The date, authorship, and literary structure of the Great Peace Scripture Digest.

• Author: Espesset, Gregoire
• Position: Critical essay

Contrary to a common misconception, it is not the Great Peace Scripture (Taiping jing) [hereafter Scripture] which actually opens the "Great Peace Part" ("Taiping bu") in the Taoist Canon of the Zhengtong (1436-49) era of the Ming dynasty (1368-1644), but a distinct work bearing the title Great Peace Scripture Digest (Taiping jing chao) [hereafter Digest]. Since the Scripture lacked its first thirty-four chapters (Juan), the Ming editors--or editors of earlier Taoist Canons perhaps--substituted for these missing parts this shortened rendition. This paper is a thorough textual analysis and reassessment of this text.

Locating the Digest before the Scripture, rather than elsewhere in the Canon, resulted in two lasting problems. First, it blurred the distinction between them, so much that modern reference materials commonly list both texts as a single item. Such is the case in the catalogues of Taoist canonical scriptures established by Leon Wieger, S.J. (1856-1933), the Harvard-Yenching Institute, and the Ecole Francaise d'Extreme-Orient. (1) Only the most recent catalogues finally make the distinction. (2) Secondly, while late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century scholars carefully distinguished between the two texts, most of their successors indiscriminately referred to these texts as if they were a single source. Partly responsible for this mishandling was Wang Ming's (1911-92) pioneering critical edition of Great Peace material, the Taiping jing hejiao, published in 1960 and reissued, with a handful of minor adjustments, in 1979. (3) On the assumption that the Digest is an abridged edition of the Scripture, Wang attempted a general reorganization requiring the former to be partitioned and relocated within the incomplete structure of the latter so as to restore as much of the morphology of the original Great Peace Scripture as possible. This groundbreaking work soon imposed itself as a major reference tool, leading an increasing number of authors to omit any distinction between the Scripture and its Digest, despite Wang's editing marginalia.

1. HISTORIOGRAPHY

   Overshadowed by the master text from which it derives, the Digest has drawn little scholarly attention. Oyanagi Shigeta (1870-1940) pointed to similarities between Scripture and Digest materia1. (4) Tang Yongtong (1893-1964) performed the first textual comparison, showing that the Digest is an edited rendition of the Scripture, and offered a dating theory for the former (see next paragraph). (5) Fukui Kojun (1898-1991) added a hypothetical authorship to this theory. (6) Ofuchi Ninji (1912-2003) was the first to stress that the earliest source to mention the Digest dates from a period much later than that Tang and Fukui suggested. (7) Wang Ming focused on the first chapter of the text and showed how it borrowed heavily from a cluster of Six Dynasties Taoist hagiographical sources, suggesting that the chapter is apocryphal. (8) Three scholars shed light on this case of intertextuality and, against Wang, contended that this chapter was either a preface to the Digest mistakenly substituted for its first chapter by Ming editors of the Taoist Canon, or even a part of the original Scripture. (9) But, in doing so, they paid no attention to the remaining nine chapters of the text.

   The year following the publication of Wang Ming's edition, Yoshioka Yoshitoyo (1916-79) published a transcription of a Sui (581-618) manuscript from Dunhuang (Gansu) bearing the shelf mark Stein 4226 and the end-title "Great Peace Part, Chapter 2" (Taiping bu juan di'er) [hereafter S.4226]. (10) The bulk of S.4226 consists in a table of contents of a Great Peace Scripture organized into 10 parts (bu), each part containing 17 chapters (juan) and each chapter in turn containing a varying number of textual units, for a total of 170 chapters and 366 units. Comparing S.4226 with the Scripture suggested that the latter contains about one third of the original text--exactly 57 chapters and 129 textual units, deprived of "part" (bu) numbering. The original division into ten parts must have been dropped as a result of textual losses amounting to five full parts, plus scattered chapters and units. (11) Furthermore, comparison of S.4226 and the Digest confirmed Wang Ming's assumption that each chapter of the latter--leaving out the peculiar first chapter--is an adapted rendition of an entire "part" (bu) of the Scripture.

   Yamada Toshiaki isolated isolated sections containing elements pointing to a former dialogue form and suggested that they originate in a now lost Scripture of All-Pervading Great Peace (Taiping dongji jing), supposedly a core text in the revealed corpus of the Heavenly Master (Tianshi) church. (12) Actually, this title appears only once in the entire Taoist corpus, moreover in a quotation of a work today lost, and nothing from its contents has survived, to the point that its very historical existence cannot be ascertained. (13)

   In the West, a few scholars pointed to interesting features of the Digest and raised questions about its nature, but the topic always remained incidental in their work. (14) The most noteworthy and recent effort to reinstate the text as an independent work is K. Schipper's synopsis in the Companion. Schipper suggests that the author of the Digest "probably used a different version" of the Great Peace Scripture than the one preserved in the Canon and admits that, as his Chinese and Japanese predecessors suspected, the first chapter may not be "apocryphal" at all. (15) However, due to its limited size and the descriptive approach of the Companion, Schipper's synopsis neglects to investigate the internal organization of the work and its purpose. Chinese catalogue entries provide little information worth noting. (16)

2. ANCIENT AND MODERN EDITIONS

   The sole extant ancient edition of the text is the version preserved in the Ming Taoist Canon. (17) This edition has numerous faulty characters and in places, as we shall see, a rather erratic layout. Wang Ming widely used it to prepare his collated edition, whence all other critical editions of Great Peace material derive. (18) The volume bearing the title Taiping jing in the "Zhuzi baijia congshu" series actually includes both the Scripture and its Digest. This anonymous edition is basically a photocopy of the original pages of the Ming Taoist Canon with superimposed punctuation marks and a condensed page layout (one page and a half per page) to fit the series format. Since all the original running titles and page numbers were deleted and the editing did not allow for character correction, the Zhizi baijia congshu edition is not fully satisfying. Still, it provides a unique punctuated version of the original pages of the Digest. (19)

   Wang Ka prepared the single existing critical edition of the Digest for the Zhonghua daozang collection. Despite the length of the original material, Wang Ka's critical apparatus is limited to ten corrections (pp. 255-58, 295, 314, and 316), plus four endnotes (pp. 242, 260, and 317). His own punctuation frequently departs from that of the "Zhuzi baijia congshu" edition, and not always justifiably so. In addition, the original section layout has been tampered with, as, following Wang Ming's critical edition, many sections were broken up into shorter textual blocks. (20) Furthermore, as elsewhere in the Zhonghua daozang, the text is marred by an undefined number of misprints. (21) A truly reliable critical edition of the Digest is still hoped for.

3. TEXTUAL MORPHOLOGY

   Sketching the basic morphology of the Digest is fairly easy. The text is divided into ten chapters numbered 1-10 with a twin part (bu) numbering according to the ten Heavenly Stems, jia to gui. Each chapter has a number of pages ranging from 8 to 42, a single title or, more often, none, and is divided into sections, the breaks between which are more or less obvious, (22) and of unequal length:

   The whole text has a single illustration covering half a page (6.18b.1-10) and a single editorial note (8.4b.8). (23) There are three puzzling occurrences of "kou kou" (1.7b.4, 23b.2, and 7.5b.2). (24) Wang Ming understood the phrase as meaning "instructions transmitted by word of mouth" and retained the reading kou in this case, using squares to denote textual lacunae in the remaining two cases. (25) All other critical editors followed Wang, with the exception of Yu Liming, who substituted two-character phrases for all three instances. (26) Interestingly, in the third case, the parallel passage in the Scripture also reads kou kou (109/177.1b.2), (27) suggesting that, contrary to Schipper's views, the Digest may well have been compiled after a Great Peace Scripture close to the canonical edition. This theory is strengthened by many instances where the Digest compiler evidently avoids the occurrence, selecting material located before and after it, or ignoring it. (28)

   In its present condition the text has two obvious lacunae at the bottom of columns, hence perhaps caused by material deterioration, appearing as blanks the size of a single character (6.18a.4) or two (8.15a.2). The context of the orator's imminent departure suggests that the first lacuna is liu (as in the title of unit 104) while the second one is certainly kaipi (is a frequent formula in Great Peace texts and is attested elsewhere). Additional lacunae not materialized by blanks may be inferred from the context or by juxtaposition with the corresponding Scripture passage. (29) Erroneous and superfluous characters may also be seen in this manner. (30)

4. DATE AND AUTHORSHIP: FACTS AND HYPOTHESES

   The Digest is anonymous and bears no date. From an occurrence of li replacing zhi in the corresponding Scripture passage, Tang Yongtong inferred that the Digest must have already existed during the Tang dynasty (618-907). (31) Wang Ming's marginalia provided further occurrences in support of this hypothesis. (32) However, both characters do appear in the...