Xing zi ming chu 性自命出, Natural Dispositions Come from Endowment
Creators: name: Poli, Maddalena
Publisher: name: Database of Religious History (DRH)
Year: 2021

description: Xing zi ming chu 性自命出, or Natural Dispositions come from Endowment, is a most-debated bamboo manuscript from the Guodian 郭店 corpus, named after the village where the tomb that contained this material was located (modern Hubei, China). The tomb was scientifically excavated in 1993 after being looted, and is dated to the beginning of the third century BCE. The corpus includes manuscripts of the Laozi 老子 (or Dao de jing 道德經), the Ziyi 緇衣 (now a chapter in the Liji 禮記), and other previously unattested texts. All these manuscripts are written in Chu 楚 script and predate the standardization of the script that took place during the Qin 秦 dynasty (221–202 BCE), thus constituting vital evidence for the study of Old Chinese language (scripts and reconstructions). _____ After the publication of the Guodian corpus in 1998, Xing zi ming chu immediately attracted worldwide scholarly attention for its content. According to this manuscript, xing 性 (generally translated as "human nature") can be described as a set of natural dispositions shared by all members of the same species. Xing zi ming chu further details the origin of qing 情 (“emotions”), and how human nature and emotions respond to forms of stimulation such as music (le 樂), rituals (li 禮), and externalities (wu 物). These were all subjects of animated debates during the Warring States era (475–221 BCE); there are in fact several intertextual parallels that can be highlighted between Xing zi ming chu and other texts related to the period. Differently from other discussions of human nature that emerged during the Warring States, Xing zi ming chu is not a treatise with one or more arguments. Rather, it collects statements concerning the topics just listed, with several echoes of other discussions of human nature now part of the body of transmitted literature (such as Mengzi 孟子, Xunzi 荀子, Zhuangzi 莊子, Lushi chunqiu 呂氏春秋). _____ A second wave of enthusiasm for this text took place shortly after 2001, when a group of bamboo manuscripts that appeared on the Hong Kong market in 1994 and were purchased by the Shanghai Museum began to be published. Among these, a manuscript titled by the editors Xing qing lun 性情論 (Discussions on Natural Dispositions and Emotions) parallels some of the content of Xing zi ming chu. The texts have been generally ascribed as close to the Confucian or Ru 儒 tradition, although uncertainties remain concerning their exact positions within intellectual lineages, if any. _____ The manuscripts has been addressed variously: as one coherent unit, as two texts (pian 篇) addressing the same topics, or explored in sections, especially those that resonate most with texts from the body of transmitted literature. In spite of almost twenty years of scholarship on it and the recovery of the Xing qing lun, there are many residual uncertainties about this text, in particular the interpretation of graphs. This poses many questions concerning the nature of this manuscript, who produced it and for what purpose. Unfortunately, being the tomb looted before archeologists could get to it, much of its material artifacts that may have provided useful information was taken. Motivations behind the burial of texts in tombs also remain subject to debate. While the impressive amount of manuscripts from the Warring States period being recovered moved the conversations onto these new collections, the Guodian corpus remains a principal body of material for the understanding of manuscript culture in ancient China, one to which scholars will return to continuously.