This study employs the critical methodology called “redaction criticism” originally developed in New Testament studies, for the analysis of the relationship between two important but overlooked sources of early Taoist thought: the Kuan Tzu essays entitled Nei-yeh and Hsin-shu, hsia. Although the relationship between these essays has long been the subject of controversy, the author concludes that Hsin-shu, hsia (written ca. 200 B.C.) is a deliberate abridgement, rearrangement, and restatement of Nei-yeh (written ca. 330 B.C.) that demonstrates a different ideological viewpoint.

Whereas Nei-yeh is a collection of twenty-two mostly rhymed stanzas devoted to the practice of guided breathing meditation, its cosmological significance and its physiological, psychological, and spiritual effects, Hsin-shu, hsia is a work of mixed prose and verse that is expressly concerned with the political benefits of such “inner cultivation” practices. In other words, it sees them as techniques for rulership.

This new ideological position is significant. Based upon previous research by the author and on the work of other scholars, the author hypothesizes that there were three distinct, but related, aspects of early Taoism: the Individualist, the Primitivist, and the Syncretist. According to this categorization, Nei-yeh is an Individualist text and Hsin-shu, hsia is Syncretist The deliberate rearrangement and emendation of Nei-yeh by the Hsin-shu, hsia author argues for the position that Syncretist Taoism is a direct descendant of Individualist Taoism — perhaps even its lineal descendant.

Among the texts discovered in December, 1973, at Mawangdui in Changsha, Hunan, was by far the earliest manuscript text (copied about 175 B.C.) of the Zhouyi or Zhou Changes, together with various commentaries, some known—such as the “Xici” or “Appended Statements”— and others —”Ersanzi Wen” or “The Two or Three Disciples Ask,” “Yi zhi Yi” or “The Propriety of the Changes,” and “Yao” or “Essentials”—not heretofore known. Despite the great anticipation with which scholars learned of this discovery, it was not until twenty years later, 1993, that this manuscript was finally published, and even at that only incompletely. In this comte rendu, the author introduces the state and contents of the manuscript, including especially how it varies from the received text, and some of the debate that these variora have already engendered among historians of Chinese thought.

The 1970's was a decade of extraordinary discoveries of texts that transformed scholarly understanding of late Warring States, Qin, and early Han philosophy, society, and culture. This article is devoted to the least well-known of these finds, made in 1972 at Yinqueshan, Linyi, Shandong. Specifically, it provides for the first time in a Western language an introduction to the Yin-Yang texts recovered from this Western Han tomb, probably dated to the early years of the reign of Han Wudi (r. 140-87 B.C.). Based on the only transcription yet published (in 1985 by Wu Jiulong), the article provides a transcription, reorganization, and full translation of three of the texts, and fragments of a fourth, together with supplementary notes on the approximately seventeen other essays and a discussion of their significance within the context of late pre-imperial and early imperial thought. The essays are found to be of immense importance in understanding the various dimensions of Yin-Yang theorizing prior to Dong Zhongshu's development of new text Confucianism. Of special interest is the author's conclusion that the texts throw considerable light on those of the Mawangdui silk manuscripts that have been categorized by most scholars as belonging to the Huang-Lao school, the so-called Huangdi sijing (Four Classics of the Yellow Emperor). The author concludes, on the basis of his analysis of the form, language, and philosophical content of the Yinqueshan Yin-Yang texts, that many of the Mawangdui silk manuscripts are products of Yin-Yang specialists and may well not belong to the Huang-Lao tradition.