The foundation of Chinese intellectual history is a group of texts known as “masters texts” (子書). Many masters texts were authored in the Han dynasty or earlier and many of these have as their title the name of a master who was generally regarded as the author. The inclination to treat a given book as the product of a single writer is apparently a strong one. Nevertheless, from the very beginning there were Chinese scholars who doubted the veracity of the putative authorship of some of these works and suggested that they may in fact have been the product of several authors. Over time, such scholars developed criteria by which to judge the authenticity of ancient masters texts. But as such textual criticism grew more penetrating, the object of its scrutiny began to come apart at the seams. In the last two decades there has been a growing consensus that most early Chinese masters texts were originally quite permeable and that only later were their received forms settled upon.

The branch of textual criticism that deals with authenticating early Chinese texts is called “Authentication studies.” This paper is a survey of the methodological advances made in the field of Authentication studies over the last two millennia. It is not a history of the field, as such a history would be a much longer project. The survey concludes with the idea of the “polymorphous text paradigm,” a paradigm that paradoxically obviates much of the preceding scholarship in its own field. Simply put, if authentication relies largely on anachronism, and anachronism relies largely on the dates of the putative author, then a multi-author work with no known “last author” will be impossible to authenticate. Furthermore, the polymorphous text paradigm does not posit these texts as necessarily having earlier and later “layers,” but rather as having had no set structure over the course of their early redactional evolution.

This survey examines the contributions of seventeen scholars to Authentication studies methodology, and concludes with how the changes in this field have influenced the work of three modern, Western scholars.

With the major exception of the Yi jing, we have neither formal canons nor commentaries for most early Chinese mantic traditions. Indirect reflections on these traditions appear in scattered commentaries, in biographical narratives, and, importantly, in excavated texts. The major source for mantic materials from the received textual tradition is the lists of their titles in Han shu 30, the “Yiwen zhi” or Bibliographic Treatise. It is a guide to the categories of knowledge used by Han thinkers, and created an influential paradigm for the classification of texts and knowledge. The present study provides a necessarily selective survey of mantic texts in the “Yiwen zhi,” with a specific view to: (1) how it underscored the authority of some techniques and marginalized others; (2) its relation to what we know of Han mantic practices; and (3) what it reveals about the role of the mantic arts as constituents of scientific observation and systematic inquiry in early China.

What did the early Chinese medical body look like before it was inhabited by the five viscera and before canonical medical rationale was framed in terms of the five agents (wuxing 五行)? This article makes the case for a body with an outwardly visible ‘form’ (xing 形) that housed invisible qi 氣 internally. The qi contained in this body was not the universal qi and all-pervasive stuff that we encounter in later medical texts. Nor can it be limited to the ‘breath’ referred to in the context of meditation techniques, since the term referred also to a moral dimension, thoughts and feelings. In the body's upper spheres, qi took on yang 陽 qualities and was associated with feelings of grief or joy; in its lower ones, it took on yin 陰 qualities and was associated with anger. Since this body was primarily a function of emotional and moral aetiologies, it is in what follows called a ‘sentimental body’, and is contrasted with the canonical ‘body ecologic’ which was most importantly a function of the seasons.

The textual material presented in this article suggests that the ‘sentimental body’ with its two yinyang spheres was an early Chinese medical body conception. From an extensive computer search that systematically compared passages on xing and qi in the Yellow Emperor's Inner Canon with texts in the early medical manuscripts from Mawangdui and Zhangjiashan, it emerged as a distinctive body. While the canonical ‘body ecologic’, framed in a pentic numerology, became prominent in medical reasoning during to the Han dynasty (206 B.C.E.–220 C.E.), the ‘sentimental body’, which alludes to yinyang cosmologies, dates to the Warring States period (475–221 B.C.E.).

This article is an introduction to and translation of the wall inscription “Zhaoshu sishi yueling wushitiao” dating to 5 C.E., which was recovered from the Xuanquanzhi site, located near Dunhuang, Gansu Province. “Zhaoshu sishi yueling wushitiao” is the sole known example of a Han edict in wall inscription form. It provides new information about the processes by which an edict was created and disseminated in late Western Han times, and about the nature and scope of seasonal governance. The core of this article is an annotated translation of the entire inscription. By way of introduction, the article includes an overview of the Xuanquanzhi excavation; a brief discussion of the people named in the inscription, their titles, and related events; and an examination of the parallels between the inscription and transmitted texts. The two appendices present a transcription of “Sishi yueling” in the original vertical format, and a table showing the correspondences between “Sishi yueling” and its transmitted parallels.