Philosophy or Bamboo: The Reading and Writing of Warring States Manuscripts

Dirk Meyer’s Philosophy on Bamboo: Text and the Production of Meaning in Early China is the revision of a doctoral dissertation titled “Meaning-Construction in Warring States Philosophical Discourse: A Discussion of the Palaeographic Materials from Tomb Guōdiàn One,” presented to Leiden University in 2008. The new title is perhaps intended to accentuate the physical nature of the texts that Meyer discusses. Meyer begins by stating that “[r]ather than focusing primarily on the ideas expressed in texts, my analysis starts by dealing with the texts themselves as meaningful objects in their own right” (p. 1). He contrasts this approach to “traditional analysis,” which “customarily sees texts from the distant past as mere vessels of thought” (p. 245). This is consistent with a great deal of current scholarship on early (and later, for that matter) Chinese textual materials, stimulated in large part by the discovery of actual examples of early Chinese texts, among which the Guodian bamboo-strip manuscripts are particularly well known. Of course, the question of what texts are will necessarily influence the way one studies them: Are they primarily the instantiations of writing, especially as realized on some material medium (be it paper or bamboo), or are they the intellectual expression of thought, regardless of the medium? Despite the expressed starting point of his analysis, Meyer seems to vacillate between these two approaches. On the one hand, he says “conventional treatment of texts as mere repositories of ideas does not suffice to establish a sound and historically valid reconstruction of early thought. Hence, my approach is to look at the philosophical texts from early China as meaningful objects in their own right” (p. 31). On the other hand, elsewhere he explicitly differentiates between the text and a manuscript:

To explore the habits of composing and using philosophical texts in early China calls for a methodological distinction between text and manuscript. I define “text” as the textual matter transmitted. It is the formulation of an idea that can take both oral and written form, and so it is abstracted from any material carrier. A text can therefore travel orally and so independently of material contexts, either with teachers, experts, or advisors or via trade routes or at markets, from person to person. “Manuscript” is the material textual representation, that is, the physical manifestation of a text on silk, bamboo, wood, or the like.

(p. 8)

In a note attached to the second sentence of this passage, Meyer “defines text in a sense that comprises the everyday mundane category but in such a way that it does not need to be (entirely) written in nature. Text can also appear in oral form or, as Martin Kern puts it, ‘co-exist in both.’”

Despite the title of his book, Philosophy on Bamboo, it seems clear that Meyer is more concerned with philosophy, as he defines it, than with bamboo. In particular, as we will see later in this review, he is particularly concerned with discerning the oral form of texts within their written nature. The iconography displayed on the book’s cover is perhaps revealing of this concern. It features a portion of five strips from the Guodian manuscript Zi yi 兹衣 (i.e., 緇衣), but the photograph has been manipulated in such a way as to render all graphs but two out of focus; the two graphs in focus, in the very middle of the photograph, are zi yue 子曰 “the Master said.” I will return at the end of this review to consider Meyer’s concern with the oral form within the written texts. However, first I will try to summarize the kind of form criticism that he brings to a few Guodian texts, and discuss the conclusions he draws from it.

In a narrowly focused study, restricted to just five of the texts from Guodian—“Zhōng xìn zhī d...