Ritual, Text, and the Formation of the Canon: Historical Transitions of Wen in Early China

The word wen X, in Xu Shen's t'tE(c. 55-c. 149) Shaowen jiezi StSF deElned as criss-cross pattern (cuohua Z),1 has been ruminatec3 upon numerous times during the last two millennia, and it is still under sophisticated deliberation wherever students of traditional Chinese culture and literature meet. This phenomenon is in itself remarkable, revealing the genuine depth of a word that in its significance is rivalled by only a few others, like dao t or qi A. Such profound words, in this respect comparable to logos or pneuma in the West, embody almost universal significance through their originally most concrete meanings, relating physical matter, human activity, and cosmological order to one another. For wen, we hear of the different patterns of Heaven, Earth, and Man, and it is wen that mediates between these three, at least in analogical thinking.2 But at the same time, even a word like wen, together with whatever meaning can be proposed for it, is not located beyond the realms of general cultural history; in its usage, it is a genuinely historical phenomenon, changing with times and therefore remaining continuously meaningful in subsequent ages and to different social orders. Wen