Introduction to Volume One

The present book explores the interface between two very important types of literary works, both of which were doubtless produced, at least for the most part and at least in some sense of the word, in the second half of the fourth century BCE, but which for very different reasons have played little or no role in the literary history of China until quite recently. The first of these works is the Yi Zhou shu 逸周書 Leftover Zhou Scriptures, said to be the early Zhou-dynasty (1045-249 BCE) documents that were left over after Confucius had selected one hundred other documents to be included in the Shang shu 尚書 Exalted Scriptures, a collection that went on to be regarded as one of the five or six canonical texts of China. Despite its quasi canonical pedigree, the Yi Zhou shu went on to be an after-thought at best. The second type of work that I will explore belongs to the corpus of manuscripts acquired by Tsinghua University of Beijing in 2008. When the first volume of these manuscripts was published in late 2010, the scholarly world saw for the first time versions of several chapters of the Yi Zhou shu almost two thousand years older than the earliest extant version of the received text. These newest versions of this old text, as well as entirely new versions of many heretofore unknown texts as well, have breathed new life into the study of the Yi Zhou shu.

Whatever modest experience I have come to acquire vis-à-vis the Yi Zhou shu has been largely accidental. In the spring of 1980, while still a graduate student at Stanford University, I had the good fortune to cross the San Francisco Bay to the University of California at Berkeley to attend a seminar on oracle-bone inscriptions taught by David Keightley (1932-2017). Already then, my interest in Chinese paleography was driven in large part by a desire to see how these new literary sources might inform our understanding of ancient China’s classic literature. Preparing to write a dissertation at Stanford on the origins of the Zhou Yi 周易 Zhou Changes (also known as the Yi jing 易經 Classic of Changes), I was particularly interested in divination terminology that was found in both the Zhou Yi and also in the oracle-bone inscriptions. As my term paper for the seminar at Berkeley, I wrote a lengthy study of one enigmatic construction that occurs multiple times throughout the Zhou Yi: you fu 有孚, which was traditionally understood as “to have sincerity” or “to be sincere.” In the oracle-bone inscriptions, a similar expression seems to refer to the “sacrificing of captives” (understanding 孚 to be the protograph for fu 俘), and I suggested that the same sense might better explain the Zhou Yi occurrences. Fortunately, this term paper never made it into my eventual dissertation, for I have since learned that the apparent similarity between the expressions masks a radical difference, and that the traditional interpretation is not too far off from the original meaning in the Zhou Yi, which apparently indicates that the result of a divination coincides with the desired outcome.

Comparisons between oracle-bone inscriptions and the Zhou Yi remained a consistent interest of mine over the years, and has been the subject of other books. The reason that I indulge in this autobiographical memory here is that in the course of doing research on the words fu 孚 “sincerity”and the cognate fu 俘 “captive,” I stumbled upon a chapter in the Yi Zhou shu entitled “Shi fu” 世俘 “The Great Capture” (or perhaps “The Capture of the World”). This chapter provides a detailed narrative—at some points an almost day-by-day narrative—of the Zhou conquest of Shang and the immediate aftermath. Since this was another topic in which I was interested at the time, I turned my attention away from the Zhou Yi long enough to write the first paper of mine that was ever published: “‘New’ Evidence on the Zhou Conquest,” a translation and study of the “Shi fu” chapter that was published in the 1980-1981 issue of the journal Early China. The publication of that article caught the attention of Michael Loewe, who was then in the course of soliciting contributions to a handbook on ancient Chinese literature; this book was eventually published as Early Chinese Texts: A Bibliographical Guide. Michael invited me to write the entry on the Yi Zhou shu.An invitation to contribute to a book edited by a scholar such as Michael Loewe was hard to resist for a young man who was then still a graduate student, and so I agreed to write the entry on the condition that I could indicate that what little I knew about the Yi Zhou shu was derived from a doctoral dissertation done a few years earlier in Taiwan. Michael agreed that this was a reasonable request, and so I wrote the entry.

When Early Chinese Texts: A Bibliographical Guide was finally published, more than ten years later, some readers assumed that I was some sort of authority—at least in the Western world—on the Yi Zhou shu. Those readers might have been led to this reasonable but decidedly incorrect assumption simply because still by that time no other Western scholar had ever published a study devoted to the Yi Zhou shu or even any of its other chapters. Having been thrust into the role of expert, I tried once or twice to live up to the assumption, publishing papers here and there on other chapters of the text. Fortunately, in the meantime, other scholars, especially in China but also in the West, finally began to devote real research to the Yi Zhou shu. Since the results of this research will be cited throughout the present book, I will not interrupt these autobiographical musings with a fullblown literature review.

My interest in Chinese paleography has evolved over the years, from my early interest in oracle-bone inscriptions to a long-term study of bronze inscriptions, and then finally to encompass the later manuscripts written on bamboo and silk that have become available over the course of the last half century. For much of that period, I was fortunate to be an acquaintance of the late Li Xueqin 李學勤 (1933-2019), China’s premier authority on all aspects of ancient China’s literary heritage. With Professor Li’s return to teach at his alma mater Tsinghua University in 2003, I began to make regular visits to Tsinghua, sometimes to participate in one of the many scholarly conferences sponsored by the university and sometimes to give lectures of my own. As described in the General Preface to the series in which this is the first volume, in 2008 Tsinghua acquired an extraordinarily important corpus of manuscripts written on bamboo slips. The university established the Research and Conservation Center for Unearthed Texts with a team of excellent paleographers under the leadership of Professor Li. As editorial work on the manuscripts progressed, I found more and more occasions to visit Beijing and to consult with Professor Li and his team, developing close relationships with many of them and also with their students, who have taken on more and more of the editorial responsibility.

With the passing of Li Xueqin in 2019, directorship of the Center has passed to Professor Huang Dekuan 黄德寬, a dynamic leader who has determined to launch new initiatives to bring the Tsinghua manuscripts to an ever wider readership. One of these initiatives is a project to produce English translations of all of the manuscripts, which I have been honored to be invited to supervise. It is my honor too to contribute the first volume in this series, which we anticipate will eventually encompass eighteen volumes. In consultation with the scholars at Tsinghua University’s Research and Conservation Center for Unearthed Texts and with the team of translators that I have organized, it has seemed appropriate to focus on the manuscripts to be published in the first volume of the Center’s “collated interpretations”series: Qinghua daxue cang Zhanguo zhujian jiaoshi 清華大學藏戰國竹簡校釋 Collated Interpretations of the Tsinghua University Warring States Bamboo Manuscripts.1 These correspond largely with chapters in the received text of the Yi Zhou shu. This has caused me to revisit my earlier accidental interest in the Yi Zhou shu to introduce Tsinghua manuscripts of four such chapters as well as two other important texts that can be described as pseudo-Yi Zhou shu chapters. It is my hope that both the Yi Zhou shu and especially the Tsinghua manuscripts will find a new circle of readers.

In lieu of a full page acknowledging all of my scholarly debts in the writing of this book, let me here just note my gratitude to the Research and Conservation Center for Unearthed Texts of Tsinghua University for all that they have done to make these manuscripts public and to support my work on them, to the Tsinghua University Warring States Bamboo Manuscripts translation group for the enthusiastic assistance all members have shown to each other, and especially to Rens Krijgsman and Yang Qiyu 楊起予 for their many contributions to the production of this volume in particular.

Edward L. Shaughnessy

12 July, 2021

Chicago

1　Huang Dekuan 黄德寬 ed.-in-chief, Qinghua daxue cang Zhanguo zhujian jiaoshi 清華大學藏戰國竹簡校釋 (Beijing: Shangwu yinshuguan, 2022-).