Qian xun 謙遜 in modern Chinese is usually translated as “modesty” in English. In this paper, I examine the arguably earliest version of it in early Chinese thought, qian 謙. I first extract its basic features from the qian hexagram 謙卦 in the Yi jing 易經 and identify very similar features in other texts, such as the Dao de jing 道德經, the Xunzi 荀子, and the Lüshi chunqiu 呂氏春秋. On the basis of this textual comparison, then, I reconstruct the idea of qian in a way that captures what underlies the relevant passages in all of the aforementioned texts. Finally, I understand the qian person to be someone who is disposed not to present himself in a better light than the other person in social interactions but to treat the other person as better by highlighting some aspect of the other person. I ultimately argue that this idea of qian was shared widely among early Chinese thinkers regardless of later historical divisions of different schools of thought.

This article examines self and identity in the “Inner Chapters” (neipian 內篇) of the Zhuangzi 莊子. Previous scholarship on this topic has tended to support its arguments by defining the “Way” (dao 道) as either a normative order or an objective reality. By contrast, this article argues that the Way is a neutral designation for the composite, ever-changing patterns of the cosmos that does not provide normative guidance.

Within this cosmos, the human “self” (shen 身) is likewise defined as a composite, mutable entity that displays “tendencies” (qing 情) of behavior and thought. Two of these tendencies include the positing of unitary agents and the creation of “identities” (ming 名)—imaginative constructs used for self-definition. As a result of combining and reifying the two tendencies, most humans conflate their identities with their larger selves. The result is a simplified vision of an essential self that gives rise to normative judgements, blinds humans to the changing cosmos, and creates problematic social structures.

The text advocates that one should retrain the tendency toward identity by cultivating an inviolate “sense of self” or “virtue” (de 德) that is empty of specific identity. Virtue acts as an emotionally safe space in which the mirror-like mind can temporarily take on the identities of other creatures. This practice increases practitioners’ empathetic understanding of the world, detaches them from destructive social structures, and has the potential to generate new versions of human society.

This article examines the story of Shun's 舜 ascension to the throne. This story has drawn considerable attention throughout Chinese history because of its significance with regard to political succession. However, in this article, I shed light on a different dimension of the story: its relevance to the issue of contingency. I investigate four texts, two excavated and two transmitted: Qiongda yi shi 窮達以時 (Failure and Success Depend on Times), Tang Yu zhi dao 唐虞之道 (The Way of Yao and Shun), the Mengzi 孟子, and the Xunzi 荀子. At one extreme, Qiongda yi shi highlights that Shun became a king by pure chance, while at the other extreme, Xunzi interprets the event as a necessary one, emphasizing that Shun cannot but succeed Yao. The other two texts fall somewhere in between the two extremes. I use these four texts to showcase different ways of thinking about areas over which humans are believed to lack control. My claim is that these four texts offer different accounts of the same event—Shun's ascension—because they see the event from different perspectives: from a perspective of the chosen, from a perspective of the chooser, from a mise-en-scène, and from a perspective of not of this world, respectively. I argue that the diverse perspectives of these texts entail the different understandings of several related issues such as the degree of human control over the event, the important features of the event, and the content of the moral and political lessons that we draw from the event.

This essay examines some key statements in the Later Mohist treatises to gain a sense of their views on language and disputation (bian 辯). I first show that the Later Mohists viewed disputation as an exercise in familiarizing oneself with patterns of language use and the verification of truth-claims in the phenomenal world. I then demonstrate that such an activity helps one attain one of the Mohists’ highest goals: the clarification of ethical imperatives about how to behave, as expressed through Heaven for all people. This claim ultimately links Early and Later Mohist ethical concerns and offers a religious explanation for Later Mohist involvement and interest in disputation. Lastly, I frame these writings from within a culture of debate about language in Early China—a culture which, for example, yielded not only Mohist views concerning the necessary correlation between language and reality, but also Confucian formulations on the rectification of names, and a Zhuangzian insistence on the emptiness of sayings.

The *Wu ze you xing tu 物則有形圖 silk manuscript was discovered inside a lacquer case in Mawangdui Tomb 3. This little-known manuscript of unusual design contains a philosophical text on the relationships between things (wu 物), forms (xing 形), names (ming 名), and speech (yan 言), and the text is arranged on the surface of the silk in the form of a densely clustered spiral within a ring inside a square. The writing on the manuscript is also accompanied by colors and shapes that represent a domed Heaven (tian 天) above a square Earth (di 地). Since it was first catalogued in 2004, just a few studies of the *Wu ze you xing tu have been published in Chinese, and the manuscript is almost entirely absent from Western scholarship. This article aims to remedy this situation by providing a detailed description of the manuscript, transcriptions and translations of its contents, a consideration of its philosophical context, and an analysis of its design. In the process, I show that this silk document functioned not just as a convenient surface or carrier for an important philosophical text, but as a material artifact in its own right, one that was designed to have a powerful impact on its viewers, readers, and users, forcing them to move their eyes and bodies in ways that reinforced its central philosophical message.

This article uses evidence from textiles, bamboo, and bronzes to explore what the elites wore, who made up the design communities behind the elites, and how luxurious these items were considered to be in 500–300 b.c.e. China. It first examines the reliability of the art historical sources available for the reconstruction of this history and cautions the readers against certain past interpretations of the textiles and accessories of the period. It then delineates a brief history of how certain textile patterns and weaving techniques developed and how their producers selected and obtained sources of inspiration and interacted and exchanged ideas with producers of other types of artifacts. It argues that textile designers seemed to favor certain types of sources and had formed their own distinct, though not impervious, community. After carefully examining the weaving techniques of several pieces of fabric, it proposes a means of building a more reliable and solid foundation for art historical reconstruction. Textiles and accessories were symbols of the wealth, status, and power of individuals who wore them. This article will explain how a combination of the production techniques of textiles and accessories, together with a sharing of designs and techniques within the community of producers, contributed to the formation of those symbols.

This paper reviews current knowledge on the geography, climate, flora, and fauna of Shaanxi's Guanzhong 關中 Basin, a region that has been particularly well studied because it was a capital region of the Zhou, Qin, Han, and Tang dynasties. Humans have so thoroughly transformed the region that it is hard to imagine that it was ever full of wild plants and animals. And since much of the English-language scholarship on the Zhou period focuses on the texts and ideas of urban elites, it is easy to forget that most people were rural farmers living in environments full of wild plants and animals, and that many places had no humans at all. Scholars in various fields have produced abundant new information on the environments of ancient China, making it possible to reconstruct climate and ecology far more accurately than was possible before. This research shows that, contra older claims that ancient North China had a subtropical climate, the climate of the Neolithic and Bronze Age periods was only slightly warmer and wetter than the present. The most important factor in the transformation of the region's ecosystems has been humans, not climate. We will focus on the pre-imperial period because various lines of evidence suggest that the first millennium b.c.e. was a period of population growth in which agricultural societies wiped out many of the natural ecosystems of lowland North China. Only by reconstructing what North China looked like thousands of years ago will we be able to understand how humans came to be the dominant force in the region's ecology.

Pictorial brick tiles and stone carvings from the Eastern Han period show women engaged in the production of alcohol, and early histories and literary sources provide an insight into women's role in brewing, drinking, and selling alcohol in shops and in the market. Preparation of alcohol for ritual ceremonies, banquets, and daily consumption is listed among the many household duties for which women were responsible. It was women's work (nüshi 女事), as was the production of textiles, which assigned women with an economic role but also gave them a moral identity in the social sphere. However, women's mastery of brewing—mentioned but rarely elaborated—upon, did not connote feminine virtues in the same way as weaving. Through a close examination of artistic representations that show women engaged in the making of alcohol on the estate and in a workshop setting in the southwest (present-day Sichuan province), this article aims to examine the role women played in alcohol production and their contribution to the economy of both their household and the region in early Imperial China.

Although Wang Chong has often been categorized as a kind of fatalist, many scholars maintain that his fatalism does not include one's moral autonomy, as he argues that one's inborn moral tendencies can be changed through education. He even acknowledges that a person can live a different life from what one's ming must have dictated. But in this article, I show that even when Wang seems to claim that personal effort is important in life, he soon claims that even the abilities to make efforts or to strive to be a better person are more or less decided at birth. And even when he claims that people born with evil nature can be guided to goodness, nowhere does he suggest that to be good or evil is a matter of our choice. And if there is an occasion where one does not live up to what one's ming has predetermined, it is only because there was another ming, one that is more powerful than that of an individual, that interfered with the realization of one's original ming, not because that one's original ming has changed. In the end, I argue that even though Wang Chong may not be a fatalist in its fullest sense, since fatalism means that every event is necessitated, he comes very close to being one, as he sees that in so many instances of our lives, we are not free to act in any other way than in the way that ming has prearranged.