The textual formation of the Shan hai jing

Abstract

The Shan hai jing 山海經 is arguably a unique and wonderous literary work in ancient China. Traditional and modern scholars tend to praise or criticize this literary work based primarily on the authenticity of its content. Studies and literary criticisms of the Shan hai jing have rested upon a prejudiced presumption that a literary text is valuable only insofar as it contains authentic information. Therefore, it has been viewed as a source of scientific and historical knowledge more than simply as a text, a cultural, man-made product. This dissertation studies the textual formation of the Shan hai jing. The author sees the book as a product formed in accretion and as a literary actualization of abstract ideas and thoughts. It aims to understand how historical and cultural factors, such as the changing worldviews, concepts, priorities, values, beliefs, ideologies, knowledge and motifs shared by different social strata and communities, might have contributed to and shaped its formation. The core of the dissertation is divided into three parts. The first part discusses the first five chapters of the SHJ, which are collectively called the Shan jing 山經. The author argues that the core body of the Shan jing was formed by collating separate regional materials and itineraries from heterogenous local communities, but it was represented by secondary editors as an all-inclusive, global cartographic account of the terrestrial space. The author demonstrates how the tensions between natural geography and political geography, and the struggles between locality and notion of globality or universality collaboratively catalyzed the formation of the Shan jing. The second part discusses the subsequent eight chapters of the SHJ generally known as the Hai jing 海經. It is shown how the notion of order plays a role in the coordination and synthesis of these elements in the composition of the Hai jing. The author argues that it is the consciousness of this very idea of order that makes the Hai jing into a highly idealized, schematized representation of the peripheral world. The third part discusses the last five chapters of the SHJ, or the Dahuang jing 大荒經 and the Hainei jing 海內經. A plenty of motifs, figure-names, ideas and thoughts of these five chapters have their parallels in the Shang oracle bone inscriptions but are not recorded accurately in traditional texts. Many scholars accordingly argue that these five chapters absorbs firsthand sources of the Shang period. The author, nevertheless, alternatively argues that more than a faithful inheritance of the Shang’s legacies, they clearly embody major conscious modifications to the Shang motifs and beliefs. It is demonstrated how the tensions between the remembrance and forgetting of the Shang tradition became a crucial catalyst of the formation of the Dahuang jing and Hainei jing. By synthesizing the three parts, the dissertation attempts to reveal beneath its ostensibly mysterious or even absurd surface the human, artificial and cultural side of the SHJ.