The body as metaphor for the civil and martial components of empire in Yi Zhou shu, chapter 32; with an excursion on the composition and structure of the Yi Zhou shu.

• Author: McNeal, Robin
• Position: Critical Essay

A BRIEF INTRODUCTION TO THE YI ZHOU SHU

THE Y1 ZHOU SHU [CHINESE CHARACTERS NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] or Remainder of the Zhou Documents is a work in seventy chapters that appears to have been compiled into its present form in the Western Han dynasty; only fifty-nine chapters remain extant, plus a preface that is traditionally counted as chapter 71. (1) A bias against the work, perhaps originating in part from the misconception that it comprised those Zhou documents that Confucius deemed unfit for inclusion in his canonical edition of the Shang shu [CHINESE CHARACTERS NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] or Venerated Documents (which includes a section called "Zhou Documents" itself), has contributed to the relative neglect of this text. (2)

Today, it is quite fashionable to turn scholarly attention towards texts that have been ignored by the traditional academic mainstream (Western and Chinese), for it is understood that such works may have suffered less at the hands of later editors and may therefore preserve more unadulterated materials bearing on early history and thought. The Yi Zhou shu is a prime candidate for such attention, and in fact has attracted a small number of critical readers and even champions from the Qing dynasty to the modern day. Recently, Edward Shaughnessy and Li Xueqin [CHINESE CHARACTERS NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] have both argued for the authenticity and accuracy of a few chapters of the text that purport to record events and ideas from the Western Zhou. They build on the work of Gu Jiegang [CHINESE CHARACTERS NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] who in 1963 published an article drawing attention to the "Shi fu" chapter of the work for the same reasons. (3) And our best critical editions of and commentaries to the work all date to the Qing, when interest in the text seems to have spread if not to all intellectual circles then at least to some of the best.

The single most comprehensive and insightful study of the text was done by the Taiwan scholar Huang Peirong in the 1970s. His dissertation on the work is a careful examination of its language, content, and dating. Building on the critical assessments of Qing scholars, Huang concludes that there is a "core" to the Yi Zhou shu that dates from the Warring States period. His conclusion rests on a range of evidence and a variety of methodological approaches, including comparisons between the text's position on the role of the military and those positions found in early military treatises, a fairly comprehensive examination of sentence structure and the use of rhyme, and relating the text's penchant for exhaustive enumeration of categories to intellectual trends in the Warring States period. Most convincing of all is the plain fact that late Warring States authors quote from the work several times. It is cited unambiguously and accurately in the Zhanguo ce [CHINESE CHARACTERS NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], the Han Feizi [CHINESE CHARACTERS NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], the Lushi chunqiu [CHINESE CHARACTERS NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], and the Zuo zhuan [CHINESE CHARACTERS NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]. (4) Furthermore, I believe it can be shown that such thinkers as Mencius and Xunzi were very familiar with some of the content of the work, and a chapter of the Mozi [CHINESE CHARACTERS NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] quotes a passage from it that is now incomplete in the version of the Yi Zhou shu we have today but can be identified in later commonbook citations and the commentarial tradition. (5) It is likely that compilers of the Huainanzi were similarly acquainted with at least some of the content of the work; it seems that whether or not an author chose to cite it specifically when drawing on it depended more on the nature of the author's own argument and other considerations of presentation than on whether he was familiar with the work as a collection called the Zhou shu.

I will address many of these issues in a subsequent study. For now, let us return to Huang Peirong's assessment of the work, for it is the basis of the most readily available summary of the Yi Zhou shu in English, viz., Shaugnhessy's entry in Loewe's Early Chinese Texts: A Bibliographical Guide. Huang concludes that the core of the work that dates to the Warring States period was the product of one hand. (6) There is indeed a striking similarity in language, style, and content among many of the chapters Huang considers "core," but the relationship of these to each other, and to other chapters of the work as a whole, is remarkably complex. I am hesitant to agree that all thirty-two chapters Huang considers part of the core are products of one hand, although I would concede that most of them may have taken shape under the direction of one editorial group--perhaps a minor distinction. But then there are a few chapters from Huang's core" that deserves more individual attention before we can speak of their provena nce.

I will focus below on just one of these, chapter 32, "Wu shun" [CHINESE CHARACTERS NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] (Martial Accord), in the belief that a careful examination of its content and language can provide insights into the early form and transmission of the Yi Zhou shu as a whole. It is indeed one of the chapters that Huang places in the "core" of the text--again, meaning that he sees the language and content as uniform enough to justify attribution to a single hand. On pages 93-94 of his study, Huang summarizes the main sorts of evidence he examined in arriving at this core, noting which of five characteristics are present in each of his core chapters. The categories he employs may be roughly understood in this way:

1) Iterative. The frequent use of what Huang calls (using traditional terminology) "linked strings of sentences," a common feature of Warring States texts. These usually take the form of "If A, then B, if B then C...."

2) Tetragraphic. The tendency of Warring States texts to be written in sentences constructed of precisely four characters each. These first two categories amount to a distinctive rhythmic style of writing that dominated much of the intellectual prose of the classical period.

3) Enumerative. The growing tendency among Warring States thinkers to present arguments in the form of numerical lists. The tendency is carried to great extremes in several chapters of the work.

4) Titular. Many of the chapter titles in the work seem to be related. A handful of terms appear over and over again in chapter titles, and many of these in turn appear frequently in the body of the chapters as well.

5) Rhyme. Huang argues that the use of rhyme in constructing Classical Chinese prose is particularly a Warring States phenomenon.

Thus summarized, Huang's five main categories might draw the critical attention of specialists in any number of aspects of early Chinese language or thought. In fact, his examination of these categories and how they are evidenced in the Yi Zhou shu and other early texts is quite comprehensive and for the most part convincing. It is not the goal of this study to offer a full critique of his methods; I will limit my comments to issues that are pertinent to chapter 32.

Of these five categories, Huang finds only 2 and 4 to apply to the "Wu shun" chapter. In fact, one section of the text engages in enumeration (category 3), but Huang seems to think that this enumeration is of a different nature than that common to so many other chapters of the work (see below). The chapter indeed is characterized by four-character sentences, and when the four-character rule is broken, a similar rhythm is usually maintained (e.g.. the text closes with several three-character lines, and is punctuated by several other passages that employ five- or six-character sentences as the norm). Taken alone, however, this fact is unremarkable for an early classical text, and does not help us to date it very specifically or assign it to a particular author. Category 4 is more helpful in this sense.

INTELLECTUAL AND STRUCTURAL COHERENCE OF THE WORK

Even a casual glance at the contents of the Yi Zhou shu will bring to the reader's attention the recurrence of several terms in chapter titles. Many chapters include the words da [CHINESE CHARACTERS NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], xiao [CHINESE CHARACTERS NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], or kai [CHINESE CHARACTERS NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]. Often, chapters are paired as "greater" [CHINESE CHARACTERS NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] and "lesser" [CHINESE CHARACTERS NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], as with chapters 22 and 23, "Da kai" [CHINESE CHARACTERS NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] ("The Greater Inception") and "Xiao kai" [CHINESE CHARACTERS NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] ("The Lesser Inception"). Another pair is obvious in chapters 9 and 10, "Da ming wu" [CHINESE CHARACTERS NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] ("The Greater Illumination of the Martial") and "Xiao ming wu" [CHINESE CHARACTERS NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] ("The Lesser Illumination of the Martial"). It is difficult to know what significance, if any, to attribute to these titles. If the text as a whole was assembled from a mix of older chapters and new material in the Western Han, were chapter titles assigned then? Or did the body of the text known in the Warring States include chapter titles? (7) In many ways, these questions lead us to a central concern: was there a pre-Qin core to the Yi Zhou shu with a relatively coherent and "fixed" structure, and if so, what relationship did it bear to the final form the text took in the Han?

These questions can be answered with relative confidence once certain elements of that structure are identified and examined in detail. Certainly the seventy-one-chapter version of the text we now have could not have existed prior to Qin or early Western Han; several chapters of the received work bear marks of this period. (8) It seems likely that the preface to the work, now counted as a seventy-first chapter, and perhaps the addition of the term jie [CHINESE CHARACTERS NOT...