AFTERWORD

CANONIZATION IN THE ANCIENT WORLD:

THE VIEW FROM FARTHER EAST

A N D R E W H. PLAKS

This afterword has been solicited to provide a parting glance at the

topics discussed in this volume from the 'outside perspective' of the
classical Chinese textual tradition. This collection of studies was
conceived as an inquiry into the mechanisms and significance of
canon-formation in the ancient world, grounded as far as possible
in a comprehensive—if not global—frame of reference. To this end,
the semester-long seminar conducted on this subject at the Institute
for Advanced Studies at the Hebrew University in the winter of 1999
was designed in such a way as to embrace a broad sweep of cultur-
al contexts up to and including that of ancient China, which I was
delighted, if ill-equipped, to represent. For a variety of organizational
and practical reasons, however, the scope of the conference that
capped the season was restricted to the chain of contiguous civiliza-
tions following the path of Alexander the Great from Greece and
Rome eastward through the ancient Near East to the Fertile Cres-
cent and the Iranian plateau—stopping conspicuously short at the
Indus. This omission could be justified as leaving merely two an-
cient literary civilizations: the Indie/Buddhist and the East Asian/
Confucian outside the purview of our deliberations, though these last
two traditions, one notes with some regret, may well comprise the
bulk of mankind's textual history.
The organizers of the Jerusalem conference presumably had no
ideological intention of marginalizing these latter civilizations, or of
prioritizing one 'East' at the expense of another. Still, there may well
have lurked within their minds the (not unreasonable) assumption
that the further east one moves beyond the familiar terrain of the
classic Mediterranean and West Asian worlds, the more likely one
is to encounter extrinsic, or downright exotic parameters of human
cultural development that need not conform to the models generat-
ed in these other spheres. The truth is, however, that when our quest
for cross-cultural universality brings us to the farther reaches of the
'East,' we discover there a picture of canon-formation that is any-
thing but 'eccentric,' one that in fact, on many accounts, sits at the
dead center of this subject of inquiry. To say this is not to blithely
invoke the well-known traditional Chinese vaunt that their cultural
and political realm (the'Middle Kingdom') is the center of the uni-
verse. Nor is it to insist upon a simplistic scenario of east-west cul-
tural diffusion among 'axial age' civilizations, compelling as such a
view may sometimes be. The point is simply that in tracing the history
of the general phenomenon of canon-making, the development of
the so-called 'Confucian Classics' presents what is in certain senses
the clearest and fullest example of the collective paradigms of can-
onization that are represented—only in a partial and uneven man-
ner—by each of the other cultural systems deployed to the west of
the Sinitic hub of the axis of ancient civilizations.
Before attempting to defend this view of the centrality of the
Chinese model of canon-formation, it is first necessary to outline the
common ground shared by the other textual traditions considered
in this volume. Reading through the essays assembled here, one may
well gain the initial impression that this 'common ground' is very
thin, that these studies reflect very diverse—perhaps incommensu-
rable-—understandings of what is meant by 'canon' in the first place.
Most obtrusively, the respective working definitions of this term reflect
a basic division between its conventional use as a near synonym for
revealed 'scripture' (see the pieces by Veldhuis, Stern, Halbertal,
Grottanelli, Chapman, Markschies, Stroumsa, and Shaked on Baby-
Ionian, Jewish, Christian, and Zoroastrian scriptures) and the essen-
tially secular perspective of those that more or less follow contem-
porary usage with respect to the 'great books' of a given culture (see
the essays by Vardi, Finkelberg, Sivan, Lamberton, and Pelliccia on
the Greco-Roman canon). The editors of this volume make an at-
tempt to downplay the distinction between canonic texts attributed
to divine revelation and those ascribed to more secular forms of
inspiration, and they try to paper over the gap between these two
opposing concepts by falling back upon the very vague expression
'foundational texts,' indicating not much more than that these books
are all of great cultural significance. This vagueness, however, pro-
vides the 'constructive ambiguity' within which the individual scholars
present their penetrating analyses and interpretations of the most
 CANONIZATION IN THE ANCIENT WORLD 269

controversial aspects of canonicity: such questions as whether a given

corpus is held to be'closed'or'open,'whether the boundaries of
inclusion and the criteria of exclusion are fixed or elastic, whether
a given set of texts is seen as singular and uni que, or as forming a
subset of a larger literary corpus, and the most controversial issue
of all: where these canonic traditions fall along the spectrum from
oral to written modes of exp ression. These are vexed issues that do
not admit of any easy consensus or simplistic resolution. And so..
wherever we fmd'common denominators'among the different tex­
tual histories brought together here, we still must ask whether these
sim p l y rep resent a minimal baseline of comp arability, or rather
indicate a shared conunensurability that is meaningfully denominated
b y the respective uniqueness of each civilization?
Given如widely varying sets of textual materials and the sharp­
ly divergent literary histories represented in these p ages, it is all the
more remarkable that one still observes a number of distinct p oints
of resonance in the sep arate stories they each have to tell about the
p rocesses of canon-formation and its cultural si gnificance.
The frrst of these p oints of overlap has to do with the complex
interrelation between oral and written modes of textuality that fi g-
ure in t�� gener�l c�ncep ual fram:work �f canonici�. ln co �tras�
. _ . . .
to the widesp read misconception of canonic texts as fL"{ed bodies of
dogma'written in stone,'in the majority of the cases discussed in
this volume we硝tness the gradual accrual of cultural value to texts
that seem to have simp ly'emerged' — autochthonousl y , as it wer尸
out of ageless oral traditions, well before the formal conferral of
authority up on any fJXed redactions. The p redominantly oral char­
acter of this so-called' p rimary'stage of canonization is not partic­
ularly remarkable in itself, as one naturally tends to assume--inac­
curately in some instances— that as a rule oral com p osition and
transmission should p recede written versions of texts in the history
of human culture. This, of course, is the presumption that general­
ly underlies the idea of revealed scrip ture. Far more interestin g in
this context are the manifold cultural dynamics that im p el ancient
thinkers at one stage or another to commit oral teachings and nar­
ratives to the fi议ity of the chisel and the pen, and the way s in which
this transition is qualified by the tenacious survival of canonical oral
traditions of recitation and exegesis alongside of—and occasionall y
competin g 沁th-the fJXed texts of sacred scrip ture or literary clas­
SlCS.
 A second major area of convergence we can perceive within our
medley of ancient texts concerns the precise historical mechanisms
by which political and cultural authorities at some later point con-
fer 'secondary' canonic status upon particular textual traditions. The
specific configurations of these processes naturally differ from case
to case, but all of our contributors seems to speak in one voice in
denying the popularly held notion of a synod or other council of sages
granting the imprimatur of canonicity in a single shining moment
of beatitude. Still, the element of official promulgation, or at least
retroactive recognition, of the unique status of privileged texts re-
mains an indispensable piece of the historical puzzle, an eventual-
ity that seems clearly correlated, to one degree or another, with the
gradual committing of ancient wisdom to the written word. The
precise nature of this correlation, however, remains a chicken-or-
egg question: does formal canonization simply follow and reflect the
ongoing transition from oral fluidity to written fixity, or is the step-
by-step consolidation of oral teachings into written redactions the
direct consequence of the investing of canonic authority.
Notwithstanding the unique paths of development taken by each
of the textual traditions investigated here, the separate studies are
united in their common emphasis on the central role of learned
transmission at the core of the phenomenon of canon-making. The
various forms of textual exposition—from master to disciple, from
exegete to reader, and eventually in formal 'schools' of orthodox or
esoteric doctrine—are all of necessity rooted in the direct medium
of oral teaching. But with the transition from oral to written texts,
the canonic traditions gradually take on the bookish aspect of the
scholastic curriculum. This observation leads a number of our con-
tributors to suggest that the most essential measure of canonicity may
be the degree to which a given textual corpus becomes the object
of traditional modes of study. In pursuing this line of reasoning, we
can go one step further and focus on the particular ways in which
canonic texts are turned to academic purposes: as pools of doctri-
nal and literary formulations of wisdom cited as 'proof-texts' (the best-
known examples in the 'western' traditions being, of course, cita-
tions of Homer in Hellenistic learning, and of the Bible, Koran, or
Avesta, in the theological writings of the monotheistic faiths), as
fountainheads of literary genres, archetypes, topoi, and elevated style,
and as compendia of teachings that supply both the terms and the
topics of discourse for secular and sacred philosophical speculation.
In short, a 'canon' may be defined very succincdy in this light as a
text that supports learned exegesis. It is important to note here that
neither reverent citation of proof-texts nor scholastic focus on nar-
rowly defined theological issues need necessarily turn traditional
canons into receptacles for petrified dogma. In a number of cases
the opposite is true: the more unchallenged the intellectual author-
ity of a set of texts, the more they may become the focus of exeget-
ical disputation—discounting, of course, literalist and fundamental-
ist uses of scripture. And so, the ongoing historical process of'closing
the canon' may, paradoxically, result in greater and greater degrees
of hermeneutical 'openness.'
A final area of agreement among scholars of canon-formation from
Rome to Persia is the notion of canon as both a matrix and a cat-
alyst for forging ethnic and cultural identity. This may be seen to
be, in a narrow sense, a natural outgrowth of the function of canonic
texts as a nucleus of traditional education, and thereby as a fount
of the koine of cultivated discourse in each culture. But it also sug-
gests that the cultural significance of the canons of the great textual
traditions of the ancient world may also lie in their power to en-
gender what Guy Stroumsa, following Bowman and Woolf, has
termed 'textual communities'—referring not simply to self-contained
esoteric cults, but rather to the broad cultural self-definition of all
members of a society who accept the unique importance of a par-
ticular set of writings. Here we meet a final paradoxical aspect of
the phenomenon of the classical canon. On one hand, while each
of the major canonic corpora, by its very encyclopedic breadth, makes
the explicit or implicit claim of embodying the total ground of wis-
dom for all mankind and for all times, each also affirms, almost in
the same breath, the counterclaim of comprising the mental bag-
gage and the 'collective memory' of a single historical community—
sometimes in a rather narrow ethnocentric sense. What this means
is that, in a very fundamental way, the cultural identity of a Chris-
tian or a Jew, a Roman or a Greek, a Muslim or a Zoroastrian, is
less an expression of doctrinal allegiance or narrow belief, and more
a direct function of the acceptance of a parochial body of texts as
constituting a universal wellspring of truth.
The proposition that these points of agreement among the schol-
ars represented here do not simply describe a few incidental areas
of overlap but rather mark out the basic parameters of canon-mak-
ing in the ancient world is substantially strengthened when we in-
troduce the complex historical development of the Confucian 'clas-
sics' into the equation. By each of the measures of canonicity out-
lined above for the major ancient civilizations to the west of China
and India—namely: the organic evolution of dominant oral textual
traditions, the mechanics and the venues of formal processes of
'official' recognition, and the cultural significance of the canonic
corpus once it is in place—the early Chinese experience of canon-
making corroborates these common underpinnings even while un-
derlining certain unique aspects of Far Eastern literary civilization.
In the remaining pages of this afterword, I will summarize what I
see as the most salient points of historical fact regarding this pro-
cess of development in China, with an eye toward reaffirming and
expanding our non-specific model of canon-formation in the great
civilizations of antiquity.

1. First, the circumstances of the earliest appearance of the textual

traditions that would eventually crystallize into the canonic Book of
Songs (Shijing), Book of Documents (Shujing), a n d Book of Changes (Tying),
as Confucianism matured from its modest roots into a comprehen-
sive system of thought, provide very strong confirmation of the non-
centrality of the revelational model of canon formation. While each
of these three collections of ancient texts contains rich lodes of li-
turgical, mythical, ritual and divinatory materials of profound im-
portance for our understanding of archaic Chinese religion, their
original rise to canonic status is largely free of the sort of religious
implications one might expect of revered repositories of ancient lore
(though later they were indeed apphed to religious functions in certain
phases of popular culture, as well as in connection with the impe-
rial sacrificial cult). This is especially true of the Book of Songs, the
first of the early 'classics' to show up on the screen of ancient Chi-
nese culture as a seminal text in the curriculum of the emerging
Confucian school. By the so-called 'Spring and Autumn' period (770-
481 B.C.E.), abundant literary evidence (though all of admittedly
late compilation) attests to the widespread use of citations from the
Songs in the ritualized rhetoric of diplomatic intercourse and other
'public' functions. But the use of even its most solemn and stately
hymns for liturgical purposes seems to have had only marginal sig-
nificance until a much later period. Similar observations can be made
regarding the Book of Documents, whose most 'mythic' passages relat-
ing the deeds of the 'Sage-Emperors' and their arch-enemies at the
dawn of the Chinese world-order apparently reflect only the late date
of composition of the relevant sections in the collection; and the Book
of Changes, in which the transformation from a rather technical divi-
nation manual into a book of 'wisdom literature' and metaphysical
speculation also transpired at a much later point in time.

2. By the Warring States Period (481-221 B.C.E) all three of these

'foundational texts' had cleary acquired an elevated status within the
rich and diverse corpus of historical and philosophical writings
characterizing this age of intense intellectual activity. Passages known
to us from later recensions of the Songs and the Documents show up
as proof-texts and as topics of disputation in a wide range of War-
ring States texts, the earliest of them appearing in certain rare
manuscripts recently unearthed at various archaeological sites in
China. In addition, they are cited in a variety of core Confucian
works: the Analects (.Lunyu), Mencius, the ζμο Commentary (^uozhuari) on
the Spring and Autumn Annals, and certain treatises of the 'ritual cor-
pus'—notably the Great Learning (.Daxue) and Doctrine of the Mean (^Jiongy-
ong)—all of which were themselves eventually incorporated into the
canon as independent titles. At the same time, they also provide
almost obligatory points of rhetorical reference in a broad range of
Warring States philosophical texts attributed to thinkers not neces-
sarily associated with the Confucian intellectual lineage. The basic
scope and content of these canonic texts remain surprisingly stable
despite the vagaries of their oral transmission and of their conver-
sion to written redactions (the latter phase showing very consider-
able orthographic instability due to the nature of the ancient Chi-
nese script). Moreover, the overall shape of the corpus, commonly
enumerated as the 'five (or six) classics,' was a matter of near con-
sensus in a number of late Warring States writings. On the other
hand, however, we already observe by this stage the beginnings of
remarkable hermeneutical diversity, with the first signs of separate
lines of transmission and exegesis of the canonic traditions now
becoming visible. And the gradual adoption and incorporation of
important layers of exegetical material into the framework of the basic
texts themselves—most obviously in the case of the three 'commen-
taries' on the Spring and Autumn Annals, and the 'Ten Wings' appended
to the Book of Changes—give rise to a conspicuously 'elastic' sense of
the boundaries of the Confucian canon, setting the stage for very
substantial expansion and readjustment in later centuries.

3. By most accounts, the formal conferral of official canonic status

on these texts transpired during the years of the Western (or 'Former')
Han Dynasty (206 B.C.E.- 8 C.E.), and this watershed event is tra-
ditionally dated to the reign of Emperor Wu (sometimes even pin-
pointed to the year 134 or 136 B.C.E.)—though the practice of
granting imperial recognition to particular texts and expositors was
already underway under the short-lived dynastic regime of the Qin
immediately preceding the ascension of the Han (221-206 B.C.E.).
In practical and institutional terms, this process consisted not in
sweeping decrees of promulgation of the entire canonic array, but
rather in the awarding of imperial sponsorship in piecemeal fash-
ion to specific scholastic lineages entrusted with the reconstitution
and exposition of the Confucian corpus, in alignment with court fac-
tions and scholarly cliques motivated by both intellectual and pa-
tently political aims. The entire impulse to 'fix' the canon in this
period is generally understood to have been guided by the overween-
ing ambition of the early Han rulers to establish the enduring legit-
imacy of their new 'imperium'—in a manner reminiscent of the grand
imperial project of Augustan Rome—on the foundations of an all-
embracing moral and cultural revival. In doing so, they propagated
a set of myths, still widely believed to the present day, about the
devastating 'burning of the books' supposed to have taken place under
the evil Qin tyrant, followed by the monumental labor of restoring
the 'lost' Confucian heritage, aided by the adventitious 'rediscov-
ery' of old texts allegedly hidden for safekeeping in the walls of
ancient ruins. The sifting of fact from fancy, truth from rhetoric, in
the actual details of this process is the business of Chinese political
history, but mention should be made here of several implications of
this story for our general review of ancient canon-making. First, the
official elevation of the Confucian classics to supreme authority goes
hand in hand with the gradual committing of each textual tradition
to written redactions as their primary mode of existence (only at this
point were the venerable texts of the Songs, Documents and Changes
irrevocably attached to the term jing and treated as fixed canonic
books). Still, even after the stakes of the game of canonization had
been raised to the highest order of imperial sanction, and the canonic
corpus came more and more to look like inviolate scripture, the texts
themselves were never endowed with sanctity as physical objects—
even though they were periodically 'carved in stone,' on monumental
stelae exhibited in the imperial precincts to serve as 'authorized'
standard texts for citation throughout the realm. Moreover, the
overall outlines of the Confucian corpus were never fully 'closed.'
It remained open to significant expansion at later stages of devel-
opment—most visibly with the addition of the 'Four Books' and the
'Minor Classics' at different stages, and continued to generate live-
ly exegetical controversy through the remainder of the Han and
subsequent dynastic periods.

4. As they passed through the stages of primary and secondary can-

onization, the Confucian classics came to embody not just a limited
corpus of writings on ritual and moral philosophy, but the cultural
foundation of Chinese civilization in its entirety. Already by the late
Warring States period the idea was commonly expressed—in both
the pious praise of followers and the mockery of detractors—that
to be a Confucian was to be a student and teacher of a particular
core set of texts. Moreover, these texts were by no means the ex-
elusive patrimony of self-defined Confucians alone; they profound-
ly inform the thoughts and writings of Mohists, Legalists, Daoists:
the full spectrum of early Chinese 'disputers of the Dao.' With the
Confucian canon firmly established as the primary fount of proof-
texts and the terms of intellectual discourse in ancient China, their
study became something far more demanding than simple pious
recitation. It required a lifelong commitment to a rich scholastic and
exegetical enterprise, much like the open-ended demands of Mish-
naic and Talmudic learning. In the traditional Chinese context, this
universe of canonic discourse later culminated in what was to be-
come the hallmark of the Imperial political and social order: the
much-vaunted classical examination system. At its worst, this sys-
tem represented nothing more than slavish memorization of dogma
in the service of elite self-replication of the most corrupt sort; but at
its best it encouraged and even demanded textual mastery and
exegetical insight of the highest order. Ultimately, the experience
of learning, teaching, and expounding upon the Confucian canon
set the lines not only of a narrow sectarian identity, but of cultural
self-definition for the entire East Asian world. Just as to be a Jew,
a Christian, a Muslim or a Zoroastrian meant to internalize and live
by a set of ancient sciptural monuments, and just as to be a proud
bearer of Hellenic civilization or its Roman incarnation meant to
treasure the classical works of Homer and the tragedians, so too, to
be a Confucian in premodern China meant first and foremost to
uphold, in theory at least, both the timeless wisdom and the con-
temporary moral guidance of the ancient classics.