Stratifying Zhuangzi: Rhyme and Other Quantitative Evidence.

• Author: Branner, David Prager
• Position: Book review

By David McCraw. Language and Linguistics Monograph Series, vol. 41. Taipei: Institute of Linguistics, Academia Sinica, 2010. Pp. iv + 135, illus. $30.

The core of this book is a fifty-one-page essay that asks whether the rhyming patterns in the Zhuangzi--particularly the occurrence of non-canonical rhyming (heyun [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII])--support the notion that the work is a hodgepodge of material by different hands. The question was clearly never in doubt for the author, who answers it in the affirmative.

The book contains no abstract or summary conclusion or index, so I list its main findings here. The first section of the essay considers a variety of Warring States texts and finds that rhyming in most of the Zhuangzi has the greatest likeness to the Lushi chunqiu [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] and Guanzi [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] "suggesting the composite nature of those texts" (p. 15). The author also finds no evidence for a distinctive rhyming style linking Zhuangzi and certain other texts with the Chu [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] region, as some have suggested. The second section of the essay considers three competing models of Zhuangzi as a composite of three, four, or six layers, and finds that A. C. Graham's six-layer model is the best supported by rhyming evidence, as well as by the occurrence patterns of distinctive lexicon. The third section of the essay compares the rhyming patterns within one of Graham's six layers, the seven "Inner Chapters," and seems to conclude that those chapters can be loosely classified into two groups, whose authors may have two different geographic origins. The essay is supplemented by a twenty-seven-page presentation of the rhyming portions of the Zhuangzi, a thirteen-page meditation on the ideas of the different strata of the received text, and various other materials.

The author of this book does not have special expertise in historical linguistics or statistics, but that should not be held against him. What should be held against him is that he has produced a badly organized volume that this reviewer, who has a professional interest in both subjects, finds hard to follow. The author does not explain his methods or conclusions clearly; he does not narrate the results of the statistical experiments concisely; he presents numerical data in too much detail but does not label all the parts of his graphs or compose them so as to draw attention to his most important conclusions...