Reading Guide for Seminar 1

Dear All,

Attached is a brief guide to orient you for the discussion of the readings for the first seminar.

I look forward to a week of stimulating discussions!

Hisa Kuriyama

Thanks for fascinating reading, Hisa, I am looking forward to discuss this, and I found your reading guide very helpful.

May I ask for further help with the footnotes? First, when it sais "x stands for y" or "x is identical with y", are these interpretations or amendments? as when classical scholars write "reading x for y"? Second, what do numbers like
"2139/43" stand for? Other manuscripts?

Cheers, Staffan

Thank you, Staffan, for these questions.
I'm glad that you asked them, because they highlight an important detail that I failed to mention: The notes to the text are translations from historic commentaries. Much of these commentaries address questions of terminology, because the Huangdi needing was often difficult to understand even for Chinese. It was difficult above all, because it was ancient, and used terms in ways that often diverged from later usage. But it could also be difficult, because the text became corrupted over the course of transmission, and similar looking or similar sounding characters--but with quite different meanings--were sometimes substituted for the original words. At least, that was how commentators sometimes tried to make sense of obscure passages.
In "X stands for Y" X is the character found in the extant text, which the commentator think requires explication; Y is commentator's gloss. So a longer translation might be: "X should be understood as meaning Y." "Stands for" seems always to identify cases of semantic interpretation. Textual amendments in these commentaries are noted in other ways.

As for numbers like 2139/43 they refer to the page (2139) and line number (43) of the Chinese edition on which Unschuld based his translation (the 1983 edition of the "Huangdi neighing" published by the Renmin chubanshe).

Thanks for the response, Hisa. Interesting, the complication of similar look and similar sound in chinese characters. And, wow, 2139 refers to the page number of an edition ...