Before Confucius: Studies in the Creation of the Chinese Classics (review)

Reviews 261 N OTES1. Elizabeth Constantine, personal communication regarding the Uzbeks ofFerghana, 1998; Sergei P. Poliakov, EverydayIslam: Religion and Tradition in Rural CentralAsia (New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1992), p. 53. 2. Dru C. Gladney, Muslim Chinese: Ethnic Nationalism in the People's Republic ofChina (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), p. 301. Edward L. Shaughnessy. Before Confucius: Studies in the Creation ofthe Chinese Classics. SUNY Series in Chinese Philosophy and CuJture. AJbany: State University ofNew York Press, 1997. 262 pp. Paperback $19.95, isbn 0-7914-3378-1. This volume collects most of the individual essays written by Edward Shaughnessy, professor ofEast Asian languages and civilizations at the University of Chicago, since the publication ofhis outstanding Ph.D. dissertation, "The Composition of the Zhouyî' (Stanford, 1983). It includes two chapters each on the Zhouyi (Yijing), Shangshu, and Shijingand one chapter each on the Yi Zhou shu and Zhushujinian. Besides these essays, Shaughnessy has made immense contributions to the field ofearly China studies through his authorship of the authoritative and indispensable handbook Sources ofWestern Zhou History: Inscribed Bronze Vessels (University of California Press, 1991) and chapters on the Yijingand Shangshu in Early Chinese Texts: A Bibliographical Guide (Society for the Study ofEarly China, 1993)· He has also edited the journal Early China, the Mawangdui manuscript of the Yijing (published as I Ching: The Classic ofChanges [Ballantine Books, 1997])) and New Sources ofEarly Chinese History: An Introduction to the Reading ofInscriptions and Manuscripts (Society for the Study ofEarly China, 1997)· It is therefore with trepidation that I, a student ofthe Yijingwho prefers lining the well to muddying the water, find it necessary to take issue with some of Shaughnessy's historical methodologies. Though I have misgivings about both of Shaughnessy's Zhouyi essays, in this short review I will concentrate on only one of them—his positing ofa historical "meaning" ofhexagram and line statements in die oldest layers ofthe Yijingtext. Unhappily, Shaughnessybases his major interpretive ploy on a sand castle built in the 1920s by the Chinese contextual critic Gu© 1999 by University jjegang jn ¿^„g so> neI16Jp5perpetuate a twentieth-centurymyth about the Zhou dynasty that is at least as pernicious as the traditional myths that Gu and his fellow iconoclasts attempted to destroy. ofHawai'i Press 262 China Review International: Vol. 6, No. i, Spring 1999 Gu himselfwas cautious when he tossed offhis suggestion, but Shaughnessy has intercepted it and carried it to the one-yard line. As Shaughnessy notes in the first essay in this book, "Marriage, Divorce and Revolution: Reading between the Lines ofthe Book ofChanges," Gu described his Zhouyi and Shijinginterpretation as "little more than a 'guess'" (p. 16). That is an accurate description, though I would be more inclined to describe it as a fantasy. But in Shaughnessy's hands die "guess" becomes first an "insight" (p. 21) and tiien, in the introductory preview, historical fact (p. 6). What is this guess-become-insight-become-fact? It is Gu's juxtaposing oflines from the Zhouyi wifh lines from the Shijing, or Book ofSongs, to reach the conclusion , in Shaughnessy's elaboration, that the founder of the Zhou dynasty, King Wen, married the daughter (or sister or cousin; translations and interpretations vary) of the Shang king Di Yi; that the marriage was a failure; and that King Wen then married a consort who became the mother ofWen's successor, King Wu. It must be noted tiiat it was only by connecting vague statements about the marriage of Di Yi's daughter in the Book ofChanges hexagram lines to equally vague statements about the marriage ofKing Wen in the Book ofSongs that Gu was able to reach his ingenious and novel conclusion. He did this even though nothing in the two texts themselves indicates diat they have any relationship to each other. Shaughnessy, transmuting Gu's guess into fact, writes in his introduction that his first essay is based on "one historical vignette mentioned in the line statements of the Classic ofChanges, the marriage ofKing Wen of Zhou ... to a daughter of the penultimate Shang king Di Yi" (p. 6). It will come as a surprise, then, to unwary readers ofthe essay that nowhere in the line statements of...