On the relationship between the Kongzi jiayu and excavated texts = 《孔子家語》與出土文獻關係探論

Abstract

Kongzi Jiayu, or The School Sayings of Confucius, is a record of the philosophy and deeds of Confucius and his disciples. It was first introduced in the bibliography chapter of Hanshu, (“History of the Han Dynasty”), as a collection with twenty seven volumes. But just as recorded in Siku Quanshu Zongmu Tiyao (“Annotated Catalog of the Complete Imperial Library”), the extant edition annotated by Wang Su in the Cao Wei era has only ten volumes. The huge difference leads to hypothesis that the book was altered in the course of its dissemination.

In the Southern Song Dynasty, the scholar Wang Bo judged that Kongzi Jiayu was forged by Wang Su through plagiarism from various sources. This triggered a persistent academic controversy about the work’s authenticity.

Fortunately, numerous excavated bamboo manuscripts, which were inscribed in per-Qin and Han Dynasty, were unearthed from the ancient tomb since the nineteen-seventies. Recent research identified that those unearthed bamboo manuscripts contained plenty of texts or passages which were found to be corresponding closely with the chapters recorded in the Kongzi Jiayu. The discovery of these excavated texts provides the most updated and strong evidence for us to further examine the authenticity of Kongzi Jiayu.

This dissertation seeks to investigate how these new materials contribute to solving the riddle of authenticity concerning Kongzi Jiashu. Its first chapter explains the research motives, significance and methodology together with a literature review. The four chapters that follow will be comparative analyses to locate parallel texts and textual variants between the extant edition with, respectively, (1) bamboo manuscript unearthed in a Han tomb at Dingzhou in 1973; (2) No.1 wooden slip unearthed in a Han tomb at Fuyang Shuanghudui in 1977; (3) Chu bamboo manuscripts acquired by the Shanghai Museum in 1994 and (4) Han bamboo manuscripts acquired by the Peking University in 2009. Its last chapter provides an integrated discussion on the relationship between the extant edition and the four newly recovered texts, from which one can trace the production and dissemination of Kongzi Jiayu and come up with a more accurate dating of the work. It is hoped that this study can open up new possibilities in the study of Kongzi Jiayu and facilitate the re-evaluation of the text’s authenticity and academic value.