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五行

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Text ID
KR2p0021
Date
-350–-300
Dynasty
戰國

Wǔxíng 五行

The Five Conducts

(anonymous; excavated bamboo manuscript, no attributable author)

About the work

Wǔxíng is one of the eighteen text-units recovered from Guōdiàn tomb 1 (郭店一號楚墓) at Jǐngmén 荊門, Húběi, excavated October 1993 and published by the Jīngmén Municipal Museum in 1998. It is a short Confucian treatise on moral psychology, defining five virtues — rén 仁 (humaneness), yì 義 (righteousness), lǐ 禮 (ritual propriety), zhì 智 (wisdom) and shèng 聖 (sageness) — and distinguishing each from its merely behavioural counterpart by an interiority criterion: a virtue “formed within” (xíng yú nèi 形於內) is dé zhī xíng 德之行 (a “conduct of virtue”, a virtuous-state-of-character), whereas one merely enacted is xíng 行 (mere “conduct”). The work then traces a developmental sequence — from concentration and stilling (shèn dú 慎獨) through an integration of the five inner virtues into a unified dé 德 — that has been read by every commentator from Páng Pú onwards as a missing link between the Lúnyǔ’s practical ethics and the moral-psychological program of Mèngzǐ’s “four sprouts” (sì duān 四端). The same title and a substantially overlapping text were already known from a Mǎwángduī silk manuscript (M3, 168 BCE) which preserves an additional 說 (commentary) layer; the Guōdiàn version is shorter, lacks the shuō, and is now the earliest witness. The text in our source is divided into 28 short numbered sections by the modern collation, mirroring the Mǎwángduī chapter divisions, and runs to roughly 1,200 graphs.

Abstract

The Guōdiàn tomb is conventionally dated to c. 300 BCE on the basis of the bronze inscriptions on the burial vessels and the lacquer cup, which name a person of the Chǔ royal lineage and place the burial in the late Wǎrring States (the most argued recent dating is the BáiqǐbáYǐng line of c. 278 BCE as the terminus ante quem; the most argued earliest date is c. 300 BCE based on Cuì Rényì’s 崔仁義 and Lǐ Líng’s 李零 palaeographic studies). The manuscripts therefore predate the Qín unification, and the Wǔxíng is one of our small handful of pre-Qín texts surviving in physical witnesses contemporaneous with their composition.

The Mǎwángduī version was first studied by Páng Pú 龐樸 in 1973–80 (Bóshū Wǔxíng piān yánjiū 帛書五行篇研究, 1980), who revived an old hypothesis based on the Xúnzǐ 荀子 Fēi shí’èr zǐ 非十二子 chapter — Xúnzǐ there attacks Zǐsī 子思 (Kǒng Jí 孔伋) and Mèngzǐ for “creating a doctrine of the five conducts” (àn wǎng zào shuō, wèi zhī wǔ xíng 案往造說，謂之五行). Páng identified the Mǎwángduī text as the very book Xúnzǐ had attacked, thereby connecting it with the so-called SīMèng 思孟 school. The discovery of the Guōdiàn version in 1993, in a tomb older than Xúnzǐ’s writing career, has consolidated this identification: even scholars who reject a tight authorial link with Zǐsī now accept that the Wǔxíng is the kind of Confucian moral-psychological text that the SīMèng tradition transmitted, and that it predates the Mèngzǐ’s extant redaction. The Guōdiàn manuscript also gives us, for the first time, the Wǔxíng without the shuō — that is, in a state plausibly close to the original, before the line-by-line gloss tradition that the Mǎwángduī version preserves.

The Kanripo source reproduces the CHANT (HKU Hànjí diànzǐ wénxiàn 漢籍電子文獻) digital text, derived from the editio princeps in 荊門市博物館 ed., 《郭店楚墓竹簡》, Wénwù chūbǎnshè, 1998 — the volume in which the strips were first photographed, transcribed in kǎishū 楷書, and annotated by Qiú Xīguī 裘錫圭 among others. For modern study and citation, the standard photographic / palaeographic references are now Liú Zhāo 劉釗’s 《郭店楚簡校釋》 (Fújiàn rénmín, 2003) and Lǐ Líng 李零’s Guōdiàn Chǔjiǎn jiào dú jì 郭店楚簡校讀記 (zēngdìng běn, Běijīng dàxué, 2002 / Zhōngguó rénmín dàxué, 2007).

Translations and research

  • Páng Pú 龐樸, 《帛書五行篇研究》, Qílǔ shūshè 齊魯書社, 1980 — foundational study of the Mǎwángduī version, with the Sī-Mèng identification.
  • Páng Pú 龐樸, 《竹帛五行篇校注及研究》, Wànjuǎnlóu túshū yǒuxiàn gōngsī 萬卷樓圖書, 2000 — comparative critical edition of the Guōdiàn and Mǎwángduī recensions.
  • 荊門市博物館 ed., 《郭店楚墓竹簡》, Wénwù chūbǎnshè 文物出版社, 1998 — editio princeps with photographs and transcriptions; Wǔxíng is text no. 5 in the volume.
  • Liú Zhāo 劉釗, 《郭店楚簡校釋》, Fújiàn rénmín chūbǎnshè 福建人民出版社, 2003 — the standard Chinese critical apparatus.
  • Lǐ Líng 李零, 《郭店楚簡校讀記》(zēngdìng běn), Běijīng dàxué chūbǎnshè 北京大學出版社 2002; rev. Zhōngguó rénmín dàxué chūbǎnshè 中國人民大學出版社 2007 — the most influential modern re-reading; reorganises strip order across the corpus.
  • Mark Csikszentmihalyi, Material Virtue: Ethics and the Body in Early China, Brill (Sinica Leidensia 66), 2004 — full annotated English translation of both Guōdiàn and Mǎwángduī Wǔxíng with extended philosophical study; the standard English work.
  • Scott Cook, The Bamboo Texts of Guodian: A Study and Complete Translation, 2 vols., Cornell East Asia Series 164–165, Cornell University, 2012 — complete annotated English translation of all Guōdiàn texts; Wǔxíng is in vol. 2.
  • Kenneth W. Holloway, Guodian: The Newly Discovered Seeds of Chinese Religious and Political Philosophy, Oxford University Press, 2009 — religious-historical reading.
  • Dirk Meyer, Philosophy on Bamboo: Text and the Production of Meaning in Early China, Brill, 2011/2012 — the key chapter offers a structuralist/material reading of Wǔxíng as a philosophical argument.
  • Dīng Sìxīn 丁四新, 《郭店楚墓竹簡思想研究》, Dōngfāng chūbǎnshè 東方出版社, 2000 — major Chinese philosophical monograph on the Guōdiàn corpus, with detailed treatment of Wǔxíng.
  • Shirley Chan ed., Dao Companion to the Excavated Guodian Bamboo Manuscripts, Springer (Dao Companions to Chinese Philosophy 10), 2019 — current handbook with multiple chapters on Wǔxíng.
  • Jeffrey Riegel, “Wu hsing: Bamboo and Silk Manuscripts of an Early Confucian Treatise” (various conference papers, c. 1995–2000) and earlier writings on the Mǎwángduī version.

Other points of interest

The Guōdiàn Wǔxíng is the principal piece of physical evidence in support of Páng Pú’s revival of the Sī-Mèng-school hypothesis, and the principal counter-piece in the long Qīng-era debate over whether Xúnzǐ’s wǔxíng in Fēi shí’èr zǐ refers to rényìlǐzhìshèng (the moral five) or to jīnmùshuǐhuǒtǔ (the cosmological five) — the recovery of an actually-existing text using the moral five and explicitly connecting them to shèng (which Mèngzǐ does not enumerate among his sì duān 四端) settles this in favour of the moral reading. The text also gives the earliest attested philological warrant for the doctrine of shèn dú 慎獨 (“watchfulness when alone”) that the Dàxué 大學 and Zhōngyōng 中庸 will later make foundational; here shèn dú is glossed as shě fū wǔ ér shèn qí xīn zhī wèi dú 舍夫五而慎其心之謂獨 — an interior unification of the five virtues into a single mental focus, a reading recovered by Páng Pú and Lǐ Líng against the Zhū Xī line of “watchfulness in solitude”.

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