Guodian Laozi and Taiyi Shengshui

Author: Xing Wen
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2005-07-01
Features: This book is a dialogue between Eastern and Western scholars on the bamboo slips of the Laozi and other documents from the Guodian Chu Tomb, which were discovered in the Warring States period. The content is based on an international conference held at Dartmouth College in the United States in May 1998. The purpose of this conference was to invite twenty or thirty scholars from various fields in China and the West to read newly discovered materials related to the Laozi. Our goal was not to complete a definitive interpretation but to clarify some key points of contention, thereby laying a foundation for future research. The book reflects an academic process rather than a mature study. It is a "record"—a genuine dialogue among approximately 30 Eastern and Western scholars with differing viewpoints, backgrounds, and academic norms. The questions raised by the Guodian Chu Tomb bamboo slips do not have simple answers. As the reader will discover, there are as many perspectives as there are participants. Even the most fundamental questions—what are these materials? What is their relationship to the current Laozi Dao De Jing?—cannot be answered easily. As with this conference, our aim was not to draw conclusions about this newly discovered literature but to clarify some key points of contention and learn from others' methods. In preparing the content of this book, we placed equal emphasis on raising questions and answering them. However, many of these answers are preliminary inferences, but they may inspire others in their further research and the challenges they might encounter. Readers may wonder why we chose to focus on the Laozi and Taiyi Shengshui materials rather than other documents discovered in the No. 1 tomb of the Guodian Chu Tomb. As mentioned earlier, the planning of this conference was motivated by the possibility of a new version of the Laozi. Since the other documents were previously unknown, their importance can only be understood after their publication. Some of these documents hold astonishing significance—they are the canonical texts of the Confucian school and were completely unknown to the world before their discovery in this tomb. The research value of these documents is no less than that of the Laozi materials, and perhaps even greater. We hope that this academic conference can lead to more collaborative seminars in the future, where other materials can be studied more carefully.
—Excerpted from the Preface to the Chinese Translation and Introduction by [American] Elain