmation would rest on unimpeachable archaeological evidence. As it happens, that archaeological validation has been found. Here is the story.
In June 1990, E Bruce Brooks revealed in a lecture, and in July 1994 he published in SPP 46, a view that the Dau/Dv Jing text, a work in 81 short chapters, grew by accretion over the period from c0340 to 0249. This specific theory is linked with, and consistent with, theories of the other major texts, including the Analects, so that a test of the DDJ theory is to some extent a test of the whole system of proposed dates.
The DDJ theory contains a prediction. It predicts that if a copy of the DDJ from between the years c0340 and 0249 were discovered, it would lack some of its higher-numbered chapters, and the number of chapters missing would depend on the exact date of the copy. Such predictions are open to testing.
A test presently appeared. In 1993, a text of the DDJ was recovered from a tomb near the capital of the old state of Chu (some of the bamboo strips are shown above). The tomb could be dated circumstantially to the period between 0298 and 0278. The theory had predicted that a DDJ text from that period would probably contain material later than DDJ 53, but not anything beyond DDJ 70. The validity of our entire construct was thus resting on one question: is the Chu DDJ complete or not? And if not complete, is it incomplete in the way the theory predicts?
When the results of the 1993 discovery were released in 1998, the Chu DDJ turned out to be incomplete, and incomplete in the way we had predicted. That is, it contained nothing beyond DDJ 66. None of the last 15 chapters of the DDJ text were represented in the Chu selection. This is exactly what was predicted by the DDJ theory proposed in 1990 (before the discovery of the Chu text had been made), and published in 1994 (before the contents of that discovery were known). The prediction was made without knowledge of the evidence. The confirmation was exact.
Some have objected that perhaps the Chu DDJ text (which contains only 33 segments of DDJ, and thus omits much material from the range DDJ 1-66 also) were omitted by chance. But the chance that a selection of 33 items from a larger group of 81 items would include nothing at all from items #67 to #81 inclusive is 1 in 7,384 (see the separate Arithmetic page). Statistically, this is so unlikely as to be impossible. The DDJ theory, and the system of text chronology of which it is a part, are stunningly confirmed by the Chu DDJ.
Such confirmed predictions, from evidence which could not have been known at the time the prediction was made, are considered decisive in the hard sciences. What kind of science history may be, we do not know, but we consider this confirmation to be decisive also.
What Comes Next
We are continuing to publish analyses of key texts, an overview of the entire chronology construct, and guides to text and historical methodology. Print materials presently available are listed at the Publications and Journal sections of this site. More will be coming soon.
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