Chronology 1

The interrelationships among the Warring States texts cannot be solved by assigning a single date to each text. We must recognize that many of the texts were compiled over time, which means that we can assign specific dates to segments, but not to whole texts. In doing so, if the evidence required us to assign different dates to one segment, our chronology would be wrong, at least at that point. So far as we know, this does not happen. The dates the Project has presently assigned to text segments seem to satisfy the requirements of the evidence as it is presently known to us.

This kind of dating assigns a stream of time, rather than a point in time, to most of the texts. The preliminary chart below, which is meant to give only a first idea of the system, shows how four major texts look from the Project viewpoint. Their formation processes run in parallel, and they overlap for part of their length.

(The Analects or Lun Yw is abbreviated LY. The Mencius, which we find consists of two parallel strands, and the Mwodz, which consists of four, are here presented as a single column for simplicity).

Year	Analects	Mwodz	Dau/Dv Jing	Mencius
0479	LY
0470	LY
0460	LY
0450	LY
0436	LY
0420	LY
0410	LY
0390	LY	MZ
0380	LY	MZ
0370	LY	MZ
0360	LY	MZ
0350	LY	MZ
0340	LY	MZ	DDJ
0330	LY	MZ	DDJ
0320	LY	MZ	DDJ	MC
0310	LY	MZ	DDJ	MC
0300	LY	MZ	DDJ	MC
0290	LY	MZ	DDJ	MC
0280	LY	MZ	DDJ	MC
0270	LY	MZ	DDJ	MC
0260	LY	MZ	DDJ	MC
0250	LY	MZ	DDJ	MC
0240
0230
0220
0209
0200

Notice that all the text strands are cut off at the year 0250. This is because the sponsoring groups of those texts happened to be located in or near to the state of Lu. Thus, all were affected by the conquest of Lu by Chu in 0249, which resulted in the extinction of Lu as a state, and the suppression of heterodox opinions by Sywndz, the governor of occupied Chu territory beginning in 0254.

Notice also that it is not possible to say whether the Analects is earlier or later than the Mwodz. It is both, depending which layers of the Analects (and the Mwodz) you have in mind. The same is true of any other two of these texts. There are chapters of the DDJ which are pre-Mencian, and there are other chapters of the DDJ which are contemporary with Mencius, or with the later additions to his school text. It is this pattern of overlap in time which permits the solution of many otherwise intractable problems in the relations between these texts.

We can sum up the Project's approach by saying that we propose to solve the Warring States text chronology problem by making modules of accretion, not whole texts, the units of analysis.

The next page, Chronology #2, will complicate this picture in the way the real Warring States world was complicated. It will divide the composite texts into some of their parallel streams, and distinguish some individual units within each stream. It will add other texts not included in this simple introductory chart. It will also interrupt the text columns to note some important political events (not just the Chu conquest of Lu) that cut across all the text formation processes, and left traces in the texts formed at that time. To go to that more complicated version of the chart, click on this arrow:

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