Consequential Misunderstandings Regarding the Terms Jinwen (Chinese Text) and Guwen (Chinese Text) in Recent English-Language Scholarship on the Higher Writings (Shang shu (Chinese Text)): a Review Article

Several persistent errors in English-language accounts of the textual history of the Higher Writings (Shang shu (Chinese Text)) go back at least as far as Creel's 1970 Origins of Statecraft and have appeared in recent work including the two books that are the primary focus here. The errors relate to the terms "jinwen"(Chinese Text) and "guwen"(Chinese Text), but their consequences are not merely terminological. They render insecure some of the interpretations advanced in the books under review. There is only one received version of the Higher Writings, not two. There is no such thing as a "received modern-script recension,"and attempts to cite it lead to a chain of further errors. There is a well-founded scholarly consensus regarding the ca. 317 CE recension of the Higher Writings and the extent that forgery played in it. Arguments to the effect that concepts of forgery or authenticity are problematic or in need of "rethinking"betray an unfamiliarity with that consensus and the evidence (palaeography, medieval commentary, and Qing and modern studies in Chinese) that supports it. Several key aspects of this consensus have not previously been well-summarized in English, so I provide a compressed summary here. I suggest that the concepts jinwen and guwen, even when used correctly, have already been stretched to the limits of usefulness by the current understanding of the Writings and their textual history. They should be replaced with less confusing alternatives.