Studies and Documents
Introduction to Classical Chinese Texts
E Bruce and A Taeko Brooks
estimated publication date: 2008

This survey of the literature of pre-Imperial and early Imperial China summarizes the Project's findings in a systematic and easily accessible way. It replaces an early 1994 monograph, itself a response to a 1993 work edited by Michael Loewe, and having the same purpose, which is here realized in a revised form and on a wider scale.

1. The classical texts of China have been heavily relied on by the architects of later Chinese tradition, and in the process have acquired secondary identities that now interfere with their understanding as documents of their own time. Thus, the Analects of Confucius has come to be regarded as a collection of entirely authentic sayings by the Master, and the Shr poems have come to be interpreted as records of Jou antiquity. Philological study has shown that, along with a core of authentic sayings, the Analects is actually a record of the later doctrinal evolution of the Confucian School of Lu over more than two centuries, and contains a continually updated image of "Confucius." As for the Shr poems, the oldest pieces in the collection were sometimes bawdy popular songs of the early 05th century, alongside which the moralists of the late 05th century quickly ranged their more sanitized versions. The Shr collection too thus reflects the changing values and evolving didactic strategies of the high Warring States period, and is perilous if it is used (as it has often been used) as evidence for any earlier period.

2. Not all the misunderstanding of early Chinese texts is the result of later interpretation; some of the texts were originally composed in order to mislead. Thus, legal history in China has been greatly confused by the appearance, in the 04th century, of several supposedly ancient documents which seem to attest an already highly developed legal system in very early times. Several of these documents found their way into the Shu (or "Ancient Documents") repertoire, and they retain canonical status at the present time. But they were composed in the 04th century, the period in which the Chinese legal system actually came into being, precisely in order to give an ancient pedigree to what was in fact an innovation: part of the state reformation process that transformed Chinese society in this period. (For an example of how these documents destroy otherwise careful and promising scholarship on this subject, see the review of Skosey, elsewhere at this site). A similar, and a similarly intentional, confusion attends the history of infantry warfare in China, where spurious documents and invented personas abound to mislead the modern scholar. Only with systematic attention to the question of spurious documents, the same kind of attention which the Roman grammarians Stilo and Varro gave to the inflated and largely spurious corpus of the plays of Plautus (and, for that matter, which the Chinese scholars Yau Ji-hvng and Yen Rwo-jyw gave to one group of Shu documents), can this situation be understood, and these documents properly evaluated as evidence.

The spurious Shu documents, for instance, turn out to be intensely valuable primary sources - but for the time of their composition, namely, the antiquity controversies of the 04th century.

3. These and like findings for all the major texts of the pre-Imperial and early Imperial period have been subjected to the test of mutual consistency, and to the further test of historical plausibility. They constitute the only sound and self-consistent solution to the text problems of early China which has ever been proposed. Those findings are briefly summarized in this Introduction, for ready reference by scholars present and future. We hope that a Chinese translation will be made in due course, in the interest of the widest possible availability, and we are cooperating with Chinese scholars toward that end.

This study is an essential reference for the literary and political historian who, whether as a Sinologist or as a specialist in a cognate discipline, has to do with the sources for early China. Only on the basis here provided can a beginning finally be made on writing an accurate history of China, even in the simplest and most elementary terms. And only when that elementary history is written can China finally take its place for the comparative historian among the other major ancient civilizations, a company from which China has too long been excluded.

17 May 2007 / Contact The Project / Exit to Publications Page