The Scene of Diplomatic Authorship: Ritual and Historical Backgrounds

As I have suggested in the previous chapter, the Chinese classics can best be understood as an attempt to create a totalizing system of human (especially elite male) behavior and speech, creating a universal system of ritual and discourse that both facilitates interaction among peer polities of the Huaxia world and marks as outsiders those who do not know the correct practices. The classics seem mostly to have begun as performance practices, as an elite system of education more or less analogous to that of the symposium in archaic Greece. As Michael Nylan has suggested, the gradual textualization and canonization of the classics may have democratized their influence; once available in textual form, the ritual and linguistic practices encoded by the classics became accessible to all who were literate. In the same way, the textualization of ritual may have eased the admission of new states in the south into the Huaxia sphere.

Dating is, predictably, a problem. The texts we know as the classics are highly “sedimented;” that is, they accreted and took textual form over a long period of time, and the ritual texts in particular did not take their final form until well into the Han.