英文摘要 |
This bamboo slip, according to Prof. Han Wei, was copied before the early period of the Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty, resembling the copies during the time of Liu An, King of Huainan, and Shima Qian. However, in the chapter of “Daoying” of Huainanzi and the “Biography of Cruel Officials” of the Historical Records, “decrees multiply” is quoted from Laozi, which has been written as “decorations multiply” in the Book B on silk. Decorations mean decorations of etiquette, which were changed to “decrees” by the contemporaries. The Book B on silk writes, “Great Way, Great Heaven, Great Earth, and Great King,” changed to and quoted by the “Daoying” of Huainanzi and this bamboo slip as “Great Heaven, Great Earth, Great Way, and Great King.” In the simplified text of Guodian, “Great Way” is wrongly copied and placed after “Great Earth”. Dao, or the Way, begets all things, and the heaven and the earth have their names and are included in all things, and thus the order should be “Great Way, Great Heaven, Great Earth, and Great King”. Since “Tianzi”, or the Son of Heaven, was the greatest in the great Han Dynasty, “Great Heaven” is given priority in the text. This bamboo slip is in a dither about two texts. There are some places where the Book B on silk is correct but this bamboo slip wrong. For instance, in “Low virtue that is done will not work”, it is wrong to make “high virtue” and “low virtue” stand oppositely. Some people like Wang Bi have evolved such a saying. Here “high virtue” should be “to value virtue”. “Low virtue” regards virtue as mean, and failure follows as a result of esteeming benevolence, righteousness, and etiquette instead of esteeming virtue. There should not have had such mistakes in the early Han Dynasty since there were many learners of Laozi then. Another case is seen in “Seeing but cannot be seen is called obscurity” in the Book B on silk, in which “obscurity” has been changed to “ease” by this bamboo slip. “Seeing” has something to do with “obscurity” and “ease” with “comfort”. In Wang Bi's text “obscurity” is taken as “dimness”, Heshanggon's text as “ease” for its Chinese resemblance, and the popular text also as “ease”, but not Wang Bi's original text. It is quite doubtful for this bamboo slip to use “ease”. Important texts are listed in this book, but on its contrastive table the popular text is mistaken for Wang Bi's. Accordingly some other words listed may be incorrect. This paper is a miscellany of reading the Han bamboo slip Laozi. |