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The Chinese characters found in the silk texts are very frequently only fragments of the characters used in the versions that tradition has handed down. Many Chinese characters are formed by combining two simpler Chinese characters, one to indicate a general category of meaning, and one to give an indication of pronunciation. Where the traditional texts have both components, the silk texts frequently give only the phonetic half of the intended character. There are several hypotheses that might explain this fact:
In addition to the "partial" characters mentioned above, the two silk texts sometimes use characters that are different from the ones present in the texts that have come down to us through consecutive publications of this text. In cases where different traditional versions of the text have characters with different meanings at the same point in the text, the newly found text can sometimes give us additional evidence. Suppose that we had two received texts, and one said: "She flowered the table," but the other text said: "She floured the table." Did she sprinkle flowers on the table? Or did she sprinkle flour on the table? If a "silk" text were to be discovered, it might say: "She powdered the table," or it might say, "She blossomed the table." The students of this text would now have an independent opinion, from much nearer in the history of this book, as to what the original meaning was. Some people believe that the silk texts of the Tao Te Ching are the real book, and that the texts that have come down to us generation by generation are wrong wherever they disagree with these two earlier versions. Other people point out that the silk texts are not particularly good -- in the sense that people often would not be able to make sense of them unless they had access to the texts written with the full forms of the characters. They add that Wang Pi , and other very early scholars who edited the texts that are the ancestors of the ones that came down to us by tradition, had access to many early versions of the Tao Te Ching and so were able to correct many mistakes by comparing the several versions available to them. Most of the time the received versions of the Tao Te Ching are in substantial agreement with each other, and most of the time the text is simple and straightforward. Occasionally, however, two received versions will write homonyms with entirely different meanings at some point in a chapter. In such cases, much help can be received from a silk text that gives a third character that has a different pronunciation but is a synonym for one of the two in the received text. In recent years several scholars have made new translations of the Tao Te Ching that are based on the silk text and ignore the received texts entirely or almost entirely. These include works by D. C. Lau , and by Robert G. Henricks . Henricks' translation does compare received versions of the Tao Te Ching with the text found in the tomb. Chinese versions of these texts include:
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