MCLC: rare record of classics discovered

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: rare record of classics discovered
***********************************************************

Source: NYT (7/10/13):
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/11/world/asia/Rare-Record-of-Chinese-Classic
s-Discovered.html

LETTER FROM CHINA
Rare Record of Chinese Classics Discovered
By DIDI KIRSTEN TATLOW

BEIJING — Five years ago this month, a precious cargo of muddy bamboo
strips arrived at the Old Library at Tsinghua University in Beijing,
donated by a graduate who had acquired them in the Hong Kong art market.

“When we opened the box it had a bad smell. Moldy. Many were broken,” said
Li Xueqin, an eminent historian and paleographer at the university.
Underneath the hard, impacted mud was something stunning: ancient literary
texts, written on the bamboo strips in pure, stable ink. For three months,
Mr. Li’s team cleaned the slender strips, a difficult job because the very
cells of the bamboo were saturated with water, making them as soft as
cooked noodles.

Inscribed with some of the earliest known texts of the Chinese classics
and believed to have been illegally excavated from the tomb of a historian
who lived in the state of Chu during the Warring States period, around 300
B.C., the bamboo strips are revolutionizing our understanding of ancient
thought and raising issues rooted in the past that feel stunningly
contemporary: Is there such a thing as fixed meaning? Is what we think of
as truth actually true? Exhortations to cleave to orthodoxy — “Love the
Communist Party” and “Study the Classics” — are common in China and often
linked, but what, in fact, are the classics?

The Tsinghua texts — totaling about 2,500 bamboo strips, including
fragments, which are up to 46 centimeters, or 18 inches, long — also
challenge Chinese culture as the country seeks to present itself as
different from the West, said Sarah Allan, a scholar of ancient China at
Dartmouth College in New Hampshire.

“Today, China wants to reclaim its own tradition as a counter to Western
influence, but what is the nature of that tradition?” Ms. Allan said by
e-mail.

“These manuscripts provide much entirely new information about the
formative period of Chinese thought just at a time of renewed interest in
what it means to be Chinese,” she wrote.

In a gauge of the excitement in scholarly and cultural circles, Francesco
Sisci, a Beijing-based Italian journalist and classically trained scholar,
compared the discovery of the manuscripts, and two other similar finds
here since 1993, to the rediscovery in Europe of the pre-Christian
cultures and values of Greece and Rome. It was this embrace of the
classical world that prompted “the fire of Enlightenment” and “helped to
free European minds from the fetters of dogmatism, justified by a
superficial reading of the Bible, and launched Europe on the path to
developing the modern world,” Mr. Sisci wrote.

The Tsinghua manuscripts and the two other collections, also dated from
around 300 B.C. (one excavated from the historical Chu state area of Hubei
Province, while the other was bought on the Hong Kong art market),
together include: The earliest known copy of the “I Ching,” the ancient
book of divination; hitherto unknown poems from “The Book of Songs”; texts
attributed to Confucius that are not found in later renditions of “The
Analects”; the oldest version of Laozi’s “Dao De Jing,” or “The Taoist
Book of the Way” (with many differences from later editions); and
previously unknown chapters of “The Book of Documents,” the Confucian
history classic of speeches about good governance by model kings, which
carried great political significance. This work would become a target for
destruction by later rulers.

It’s simply extraordinary in its implications, said Mr. Li.

“It would be like finding the original Bible or the ‘original’ classics,”
he said in an interview at Tsinghua, as the inscribed bamboo strips lay in
boxes of distilled water in a cool room on a floor above us. “It enables
us to look at the classics before they were turned into ‘classics.’ The
questions now include, what were they in the beginning, and how did they
become what they became?” he asked.

It’s important to know that about 100 years after the texts were buried,
the first Qin emperor conducted a “literary holocaust” in China, Ms. Allan
said. He ordered books burned and banned private libraries, shaping the
intellectual tradition for thousands of years by standardizing the written
Chinese language. That required all texts to be rewritten, during which
unwelcome theories were discarded.

As Mr. Li, 80, said, his eyes twinkling: “The classics are all political.”

By predating that censorship, the bamboo strips show us the true core of
China’s philosophical, literary and historical thought, Ms. Allan said.

“The particular significance of these three groups of manuscripts lies in
the date at which they were buried,” she wrote in an e-mail.

“300 B.C. was the height of China’s Axial Age, that is, it was in the
middle of the period in which the core ideas of the Chinese intellectual
tradition took form,” she wrote. “These manuscripts speak directly to the
core issues of the Chinese intellectual tradition and were recorded at the
height of the formative period.”

They include a description of a popular, alternative political system to
the dynastic rule that dominated for thousands of years — the “abdication
of the good to the good as the best means of political succession,” Ms.
Allan wrote. A ruler would retire from office and hand power to a
deserving person, who could in theory be anyone.

“This idea of abdication as a means of political succession was too
threatening to later dynasties to survive,” she wrote.

Could the strips be fakes? The complex way in which the content connects
to existing texts, the historical detail and physical condition rule that
out, according to experts who include some of China’s leading
paleographers and intellectual historians. Mr. Li’s team at Tsinghua
carbon-dated them to 305 B.C., plus or minus 30 years.

“They were so saturated with water, to 400 percent, when we got them,”
said Liu Guozhong, a member of the Tsinghua team. Offering a homely
analogy, he said, “It’s like boiling noodles. You can’t make over-boiled
noodles without spending the time boiling them.”