The Bamboo Texts of Guodian: A Study and Complete Translation (Cornell East Asia Series)

The cache of bamboo texts unearthed in the village of Guodian, Hubei Province, in 1993 is a rare and unique find in the history of Chinese philosophy and literature. This study renders the complex corpus of the Guodian texts into a more easily manageable form, incorporating the past several years of scholarly activity on these texts and providing them with a comprehensive introduction along with a complete and well-annotated translation into English. As the only archaeologically excavated corpus of philosophical manuscripts to emerge from a Warring States–period tomb, the Guodian texts provide us with a wealth of reliable information for gaining new insights into the textual and intellectual history of pre-imperial China. Given the prominence of Confucian works in the corpus, they serve to fill out much of the intellectual historical picture for the doctrines of roughly three generations of Confucian disciples who fell between the times of Confucius (551–479 BC) and Mencius (c. 390–305 BC). The manuscripts also hold great significance for the study of early Chinese paleography and phonology. Volume I contains a general introduction to the Guodian tomb, the manuscript contents, and a discussion of the various problems of reading and interpretation that the manuscripts involve, along with their place within the larger context of early Chinese intellectual history. It also contains introductions to and annotated translations of the "Laozi" and "Taiyi sheng shui" manuscripts, along with those of "Ziyi," "Lu Mu Gongwen Zisi," "Qiongda yi shi," "Wu xing," "Tang Yu zhidao,"and "Zhongxin zhi dao."

Scott Cookreceived his Ph.D. in Chinese from the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Michigan in 1995 and was recently Professor of Chinese and Cowles-Kruidenier Chair of Chinese Studies at Grinnell College, where he has been teaching since 1996. He specializes in pre-Qin textual studies and early Chinese intellectual history. He is the author of Guodian Chujian xian-Qin rushu hongweiguan(The Pre-Imperial Confucian Texts of Guodian: Broad and Focused Perspectives) (Taipei: Xuesheng shuju, 2006), editor of Hiding the World in the World: Uneven Discourses on the Zhuangzi (Albany: SUNY Press, 2003), and the author of around fifty articles in English and Chinese.

Professor Cook is currently on the faculty of Yale-NUS College in Singapore.