The chapters below are based on papers originally presented at the “Chinese Poetry and Philology” conference held at Arizona State University on May 19–20, 2023. The conference honored the work and teaching of David R. Knechtges, Professor Emeritus of Chinese literature at the University of Washington. We are grateful to all the participants in that conference and also its sponsors at the university: the School of International Letters and Cultures, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, and Asia Center.
The introduction, by co-editors Williams and O’Neill, examines the intertwined histories of philology and sinology, and discusses the continuing role of philology in the study of Chinese history and culture. The remaining twelve chapters are case studies in the philological approach to the study of premodern Chinese history and culture, and also offer individual reflections on methodology and on the scope and limits of philological study. In each essay, a scholar uses close reading, textual analysis, comparison, and other historical, philosophical, botanical-medicinal, geographic, linguistic, and literary methods to present an original view of the topic at hand.
Philology has the potential to transform our understanding of the key concepts of a culture. In the first essay, Mark Pitner shows how a single word in the classic poetry anthology, Shijing, reveals changing conceptions of aging through early China. Rather than identifying or reconstructing an original meaning, the focus is on understanding how the semasiological crux has been transformed, so as to draw out a broader historical understanding of aging. Similarly, Chen Zhinan explores how two conflicting identifications of the tidal bore in a Han-dynasty poem reflect both changing geographical associations and the changing historical attitudes of scholars. Our understanding of individual terms is likely to have ramifications for our view of early Chinese culture and its hermeneutical history.
Several essays also use new materials and approaches to cast new light on early Chinese cultural history. Chan Chok Meng shows how a newly discovered bamboo-slip text can be used to reinterpret another poem in the Shijing. The essays by Y. Edmund Lien and Jennifer Liu similarly demonstrate the hidden importance of so-called apocryphal texts and a Han-dynasty imitation of the Book of Changes, respectively. What at first appear to be minor paratexts turn out to have profound philosophical, ethical, and historical significance. Sean Bradley similarly explores the botanical and medicinal implications of herbs in the Elegies of Chu anthology to show their hidden entheogenetic potential; Jui-lung Su offers a complete translation of the Dunhuang text “Debate between Tea and Wine,” carefully identifying its place within the historical development of literary genres.
Other studies employ philology to reveal that certain literary works may possess implications different from how they have been commonly read in the 20th century. Hsiang-lin Shih and Robert Joe Cutter show how two different literary works are not at all what they seem on the surface; a court poem contains subtle echoes of the “Summons to the Soul” that concern mortality and mourning, while a funerary poem from the Liu-Song court was likely not written by the author to whom it is attributed, which significantly changes its meaning. Finally, Nicholas Morrow Williams and Wang Ping use detailed philological analysis to shed light on how two lengthy Tang poems are not quite about what they appear: the imperial court rather than a white elm forest and a magic mountain rather than a geographical location.
As Timothy O’Neill argues in the concluding essay, the Chinese conception of philology in the Han dynasty was intentionally subversive, and aspired to play a major role in ethical education and societal transformation. Philological attention to fine semantic details and textual structure can draw our attention to those dimensions of premodern China that do not conform to present-day expectations or understandings. While all the essays in this book examine minute problems of language and text in premodern China, endeavoring to follow the philological method of our esteemed predecessors (aspiring to scholarly humility while engaging in reasoned and respectful dialogue with our sources), we now use such problems to identify new questions, to construct new arguments, and to pursue new historical understandings. While the directions these essays take are varied, they collectively argue for the persistent utility of the philological method in this century.