Talk:Mawangdui Silk Texts

message: Disclaimer: the following are just wild spectulations, not based on any known facts. Experts in the history of Daoism can probably judge how probable these alternative explanations are.
The scribe may be jotting down what he earsdropped.  For example, he sneaked into a Daoist school to "steal" the knowledge because he was rejected as a student due to poor education background.  Which also explains the wrong words in the dictation.  
In ancient China, knowledge were often passed only to selected students or blood relatives.  Such practice was especially evident in the field of martial art and medicine etc.  The scribe may be encrypting his notes with the wrong words on purpose so that no one else can steal his secret.  Given that many Daoists back then pursued eternal life, these daoists priests may be guarding their knowledge like trade-secrets and only explained to their own students the real meaning behind the text.
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The most commonly accepted view is that these texts were a kind of "state of the art" text for the time that they were written, and they are the earliest texts, so all the other texts that came down to us the "normal" way must have been contaminated by the meddling of later editors. But trying to weed out the equivalent of spelling errors, i.e. various kinds of copyists' errors, is a necessary practice even today when the editor of the New York Times gets something that has presumably been "threw" the spell-checker but still doesn't make sense. The two silk texts are very closely related, i.e., they often depart from the received text(s) is the same way. It appears that one might have been copied from the other or both might have been copied from a single earlier text. But there is no reason to believe that there were not several other versions of this text around at the time. By the time the silk texts were written down it was quite late -- especially is Lao Zi really came before Zhuang Zi. The normal practice in a pre-printing press world is for people to copy books by hand and so one volume might get copied several times by various interested parties, and their copies would have spawned more copies, and so on. Before long discreptancies would have crept in.
Wang Bi, centuries later, made the best copy he could by studying the versions available to him. That version was widely enough known soon after the author's death (at an early age) that people appear to have made and kept a consistent text that has few errors. One reason would be that Wang's version of the text was interspersed with his famous commentary. So one might copy the text or the commentary incorrectly, but it would be hard to make an honest copyist's mistake in both places. When people saw the inconsistency in any handwritten copy, they would have sought out another version and corrected the one they had.
To me, the kinds of mistakes/differences that occur among the two silk versions, the Wang Bi version, and some 60 other versions (I think it was about that many), are highly suggestive of what would happen if people who had learned these passages in the oral tradition and then had decided that it was time to write the teachings down before they became lost.  Sometimes the copyist knows the meaning and writes the right meaning but uses a word that spoils the rhyme. Sometimes the copying knows the sound but doesn't appear to know how to correctly write the word so he just writes the phonetic value that he remembers. 
That scenario does not suggest a secret tradition that has gotten "bootlegged" by some interloper. Besides, the Zhuang Zi (or at least the core materials) was written by a literary and philosophical genius who wrote it, presumably, so that other people could read it. 
The so-called religious Daoist tradition sounds more like the kind of group that would try to keep things secret. The whole reason for writing and teaching the Lao Zi materials was that the author(s) thought that the world would be a much better place iv everyone would stop doing counter-productive things. It was strongly anti-guys on power trips, and strongly in favor of freedom. The Zhuang Zi starts with an image that is frequently explained as emblematic of the great power and freedom that derives from mastery of the techniques that let one rid oneself of various kinds of delusions and other threats to individiual freedom. So if you are writing on how to secure a better society and how to secure individual freedomes, then why would you try to keep it secret? 
Anyway, the only basis we have for speculation at all lies in the peculiar "mistakes" of the silk texts. I think it would be better not to go beyond what can be supported by the text itself. If somebody accepts the idea that the teachings were originally passed down only in the oral tradition, then, of course, it makes sense to ask why those generations of students did not write it down? Why wait hundreds of years? My guess is that they were counter-culture and were reluctant to disclose themselves fully to members of the dominant culture. But that is only a guess.
Patrick0Moran 00:53, 15 Sep 2003 (UTC)

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