The Wenzi: Creativity and Intertextuality in Early Chinese Philosophy.

• Author: Meyer, Andrew
• Position: Book review

The Wenzi: Creativity and Intertextuality in Early Chinese Philosophy. By PAUL VAN ELS. Studies in the History of Chinese Texts, vol. 9. Leiden: BRILL, 2018. Pp. xiv + 233. $108, [euro]90.

The Wenzi [phrase omitted] is a paragon of the understudied text, of which there are so many in the broad field of classical Chinese letters. Although it was revered for many centuries and in many quarters as a repository of ultimate wisdom, it is rarely utilized as a source in present-day scholarship even in China or Japan, much less in Europe and America. Paul van Els would change that situation. He fashioned his recent monograph both as a resource for those interested in exploring the Wenzi. and as an extended argument for its value as an object and implement of study, and has succeeded significantly in both regards.

The Wenzi poses more than the usual quantity of conundrums for present-day interpreters. Conventional lore attributes it to a disciple of Laozi [phrase omitted] and thus deems it a "Daoist" text, and its rhetorical and ideological properties superficially bear out such characterizations. But testimony to corroborate this lore cannot be found before Former Han (206 BCE-8 CE) times, and the legend of "Master Wen" himself is problematically anachronistic. (Wenzi is said to have advised "King Ping" [phrase omitted], but, as van Els notes, the only Zhou monarch of that title reigned from 770-720 BCE, at least a century before the putative author of the Laozi would have been born [pp. 47-52].) Moreover, the text as we have it today shares eighty percent of its content with the Huainanzi [phrase omitted]. It has thus been common in recent centuries to dismiss the Wenzi as either a forgery or a wholly derivative text (or both).

The status of the text was further complicated by the discovery in 1973 of a Han-era tomb in Dingzhou [phrase omitted], Hebei, from which was recovered a partial and fragmentary manuscript, titled Wenzi, that shares material with the transmitted text of the same name. Although this lent more credence to the "authenticity" of the Wenzi, most scholars were unable to examine the full text of the bamboo slips until their publication in 1995. Even after this material was made available, however, the relationship of the archaeologically recovered text to its transmitted namesake is beset by so many complicated questions that few scholars have braved a robust exploration of the Wenzi as a whole.

Paul van Els's study is thus a welcome and valuable contribution. There are many variables in play whenever anyone engages the field of Wenzi-studies, and van Els has succeeded...