Abstract A comparison of two body cosmograms in fourth century bce bamboo manuscripts stored in Tsinghua University reveals overlapping conceptions of how the human body is controlled by supernatural forces, albeit adapted to different social contexts. A “cosmogram,” in this context, is a graphically or textually described pattern depicting the interconnection of the spirit world, including agents of time and space, with the structure of the human body. One manuscript, the * Wu ji 五紀 ( The Five Guidelines ), reflects government-level hierarchy and a scholarly readership concerned with the role of moral prosocial behavior and sustaining a balanced cosmic order. The other manuscript, the *Shi fa 筮法 ( Stalk Divination ), reflects householder-level hierarchy and a specialist group of literate diviners concerned with managing the forces influencing a particular person. Both manuscripts reveal a dynamic relationship between pantheons of divine and demonic spirits that affect the welfare of the living. In a world where divine spirits, like officials, governed the people through a system of awards and punishments, illness is a punishment. This is specified in the * Wu ji . It is the role of ghosts and demons to inflict that punishment, causing “supernatural harm” ( sui 祟) to individuals. It is the identification of the source of sui that concerns the diviners using the * Shi fa . In both texts, the afflicting demonic forces are categorized according to the divine spirits in charge of the “harmed” body site. While demonic harm was seen in the fourth century bce as potentially affecting all aspects of social and political life, this essay focuses on afflictions to the physical bodies of individuals. Hence, the details presented in the * Shi fa are linked to diviner records of prayer and sacrifice buried in fourth-century- bce tombs (in Baoshan 包山, Hubei, and Geling 葛陵, Henan, for example) and compared to the larger framework presented in the * Wu ji .
Abstract The “composite nature of early Chinese texts” is a familiar way of thinking about textual formation in early China. It highlights how a text is comprised of small, movable textual units called “building blocks,” how an assemblage of building blocks stands either on its own or as part of a larger whole, and how a composite structure is the “norm” rather than exception in early Chinese writings. Since its inception, the “composite nature” has garnered wide recognition; at the same time, the notion exhibits some conceptual inadequacy, which has come to surface in its applications. This article joins a small but growing number of critiques to further reconsider the notion of the “composite nature” by examining the conditions that make compositeness the norm in early Chinese writings. It points to a basic order of textuality, a kind of architectonics, as I call it, that informs, regulates, and sustains the formation of composite texts. This architectonics, I argue, offers us a way to rethink what constitutes a “building block,” how building blocks actually build a larger, meaningful whole, and how that meaning can be more reliably discerned and interpreted.
Abstract Study of the early rhetoric commenting on the reign of Empress Deng Sui 鄧綏 (in supreme power, 106–121) should cause us to rethink the stereotypes some have long entertained about successful female rulers, such as Wu Zetian 武則天 (r. 690–705) and Cixi Taihou 慈禧太后 (regent, 1861–1908), which do not reflect the Han gender norms. The essay argues that Deng Sui, in her own self-conscious and independent way, managed still to adhere faithfully to the Eastern Han gender norms of her time, while refusing to bow to inconvenient court conventions. Like many other learned women of her time—that her confidant and advisor was Ban Zhao 班昭 (45–116) is hardly coincidental—she knew how to deploy classical learning to achieve her own goals; and her reign, like that of Dowager Empress Lü 呂 (d. 180 bce ) of Western Han, won high praise for its capable governing of the realm.
Abstract This article reexamines the construction of Qu Yuan 屈原 personae in his Shi ji 史記 biography, the foundational yet problematic source for our understanding of both the figure and related poems. While scholars have long noted the biography’s inconsistencies, they have either dismissed the text as unreliable or attributed its flaws to authorial oversight or later interpolations, overlooking the formative role of Sima Qian’s 司馬遷 narrative. This study argues that these “defects” reflect the heterogeneity of Sima’s sources, particularly the first-person, self-expressive poems in the Chu ci 楚辭. By discarding the uncritical assumption that these poems were authored by a single historical Qu Yuan, we uncover a range of distinct personae, each responding differently to a shared plight. Sima selectively drew upon this diverse tradition to construct a relatively coherent figure of Qu Yuan, centered on suicide. This interpretive act produced a narrowly defined yet enduring image of Qu Yuan that has profoundly shaped subsequent readings of the Chu ci .
The fall of the Western Zhou Dynasty "left behind" the regional states of China's central plain, creating a situation perhaps unique in history: the near-erasure of a colonizing power while its colonies continued to thrive. That the Western Zhou regime, despite its loose authority in the Guanzhong, can be considered a "colonizing" entity is here argued both in light of archaeological and textual evidence. Over time its destruction became re-imagined as a kind of traumatic inciting incident of the sort that many diasporic groups recall as the cause of their diasporic status. Just as with other diasporic groups, existing traditions and gaps in memory are filled in by re-imagined accounts and moral lessons displaying clear concern for the preservation of identity and discomfort with "outsiders." This new reading of the Zhou period opens up a new angle by which Warring States texts-especially those including the Confucian canon-must be re-read, explaining such things as Confucian concerns about traditionalism as absolutely understandable given the wider diasporic discourse that emerged in the Eastern Zhou period.
