Short chapters are the most important document system in the Warring States Qin and Han Dynasties, and have gradually become the consensus of scholars. At this time, the short chapters in the literature, the vast majority of their word count is within 500 words, and constitute a complete unit of meaning. Many ancient books (such as the Book of Rites, the Chinese, the Analects, LaoZi, Zhuangzi, Mencius, Yanzi Chunqiu, Lü's Chunqiu, etc.) are originally a combination of chapters. It looks like lego bricks, public material for that era, the basic material for building larger texts. The American scholar William G. Boltz, "The Composite Nature of Early Chinese Texts" (in Comartine's "Early Chinese Texts and Etiquette") is the most systematic discussion of this issue, and it is worth reading. The phenomenon of short chapters is perhaps one of the most important discoveries in the field of pre-Qin literature research in decades. This discovery takes our understanding of pre-Qin literature to a new level. How did the early LEGO brick literature come about? Why did those independent short chapters become the bulk of the early literature in the form of universal blocks? Such questions are rarely asked, but they are equally important.
Peking University Tibetan Western Han Bamboo Book, Lao Tzu Shangjing
One
The answer to the question needs to return to the daily life written by the ancients. We know that Jian Mu was the main book carrier in the pre-Qin and Han Dynasties, but is there a difference between Jian and Mu in daily use? Judging from the literature, the brochure and the tablet have different use environments. The documents written in the pamphlet are either classics or important documents, such as edicts, booklet documents, etc., and in general, they are documents of preservation value. Xu Shen's "Preface to the Interpretation of The Words of the Sayings" says that "the book written in the bamboo book", the ancient book often said "written in the bamboo book", the so-called "bamboo" is the simple book of bamboo. For example, "Mozi Shangxian", "The Ancient Saint King judges Shangxian and wants to be a government, so the bamboo of the book, the bamboo of the book, the bamboo of the book, the sword of the book, passed on to the descendants of future generations", "Han Feizi Anwei" "The first king is entrusted to the bamboo veil, and his way is obedient to the future generations", "Lü Shi Chunqiu, Zhongchun ji , lust" "So that the king of Zhuang's merits are written in the bamboo veil, passed on to future generations", "The Book of Han , Oriental Shuo Biography" contains his "Difficulty in Answering Guests", "The Master of the Present Son's Cultivation of the Art of the Former King, the Righteousness of the Saints, the Irony of the Hundred Families of the Poetry and the Book, innumerable, written in the Bamboo Book, the lips rotting teeth, Obedience without release" and so on, it can be seen that the literature contained in the bamboo booklet has a lot of preservation value, and it is naturally a relatively formal type.
In the early days, the use of daily writing was mainly the Mu version, "Shuowen": "Mu, the book version is also." For example, the "Warring States Strategy, Qi Ce" records that Qi Wangjian "took the pen and received the words". Volume VII of the "Han Shi Wai Biography" records that Zhao Jianzi's family minister Zhou Sheyue said: "Willing to be a courtier, the ink pen is manipulated, from the jun, the si jun is over and the book is written, the day has a record, the month has a success, and the year is effective." These two stories take place in the Warring States period, although what they do not necessarily record is historical. But it can also be seen in the experience and common sense of the storyteller, especially those everyday details that have no direct impact on the meaning of the story. Qi Wangjian "took the words of the mu and received the words" and Zhou She "ink and pen manipulation", these two details can let us know, at that time, the tools of daily writing were pen and mu. The Warring States Policy and the Outer Tale of Han Poetry were both compiled by the Western Han Dynasty, but the writing instruments of the Eastern Zhou And Qin and Han Dynasties did not change much in technology, so they can generally reflect the general situation of the Eastern Zhou Qin and Han Dynasties. Therefore, it is known that in the Qin and Han Dynasties, from the Heavenly Son to the small officials, Mu was one of the carriers of his handwritten books.
For example, in the Qin and Han dynasties, letters and deeds were mainly used in the Mu version. The Son of Heaven sent the book with a foot and an inch of tablets to show honor. Tianzi is like this, then the daily letters of all classes should also be Mu, most of the letters in the excavated documents are written on the tablet, such as the earliest family letter seen today is the Hubei Yunmeng Sleeping Tiger No. 4 Tomb two pieces of wood, respectively, Heifu and Shock two letters to the family, the complete one is 23.1 cm long and 3.4 cm wide. Anhui Tianchangji Zhuang Han Tomb unearthed 34 pieces of wood, most of which are letters, which are between 22.2-23.2 cm long and 3.6-6.9 cm wide. There are 50 letters unearthed from the ancient well no. 7 of Changsha East Archway, all written on wooden mu, 20.0-27.9 cm long and 2.2-6.3 cm wide. The length of these wooden tablets is roughly consistent with the so-called "rulers" in The Han Dynasty literature.
The Han Chinese also use 牍, the so-called Sonata, to write and talk about things. The wat board, which has been used until the Tang Dynasty, is a special type of sonata. The Book of Rites and Jade Algae says: "Whoever has a finger painted in front of the king, uses a wat, and is ordained before the king, then the book is wat." "The administrative documents of the Qin and Han local government offices are also mainly based on Mu or single-piece Jane, and The Liye QinJian, Juyan Hanjian (or Juyan Xinjian) and The Hanging Spring Hanjian are mainly local administrative documents. However, these materials are not very relevant to the subject matter of this article and are therefore not described in detail.
In short, from the analysis of various literature, mu should be the most daily writing carrier before the popularity of paper. As late as the Han Dynasty, Mu was still the main carrier of daily writing. It can also be seen from its existence that the daily nature of mu is higher than that of the pamphlet. Ma Yi said that "pamphlets were quite rare after the Eastern Han Dynasty, but the use of tablets lasted for a long time, even extending to the Tang Dynasty. "The Mu edition was used until the Tang Dynasty, in addition to its convenience in production and use compared to the brochure, it also shows that people's habitual dependence on it is higher than that of the pamphlet.
Two
Among the excavated documents, almost all the classics are written on the brochures, and the practical documents such as documents, books, and letters are often written on the plates. At first glance, the mu edition seems to have little to do with the classics. In terms of literature research in the general sense, unearthed documents are a very important type of evidence, but their validity is still limited. At present, there are three main sources of excavated documents: tombs, the ruins of the Health Department, and waste accumulation sites such as ancient wells. The briefs in these three places are mainly burial items, administrative documents and abandoned documents, and the scope is relatively fixed. Among the documents discovered so far, a large number of administrative documents are often abandoned documents, such as Liye Qinjian, Hanging Spring Hanjian and Zoumalou Wujian. An ancient scholar, his daily life and individual writing, had no direct connection to these three fields. The daily administrative writing of officials and the writing of ideological texts are also different, and whether the texts in tombs and ritual factors will affect their form and content is a question that needs to be studied. In short, any thinking cannot be bound by limited materials. The question of what the ancients used in their daily writing is still interesting and worthy of scrutiny.
Since the tablet is the writing carrier used in daily life, the tools used for taking notes in classic writing and lecture occasions should also be pens and tablets. The pre-Qin historical materials are insufficient, and the materials used in the writing of articles of the Han Dynasty are generally called pen notes. The Za in the Pen, the Shuwen Kibu said: "Za, Yaya." Duan Yu cut yun: "The film is known as: 牒, Zaye." The two words are mutually trained, the grown-ups are known as the tree, and the thin and the small are known as the zha and the young. "Shuwen" Kibu: "椠, 牍朴也." Duan Yu cut a note: "The book is the essence of the book, and the unsubscribed is also." "In fact, 牒 or Za, generally refers to the Mu version. The books in the excavated documents are contained in the Mu Edition. And the books are also called 牒, such as the "Book of Han Kuang Heng Biography": "Plain literature Kuang Heng has more than enough wisdom and excellent scripture learning, but with the orderless imperial court, so it is with Mu in the distance." According to Yan Shi's ancient notes, the mu here is the "HengMu of The By-election", which belongs to the famous book, and the material carrier is the book version. Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty sealed Zen Taishan, there is a jade book, and the "Continuation of the Han Zhi And Sacrifice Chronicle" contains the Eastern Han Dynasty Sealing Zen, and also "uses the jade book to collect square stones." It is five inches thick, three inches long, five inches wide, and has a jade inspection", which is sealed and inspected, and is one foot three inches long and five inches wide, which is a ruler used to imitate the letters of the Han Dynasty, because it is sealed Zen, so it is slightly three inches long. The "Book of Han and Xue Propaganda" contains that "Xuancha Zhan has the effect of changing the style and respecting the xuan, but it is a self-made book, and it is a treacherous book, and it is sealed with Zhan Yue", then the 牒 here is the carrier of the letter, and it should also be a version. Therefore, it can be regarded as a type of 牍.
The writings of the ancients should not be written directly in the booklet, Yang Xiong's "Reply to Liu Xinshu" said: "Xiong often put three inches of weak Han, four feet of oil, in order to ask his different words, that is, to pick the lead from the second to the slug, twenty-seven years old in the present." Then Yang Xiong's "Dialect" first draft book to Yu Yu, that is, the Mu edition. Yang Zhen's "Reply to the Book of the Marquis of Linzi" says of Cao Zhiyue: "I also tasted the deacon holding a pen and making some fabrications, and if he recited it in his heart and borrowed the book in his hand, he did not have to think less about it." It can be seen that the composition of the literati at the end of the Han Dynasty is also a grass on the Mu version. During the Southern and Northern Dynasties, the pen scribe often referred to the article. The article is drafted in the pen, and the pen can become synonymous with the article, and even the exquisite adjective of the article. This reflects the universality of the penmanship (especially the mu version) in everyday writing.
Portrait tiles with talking content unearthed in the Guanghan Dynasty, Sichuan Province, are generally considered to be performance appraisal maps, that is, images showing the scenes of officials on the count (below). According to Sun Ji's "Han Dynasty Material Culture Data Map", the figure depicted in the picture should be the figure of the Eastern Han Dynasty. This is an extremely rare portrait brick depicting scenes written by the ancients on the spot. The person in the center of the picture is talking, and the other four people are attached to listening, each holding a mule board. There are two small cases in the picture, with a mule board and a brush on the case, and on the ground there is research and ink. It can be seen that until the Eastern Han Dynasty, the main tool for on-site recording and writing was still Mu.
Talking about the map, china audit museum collection, Sichuan Guanghan excavation (excavation age, location unknown)
Therefore, in the daily writing of the ancients, whether it is administrative documents, writings and words, or disciple recorders, the mu version is likely to be its original carrier. Subsequently, those considered valuable would be compiled into volumes later, or reorganized and copied into simple books. Wang Chong's "On Heng Chaoqi" commented on Confucianism, which included Yun: "Or you can't say a scripture, teach the future life." Or bring disciples together to gather a crowd and say that the cave overflows, which is called the scriptures. Or can not become a mu, Zhiyi said. Or can be old gains and losses, play cheap, words should be passed on, the text is like the stars and the moon. Its highest, such as Gu Ziyun and Tang Zigao, said that the book was on top of the music and could not connect the chapters. Wang Chong said that he can support the above judgment in this article.
Three
In the Zhou Qin and Han dynasties, when a scholar wrote a pen to record the teacher's words or wrote an article, the version he faced naturally became a limiting factor in the scale of his writing. As for the relationship between this limiting factor and the generation of classical texts, it is difficult to make a valid judgment at present due to the research material. However, comparing the shape of the excavated version with the basic characteristics of the short chapters in the heirloom literature, the correlation between the two can be roughly seen.
Regarding the rong characters of the mu plate, the situation in the excavated documents varies greatly, of course, it is also related to the size of the mu plate and whether it is written fully. For example, the ancient well of Liye No. 1 unearthed wooden mu, 23 cm long and 1.4-8.5 cm wide, generally one thing is simple, written on both sides, and some of the back belongs to writing practice. These separate editions were later compiled and linked together. There are certain differences in the number of characters in the manuscript, but most of the plates can write about 30 words per line. For example, Mu 1: 6 lines on the front, a total of 155 words, there should be about 180 words in the full; Mu 2: 6 lines on the front, a total of 129 words, written in about 160 words; Mu 3: 4 lines on the front, a total of 95 words, written in about 120 words; Mu 4: 7 lines on the front, a total of 209 words, written in about 240 words.
It can be seen that for the daily use of the plates, limited by the width and narrowness, whether it is full, and the different writing habits of the writer, the rong character will be very different. Generally speaking, the length of about 23 cm, the width of more than 3 cm of the version, the single facial characters are mostly between 100-500. More Rong characters are part of the wooden tomb of Yin Wanhan. For example, the wooden mu excavated from the Han Tomb of YinWan No. 6 is 23 cm long and 7 cm wide, copied on both sides, and the finisher is named "Donghai County Official Thin", with a total of more than 3400 words on the front and back sides. This is the one with the largest number of words and the most standardized writing in the wooden mu mu excavated from the Yin Wan Han Tomb, and it is also likely to be the upper limit of ordinary ruler Rong characters. Yin Wan Mu belongs to the book and has its own particularity.
The "Analects" plate excavated from the tomb of Marquis Haixia, the size is unknown, a total of six chapters are recorded, and some of the handwriting is rambling, but according to the supplement of this book, it can be known that the total record of this version is 168 words. If the font size of the fifth chapter "Zi Yue Shan Ren Hundred Years of the State" is used, the tablet can accommodate more than 200 characters, which is closer to the rong character of the ordinary letter or administrative documents excavated in Liye, Juyan, Dunhuang, Changsha and other places. This should be the number of words that are more common when used in everyday writing.
Based on the above investigation of the Rong characters of the Mu edition, it is very interesting to look at the word count of the short chapters of the early documents. The number of words in the short chapters in the Zhou, Qin, and Han literatures that have been handed down from ten to about a thousand words, most of which are between 100 and 500 words, and chapters with more than 500 words are rare. Among them, the "Chinese" is a special situation, which is also an ancient book composed of chapters, but the source of each part is more complicated, such as the "Zhou Yu" has more long chapters, in terms of the current version of the chapter, the number of words in each chapter of the Zhou Yu is 512, 94, 262, 198, 72, 572, 96, 181, 189, 131, 508, 587, 341, 632, 46, 351, 227, 137, 101, 438, 722, 432, 185, 810, 500、554、1227、522、406、1002、611、101、479。 Of the 33 chapters, 13 are more than 500 words, which is already a high proportion. After the Lu Language, there are very few chapters of more than 500 words. Because the Chinese has a historical relationship with the Zuo Zhuan, and some chapters in the Zhou Yu also have traces of later collation, it is difficult to discuss the relationship between the generation of its text and the writing materials. The materials in ancient documents such as "Yanzi Chunqiu", "Lü Shi Chunqiu", "Han Shi Wai Biography", "Shuoyuan" and so on, although they have also been copied many times, are mostly carried and carried as a text as a whole, and their original scale has not changed much, which can help us understand the relationship between writing and material carriers in early text generation.
For example, in the 25 chapters of Yanzi Spring and Autumn, the word count of each chapter is: 281, 273, 141, 95, 516, 187, 300, 229, 464, 106, 300, 370, 164, 408, 214, 303, 164, 346, 204, 156, 241, 348, 260, 111, 198. The first volume of the Han Shi Wai Biography has 28 chapters, and the word count of each chapter is: 175, 72, 350, 100, 105, 128, 45, 220, 233, 77, 75, 111, 81, 74, 59, 155, 58, 41, 121, 277, 115, 141, 136, 119, 266, 128, 235, 145. The format of each piece of "Saying Garden" is very close to that of "Han Shi Wai Biography".
"Han Shi Wai Biography" and "Saying Garden" are all works that record all kinds of Warring States Qin and Han short chapters, so they have the nature of samples, and a random volume should generally see the basic characteristics of the Warring States Qin and Han short chapters. Comparing the number of words in the short chapters of the Warring States Qin and Han literature and the Rongzi of the Mu Edition, it is not difficult to find that the two are generally the same, and they are concentrated within 500 words, which is exactly the general scope of the Rongzi of the Mu Edition. Therefore, the author believes that the formation of the short chapter system in the early literature should be closely related to the use of plates in daily writing.
As for whether the short chapter system formed by the materiality of the edition gradually became a stylistic form and played a standardizing role in later writing, it is difficult to judge. But according to common sense, this possibility should exist.
Four
Short chapters are like the masonry of early literature, and without understanding these masonry, it is difficult to actually touch the entity of the classical literature. Although the original writing of its texts may not all be related to Mu, the fragmentary characteristics of the literature of that era as a whole can be roughly judged when they have a strong correlation with daily writing, especially the use of mu plates in drafts and notes. In this way, not only can the problem of how the short chapters are formed can be initially solved, but the rhetorical style of the ancients may also find a little answer.
In recent years, the generation of pre-Qin texts has become a very important topic, but most of the research only focuses on comparing different texts and judging the changes or invariances in the circulation of literature, which is still far from the real so-called "generation" of texts. To truly explore the formation of texts, we cannot but resort to unearthed documents. However, how to effectively deal with the relationship between excavated documents and heirloom documents has not attracted enough attention. There are many manuscripts of classic documents in the excavated documents, which have been compared with the documents handed down by researchers to judge the early circulation and variation of the text. However, regardless of the self-consciousness of the method, the vast majority of scholars simply compare two texts, such as Qinghua Jian's Crickets and Poetry Tang Feng Crickets. The texts passed down through the Han Dynasty have been orthographed several times since the Han Dynasty, and there have been four or five times in the Tang Dynasty alone. The documents we see today are mainly texts after collation and collation in the Northern Song Dynasty, and the appearance of the text is basically fixed because of engraving and printing. Many ancient scripts have similarities and differences, especially those between the Han Dynasty and the pre-Han Dynasty, and we know very little about them. Comparing the Warring States and Western Han texts with the texts compiled by the Song Dynasty, there are many potential methodological pitfalls.
At the same time, comparing the excavated documents and the heirloom documents is still essentially comparing the two texts, and the unearthed documents are an extremely important factor: material characteristics, which have not become an important object of thought. Scholars who are interested in the material characteristics of the excavated documents lack concern about the content of the text, and the compilation of bamboo janes, the way of writing, the different ways of writing the text, punctuation, etc. are their concerns. The study of text and materiality is still separate, and there is still a lack of effective methods to connect the two studies.
Among the textual factors that can be associated with the material characteristics of the written material, the system of the article should be one of them. If the writer already knows the carrier of the article in advance, and the capacity of the carrier is limited, then there will be a potential constraint when he conceives or writes: whether it is bamboo or wood, he is required to complete the expression or narrative within a certain number of words. It can be assumed that whether it is creation or notes, or the length and wording of the article, it will be subtly affected by this material condition. Therefore, when we think about the problem of "text generation (or formation) in the pre-Qin and Han dynasties", it is at least a feasible attempt to implement it into a specific material form, at least in terms of methodology.
(The paper "Mu and Zhang: The Material Background of the Formation of Early Short Chapter Texts" was published in Literature, No. 1, 2022.) This article has been rewritten by the author and authorized to be published by The Paper, and the annotations are omitted. ）