Guodian: The Newly Discovered Seeds of Chinese Religions and Political Philosophy.

• Author: Richter, Matthias L.
• Position: Book review

Guodian: The Newly Discovered Seeds of Chinese Religions and Political Philosophy. By KENNETH W. HOLLOWAY. OXFORD: OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2009, Pp. viii + 198. $55.

The cache of Warring States manuscripts excavated in 1993 from a tomb of modest dimensions near the village of Guodian [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] in Hubei Province, China, is undoubtedly one of the most important archaeological discoveries of the twentieth century. The 804 bamboo slips with a total of 13,000 characters of text have drawn a tremendous amount of scholarly attention ever since their first publication in 1998. It took less than a decade for thousands of articles and a great number of book-length studies on these manuscripts to be written and published. The overwhelming majority of these works are written in Chinese, but, with a slight delay, a great number of Western language articles have accumulated as well. However, except for the conference volume on the Guodian "Laozi [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]" (The Guodian Laozi, ed. Sarah Allan and Crispin Williams, Berkeley, 2000) and a few unpublished dissertations, Kenneth Holloway's book is the first English-language monograph exclusively devoted to the Guodian manuscripts. Thus it is likely to be burdened with a heavy load of expectations, which the author would have done well to check by clearly defining the scope of the study, and on which the reader needs to reflect in order not to judge the book unfairly. In the introduction, the author promises nothing less than that

[t]hese Guodian manuscripts are transforming our understanding of the formative era of China's religious and political philosophy. This book will analyze these manuscripts with an eye toward reconstructing their worldview and will provide a window into a pivotal moment in Chinese history, (p. 3) The main part of the book is organized in five chapters, followed by a translation of the Guodian version of Wu xing [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] (i.e., "The Five Aspects of Conduct"), endnotes, bibliography, and index. These latter technical parts are all reasonably proportioned and generally useful, except that the endnotes could take up much less space if they did not unnecessarily give the full bibliographic information of sources that are also listed in full in the bibliography.

Chapter 1 ("Religious Characteristics of Guodian Texts") outlines, in the author's own words, '"general principles of Guodian religion." As the focus of this "religious system." Holloway identifies "unification that involves the...