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Textual Criticism More Sinico

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 March 2015

William G. Boltz
William G. Boltz*
Affiliation:
Department of Asian Languages and Literature, U. of Washington, Seattle WA 98195
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Abstract

Textual transmission is viewed in the West typically as a destructive process that results in ever greater corruption and error in a text, and the enterprise of textual criticism in correspondingly seen as the task of restoring the damaged text to a form as close to its original as possible. In China such a negative view of the process of textual transmission does not normally obtain, and textual criticism therefore does not carry the image of being primarily a rehabilitative procedure.

An important part of the reason for the different perception of the consequences of textual transmission and of the goals of textual criticism lies with the nature of the writing systems involved. Western texts in alphabetic scripts directly reveal errors at the level below that of the word, e.g., spelling errors, grammar errors, pronunciation errors, etc., for which no interpretation is available save that of seeing them as mistakes. Orthographic errors in Chinese texts, written in logographic script, are not prone to such immediate identification as mistakes. All variants in a text written in a logographic script have the potential to be meaningful and therefore are perceived as different, but are not stigmatized automatically as wrong.

西方人多半把版本流傳看作是一錯訛不斷增累的帶有破壞性的過程, 同時以修正傳本中的訛誤,使之盡可能地接近原本爲校勘的終極目標.在中國,人們通常對版本的傳流過程沒有這種消極的看法, 因而校勘亦不常以恢复版本的原始面貌爲其主要宗旨.中西之所以對 版本的流傳及校勘的目標看法不一主要是因爲二者使用的文字系統在性質上截然不同.西方以字母表音的拚音文字能直接顯示低於詞一層之錯誤.諸如拚寫、語法、以及發音之錯誤,這些錯誤顯而易見, 除了把其視爲錯誤外別無其他的解釋.而用漢字書寫的文字中如有訛誤則不易馬上被覺察,當某一漢字爲其同音字所替代時, 常有可能在意義上講得通, 因此在中國人看來, 該字僅是不同而已, 並不一定就是錯誤的.

Type
Articles
Information
Early China , Volume 20 , 1995 , pp. 393 - 405
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Study of Early China 1995

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References

1. Keightley, David N., Sources of Shang History: The Oracle-Bone Inscriptions of Bronze Age China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), xiiiGoogle Scholar. Keightley repeated that dictum again in the opening of a just-finished monographic-length manuscript on ch'i 其 in the Shang inscriptions, Divinatory Conventions in Late Shang China, typescript, dated 19 07 1995, 1Google Scholar.

2. Cherniack, Susan, “Book Culture and Textual Transmission in Sung China,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 54.1 (07, 1994), 5–125CrossRefGoogle Scholar, citation from p. 6.

3. See Cherniack, , “Book Culture and Textual Transmission China,” 9–18Google Scholar, where these different aspects of the Chinese view of textual criticism are documented with examples.

4. Cherniack, , “Book Culture and Textual Transmission China,” 7Google Scholar.

5. One of them may be “right” relative to the wording of the original text, or to some other specified criteria, and the other therefore wrong, but that is a different level of rightness and wrongness and does not apply to the judgmental impulse that affects graphic variants alone.

6. Even the briefest of inspections reveals that the texts of Ch'en She's biography in the Shih chi and Han shu are drawn from a common source.

7. Watson, Burton, Records of the Grand Historian of China (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961), 20Google Scholar.

8. The B manuscript is damaged, and the text is missing, here.

9. See the entry on the Lao-tzu in Loewe, Michael, ed., Early Chinese Texts, A Bibiio-graphical Guide (Berkeley: The Society for the Study of Early China and The Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, 1993), 269–292, esp. 275–276Google Scholar.

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13. Lu Te-ming 陸徳明, Ching tien shih wen 經典籍文 (Yi-wen facsimile reprint of the Ssu-k'u shan pen ts'ungshu ed.), 5.5b: 或云楚人名火曰燥.

14. Norman, Jerry, “Some Ancient Chinese Dialect Words in the Min Dialects,” Fang yan 方言 1983.3, 202–211, esp. 207–208Google Scholar.

15. Or ‘cool and moist’k/‘dry and warm’, alternatively.

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17. What I transcribe as (A) is a close approximation to the Ma wang tui A manuscript but has been modified for convenience of printing; no textual variant of significance has gone unmentioned. The Ma wang tui Β manuscript is very damaged and is crucial only at one point, as marked. What I call (R) here is a unified version of the received text, again presented this way for conciseness, and again no significant variant has gone unmentioned.

18. See, e.g., Hsün-tzu, “Fei hsiang” 非相 (SPPY ed.), 3.6a:與時遷徙, 與世偃仰, 緩急臝絀, translated by Knoblock as “He modifies and changes [the examples he cites] with the occasion, adapting and adjusting them to the age, sometimes indulgent, sometimes urgent, sometimes expansive, other times restrictive”; Knoblock, John, Xunzi, A Translation and Study of the Complete Works, vol. I (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988), 209Google Scholar.