Warring States Project Summary

Philology addresses problems of dating, authenticity, and interpolation within text. It leaves behind it, in favorable cases, a set of cleaned up texts, from which the history of the period can then be written. But there is a further test of the correctness of the philological work, and it consists precisely in the historical plausibility of the textual result. We here go back a bit, and recall the progress of scholarship, over the last thousand years, in getting a sense of how the Analects came to be, what developmental picture it suggests, and what the developmental picture of all the Warring States suggests.

Dating a Text

Everyone's first presumption is that a text is written on one occasion, and thus has a single date of composition. That is sometimes the case. But what do we do when philology discovers that a text in internally inconsistent, and thus may have more than one date? This question has arisen with the Analects. Here are some of the answers given by students of the text.

1. One response, when late material is discovered in a work, is to assign that late date to the whole work. Thus, Lyou Dzung-ywaen, toward the end of the Tang dynasty), assigned the whole Analects to the generation after Dzvngdz. That was a step in the right direction, but it still maintained the concept of an integral text, written at one point in time.

2. 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.

Kogido, the Residence and Study of Ito Jinsai in Kyoto

3. 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,

4. . . . and by the Chinese scholar Tswei Shu (1740-1816), who in his comprehensive studies of all the classical texts, identified a still later section (LY 16-20) within the Hu/Itô late layer.

5. Jang Sywe-chvng (1738-1801) provided a rationale for the layered Analects by suggesting that the Analects (and several other Warring States texts) was not a book by Confucius, but rather the house record of the Confucian successor school.

5. There was also Arthur Waley (1889-1966) in the 20th century, who in a similar way an earlier portion (LY 3-9) within the Hu/Itô early layer.

6. And Timoteus Pokora, who noticed in 1973 that all these layer theories could be combined into a single accretion theory, of a gradually expanding text.

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 Gu Jye-gang (1893-1980) and others, which were part of that revival, were abruptly ended by World War Two. Their work, and the analytical approach in general, have continued to be held in contempt, as unpatriotic or otherwise countercultural, by majority Chinese opinion.

6. 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 not a book by Confucius, but rather the ongoing house record of the Confucian school of Lu, 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 other classical texts as well.

The Analects in Detail

It may help to give a more detailed idea of how we detect different layers in the Analects. Here is a very short summary.

Defining Layers. Like many earlier commentators, we find significant differences between chapters of the Analects. We therefore conjecture that the chapter is the major module of accretion in this text. We then examine the chapters with special care:

Sequence of Layers. Of the Analects chapters, LY 4 has several archaic features, and may be the core of the work. With exceptions which are limited to two passages, which thus may be later interpolations: (a) its average passage has 19 words, the shortest in the book (the overall average is 30 words); (b) uniquely among the Analects chapters, it uses no narrative devices, rather, all sayings are isolated quotes introduced by the formula "The Master said;" (c) also uniquely among the Analects chapters, it contains no dialogues, rather, the Master is the only speaker; (d) also uniquely among the Analects chapters, it mentions no proper names, rather, the focus is entirely on the Master; and finally (e) it contains among other details a linguistic archaism, the full verb yw "to be in relation with" [see above], which is known in Warring States in general only as a coverb "in relation to," and may thus be a survival of an earlier usage from the Spring and Autumn period, in which period Confucius's lifetime entirely falls.

These suggest an early relative date. As to absolute date: Since it refers to Confucius in the third person, LY 4 is unlikely to have been written by Confucius himself. At earliest, it will most likely date from sometime after his death in 0479 (479 BC), and consist of sayings remembered, but editorially framed, by his protégés.

In subsequent chapters, we may note the following limitations on absolute date:

LY 6 uses the posthumous name Ai-gung, and thus, unless it has been later emended, cannot be earlier than his death in 0469.
LY 8 reports the dying words of Dzvngdz. It does so in two versions, of which the more elaborate (LY 8:4) is probably a later aggrandizing interpolation. The simpler and presumably original version (8:3) cannot possibly be earlier than Dzvngdz's death, which is traditionally given as 0436.
LY 12-13 are similar in content to the speeches of Mencius in MC 1. Mencius's public career, as D C Lau has shown (Mencius Appendix 1), dates from 0320, and these two Analects chapters should thus be from a slightly earlier time, when Mencius had not yet separated himself from the Analects school.
LY 14 refers to the myth of the early death of Dz-lu. So does the Dzwo Jwan (DJ). The final composition date of the DJ can be dated by astronomical and internal evidence to somewhere in the vicinity of 0312.
LY 16:2-3 contain veiled but numerically precise references to the Chi conquest of Sung in 0286. LY 16: may also be read in this sense.
LY 18 includes a hostile interchange with Jwangdz 4 (LY 18:6 is a near replica of JZ 4:7, with the ending changed so as to favor Confucius rather than his critic). What is the date of the Jwangdz? Parts of it are noticed by the early 03rd century philosopher Sywndz, and many more are quoted in the Lw-shr Chun/Chyou (LSCC, the earliest stratum of which, LSCC 1-12, is from 0241). The bulk of the Jwangdz thus apparently becomes visible to other schools of thought in the early middle 03rd century.
LY 20, the final Analects chapter, consists of a short Shu-type text followed by a few Confucius sayings. The sayings do not make a chapter on the standard Analects model, and LY 20 may thus reflect an interruption in the usual compilation process. The Analects school was undoubtedly located in the capital of Lu, and one very strong candidate for such an interruption would have been the conquest of Lu by Chu in 0249.

These are the principal indications of absolute date in the Analects. It will be obvious that they form a chronological sequence, beginning with LY 4 and ending abruptly with LY 20. The simplest theory that will cover these details is that the Analects chapters from LY 4 through LY 20 were compiled in that chronological order between an earliest date of 0479 and a final date of 0249, a total time-depth of 230 years. Schematically:

LY 4 (after 0479)
LY 6 (after 0469)
LY 8 (after 0436)
LY 12-13 (shortly before 0320 and the Mencius 1 interviews)
LY 14 ( ~ DJ final layer, c0312)
LY 16 (after 0286)
LY 18 ( ~ JZ 4, probably early mid 03c)
LY 20 (interrupted in 0249)

It will be noted that the above list of dates gives to the late layer noticed by Tswei Shu a chronological interpretation which Tswei did not himself suggest. That layer, the five chapters LY 16-20, which Tswei Shu defined by their many anomalies of procedure as compared with the rest of the Analects, turns out to be simply the 03rd century portion of the Analects.

By a similar argument (see Brooks Analects 206), LY 1-3 can be fitted into this plan as a separate and parallel sequence of preposed chapters. These chapters seem to have been added to the LY 4 core in reverse order, LY 3 first and LY 1 last. Their placement at the beginning of the text as it then stood may have been to legitimate the doctrinal shifts which they imply, the clearest being the new emphasis on the theory of ritual which is extensively worked out in LY 3.

Test by Content. If we test this proposed sequence by examining the content of these passages, we find many examples of plausible development. Thus,

Confucius has modest status in LY 4, but is a grand figure in LY 19
The Confucian school is scarcely visible in LY 4, which reads like a series of remembered remarks made to individuals at different times, but by LY 19 it has become a tuition-charging three-year institution with a fixed classical book curriculum, housed in a mansion.

Over the same span, we may also observe, in the culture at large, hints of the following:

the increased availability of silk
a shift in the metal industry from ritual vessels to weapons
the rise of the mass infantry army, and the new art of the the army general

(For such developments in real time, see further Brooks Analects Appendix 3). The plausible character of these developments, plus the fact that no developments implied by the Analects layer theory are notably implausible, tends to confirm that theory.

Evidence From Other Texts

The above is an argument from within the Analects itself. Independent evidence as to the soundness of the Analects theory is available from the seeming contacts between the Analects and other Warring States texts (or the points of view which those texts preserve). As we read the Analects chapters in the sequence here proposed, we may ask ourselves the question: Of what other texts (or viewpoints) is this text aware? The answer changes as we move along the sequence of Analects chapters. Avoiding preposed chapters, as requiring a separate argument which is not practical to give in this brief space, the resulting list looks, in part, something like this:

LY 8:3. Dzvngdz quotes a Shr poem
LY 9:15 speaks of the adjustment of parts of the Shr corpus
LY 9:24 seems to allude to two lost wisdom texts (Waley Analects 143)
LY 12-13 overlap often with the wording of the 04c Gwandz (GZ 1-3 and 7; see Rickett v1)
LY 12:22 redefines the virtue rvn in Mician terms as ai "love" for others
- DJ 9/29:13 describes a musical performance of the "300 Poems"
LY 13:3 refers to the Shr as numbering 300
LY 12:1 use the term "revert" in a moral sense; so do DDJ 14, 16, and 22
LY 12:6 echoes DDJ 16
LY 12:17 echoes DDJ 37 (a theme occurring also elsewhere in DDJ)
LY 14:40 unambiguously quotes Shu 43 on the three-year mourning
- DJ 9/23:5 gives a favorable view of Dzang Wvn-jung
LY 14:14 disputes the favorable view of Dzang Wvn-jung
LY 15:1 (and some seemingly earlier passages which turn out to be interpolated in context) takes a negative view of military strategy, and deplores a ruler's interest in it
LY 16:4 deplores the "weakness" philosophy exemplified by DDJ 43
LY 16:8 responds to the "jeering at the sages" which is exemplified in DDJ 53
LY 17:2a echoes the human nature issue, debated in SZ 23 and MC 6A
- MZ 48:8 deplores the damage to culture caused by Confucian three-year mourning
LY 17:19 has "Confucius" rebuke a disciple for stating the Mician position
LY 17:19 cites parents' care of infants as a justification of three-year mourning
- MZ 48:12 ridicules the Confucians as "no wiser than a baby"
LY 18:5 almost exactly duplicates Jwangdz 4:7

There are some important implications in the above data for the dating of other texts:

The gradual crystallization of the Shr repertoire, finally reaching its canonical size of 300 poems, seems to be included within the time span of the Analects. This refutes the traditional idea, still often mentioned (for example, in Nylan Five 72f), that Confucius was himself responsible for editing the Shr into the form we know, an idea which is refuted by the gradual text formation process which the Shr seems to be undergoing within the Analects material. That idea is refuted on the positive side by the fact that Confucius's teaching in the material previous to LY 9 is based, not on written authority, nor on the authority of antiquity in any form, but on appeals to experience (as in LY 7:21) and to the moral instincts of his protégés. The conclusion is irresistible that the historical Confucius did not know the Shr as we now have it.
The contacts with the early Gwandz, coming in the middle period of the Analects, confirm Rickett's 04th century dating of those chapters, against the traditional view that connects the text with the historical Gwan Jung in the 07th century.
The contacts with the Dzwo Jwan, coming in the same middle segment of the Analects, agree with the critical scholarly opinion that though this text purports to describe the 08th through 06th centuries, it was itself written in the 04th century, and reflects 04c political and literary developments.
Similarly, the appearance of Dau/Dv Jing contacts only in the middle and later stages of the Analects confirms the later of the two datings between which scholarship has continued to hesitate: the 06c date maintained by Wing-tsit Chan (Way 61-71) and by Hu Shih (Problems). or the 04c and/or 03c date assigned by Lyang Chi-chau, Henricks, and others.
The appearance of Mician influence in the middle Analects (12:22), and the extended interaction between the Analects and the Mwodz (see Brooks Analects 259f) generally supports the accretional Mwodz theory of Watanabe over the integral theory of Graham (Later 3-5, ECT 337f)
Mention of military tactics as an unwelcome novelty in this same part of the Analects tends to confirm the Griffith 04c dating of the Sundz against the traditional 06c date which is defended by Gawlikowski and Loewe (ECT 447-449)
The appearance of the "human nature" debate in LY 17 agrees with the fact that the Sywndz half of that debate must be in the time of Sywndz (at earliest, the first half of the 03c)

None of these inferences about the dates of other early texts is unprecedented in the literature, but together, they form a coherent system of datings which generally, and for the first time consistently, support the findings of critical scholarship.

The Larger Historical Picture

If we proceed in this way, not just with the Analects but with all the major Warring States texts, we arrive at a system of interconnecting relationships over time: a relative chronology of the texts. Of that system too we may ask: does it as a whole give a plausible developmental picture? Here are some features of the picture of Warring States times that emerges if we read our system of texts with the larger historical picture in mind. The following things seem to be happening: