竹簡《文子》與傳世本《文子》異文研究 = Study on Variant Character in the Bamboo Slips and Current Edition of Wen Zi

The project analyzes variant character in the bamboo slips and current edition of the Wen Zi.
Wen Zi is an important literary contribution from Daoism. There are twelve passages which have been passed on. Before, no one questioned if the passages were original. Yet, since Tang Dynasty, Liu Zhongyuan firstly doubted the originality. He pointed out that the prevailing edition of Wen Zi was not original and was a forged work. After that, there was also the same doubting voice in Ching Dynasty. When the scholars in Ching Dynasty used Wen Zi as the authoritative text to emend Huai Nan Zi, they found that Wen Zi is plagiarism from Huai Nan Zi. This conclusion of plagiarism soon became the mainstream in the academic field. However, there was still a debate of “Wen Zi and Huai Nan Zi, which is the original?”
It was not until the finding of scripts in 1973, with the finding of the Mawangdui silk script, the foreword of the second edition of the ancient lost book Lao Zi, and the excavation of the bamboo script of Wen Zi from Han Dynasty Tomb number 40 in Ding Country in Hebei province, the significance of Wen Zi as a historical document was reassessed.
The Ding county Western Han bamboo script of Wen Zi was unearthed in 1973; in the end of 1995, a translated version of the text was published in Wen Wu. After publication, the translated text was highly scrutinized by the academia, including projects of its value pertaining to literature, ancient etymology, historical knowledge, and historical philosophy. These projects have already conducted analysis of comparisons and contrasts.
Comparisons and contrasts between the bamboo script version of Wen Zi and the passed down version can be divided into three aspects: identical passages, similar passages, and lost passages. Although some comparative and contrasting analysis were done, studies concerning “variant characters” are relatively rare.
The bamboo version of Wen Zi includes 277 scripts, 2790 characters. Unfortunately, since the scripts were damaged due to robbery, fire, carbonization and earthquake, there are merely about one thousand of words can be recognized and then analyzed. Moreover, the recognizable words are most about the specific piece Tao Te. As a result, this project will highly focus on Tao Te, to analyze the examples of interchangeable characters, variant form of characters, wrong characters, form characters, taboo characters, inverted characters, and misidentified characters, to investigate textual changes of Wen Zi.