When several versions of a text display variations, it is necessary, for a correct understanding of the text, to determine which variant best reflects the original. These variations can be categorized into graphic, lexical, vacant, and transpositional variations.

The graphic variants display different graphs but represent a single word which is the proximate or most likely original. The variation is not significant since the word is known.

To handle the other types of variation, one powerful method is to discover the transmission lineage for three or more versions of the text and detect alterations that were made in later versions. When the lineage method does not determine the proximate original, each variation must be approached independently. For lexical variation, the lectio difficilior is more often the proximate original than the lectio faciliior. A taboo character that was later avoided may also represent the proximate original, or the proximate original may be disguised as a dialectal word. For vacant variations, trends toward adding, deleting or altering certain words in a version of the text help to determine the proximate original. When transpositional variation creates differences in the meaning of the text and the lineage method is not of help, judgment must be applied through a careful examination of the context.These methods provide systematic solutions to textual problems that would otherwise require independent analysis.

(A recent conversation between the author and Prof. Nathan Sivin of MIT onthe correct translation of the term hsiu was followedup by a thoughtful letter from Prof. Sivin which is quoted at length below.It seemed appropriate to broaden the discussion to include the term wu-hsing, to provide some lexical-historicalbackground, and to share the sense of the conversation with ourcolleagues.)

Technical terms in any language cannot be understood correctly when renderedin another language unless commonly accepted and precise translations, whichevoke neither more nor less than the meaning of the original term, can beachieved. Yet that is a difficult task, bounded by prior connotations of thetranslations chosen, and by differences in general cultural context that maybe very great. The task is made more difficult still because any scholarlydiscipline that relies heavily on translation as one of its methods is oftenheir to “standard” translations of technical terms. Some of these haveachieved general currency through long use, but might not have been, whenthey were first proposed, well thought out or based on adequate scholarlyunderstanding. Others may be, in some cases, just plain wrong. An example ofa standard translation that is not well thought out is “five elements” for wu-hsing; one that is clearly wrong is “lunarmansion” for hsiu.

This study traces the origins and development of the concept of Li 理 (Pattern) in early Chinese Cosmology, locating its foundation in the root metaphor derived from the natural lines or veins along which a block of jade can be split by a skilled artisan. From this relatively concrete image, li comes to eventually represent in Daoist cosmology the more abstract quality of the natural patterns or structures within the universe along which all phenomena move and interact with one another without the interference of human beings. After examining how early Confucian works emphasize the more abstract and derivative qualities of order and structure, we see that the likely Yangist authors in the Lüshi chunqiu return to the original metaphor of veins in jade but, instead, apply this to the veins through which the qi circulates through the human body.

We then see how this metaphor is expanded beyond the human body in the classical Daoist texts to come to represent the natural guidelines both within all phenomena and those that guide their movements within the cosmos. Within phenomena these include such varied things as the structures for the generation and expression of emotions within human beings as well as the natural lines along which the butcher's chopper passes in order to cleave oxen. In Daoist inner cultivation literature it is these patterns with which sages accord so that their spontaneous actions are completely in harmony with the greater forces of the cosmos. Only after long practice of the apophatic contemplative methods that include concentrating on one breathing and emptying out the normal contents of consciousness can the sage be able to accomplish this goal of “taking no action yet leaving nothing undone.” Thus the concept of li as these natural guidelines comes to serve as an explanation for why this classical Daoist dictum is effective in the world.

Finally, the Huainanzi contains the most sophisticated and sustained usages of the concept of li as the natural patterns and guidelines in the cosmos arguing that complying with them is the key to a genuinely contented life.

The silk manuscript texts of the Yijing and Comtnentatires — “Xici” “Yi-zhiyi,” “Yao,” and “Ersanzi Wen” — though excavated more than twenty years ago were published, albeit incompletely, for the first time in 1993. The physical state and the organization of these versions of the classic and commentaries were described by Edward Shaughnessy in Early China 19 (“A First Reading of the Mawangdui Yijing Manuscript”), and it is my intention in this article to begin to explore in some depth the differences between the silk manuscript Commentaries and the received text of the Xici to determine what they tell us about our understanding of the Zhou yi tradition. Even with our partial scholarly understanding of these texts it is possible to venture some preliminary judgments on the structure of the Commentaries, on the differing content of the silk manuscript version, on the enigma of the recurring phase “Zi yue” and on the date of its composition. Three main differences can be identified: discrepancies in characters, in sentences, and in chapter sequence. Nevertheless, the structure of the silk manuscript Xici and that of the received Commentaries are largely in agreement and what differences are in evidence, such as the scattering of certain parts of the received Xici in the heretofore unknown Yizhi Yi and Yao commentaries, may be explained by Qin discrimination against ru tradition following the conquest of Chu in 278 B.C. One of the principal discoveries resulting from comparison of the excavated and received texts is the presence of numerous loan graphs in the silk manuscript text, and it is through a better understanding of the function of such loans that a satisfactory explanation of the age-old enigma of “Zi yue” that occurs frequently and in the same places in both texts may be obtained.

From the outside, it would almost seem as if the authors and the editor of New Sources of Early Chinese History (hereafter, Sources) had completed their job before it was due. After all, this volume, which is no. 3 in the Early China Special Monograph Series,1 is the first Western book exclusively devoted to introducing a broad range of Chinese epigraphical materials: inscriptions in bones, turtle plastrons, and bronze as well as manuscripts written on stone tablets, wooden and bamboo strips, and silk.

Having demonstrated in a previous article entitled “On the Authenticity of the Bamboo Annals” that the “Current” Bamboo Annals can be a surprisingly reliable source for the history of early China and particularly for the Western Zhou period, in this article the author again examines a brief series of entries from this text, in this case dealing with the death of King Wen and the succession of King Wu. The analysis is divided into three sections, historical, philological, and chronological, all of which show that although this section of the “Current” Bamboo Annals has been revised, apparently just after the text's exhumation in the late-third century, and is no longer accurate per se, it is still possible to use it to reconstruct the original tomb text, which can be shown to be historically reliable. In addition to demonstrating once again the reliability of the Bamboo Annals, the discussion also verifies that the date of the Zhou conquest of Shang was 1045 B.C.

In a previous article in these pages (EC 7.1981-82:2-37) I reported on the discovery in the jinben version of the Bamboo Annals of verifiable records of the planetary conjunctions of 1576 and 1059 B.C. I argued that literary and chronological evidence drawn from a variety of Zhou and Han sources indicates that the two celestial events were taken at the time to signal Heaven's conferral of legitimate right to rule on the new dynasty, first Shang and then Zhou.

If this view is correct, the discoveries not only establish the historicity, and indeed the great antiquity, of certain chronological and atronomical records in the Bamboo Annals, they also prove that a concept akin to the Zhou “Mandate of Heaven” must have existed as early as the founding of the Shang in the midsecond millennium B.C., just as implied in the Shangshu. Equally noteworthy is the finding that numerous Zhou and Han works, including those of a notoriously “soft” variety such as the apocryphal “weft” commentaries of mid-Han date, contain mythicized though recognizable accounts of the same celestial phenomena.

Twelve years after Professor Keightley published The Ancestral Landscape, which was a fascinating, elegant summary of decades of investigations of the Bronze-Age Late Shang dynasty, he has now published another wonderful book on the same era, under the title Working for His Majesty. As the title suggests, and as he recounts in a highly personal preface looking back at the origins of this work, he returns in this book to the topic of his doctoral dissertation on Shang labor (Public Work in Ancient China: A Study of Forced Labor in the Shang and Western Chou, Columbia University, 1969).

Contra the consensus view of the Shi jing 詩經 (Classic of Odes) and Chu ci 楚辭 (Verses of Chu) as the products of two distinct literary cultures, one northern and one southern, this article argues on the basis of intertextual analysis that the Chu ci developed in direct response to the Shi jing. The foremost poem in the anthology, the “Li sao” 離騷 (Parting's Sorrow) emerges as a metadiscursive journey through various Shi jing archetypes, the goal of which is to authorize its hero to say farewell to his ruler and homeland—a possibility denied by Shi jing poetics. A final section explores the relationship between the oppositional poetics of the “Li sao” and the rest of the Chu ci. The article concludes with some reflections on the limitations of the north–south model for historians of early Chinese literature.