Re-Dating the Sources

The sources for history are basic to history, and an accurate idea of the chronology of the sources is basic to the task of understanding the sources themselves historically. We cannot effectively investigate the history of China’s formative Warring States or classical period without knowing which of these texts are earlier and which are later. I here describe a systematic attempt to reach a better understanding of Warring States text chronology. But before saying how we have approached the chronology problem, I should first say why we think there is a problem – a problem that has not been solved in Michael Loewe’s 1993 survey, Early Chinese Texts (ECT).1 One reason is that the book’s conclusions are not entirely consistent with each other. A second is that some are indeterminate, quoting conflicting opinions without deciding among them. A third is that some fail to address all the problems in the texts. There are also points at which problems which are addressed might be reconsidered. In other words, a fully coherent and convincing text chronology has not yet emerged. The existence of conflicting opinions about the date of a text may indicate that the text itself includes diverse material. The proper solution in such cases may be, not to choose among the suggested dates, but to recognize different portions of the text as different layers, and assign to each layer its proper date. This approach is exemplified in Allyn Rickett’s work on Gwandz.2 Rickett recognizes the 86 Gwandz chapters (and in some cases, chapter sections) as being potentially different layers, and assigns them dates ranging from the 04th to the 02nd centuries (4th to 2nd centuries BC). The idea that a Chinese text may not be an entirely self-consistent object has been around for a long time. Jang Sywe-chvng (1738-1801) once dropped the hint that some of the philosophical texts may derive from a school rather than from a person.3 His contemporary Tswei Shu (1740-1816) recognized a very late layer (LY 16-20) within the late Analects layer (LY 11-20), an idea which had been first suggested by the Sung scholar Hu Yin (1098-1156) and was further developed by Itô Jinsai (1627-1705)