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26. A New View of King Wu Ding

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 March 2015

Chang Tsung-Tung
Chang Tsung-Tung*
Affiliation:
Universität Frankfurt
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Abstract

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This paper tries to attribute some peculiarities of the oracle inscriptions of Period I to the personality of King Wu Ding himself and comes to the conclusion that Wu Ding must have suffered from a persecution complex. It was precisely his occasional dumbness and permanent fears of the dead and of evil spirits that motivated him to consult bone and shell oracles frequently and, moreover, to have divination questions and postscripts about the real events written. From this point of view early Chinese writing owed much of its development to the personal suffering of King Wu Ding.

Type
Session VIII: State and Society
Information
Early China , Volume 9 , supplement S1: International Conference on Shang Civilization: Abstracts of the Papers Presented and a Summary of the Discussions , 1986 , pp. 56 - 57
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Study of Early China 1986