The Mawangdui Silk Texts: The Laozi Before It Was Edited

In December 1973, archaeologists working at Mawangdui, on the edge of Changsha in Hunan province, opened the third of a group of Han dynasty tombs belonging to the family of the Marquis of Dai. The man buried there, generally identified as a son of the marquis Li Cang, had died in 168 BCE. Inside a lacquered box lay rolls and folded sheets of silk covered in writing: some thirty texts on philosophy, medicine, astronomy, divination and war. Among them were two copies of the Laozi, the book later called the Daodejing, now known as Laozi A and Laozi B. They were, at the time, the oldest known manuscripts of the text by more than five hundred years.

What the manuscripts showed

• Order. In both copies the section on De ("virtue", "power") comes before the section on Dao ("the way"). The received book begins with the Dao; the Mawangdui copies would be called, in that order, a Dedaojing.
• The opening line. The received text begins "Dao ke dao, fei chang dao", "the way that can be spoken of is not the constant way". The silk copies read "道可道也，非恒道也", dao ke dao ye, fei heng dao ye, with heng, "constant", where later editions have chang. The substitution is usually explained as avoidance of the personal name of Emperor Wen of Han, Liu Heng (r. 180–157 BCE), whose name could not be written; the added particles ye also change how the line can be read.
• Two hands. Laozi A is written in a script still close to the older seal forms and does not avoid the name of the dynasty's founder; Laozi B is in the clerical script of the Han and does avoid it, so it was copied later, probably under the first Han emperors.

Not the oldest after all

In 1993 a tomb at Guodian in Hubei yielded bamboo slips of about 300 BCE carrying portions of the Laozi, about a third of the received text in a different order. Mawangdui remains the oldest complete text of the book; Guodian shows that the Laozi was still being assembled in the late Warring States period.

The other texts

The tomb also held the "Four Classics of the Yellow Emperor", a Yijing (Book of Changes) with commentaries, medical and sexual-cultivation manuals, star charts including a list of comets, maps, and the Daoyin tu, a painted chart of exercises. Tomb 1, of the marquis's wife Xin Zhui, held her remarkably preserved body and a famous painted silk banner showing the passage to the afterlife.

Symbology and sacred encoding

The taboo name. The swap of heng for chang is a small case of a large Chinese practice: a ruler's personal name was sacred and could not be written, so texts were altered around it, and editors can date copies by which names they avoid.

Heng: the constant. The word the taboo hid, heng, is also the name of a hexagram of the Yijing ("Duration"), and the "constant Dao" is the unchanging source that cannot be named.

Silk. Writing on silk was costly and prestigious; burying such a library placed learning among the goods the dead would need.

Connections

Confucianism & Daoism (ch12), with Early China (ch09) for the Zhou background. Compare the Oracle Bones of Anyang (V55) for the oldest Chinese writing, and the Diamond Sutra (V30) for another milestone Chinese book.

From The Divine Archives · https://getconexto.com/vault/mawangdui-silk-texts.html