Unearthed Documents and the Question of the Oral versus Written Nature of the Classic of Poetry

Prominent Western scholars have proposed that the Shijing was produced in a largely oral context and that writing played little role in the creation and subsequent transmission of the poems. Recent discoveries of several manuscripts of and about these poems call into question this view. I examine these recently published manuscripts as well as other types of paleographic evidence to show that writing played a crucial role in each of the three phases of the Classic of Poetry’s early history: its redaction during the Han dynasty, its transmission over the course of the Eastern Zhou period, and the original creation of at least some of the poems during the Western Zhou dynasty. I do not claim that oral influences played no role in the creation, transmission, and redaction of the text, but I do suggest that these influences have been overemphasized in recent Western scholarship.