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Encyclopédie des historiographies : Afriques, Amériques, Asies

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Nathalie Kouamé
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Éric P. Meyer
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Anne Viguier

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Shangshu 尚書 (Venerable Documents)

Shangshu 尚書 (Documents)

Michael Nylan

Résumé

Le classique des Documents (Shangshu 尚書) en 28 ou 29 chapitres est depuis longtemps considéré comme l’un des deux plus anciens textes du corpus des Cinq classiques, l’autre étant les Odes (Shijing 詩經). Comme le montrent nettement les sources transmises, pour la plus grande partie de l’histoire impériale chinoise, les Documents ont été tenus comme étant le conservatoire le plus important en matière d’écrits officiels concernant la vie politique, depuis les relations entre souverain et sujets jusqu’aux taxes et tributs, en passant par les politiques à mener sur le plan judiciaire et face aux populations étrangères. Pour cette raison, lors des débats à la cour, les fonctionnaires discutaient souvent le sens précis de certains passages des Documents et, plus tard, de nombreuses épreuves des examens mandarinaux consistèrent à relire des extraits de l’ouvrage à la lumière de problèmes contemporains. Fait révélateur, les Documents laissent voir une forme de gouvernement bien plus consultative que celles qui ont été mises en œuvre durant l’époque impériale tardive, des Yuan aux Qing. À la fin du vingtième siècle, les études sur les Documents se sont mises à l’arrêt, après les monumentales contributions de Gu Jiegang (1893-1980) and Liu Qiyu (1917‑2012), à cause du manque de nouveaux matériaux archéologiques et du fait du consensus général sur la méthodologie à appliquer pour l’étude de ce texte. En 1983, Li Xueqin (né en 1933) proposa, dans un article très influent, d’écarter la plupart des recherches menées par Gu et Liu. Plus récemment, Li a été partie prenante du projet des Trois Dynasties (Sandai 三代) patronné par l’État et dont les investigations à propos des légendes concernant l’époque pré‑Xia, les Xia, les Shang et les Zhou portent majoritairement sur des chapitres des Documents. Parallèlement à cela, Li a également conseillé le groupe d’étude des manuscrits de Tsinghua à propos des matériaux découverts 發現 (et non exhumés 發掘 en contexte archéologique) achetés sur le marché en juillet 2008. Ce corpus « découvert » de Tsinghua contient environ vingt chapitres que Li considère comme constituant en partie l’Urtext original du classique des Documents. Cette affirmation non confirmée, si elle est vraie, révolutionnerait nécessairement notre approche des Documents, et apporterait aux textes transmis une belle moisson de nouveaux matériaux. Pour le moment, il semble meilleur d’adopter une approche attentiste face à ces matériaux controversés.

Texte intégral

Introduction

  • 1 The pre‑Qin "Tai shi" (Great Oath) chapter was lost, apparently, and a chapter (almost certainly a (...)
  • 2 Zhang Taiyan 章太炎 (aka Binglin 炳麟) and others argued that the Shangshu should be regarded as nothin (...)

1During the early empires in China, it was the Shangshu 尚書 (Venerable Documents) classic, in twenty‑nine chapters – not the Analects (Lunyu 論語), Great Learning (Daxue 大學), or the Mencius (Mengzi 孟子) – that was deemed the primary repository of political wisdom.1 For that reason, the Shangshu was repeatedly "reconstructed" and revised in imperial times, and down to today, the Shangshu remains a site of fierce contestation, since it looms large in the cultural nationalists' narratives depicting China as the "oldest, continuous civilization" on earth. However, the Documents classic was not construed as a set of "histories" in any modern sense of the word until the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in China, notwithstanding Sima Qian's 司馬遷 (145‑89? BC) heavy reliance on Documents passages when compiling the early chapters of his monumental history of the known world, called today the Shiji 史記 (Records of the Historian).2

2Professional historians today do not engage in metaphysical speculation about such topics as "origins" and "essences," but because the Documents has played so central a role in the construction of Han Chinese vs. "barbarian" identity in late imperial and modern times, specialists and non‑specialists alike must be on the alert for anachronistic claims ascribed to the Documents chapters. In antiquity, as the French historian Paul Veyne has suggested for classical Greece, the tellers of legends were less troubled by questions of factual accuracy than with how to properly commemorate family ancestors and culture heroes. The Documents, as a result, is most usefully compared with the eulogies found in the Odes (Shijing 詩經) and other praise‑pieces generated during the early empires. Hence the coupling of the two Classics in the common expression shishu 詩書 (Odes and Documents).

  • 3 Tianxia 天下 has often be translated as "empire" or, more recently, as "world." Perhaps it is best t (...)
  • 4 For example, Wang Su speaks of wide consultation with officials and even the wan min 萬民 in the "gr (...)

3Upon first reading the Documents, the contents of the Han‑era chapters seem extremely heterogeneous. Closer examination reveals that most of the chapters that circulated during the two Han dynasties take the form of short dialogues between sage‑rulers (in which group falls the Duke of Zhou 周公) and worthy ministers. Four oft‑cited chapters do not fit the general pattern, however. Two chapters (the "Great Plan" 洪範 and the "Punishments of Fu/Lü" 呂刑) provide detailed plans for good governance, with the first focused on proper rewards and the second on appropriate punishments, while two other chapters map space, with the "Tribute of Yu" 禹貢 chapter preoccupied with geographic space3 and the "Testamentary Charge" 顧命 chapter, with ritual space during the accession ceremony of a new ruler. The strong dialogic thrust of the Documents chapters is not simply an artifact of longstanding oral traditions teaching the classic. The earliest extant commentaries by Ma Rong 馬融, Zheng Xuan 鄭玄, and Wang Su 王肅4 emphasize that in all "great matters" of state (e.g., war, sacrifice, and succession matters), the good ruler is to consult widely with his ministers at court, and sometimes even beyond. Fragments from other Han compilations, including the Guoyu 國語 (Discourses of the States) and Yi Zhoushu 遺周書 (Remnant Zhou writings), reinforce this early portrait of the sages in terms of their "wide searches for wise men from all four quarters," although this feature of the Documents tended to be overlooked, under more authoritarian rulers. Such wide consultation, not autocratic policy‑making, was reflected in the precedents of the Han ruling house, which called for great convocations of experts to assess policy changes under consideration.

Major Reconstructions and Revised Readings of the Documents

  • 5 As the dating of almost all received texts from the early period is fraught, these numbers are app (...)
  • 6 Somewhat confusingly, this set of chapters is labeled guwen (meaning, "pre‑Qin texts") by Sima Qia (...)
  • 7 He & Nylan, 2015.

4Curiously, in view of the Documents' presumed importance to the body politic, only two, or possibly three, of Documents chapters are cited by title in the received pre‑Qin literature5. The excavated Guodian 郭店 materials cite an additional chapter by title. Perforce, then, the present history of the Documents begins with the transcription of the twenty‑nine chapters of the Documents derived from the Qin Academician Fu Sheng 伏生 (fl. 221‑ca. 170 BC) in early Western Han. (Today those chapters are apt to be labeled Modern Script 今文 chapters, in view of their transcription into the clerical script current during Han.) Those are the chapters that Sima Qian knew and, with some modifications, what the Han Academicians taught6. While Han textual scholars noted many textual variants among various teaching traditions, no additional pre‑Qin chapters surfaced during the Han7, so far as we know.

  • 8 Yuandi, Chengdi's father, was classically trained. During his reign and that of Chengdi that Docum (...)

5Nonetheless, Western Han legends spoke of a "one‑hundred chapter" version supposedly taught by Confucius (551‑479 BC) himself. And so, predictably, a certain Zhang Ba 張霸 duly produced a Documents of 102‑pian (bamboo bundles; chapters), in hopes of winning favor at Chengdi's (r. 26‑6 BC) court. Initially, the court was inclined to accept this recension of the Classic, even though it was widely suspected of being a forgery. Zhang Ba's version was set aside only when Zhang was implicated in an unrelated crime. Before and after Zhang Ba, two new trends can be seen in Documents learning: (1) the tendency to read the Documents as a repository of omen predictions about the future of the ruling house8; and (2) the continual re‑editing of the Documents so that it acquired ever more archaistic features, with some linguistic conversions so regular that they can be listed.

  • 9 This cache supposedly included a 10 juan (scrolls) Zhoushu (Zhou Writings).

6Early in the fourth century CE, a huge corpus of texts was purportedly discovered from a Jizhong 汲冢 tomb whose occupant was thought to be a prince of Wei, who had died well before unification in 221 BC9. Around AD 320, a certain Mei Ze 梅賾 submitted an expanded Documents classic of fifty‑eight chapters to the Eastern Jin throne, based on that find. For his version, Mei made two separate claims: first, that it represented a pre‑Qin version of the Documents classic whose greater age made it superior to Fu Sheng's version, and second, that his version had been the subject of intense study by the classical master Kong Anguo 孔安國 (d. ca. 74 BC), a lineal descendant of Confucius, in mid‑Western Han, whose family had access to this pre‑Qin version.

  • 10 Yan's book was printed in 1796, in Tianjin, but it circulated earlier in manuscript form in China (...)

7This expanded version of the Documents – once dubbed the Ancient Script 古文 version, in view of its supposed greater age, despite being transcribed into the current clerical script – was duly accepted as earlier and more reliable until the late seventeenth century, when Yan Ruoqu's 閻若璩 Shangshu guwen shuzheng 尚書古文疏證 Evidential Analysis of the Archaic Script Documents10 proved, to the satisfaction or outrage of his peers, that the additional twenty‑five chapters ascribed to Kong Anguo were late forgeries or pastiches of early works spliced together with newer bridging material, produced in all likelihood after the fall of Eastern Han (more on this below). The "pseudo‑Kong" 偽孔 Documents chapters (as those now found in Mei's version came to be called) look like such obvious pastiches after Yan's groundbreaking work that it is hard to see what rhetorical advantages Mei Ze's corpus enjoyed over the much shorter corpus from Fu Sheng. Still, the addition of a new "Great Preface" for the Documents extended the pseudo‑historical reach of the Documents classic much further back in time than the reigns of Yao and Shun, insofar as it mentioned Fuxi 伏羲, the supreme "father" of all human beings (tradit. Sixth millennium BCE).

  • 11 Yoshida, 1988.

8Yan was hardly unaware of the impact his conclusions would have upon Chinese tradition, for he was in communication with three of the most famous pioneers of evidential (kaozheng 考證) scholarship: Huang Zongxi 黄宗羲 (1610‑95), Gu Yanwu 顧炎武 (1613‑1682), and Zhu Yizun 朱彝尊 (1629‑1709). In their own writings, Huang, Gu, and Zhu had each acknowledged the probability that the so‑called "Archaic Script" portion of the Documents was forged, but equally, each hesitated to admit the full force of Yan's argument. In particular, Zhu feared that classical learning would be ruined, if the Archaic Script chapters were expunged from the Documents classic. Yan responded by making clear his intention to use his studies to restore the true “classic of the sages,” rather than to shake the foundation of classical learning.11 Nonetheless, with Yan's substantial study spawned both the "Doubting Antiquity" (yi gu 疑古) thrust of Documents scholarship, and its reaction among cultural nationalists, whose members self‑identify as "Antiquity Believers" (xin gu pai 新古派), as if good scholars do not consider evidence on a case‑by‑case basis.

  • 12 Matsumoto, 1966.

9Since 1911, antiquity‑doubters and believers in China and elsewhere have continued to consult the Documents regularly, intent as they are upon ascertaining, verifying, or rejecting the specific claims it advances, implicitly and explicitly, about good governance. The continuing relevance of the text in large part can be traced to Gu Jiegang 顧頡剛 (1893‑1980), China's foremost historian, who made the Documents' chapters the center of his own investigations into China's hoary past and the ultimate testing ground for the new Text Critical methods that Gu promoted over the course of his long career. In 1966, Matsumoto Masaaki 松本雅明 published his path‑breaking study of the early Documents, which concluded that multiple versions of Writings or the Documents (both are shu 書) were in circulation within small textual communities in the centuries just before and after unification, with each community knowing different chapters and competing accounts of antiquity.12 In an effort to countering this sort of probing analysis, Li Xueqin 李學勤 in 1993 made an influential speech in which he urged archaeologists and historians to "leave the Doubting Antiquity period" behind; that speech quickly became the manifesto of the "antiquity‑believers" (for this speech, widely reported and cited, see Li, 2002‑2003).

  • 13 Li, 2011.

10More recently, Li Xueqin has developed a series of propositions regarding the Documents that would make the "found" (faxian 發現, i.e., unprovenanced and unexcavated) manuscripts of Tsinghua University in Beijing (his employer) central to any Documents research in future. He contends the following (I summarize here the contents of his essay13:

  • that the Tsinghua "Jinteng" (Metal Coffer) is the "same content" as Fu Sheng's jinwen (modern script) "Jinteng";
  • the 16 pian associated with "a wall find" in Kongzi's (Confucius's) hometown were definitely Documents chapters, to which the "twenty or so essays" in the Tsinghua manuscript can be added, since they are all "genuine". Doing the math, these Tsinghua chapters, plus 16, plus the "28 or 29" chapters of Fu Sheng's version, approximate the 100‑pian Documents classic that has figured strongly in the cultural imaginaire since Han times;
  • that the seventy‑one chapters of the Yi Zhoushu, often regarded as a potential source of the supposedly missing chapters of the Documents known and taught by Confucius, since 71 + 29 = 100, is not a repository of "genuine" Urtexts for Confucius's Documents, but rather "what was left over after Kongzi edited the Shangshu;
  • that "at least four" chapters (pian 篇) of the Tsinghua manuscript corpus can be securely dated to Western Zhou.
  • 14 Cherniack, 1994.

11For none of these contentions does Li offer solid evidence. In fact, each of his points glosses over longstanding disputes (for example, regarding the content of the 16 "extra" pian) or it relies upon a conflation of Fu Sheng's Han version with today's pseudo‑Kong version, as when the extant Zheng Xuan 鄭玄 commentary (inevitably emended to fit Mei Ze's expanded Documents) is adduced in evidence about the Han‑era Documents. All Li's points ignore the activist editing practices outlined by the recent scholarship.14

  • 15 The Documents mentions a Xia dynasty in the "Tang shi" 湯誓 (Oath at Tang) chapter, for example, as (...)

12In the eyes of critics, the PRC state and the cultural nationalists whom the Party employs (or who seek its patronage) have abandoned any objectivity in their rush to shore up the notion of China as the "oldest, continuous civilization in the world," thereby producing a "fantasy archaeology" for the period before 300 BC like that seen in Hitler's Germany, in Stalin's Soviet Union, or in Hindu nationalism today. For example, studies conducted under the aegis of the state‑sponsored Sandai 三代 (Three Dynasties) Project insist on the historicity of the legendary Xia 夏 dynasty, despite flimsy evidence, some found in the received Documents.15 In this era, interest in the Documents remains high because of the Tsinghua manuscript cache, which contains, by the editors' accounts, Urtexts – not variant traditions or parallels – for at least two Documents chapters, the "Yue ming" 說命 (Charge of Fu Yue) and "Li zheng" 立正 (Establishing Good Rule).

Han‑Song Commentarial Traditions

13Many students of Chinese history have believed, following the assertions of Song scholars, that the early Tang imperially‑sponsored compilation entitled the Wujing zhengyi 五經正義 (Correct Readings for the Five Classics), if not the Han Stone Classics (engraved 175‑183 CE), somehow "fixed" not only the contents of the Documents chapters themselves but also the readings attached to those chapters, since the Zhengyi specified a single commentary for each of the Classics and commissioned a new sub‑commentary for each as well. In the case of the Documents, a commentary ascribed to Zheng Xuan was somehow reworked to fit the expanded pseudo‑Kong version of the Documents, as we see from Dunhuang fragments. Recent work by Noma Fumichika 野間文史 has disputed the degree of influence exerted by the Wujing zhengyi, and scholars cannot agree over the value of such readings, which came centuries after Fu Sheng in early Western Han. What is certain is this: the court of Tang Taizong (r. 626‑649) granted broad editorial authority to the early Tang writers of sub‑commentaries for the Five Classics, to "trim away the excessive verbiage and to add to the places that were sketchy" (Shijing Zhengyi, 1.4a‑4b).

14Later, in both Northern and Southern Song, classicists felt free to "emend antiquity" (biangu shidai 變古時代), according to their own notions about antiquity. More than four hundred Song scholars produced works on the Shangshu, of whom Wang Anshi 王安石 and Su Shi 蘇軾 in Northern Song and Cai Chen, Zhu Xi's disciple, and Li Ziqi 林之奇, Zhu Xi's friend and collaborator, in Southern Song, are but the most famous. Already by Song, commentators had identified some of the most important problems with the standard guwen Shangshu from Mei Ze, problems of broad content, including the Documents' descriptions of the ideal rulers, as well as smaller problems attached to individual vocabulary units.

  • 16 "Da gao" 大誥, "Kang gao" 抗誥, "Lord Shi" 君奭 and "Duo fang" 多方 allude to Heaven's unreliable support (...)

15As Han and Song (particularly Southern Song) commentators lived in very different conceptual worlds, it is worth summarizing some the most obvious fault lines that mark Southern Song "True Way Learning" 道學 exegetical traditions off from those of the Han, even if the Han and Song exegetes often disagreed among themselves about how to read particular passages. Generally speaking, the neo‑Confucians did not like their sage kings to execute large numbers of people, even if the Documents chapters had them deploying fierce punishments. Nor could they easily accommodate the notion that the "benevolent kings" of the Documents would use duplicity or cunning to achieve their aims, even in wartime. Generally speaking, the Song exegetes shied away from having their exemplars pay overmuch attention to the spirit world. At the same time, they posited a just and compassionate Heaven, rather than the "pitiless" and "unreliable" Heaven found in the earliest readings16. They were inclined to emphasize interior self‑cultivation far more than their predecessors in Han, who focused on sociopolitical realities, though Northern Song scholars engaged in fierce debates over taxation and land use policies. Given the increasingly authoritarian political landscape, Song exegetes also began to question whether Zhougong had ever arrogated the powers of a king for himself, only to "return them" when the king reached adulthood. Naturally, to demonstrate Zhougong's ever‑faithful subservience to his king entailed revisions to nearly half of the Documents chapters. Finally, the Song exegetes were conscious of a strong racial distinction between the Chinese‑peaking states in the North China plain, versus the barbarian or semi‑barbarian states, whereas the early exegetes of the Shangshu made less of age‑old tensions between sedentary agriculturalists and their neighbors.

16Only recently have Euro‑American scholars, in company with some of their East Asian counterparts, begun to acknowledge a "general shift in the textual landscape" during Song, spurred in part, perhaps, by the Song ancient prose movement. Crucial to research on this topic is the careful two‑volume reconstruction of the Wang Anshi's "New Readings" (xinyi 新義) for the Documents classic and Song responses to it, by Cheng Yuanmin 程元敏 (a student of Qu Wanli 屈萬里, in Taiwan). Equally helpful is the English translation of the "glosses" for the major Documents commentaries prepared by Bernhard Karlgren for The Bulletin of the Far Eastern Antiquities journal (1948‑1949), despite Karlgren's disparagement of previous scholarship. What has proven far less constructive is the insistence by some Chinese scholars that unprovenanced materials bought on the market in Hong Kong or Japan be accorded the same "weight" as scientifically‑excavated manuscripts. Past experience suggests that patient accumulation and sifting of the evidence is preferable to overly‑hasty judgments.

Themes in the Documents

  • 17 El‑Amine, 2015, p. 9.

17The distinctive contribution of Chinese wisdom texts (or indeed of all non‑Western political conceptions in general) is typically characterized as "moral" or "spiritual" rather than political. Most students of the Classics and masterworks today insist that their approach to politics stems from Confucian ethics in a straightforward manner and the Confucian political vision is one of a sage king seeking the moral edification of the broad ranks of his people.17 Reading the Documents with any care makes such arguments very hard to sustain. In the entire Documents corpus, there are but a handful of catchphrases in the Han‑era version that readily lend themselves to moralizing constructions, and each of these, in the Han readings, has less to do with the ethics of self‑cultivation than with social cultivation, defined for members of the governing elite (the original readers of the Documents classic) as due attention to one's duties within the sociopolitical order. Put another way, in the Documents the evaluation of regimes does not rest primarily on whether they allow for human flourishing, but on whether they allow for greater security and public order. Order is a good, an end in itself, not only a precondition for the moral cultivation of members of the ruling elite. (Perhaps this explains why Zhu Xi wrestled with the Documents long and hard, and ultimately dropped his plan to provide a full commentary to it. Certainly, it is why Zhu Xi's followers had occasionally to do real violence to the meaning of the text to adapt it to their moralizing agendas)

  • 18 Charnay, 1982, p. 13‑14.
  • 19 Wolin, 2004, p. 10‑11.
  • 20 Needless to say, it does not justify a push for democratic models, though it fulfills Heiner Roetz (...)

18Antique texts the world over lauded "happiness through empire". Historians speaking of the empire of Alexander the Great discussed its "luminous face," for example, whose vaunted ideal was "universal peace and the coexistence of heterogeneous entities, nations, and groups.18 Similarly, the Documents is concerned with how to preserve social order. The commitment to a just order is expressed through sacrifice and tribute to the reigning powers, in this life and in the afterlife, and enhanced by the wise rulers' frequent consultation with sagely advisors. Thus, the central problematic addressed again and again in the Documents is known from the Western political tradition: how to "render politics compatible with the requirements of order," so as to "reconcile the conflicts created by competition under conditions of scarcity with the demands of public tranquility19 – how to conceive a workable common good, in other words, in complex societies. Frank discussions between rulers and ministers in the Documents are therefore central to understanding early political theory, and not just of marginal interest to thinkers intent upon cultivation. As a result, "Chinese tradition" does not justify resort to autocratic methods ("Asian values" in today's state‑sponsored idiom), in the interest of building a greater unity20.

  • 21 Joseph Chan (Chan, 2007, p. 188), which borrows from Joseph Raz. By such a conception, the common (...)
  • 22 As Gramsci noted of modern societies, subject groups may agree to be ruled by the dominant group, (...)
  • 23 Giele, 2011.

19Of considerable interest, then, not only to the early thinkers but also to us, is how the Documents deals with issues of justice in the face of non‑compliance, also the authority invested in the office of ruler, as distinct from his personal character and qualifications. There seems to be embedded what one might call a "service conception of authority," whereby the ruler's chief qualification and goal seems to be to satisfy the people's needs, mainly for peace and secondarily for ensuing prosperity21. Further work remains to be done, however, if we hope to understand what is meant by the Documents' frequent calls for "harmony," for the key attributes of the exemplary ruler in the Documents boil down to two words: wei 威 (to overawe) and xin 信 (to prove reliably trustworthy). As noted above, the early readings of the Documents corpus are ready to countenance the application of force, even if they deem it a last resort to dispose of the most recalcitrant offenders. At the same time, technological factors, especially the cost of transport (and hence of provisioning armies) and the slowness of communications between capital and periphery, undermined any ability of the early courts to impose direct domination over vast territories. Trust entered in, insofar as the dynasty could not rely upon Heaven's continuing good will, and perforce had to seek out any apparent "harmony of interests" among men, mitigating real‑life disadvantages to the locals, lest those locals, as individuals or by groups, organize against the court's representatives. Like the Augustan rhetoric of concordia, then, the Chinese rhetoric of "harmony" (he 和) fostered a sense of common interests and continuities, rather than injustices and discontinuities22. We know that in early China, significant ethnic and local differences were downplayed in the literary and visual sources.23 And as soon as visual and literary representations of harmony became part of the stock‑in‑trade in the political discourse, harmony became as potent a factor in "real" life as any other.

  • 24 Areshian, 2013, p. 2‑5.

20Of course, since "managing diversity" (code for persuading or pressuring local elites to cooperate) has become the key desideratum of empire today, the modern nation‑state – and here China is no exception – prefers to showcase a very different face of empire, one in which conquerors for long millennia have successfully assimilated the conquered populations. Hence the current propensity in Chinese scholarship on the Documents to allude (sometimes in thinly-veiled tropes and sometimes not) to the PRC bids for "soft power." By the state rhetoric today, China (i.e., Han China) is so manifestly superior a civilization that it need not rely, as did the Western and Japanese colonial powers, on the "somber face of power, domination, and technocratic rationalism".24 So, when idly perusing the most famous portraits of good rule, as presented in the Documents, it is wise to ponder the precise lessons drawn over time in China's ongoing acts of self‑construction.

Bibliographie

Books

Areshian Gregory E. (ed.), 2013, Empires and Diversity: On the Crossroads of Archaeology, Anthropology, and History, The Cotsen Institution of Archaeology Press, Los Angeles, 272 p. [9780917956348]

Charnay Jean‑Paul, 1982, Le Bonheur par l'empire ou Le rêve d'Alexandre : actes du colloque tenue en Sorbonne le 1er Mars 1980 par le Centre d'études et de recherches sur les stratégies et les conflits, Anthropos, Paris, 170 p. [9782715710559]

El‑Amine Loubna, 2015, Classical Confucian Political Thought, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 232 p. [9781400873944]

Fagan Garrett G., 2013, Archaeological Fantasies: How Pseudoarchaeology Misrepresents the Past and Misleads the Public, sixth printing, Routledge, London, 420 p. [9780415305938]

Guo Yu 郭彧, 2007, Jingshi Yi yuan liu 京氏易源流 [The Sources of Jing Fang’s Changes], Huaxia chubanshe, Beijing.

Matsumoto Masaaki 松本雅明, 1966, Shunjū Sengoku ni okeru Shōsho no tenkai: rekishi ishiki no hatten o chūshin ni 春秋戰國における尚書の展開: 歴史意識の發展を中心に, [The Development of the Documents in the Chunqiu and Zhanguo Periods, with a Focus on the Development of a Sense of History], Kazama Shobō, Tōkyō.

Noe Jee hyun, 2013, Chong Yagyong 丁若鏞 (1762‑1836) et sa critique du Shangshu 尚書 en guwen 古文, Ph.D. thesis, Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales.

Nylan Michael, 2011, Yang Xiong and the Pleasures of Reading and Classical Learning in Han China, The American Oriental Society, New Haven, 148 p. [9780940490321]

Shijing Zhengyi 詩經正義 [Correct Readings of the Odes Classic], edition of the Shisanjing zhushu 十三經注疏 [Commentary and Subcommentary to the Thirteen Classics], 1980, Zhonghua shuju, Beijing.

Wolin Sheldon, 2004, Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought, Princeton University Press, Princeton., 792 p. [9780691174051]

Papers and contributions to books

Chan Joseph, 2007, “Democracy and Meritocracy: Toward a Confucian Perspective”, Journal of Chinese Philosophy, vol. 34, no 2, p. 179‑193.

Cherniack Susan, 1994, “Book Culture and Textual Transmission in Sung China”, Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, vol. 54, no 2, p. 5‑126.

Giele Enno, 2011, “Evidence for the Xiongnu in Chinese Wooden Documents from the Han Period”, in Brosseder Ursula & Miller Bryan K., 2011, Xiongnu Archaeology, vol. 5, Friedrich Wilhelms Universität, Bonn, p. 49‑75.

He Ruyue & Nylan Michael, 2015, “On the Han‑Era Postface (xu 序) to the Documents Classic”, Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, vol. 75, no 2, p. 377‑427.

Li Xueqin, 2002‑2003, “Walking Out of the Doubting-Antiquity Era”, Contemporary Chinese Thought, vol. 34, no 2, p. 26‑49.

Li Xueqin, 2011, “Tsinghua jian yu Shangshu Yi Zhoushu de yanjiu” 清华简与尚书遗周书的研究 [Research on the Tsinghua Strips in Relation to the Documents and Yi Zhoushu], Shixue shi yanjiu 史學史研究, vol. 142, p. 104-108.

Yoshida Jun 吉田純, 1988, “ Shôsho kobun soshô to sono jidai ” 尚書古文疏證とその時代 [Evidential Analysis of the Archaic Script Documents and its Era], Nippon Chûgoku Gakkaihô 日本中國學會報, vol. 40, p. 153‑167.

Notes

1 The pre‑Qin "Tai shi" (Great Oath) chapter was lost, apparently, and a chapter (almost certainly a forgery) replaced it during mid‑Western Han. The chapter count is often given as twenty‑eight, by analogy to the twenty‑eight lunar mansions 二十八宿 in the sky. Because the Documents provided examples and guidelines for fiscal, flood control, succession, and frontier policies, training for the Jesuits in the early 17th century was based mainly on the Four Books and the Shangshu.

2 Zhang Taiyan 章太炎 (aka Binglin 炳麟) and others argued that the Shangshu should be regarded as nothing more or less than the earliest extant record of events (yin shi jilu zhi shu 因事記錄之書). The Shiji invokes twenty‑seven chapters, and it includes substantial quotations drawn from sixteen chapters of the Documents, ranging from several sentences up to a block of text forty-seven sentences long.

3 Tianxia 天下 has often be translated as "empire" or, more recently, as "world." Perhaps it is best to think of it as the lands under the watchful eyes of the spirits, including the ancestors of the ruling house.

4 For example, Wang Su speaks of wide consultation with officials and even the wan min 萬民 in the "great affairs" of state; "the ruler does not in solitary fashion occupy the throne" (非獨在位).

5 As the dating of almost all received texts from the early period is fraught, these numbers are approximate. See Nylan, 2011.

6 Somewhat confusingly, this set of chapters is labeled guwen (meaning, "pre‑Qin texts") by Sima Qian.

7 He & Nylan, 2015.

8 Yuandi, Chengdi's father, was classically trained. During his reign and that of Chengdi that Documents experts like Jing Fang and Liu Xiang make it possible to read the Documents by analogy to the Changes classic. See Guo Yu 郭彧 (2007).

9 This cache supposedly included a 10 juan (scrolls) Zhoushu (Zhou Writings).

10 Yan's book was printed in 1796, in Tianjin, but it circulated earlier in manuscript form in China and possibly beyond. In Korea, a similar critique was independently written by Tasan. See Noe, 2013.

11 Yoshida, 1988.

12 Matsumoto, 1966.

13 Li, 2011.

14 Cherniack, 1994.

15 The Documents mentions a Xia dynasty in the "Tang shi" 湯誓 (Oath at Tang) chapter, for example, as the founder of Shang defeats the last ruler of Xia. The Xia dynasty appears in this capacity in the "Shao gao" 召誥(Proclamation by/to Shaogong) chapter. The Xia dynasty appears more frequently in the pseudo‑Kong chapters, however. Few realize that "Xia" (meaning, "fair") is the name given the area around Anyang, which was the royal domain of the last Shang king. See Fagan, 2013.

16 "Da gao" 大誥, "Kang gao" 抗誥, "Lord Shi" 君奭 and "Duo fang" 多方 allude to Heaven's unreliable support and its propensity to rain down punishments.

17 El‑Amine, 2015, p. 9.

18 Charnay, 1982, p. 13‑14.

19 Wolin, 2004, p. 10‑11.

20 Needless to say, it does not justify a push for democratic models, though it fulfills Heiner Roetz's call for "non‑regressive" politics. Indeed, it is striking lacking in specifics are the programs and policies, strategies and methods, found in the Documents. The empire works largely because of the remarkable insights supplied to individual rulers assisted by able ministers, and not because a range of institutions prop up the dynastic house.

21 Joseph Chan (Chan, 2007, p. 188), which borrows from Joseph Raz. By such a conception, the common people would be the most important element of classical political theory, but are the people even in view here?

22 As Gramsci noted of modern societies, subject groups may agree to be ruled by the dominant group, and to participate in imperial projects, if they receive social status, economic benefits, and ideological rewards. Frequently, local elites retain some measure of local autonomy in exchange for their cooperation.

23 Giele, 2011.

24 Areshian, 2013, p. 2‑5.

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University of California, Berkeley

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