Textual Rediscovery
Before discussing the Later Mohists in
greater detail, let us glance at the textual explanation of the loss and
recovery of the Mohist Canons. The currently accepted textual theory
says the Mohists wrote two 'Canons' (I and II). Each consisted of around 80
short maxims. Since they were short, Mohists economized by writing the first
half of each Canon vertically across the top of a standard sized book of bamboo
strips. They wrote second half along the bottom; a key phrase at the end
instructed us to read this text "in rows." The editors indexed the
terse theorems of the Canon to another bamboo book called Canon
Explanations. These contained longer passages including explanatory
formulae, examples and arguments for the Canon's maxims. They indexed
the Explanations by writing the first character of the relevant Canon
to the side of the explanatory string.
We suppose that later scribes, lacking
understanding of both the organization and the philosophical thrust, copied
straight through each strip ignoring the "rows." Effectively, they
shuffled the Canon like a deck of cards. Since Classical Chinese had no
punctuation or grammatical inflection, this textual disaster (1) obscured the
slogans, (2) jumbled the order and (3) shrouded the indexing principle. The
scribes also shifted the indexing character into the flow of the text of the
orphaned explications. Having lost the ordered link between canon and
explanation, the tradition then treated the whole corpus as incoherent essays.
Other common sources of textual corruption, including displaced strips of
characters, mistakes in copying, scribal emending and so forth, further
complicated the textual puzzle.
Given:
The philosophical sophistication and difficulty of the text,
The school's obliteration at the beginning of China's philosophical Dark
Age (roughly 200 BC),
The placement in the middle of the most vociferous anti-Confucian
classical text,
Medieval Confucian orthodoxy did not
tackle the puzzle until the textual studies movement of the late Qing
(1644-1911). Angus Graham credits Sun I Jang (1848-1908) with the insight about
how to reorder and analyze the content—the instruction to 'read these
horizontally.' (Sun, in turn, credits it to Bi Yuan.) Various Chinese scholars
proposed reconstructions. Angus Graham's Later Mohist Logic, Ethics and
Science delivered a well-argued version of the reconstructed text to
Western sinologists in 1972. Many problems and obscurities remain, but Graham's
reconstruction was enough to reveal a reflective, coherent and reasonably
sophisticated theory of language.
The maxims do deal with central
philosophical concepts and, like Chinese dictionaries, frequently consist of
lists of substitution characters or a range of examples. Some slogans are
metaphors on which the Explanations expand. Others are helpful ways of
re-thinking and reflecting on a familiar concept. In addition to theory of
language, intelligible sections of the Canon present fragments of ethics, epistemology,
geometry, optics, and economics.
