Writing and Authority in Early China

SUNY series in Chinese Philosophy and Culture

by Mark Edward Lewis

Traces the evolving uses of writing to command assent and authority in early China, an evolution that culminated in the establishment of a textual canon as the basis of imperial authority.

"This book is a masterful study of the ideology and uses of writing in early China. The scholarship is impeccable--indeed, stunning--the interpretation of an array of difficult texts is brilliant, and the conclusions are of central importance to all subsequent studies of this period. This book, in my opinion, is the single most valuable study in the field of early China scholarship since Angus Graham's Disputers of the Tao . It is certain to be read, cited, and disputed for many decades." -- Stephen W. Durrant, author of the The Cloudy Mirror

This book traces the evolving uses of writing to command assent and obedience in early China, an evolution that culminated in the establishment of a textual canon as the foundation of imperial authority. Its central theme is the emergence of this body of writings as the textual double of the state, and of the text-based sage as the double of the ruler. The book examines the full range of writings employed in early China, such as divinatory records, written communications with ancestors, government documents, the collective writings of philosophical and textual traditions, speeches attributed to historical figures, chronicles, verse anthologies, commentaries, and encyclopedic compendia. Lewis shows how these writings served to administer populations, control officials, form new social groups, invent new models of authority, and create an artificial language whose mastery generated power and whose graphs became potent objects. Writing and Authority in Early China traces the enterprise of creating a parallel reality within texts that depicted the entire world. These texts provided models for the invention of a world empire, and one version ultimately became the first state canon of imperial China. This canon served to perpetuate the dream and the reality of the imperial system across the centuries.

"Writing and Authority in Early China is a comprehensive presentation about the structure of society and authority in pre-imperial and early imperial China from a very important and heretofore unexplored perspective. I would not be surprised to see this book rise to a level of lasting importance that few modern works of scholarship, even good ones, can hope for." -- William G. Boltz, University of Washington

Genres: Nonfiction, China, History

Paperback

First published March 1, 1999

Reviews

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Invented as an ideal by small bands of scholars, expanded into a detailed program in encyclopedic texts and commentaries, the Chinese empire survived 2,000 years of dynastic rise and fall as a dream preserved first in a body of texts and ultimately in theatrical performances. Now only the texts and theater remain."

Take a handful of small, peripheral, warring states in an ancient land. Circulate among them itinerant poets and moralists and teachers with a memory of a glorious past, upon which they draw in their meditations and frequently critical discussions of the chaotic present. Gather these writings into a canon which serves to legitimize the political unification of the region and lend authority to the new social hierarchy that comes with it. Watch the kingdom of words upon which the dynasties rise and fall, together with the status of the scholars who master them, persist for thousands of years.

What I found thrilling about this book - and it's a big, heavy, workmanlike, often plodding tome - is that so much of what was being described was evocative of other moments of cultural consolidation around a key corpus of texts at about the same time. Think Judea and the composition of the Bible in the 7th century, or Greece and the emergence of philosophy in the 5th. Here we have central China in the 6th through 4th centuries, the age of Confucius, but just as much of a dozen other writers and schools much less well known outside their homeland. In a period of social breakdown - the protracted collapse of the Zhou dynasty running from the 8th to 3rd centuries - characterized by a shifting landscape of contending successors, Chinese literature suddenly lurches forward from divination manuals to some of the earliest and most sophisticated political philosophy of antiquity. With the unification of China under the Qin and later Han Dynasties, this literary and philosophical harvest of culture (or one version of it, the Confucian variety) became the ideological foundation for the following 2,000 years of imperial government.

Lewis's main argument links all of this to the technology of writing, arguing that, contrary to arguments along the lines of Jack Goody that prioritize its function as a prosthetic of human memory and information storage, it was much more crucial as a tool in cementing an imagined community capable of enduring across great reaches of space and across great variations in culture and circumstance. The role of intellectuals in the Warring States Period, following the decline of the Zhou and preceding the rise of the Qin and Han, was to make the bridge between the ancient use of script as a form of communication with the gods, and the mastery of script as a sign of fitness for rule over men. As in ancient Judea with Hebrew, a script the very form of which was felt to hold divine significance became the basis for a model of earthly virtue and universal order that far transcended its provincial origins.

[Maxine · Rating 5 out of 5]

Took me 4 or so months to work my way through, but definitely worth it. Would read again.