Warring States Project | Publications

The Project's publications are based on its research results. As far as is currently possible, they aim to present the major classical Chinese works on their own terms, as they happened, and as they were shaped by events in the world around them. Our systematic attention to the chronology of the texts, and to the interactions among the texts as well as between texts and events, constitutes a new way of reading the classics. As scholarly Comments on our first book have attested, it produces a revolution in how classical China will be understood in years to come, by scholars and by the general public.

We see many of the major texts as having been formed by an accretion process of growth over time; this easily explains why the same text can contain contradictory ideas, or include both both rudimentary and sophisticated versions of some concept. Such explanations can sometimes be checked against reality. A stunning validation of the accuracy of the accretional view of the Dau/Dv Jing occurred when the texts found at the Gwodyen site were released to the scholarly world. Our accretional view of that text had been introduced in a lecture of 1990, and published in a survey article of 1994. The archaeological text was finally released in 1998. The prediction of the accretion theory as to the extent of the Dau/Dv Jing text as of the probably date of the Gwodyen 1 tomb turned out to be confirmed by the archaeological results. Confirmed along with it was the root idea that Chinese texts, and Chinese culture at large, were not always the same, but reached their final state after a period of growth and adaptation. Classical China turns out, after all, not to be as monolithic as the standard textbooks present it, but lively, vital, and evolutionary.

Forthcoming publications will be distributed by the University of Massachusetts Press, and may be ordered from their web site. Some advance descriptions are also available here. In addition to the Journal, there are three book series. One, issued under the rubric Ancient China in Context, continues the tradition of our 1998 study The Original Analects by presenting complete or nearly complete translations of texts, together with interpretive notes to aid the reader in understanding the meaning of the text when it was first written, or (in the case of The Hundred Voices) to place samples of all the major text in a continuous sequence covering the Warring States period and the early years of the Empire. Abridged classroom versions of some of this material will be issued under the rubric Reading Classical China. Another series, Studies in Chinese Philology, deals with problems of lost or recovered as well as extant texts, for a professional audience; the overview volume in this series is Classical Chinese Texts, a reference guide to our conclusions about the nature and date of all the major texts.

And since the philological methods used in arriving at these conclusions are perfectly general, and apply in principle to texts in all languages, we also explore famous philological problems in ancient India, Homeric Greece, and the Sea of Galilee. This series is called Studies in Comparative Philology.