This paper compares how ancient Chinese sources discussed the causes and treatment of ailments suffered by the elite. It focuses on the Zuozhuan account of the long-term illness of Duke Ping of Jin (r. 557–532 B.C.E.) but contextualizes this passage by introducing as well other examples of stories—found in transmitted literature as well as in recently excavated manuscripts—about sick rulers who consulted with a sage in search of a cure for their troubles. The Zuozhuan passage is also viewed in the light of the Yin shu, an excavated text written on bamboo strips that is concerned with the treatment of elite ailments. A comparison of the two sources suggests that the claim in the Zuozhuan that Duke Ping's illness was “incurable” was not simply based on the medical knowledge and practices of the day.

According to the historical sources of the early Zhou dynasty, the of the Shang kingdom included and . In the late oracle-bone inscriptions, and were mentioned side by side, and so were and . In the Western Zhou period, were all princes. The in oracle inscriptions was considered by most scholars as a kind of prince too. The author of this paper does not quite agree with this point of view. According to the fact that were often mentioned as , and that some of the places where were staying were located in the fiefs of or the author believes that were originally officials who were sent by the king to be stationed at places beyond the capital of the Shang kingdom to engage in cultivation. But in the late Shang period, many became princes.

The situation of and , was similar to that of . They were often referred to as and respectively in oracle-bone inscriptions. The former was sent to be stationed at some place to engage in livestock husbandry, and the latter to defend the kingdom. A number of them also became princes afterwards.

This is a short review of the “Mirroring China's Past” exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago (February 25th–May 13th, 2018). For reference, the exhibition catalog is: Tao Wang 汪涛 et al. Mirroring China's Past: Emperors, Scholars, and Their Bronzes [吉金鑒古]. The Art Institute of Chicago, 2018. Distributed by Yale University Press, New Haven and London.

While Yuandi's reign is not known as a period of imperial expansion, discussions of the major questions of the concept of imperial government and the administrative problems of the day were to be of long-lasting influence. The views put forward by scholars and officials such as Xiao Wangzhi, Gong Yu, Wei Xuancheng, Kuang Heng, Liu Xiang and Yi Feng led the way to the open adoption of Zhou as the ideal which Wang Mang and subsequent emperors claimed to follow. Yuandi himself played little part in government; his advisors raised matters of religious cults, economic practice, the standards of officials, the extravagance of the palace, relations with non-Han leaders, and the value of holding outlying parts of the empire.

With the publication of volume II of W Allyn Rickett's Guanzi: Political, Economic, and Philosophical Essays from Early China (Princeton University Press, 1998), a long-neglected and poorly understood text from China's classical period should now be much more accessible to a wider audience of students, teachers, and scholars in the West. The second volume completes the translation of the 76-chapter original, and, like volume I (Princeton University Press, 1985; 2nd, revised edition, Cheng and Tsui, Boston, 2001), includes brief chapter-by-chapter introductions addressing issues of dating and content. The Guanzi has much to offer, spanning as it does the entire classical period proper; the earliest portions of the text date to the fourth or even fifth century B.C., and the work as a whole was only fixed in its present form by Liu Xiang (97–8 b.c.) late in his life, after over three centuries of accretion. Rickett's translation is the fruit of a long career spent studying this text, and it is worthy of frequent and thoughtful consultation; many of the historical issues that this translation sets before us are crucial to a deeper understanding of social and intellectual history in the classical age. To judge from contemporary sources, Guan Zhong , namesake of the text, was a popular figure during this era, around whom formulations of political philosophy and conceptions of new institutions easily accumulated over time. Recognizing this process of accumulation is crucial to placing the text in its historical context, since the Guanzi, like so many of our texts from the classical period, is fraught with difficulties concerning authorship and dating.

This article looks beyond the dichotomy between silence (mo 默) and speech (yan 言) and discusses the functions of and attitudes toward silence in the Yanzi chunqiu 晏子春秋 as a case representing the variety of ideas of silence in early China. In the West, silence has been widely explored in fields such as religion and theology, linguistic studies, and communication and literary studies. The consensus has moved away from viewing silence as abstaining from speech and utterance—and therefore absence of meaning and intention, toward seeing it as a culturally dependent and significant aspect of communication. However, beyond a number of studies discussing unspoken teachings in relation to early Daoism, silence has received little attention in early China studies. This article approaches the functions of silence by pursuing questions regarding its rhetorical, emotive, political, and ethical aspects. Instead of searching for the nature of silence and asking what silence is, this article poses alternative questions: How do ancient Chinese thinkers understand the act of silence? What are the attitudes toward silence in early China? How does silence foster morality? How does silence function as performative remonstrance? How is it used for political persuasion? How does silence draw the attention of and communicate with readers and audiences? How does silence allow time for contemplation, reflection, and agreement among participants? How is silence related to various intense emotional states? These questions lead us to reflect on previous scholarship which regarded silence in early China as the most spontaneous and natural way to grasp the highest truth, which is unpresentable and inexpressible through articulated speech and artificial language. In this sense, the notion of the unspoken teaching is not only understood in opposition to speech, but also as a means to reveal the deficiency of language and the limits of speech. However, through a survey of dialogues, stories, and arguments in Yanzi chunqiu, I show that silence is explicitly marked and explained within the text, and is used actively, purposefully, and meaningfully, to persuade, inform, and motivate audiences. In other words, silence is anything but natural and spontaneous. Rather, it is intentionally adopted, carefully crafted, and publicly performed to communicate, remonstrate, criticize, reveal, and target certain ideas. That is to say, silence is as argumentative as speech and as arbitrary as language. Finally, an awareness of and sensitivity to silence provides a new perspective to engage with other early Chinese texts.

Dealing with China's oldest and second oldest intellectual documents (Lun-yü and the genuine parts of Mo-tzu), this paper views them as “laying” the intellectual foundations of China's axial civilization” and sharing a distinctive concept of knowledge, “epistemological optimism.” Epistemological optimism, in turn, was a necessary corollary of “this-worldliness,” the preoccupation, especially intense in the case of Lun-yü, with evaluating people and distributing sanctions in a morally perfect way during this life, as opposed to depending on a bar of judgment in the afterlife. The combination of “this-worldliness” with epistemological optimism has dominated Chinese thought to this day, in striking contrast to the major role of “epistemological pessimism” in the intellectual world of the modern West. Mo-tzu was more reflexive than Confucius. Yet instead of leading to “epistemological pessimism,” his reflexivity was combined with not only epistemological optimism but also his assumption that the development of doctrine can resolve all moral questions and bring about moral action. This paper also explores other ways in which Mo-tzu was a seminal thinker, one introducing words and ideas that are missing in Lun-yü, and that came to be commonplaces of Chinese thought. It also argues that the emphasis on evaluation found in the thought of Confucius and Mo-tzu must be considered when we describe how these two thinkers envisaged the relation between self and group, and its methodology differs somewhat from the approaches used in previous studies of Chou thought.

This article examines self and identity in the “Inner Chapters” (neipian 內篇) of the Zhuangzi 莊子. Previous scholarship on this topic has tended to support its arguments by defining the “Way” (dao 道) as either a normative order or an objective reality. By contrast, this article argues that the Way is a neutral designation for the composite, ever-changing patterns of the cosmos that does not provide normative guidance.

Within this cosmos, the human “self” (shen 身) is likewise defined as a composite, mutable entity that displays “tendencies” (qing 情) of behavior and thought. Two of these tendencies include the positing of unitary agents and the creation of “identities” (ming 名)—imaginative constructs used for self-definition. As a result of combining and reifying the two tendencies, most humans conflate their identities with their larger selves. The result is a simplified vision of an essential self that gives rise to normative judgements, blinds humans to the changing cosmos, and creates problematic social structures.

The text advocates that one should retrain the tendency toward identity by cultivating an inviolate “sense of self” or “virtue” (de 德) that is empty of specific identity. Virtue acts as an emotionally safe space in which the mirror-like mind can temporarily take on the identities of other creatures. This practice increases practitioners’ empathetic understanding of the world, detaches them from destructive social structures, and has the potential to generate new versions of human society.

The fixity of urban centers has been deeply implicated in models of political development from chiefdom to the state and early empire. For this reason, both Western and Chinese scholars have neglected the importance of non-permanent or shifting ceremonial centers or capitals like China's in the evolution of complex society. A brief examination of the touchstone cultures of early Mespotamia and Classical Greece, to which China is compared, demonstrates how narrowly conceived and exclusive the Euro-American view of complex society constructed by archeologists and historians has been on the issue of mobility and the relation of ruler and polity to territory. The Chinese case, like those of India and South Asia, suggests that the moving center should be recognized as a common variant in the process of socio-political development and change. The integration of the Asian state and early empires into the comparatist project seeks to analyze the formative relations between religious and cosmological conceptions and social, political and economic development.