The authorship of early Chinese classics is a highly complex issue, marked by the absence of specific authors, ambiguous records of authorship, the confusion between professional titles and authors’ alternate names, and the individual attribution of collective writting. This can be attributed to two primary factors: First, the writing system and authoring tradition in early China differed significantly from those of later periods; second, the consciousness of individual authorship had not yet fully developed. This situation represents a unique cultural phenomenon in early China that demands a comprehensive understanding. It is essential to abandon the later ages’ conception of authorship and instead integrate the complexities surrounding the creation of early Chinese classics with the diversity of authorship. In doing so, we can establish a dynamic view of authorship that aligns with the actual formation of the classics and reveal the role and significance of these authors in the creation of classics and the broader construction of Chinese culture.
In the age of manuscripts and transcripts, text generation can be ascribed to four distinct roles: the author, the narrator, the transcriber, and the scribe. The author is the creator of the text, while the scribe acts as the disseminator. The narrator and transcriber may perform the dual roles. Recognizing the different powers associated with these four roles, particularly how transcribers amalgamate diverse textual sources to produce “heterogeneous” derivative texts provides valuable insights into the text generation process and its underlying structure and literary elements during the age of manuscripts and transcripts. In essence, acknowledging the transcribers’ creativity in generating heterogeneous texts and exploring the establishment of a “transcriber studies” paradigm at the methodological level is crucial for advancing in-depth research on texts from the age of manuscripts and transcripts.
From the Han to early Jin dynasties, compositions are all written on bamboo slips and wooden tablets and restricted by their dimensions and shapes. These slips and tablets featured distinctive writing patterns, literary genres, and text structures that are different from those of later paper books, becoming a unique writing system known as the bamboo slips and wooden tablets system. This writing system, formed based on the use of bamboo slips and wooden tablets, is characterized by its inclination to compose short essays in a range of practical genres. These essays are inscribed on small tablets, making them easy to carry and read. Despite their short length, typically composed of only a few dozen to a hundred characters, they are concise in language and full of meanings. There are more than ten genres, including imperial edicts and orders, argumentative essays, letters and correspondences, odes and panegyrics, exhortations and inscriptions, condolences and elegies, proclamations, rhymed proses, and rhapsodies. Due to their relatively low writing requirements and easyto-master nature, this form of writing quickly gains favor among literati and scholars and develops rapidly. Consequently, a literary landscape emerges where short works are popular and long works are neglected. As a result, most literati and scholars excel at writing short works but struggle with long ones. The emergence of this writing system and the associated writing skills is closely related to the limited writing capacity of bamboo slips and wooden tablets, as well as the different application scenarios of bamboo slips and wooden tablets. During the Eastern Jin Dynasty and the Southern Dynasties, with the widespread use of paper, books are then made of paper in scrolls that allow for continuous writing. This removes the constraints previously imposed by bamboo slips and wooden tablets on essay writing, enabling literati and scholars to focus more on structure, layout, and language organization during their writing. However, the concise writing style established in earlier generations has already been deeply entrenched, becoming a norm and a constraint for the writing of later literati and scholars. The bamboo slips and wooden tablets system, inherited from the Han, Wei, and early Jin dynasties, can still be faintly discerned. The formation of the bamboo slips and wooden tablets system during the Han and Jin dynasties illustrates the interplay between the generation mechanisms of early literary forms and the changes in writing mediums usedand literary styles of that time, which is worthy of depth investigation.
In early medieval China, books were rolled up in paper rolls. Roll is simple and ergonomic. It also had a profound influence on the structure, content, cataloguing and reading method of books. These further affected the production and dissemination of knowledge in early medieval China.
The publication of newly unearthed texts, such as “Recipes for Ailments” in the Qin bamboo slips of Peking University, has made the evolution of recipes for ailments clearer. First, in the Qin Dynasty, recipes for ailments often had no catalogs, and their contents were relatively heterogeneous. In the Western Han Dynasty, recipes for ailments were commonly categorized by the name of the ailment in the table of contents, and the format of the main text was in line with the table of contents. At the same time, the recipes for livestock, which were common in the Qin, disappeared in the early years of the Western Han. Additionally, incantation recipes were gradually marginalized after the middle of the Western Han Dynasty. In the Qin recipes for ailments, those related to incantations for removal (zhuyou 祝由) address a wide range of conditions, thereby blurring the boundaries between these recipes for ailments and other types of texts on calculations and arts (shushu 数术). Subsequently, in the Western Han Dynasty, the meaning of incantation recipes was narrowed to the way of dealing with human diseases, in contrast to medical treatments, with the boundary between recipes for ailments and other texts on calculations and arts becoming clearer. In conclusion, from the Qin to the transition between the Western and Eastern Han, recipes for ailments gradually took shape in terms of content, structure, and format, becoming more similar to the medical recipes of later ages.