The Original Meaning of the Yijing: Commentary on the Scripture of Change.

Abstract

that is so hard to translate into other languages, especially East Asian, where it is commonly understood as simply meaning “common knowledge” (Chin. changshi; Jap. jōshiki). Secondly, how can pages of common knowledge, such as the “extremely popular” (p. 27) vocabulary lists, on their own be judged “creative”? I have the same reservations about claims for creativity for the overwhelmingly formulaic apologia copybooks, and the matching couplets. When people purchased a herbal doctor’s prescription, what they paid for was not “creativity.” Surely, they wanted the tried and tested prescription, that is, the formulaic formula, not a crackpot’s “creative” herbal cocktails. As a result, I suspect that whatever creativity the ordinary Chinese imparted to these manuscripts can be found mainly in their use of them, that is, in their work or some performance. And, a record of such work or performances (often part of an oral culture) is precisely what we do not have in the copybooks used for the study of these manuscripts. The difficulties of provenance and dating these manuscripts further compound the problem of unearthing and identifying their copyist’s or owner’s “creativity.” In fact, despite my sympathy with an effort to use manuscripts to observe Chinese society “from below,” the manuscripts discussed in this book most often strike me as pages of phrases and passages filtered from the very elite literary tradition that present-day social historians of China are so anxious to supplement, neglect, or even supplant. They are less the musings of ordinary people on their life or their culture than the droppings they have gleaned from that “elite” literary tradition. In the end, I feel forced to wonder if they are best read as adoptions and adaptations rather than as creations by ordinary people in a society shaped profoundly by the use of texts. It thus was a society in which literacy was attained and its attendant bodies of knowledge used at very varying levels by its “ordinary people,” even when they were not considered “literate.” The manuscripts reflect then the gap between these different literacies as well as the bodies of knowledge on which these literacies took shape and survived like barnacles through centuries of change.