Guodian

Fourteen years ago, a corpus of bamboo-strip texts was found in a late-fourth-century-BCE tomb at Jingmen, Hubei province in central China. The discovery of the "e;Guodian"e; texts, together with other recently discovered Warring States manuscripts, has revolutionized the study of early Chinese intellectual history. Kenneth Holloway argues that the Guodian corpus puts forth a political philosophy based on the harmonious interconnection of individuals engaged in moral self cultivation. This unique worldview, says Holloway, cannot meaningfully be categorized as "e;Confucian"e; or "e;Daoist,"e; because it shares important concepts and vocabulary with a number of different textual traditions that have anachronistically been characterized as competing or incompatible "e;schools"e; of thought. He finds that within the Guodian corpus familiar philosophical concepts and texts are applied in distinctive ways, presenting a worldview that is quite different from the received textual traditions. In addition to contributing to our understanding of this particular body of texts, Holloway proposes a methodology for assessing a corpus of texts without relying on assumptions and definitions that derive from two millennia of scholarship.