Figure 0.1
Plan of Western Zhou structure at Shaochen 召陳; from Fu Xinian 傅熹年, “Shaanxi Fufeng Shao-Chen Xi Zhou jianzhu yizhi chutan: Zhouyuan Xi Zhou jianzhu yizhi yanjiu zhi er” 陝西扶風召陳西周建築遺址初探：周原西周建築遺址研究之二, Wenwu 文物 1981.3: 37
The reconstruction of this Western Zhou temple depicted above was achieved through the methodology of archaeology. At least four steps were required before the picture could be completed. First, successive layers of accumulated Chinese history had to be penetrated, coming at last to the pisé foundation on which the temple was erected. Next, the perimeter of the foundation had to be determined, thereby demonstrating the size and outline of the structure. Third, post-holes cut into the pisé indicated the detailed configuration of the temple’s walls and some idea of the supporting structure of the roofing. And finally, comparative evidence and a degree of imagination allowed the archaeologists to draw in the roof.
In the following pages I propose to undertake a somewhat similar reconstruction of another temple of the Western Zhou. The same four-stage methodology will be employed: successive layers of Chinese history will have to be penetrated, the outline of the foundation will have to be determined, markpoints will have to be found in that foundation demonstrating how the edifice was constructed, and finally, a degree of imagination will be required to complete the picture. But the result of this reconstruction effort will inevitably be less graphically satisfying than that of the temple at Shaochen village, for although the temple with which we will be concerned was crafted by the same Western Zhou men out of the same hard Western Zhou earth, it was constructed of ideas and images rather than of timber and thatch. This temple of which I speak is the Zhou Changes.
The comparison is not fatuous. As surely as men worshipped in the temple at Shaochen, so too have one hundred generations of Chinese never ceased to worship at the temple of the Zhou Changes. But exposure to the light of day can result in the same type of disfiguration of original structures as can such long burial as that at Shaochen. Living institutions invariably and ceaselessly evolve. This has been true also with the Zhou Changes. Early on, a cult formed around the sacred scripture, giving rise in turn to an intermediary priesthood formed in order to explain its mysteries. Later, successive generations never hesitated to change the temple trappings to suit the fashions of their own day. This evolutionary process continues even today with the Zhou Changes.
But for better or for worse, modern historical scholarship is decidedly agnostic. We in the halls of academe are only anthropologically concerned with cult. We are interested in the context of cult: where did it happen? when did it happen? how did it happen and what actually happened? who was responsible? and finally why did it happen? We are fortunate with regard to the period since the formal organization of the cult of the Zhou Changes to have abundant evidence with which to answer these questions. Unfortunately, even the beginning of that period some two thousand years ago was already long removed from the original creation of the temple by the people of the Western Zhou. But thanks largely to the efforts of modern archaeologists and their related brethren the paleographers and historians of ancient China, it is now becoming ever more possible to ask these questions even of the time when the Zhou Changes was but newly built. Indeed, it is time that these questions must be asked. For as splendid as the temple at Shaochen appears, it is but a hollow shell. It is from relics such as the Zhou Changes that the spirit of the time may finally be divined.1
I beg the reader’s indulgence to begin this book on the origin and early development of the Zhou Changes with a lengthy quotation from the very beginning of my own doctoral dissertation, written almost forty years ago. I hope that the reader will excuse the purple prose as just an indication of my youthful exuberance, but see in that exuberance something of the spirit that I brought to that dissertation. While I hope that my writing style now is a little less breathless, I also hope that I have not lost any of that exuberance for the topic, or any of the imagination that I suggested was necessary to complete the picture.
It has become quite standard in the American scholarly world for newly minted Ph.D.s to go on to publish the dissertation as their first book. In the Spring of 1986, less than three years after completing my degree, I was approached by Jim Clarke, then director of the University of California Press, who inquired whether I would consider publishing the dissertation book with his press. Of course, I was flattered but also reluctant. As I told Mr. Clarke, I was then deep into another research project, studying the bronze inscriptions of the Western Zhou dynasty, hoping thereby to gain a better control over the linguistic context of the period.2 I promised him that once I had gained that better control that I would return to the dissertation and to the Zhou Changes.
I hoped to do so when I finally had my first research leave from the University of Chicago, in 1993–1994. However, in the middle of that year the Mawangdui 馬王堆 manuscript of the Yijing, first unearthed twenty years earlier, was finally published and I was invited by Owen Lock of Ballantine Books to publish a translation of it. Again, I was flattered and happy to be paid for a task that I would surely have turned my attention to in any event. In the years immediately after publishing that translation,3 three more manuscripts that had been unearthed in the intervening time were also made available in China, and I published preliminary reports on each of them in scholarly journals.4 In 2007–2008, the beneficiary of another sabbatical leave, I thought that maybe I would finally return to the dissertation. However, for reasons no longer clear to me (I seem to recall that it had something to do with becoming chair of my department at Chicago), I decided instead to gather these preliminary articles and to pair them with translations of all three of those newly published manuscripts, which could then be published as a single book.5
I was beginning to think that my dissertation would remain just that: my dissertation. However, as luck would have it, as I was writing my book on the unearthed manuscripts of and related to the Zhou Changes, the Chinese government launched a major initiative called the “2011 Project,” one important item of which was designed to reconsider the Chinese traditional literary heritage in the light of recent archaeological discoveries. This project brought together scholars from eleven different universities and research institutes under the joint leadership of Li Xueqin 李學勤 (1933–2019) of Tsinghua University in Beijing and Qiu Xigui 裘錫圭 of Fudan University in Shanghai, then the two greatest authorities on China’s ancient cultural history. In 2014, Professor Qiu invited me to write the Project’s book on the Yijing. Imagine my shock at this, that a major research project funded by the Chinese government and intended to reconsider China’s literary heritage would invite a foreign scholar to write the book on the Yijing, arguably the most important single book in that tradition. Needless to say, I was once again flattered and could not possibly say no to Professor Qiu.
However, while I could not say no, I accepted with three conditions. First, I would write the book that I wanted to write, which was finally to finish my dissertation. Second, I would not be able to begin work immediately. I was just then in the process of writing a very different kind of book: a comprehensive overview of the contributions that Western Sinology has made to the study of Chinese unearthed texts. This book too was started at the instigation of friends in China, and was absorbing much of my time and energy. I wanted to finish that book before turning my attention back to the Zhou Changes.6 Professor Qiu agreed to both of these conditions without hesitation. The third condition was more problematic. I insisted on writing the book in English. I have spent much of my scholarly career writing in Chinese, which is doubtless why Professor Qiu invited me to write the book in the first place. However, two factors caused me to be reluctant to write this book in Chinese. First, the book I was then writing was in Chinese, and I became quite aware of just how limited my ability to express myself in Chinese is over the course of a lengthy book (that book was eventually published at 650 pages). Second, and much more important, in the years immediately preceding Professor Qiu’s invitation I had come to know a brilliant young scholar from Fudan University: Dr. Jiang Wen 蔣文. Then a post-doctoral fellow at Chicago (she is now an instructor at Fudan), she had translated a couple of short pieces that I had written about other topics, and had demonstrated both a perfect grasp of what I was saying and also an ability to put it into straight-forward but elegant Chinese. I asked Professor Qiu to make Dr. Jiang available to undertake the translation when I would finally finish the English draft, and he—and she—readily agreed.7
In publishing this study, I am well aware of three possible dangers—for me and for my readers. First, I have been studying and writing about the Zhou Changes and the Yijing for over forty years now, and although I have learned a thing or two since first writing my doctoral dissertation, I know very well the danger of repeating myself, at least in many details if not in the grand organization. I will just have to trust that readers who have read much of my already published scholarship will be forgiving, and that I will have something to offer to newer readers. Second, as noted above, this book was originally intended for Chinese readers, even though I subsequently determined that it should appear in both Chinese and English. These different groups of readers approach the topic with very different backgrounds and very different sets of expectations. Even in terms of general presentation, Chinese readers tend to expect extensive surveys of the relevant data, while Western readers value analyses of paradigmatic cases. In trying to satisfy both of these demands, I suspect that to a greater or lesser extent I will dissatisfy both sets of readers. Third, I am all too aware of the danger of trying to produce a general theory of the Zhou Changes. Having begun my doctoral dissertation—and this book—with an architectural rendering of an ancient Chinese temple, I very much take to heart a warning by Li Xueqin, who himself published some of the most outstanding research on the Zhou Changes:
I often feel that studying the Zhou Changes is very “dangerous.” The text of the Zhou Changes is arcane and simple, but subtle and abstruse; you can explain it this way, but it is also not hard to explain it that way. It’s bad enough if you borrow the terminology of the Changes to express your own thoughts, but if you want to find the original meaning of the Changes, it is really too difficult. One very common result is that one constructs upon the foundation of one’s own imagination a seven-storeyed pagoda, the soaring eaves and complex structure of which give the architect the sense that it is entirely natural.8
I have no illusion that the present book constitutes any sort of “seven-storeyed pagoda,” but I am well aware that many of my conclusions are constructed upon the foundation of my own imagination. My only defense in this regard is the book itself. To the extent that some readers may find it helpful in explaining some aspects of the Zhou Changes, my forty years of study of the text will not have been in vain. And I know full well that other readers will feel that I have misinterpreted or simply left unexplained many other aspects of the text. I hope those readers will be inspired by my mistakes to undertake their own explanations. I very much look forward to spending the next forty years reading their work.
Edward Louis Shaughnessy, “The Composition of the Zhouyi” (Ph.D. diss.: Stanford University, 1983), vii–ix, changing “Zhouyi” to “Zhou Changes” in line with usage of the present book.
The result of this research was published in due course, with the University of California Press: Sources of Western Zhou History: Inscribed Bronze Vessels (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991).
This book too was published in due course: I Ching, The Classic of Changes: The First English Translation of the Newly Discovered Second-Century BCE Mawangdui Texts (New York: Ballantine Press, 1996).
“The Wangjiatai Gui Cang: An Alternative to Yi jing Divination,” in A. Cadonna, and E. Bianchi, eds., Facets of Tibetan Religious Tradition and Contacts with Neighbouring Cultural Areas, Orientalia Venetiana 12 (Firenze: L.S. Olschki, 2002), 95–126; “The Fuyang Zhou Yi and the Making of a Divination Manual,” Asia Major, 3rd ser., 14.1 (2001 [actually 2003]): 7–18; “A First Reading of the Shanghai Museum Bamboo-Strip Manuscript of the Zhou Yi,” Early China 30 (2005): 1–24.
Edward L. Shaughnessy, Unearthing the Changes: Recently Discovered Manuscripts of and Relating to the Yi Jing (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014).
I finished writing this book in the summer of 2017, and saw it through to publication in the spring of 2018: Xia Hanyi 夏含夷, Xiguan Han ji: Xifang Hanxue chutu wenxian yanjiu gaiyao 西觀漢記—西方漢學出土文獻研究概要 (Shanghai: Shanghai Guji chubanshe, 2018). For a translation into English, see Edward L. Shaughnessy, Chinese Annals in the Western Observatory: An Overview of Western Sinologists’ Studies of Chinese Excavated Documents, Jao Tsung-i Academy of Sinology Monograph (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2019).
Xia Hanyi 夏含夷, Zhou Yi de qiyuan yu qi zaoqi yanbian 《周易》的起源與其早期演變, Jiang Wen 蔣文 tr. (Shanghai: Shanghai Guji chubanshe, 2022).
Li Xueqin 李學勤, “Xu” 序, in Xing Wen 邢文, Boshu Zhou Yi yanjiu 帛書周易研究 (Beijing: Renmin chubanshe, 1997), 2.