The Bamboo Texts of Guodian: A Study & Complete Translation by Scott Cook (review)

critical analysis of the text. Indeed, as we are very much aware today, there are important gaps between the man Confucius and the text of the ZY edited some two hundred years later. There are also important gaps between the text of the ZY and its interpretation by Zhu Xi. Therefore the reader should be reminded that the strong coherence between the man Confucius, the text of the ZY, the commentary of Zhu Xi, and the commentary of Arghiresco is mostly a hermeneutical construction. Confucius would have certainly been bewildered by the sayings and meanings attributed to him in the ZY during the Han dynasty, or in its Song and modern commentaries. Frequently, Arghiresco explains the Neo-Confucian Zhongyong in dialogue with Western philosophy, and this approach is similar to what Tu Wei-ming presented under the title Centrality and Commonality.5 Like Tu, Arghiresco strives to expound the inner logic of the text, but their translation differs in some key points. For example, Arghiresco translates cheng with natural correctness (rectitude naturelle), while Tu follows the traditional translation as sincerity. The Buddhist influence on Zhu Xi’s commentary of the ZY is evoked very briefly and could have benefited from a more developed exposition. However, the Taoist influence on the ZY itself, underscored by Qian Mu 錢穆, is treated more systematically.6 Arghiresco’s empathic reading shows little critical distance from NeoConfucianism , especially concerning its political conservatism, since she suggests that positions in society reflect the moral order, and that any mismatch could be corrected through the examination system! Many important notions of the ZY, such as Shangdi 上帝, are not developed adequately (only a brief footnote), arguably because Zhu Xi did not do so. The work is quite lengthy (395 pages) with many repetitions, but perhaps it is intended as a process of internalization. This important book will surely find a wide audience among scholars and students of Neo-Confucianism and of the interpretative tradition of the Classics. THIERRY MEYNARD Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, China SCOTT COOK, The Bamboo Texts of Guodian: A Study & Complete Translation. 2 vols. Cornell East Asia Series, vols. 164 & 165. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University East Asia Program, 2012. xviii, ix, 1200 pp. Vol. 1: US$69 (pb), ISBN 978-1933947 -64-8; vol. 2: US$69 (pb), ISBN 978-1-933947-65-5 The long-awaited publication of this magnum opus by Scott Cook, one of the leading scholars in the fields of early Chinese philosophy and the study of excavated manuscripts, is a major event in the study of early China and a cause for celebration. Cook, in Asia better known under his Chinese name Gu Shikao 顧史 5 Tu Wei-ming, An Essay on Confucian Religiousness: A Revised and Enlarged Edition of Centrality and Commonality: An Essay on Chung-yung (Honolulu, University of Hawai‘i Press, 1989). 6 Qian Mu 錢穆, Zhuzi Xinxuean 朱子新學案, 5 vols. (Taipei: Sanmin Shuju, 1971). 216 BOOK REVIEWS 考, which also appears on the book cover, presents us with a comprehensive study and translation of the entire corpus of the Guodian 郭店 manuscripts. The great significance of this work is owing not only to its scholarly quality but also to the special importance of its subject matter. The cache of bamboo manuscripts discovered in 1993 in the modestly sized tomb number one of Guodian in Hubei 湖北, is exceptional in several respects. The 731 slips bearing a total of over 13,000 characters form the largest corpus of Warring States prose text recovered so far in a controlled archaeological excavation. It is theoretically surpassed in volume by the find in tomb no. 36 of Cili 慈利 Shibancun 石板村, Hunan 湖南, excavated in 1987. However, those ca. 800–1000 slips with approximately 20,000 characters are so badly damaged that the text, apparently mostly historical narratives, could not be reconstructed as yet, so the Shibancun manuscripts have remained unpublished. Another exceptional feature of the Guodian find, dated to the end of the fourth century BCE, lies in the content of its texts. While the greater part of early Chinese manuscripts found in one particular tomb is usually of a technical nature—be it tomb inventories, administrative documents, divinatory, legal, military, or medical texts—the manuscripts recovered from the Guodian...