Units, Assemblages, Compilations: The “Composite Nature of Early Chinese Texts” Reconsidered

The “composite nature of early Chinese texts” is a familiar way of thinking about textual formation in early China. It highlights how a text is comprised of small, movable textual units called “building blocks,” how an assemblage of building blocks stands either on its own or as part of a larger whole, and how a composite structure is the “norm” rather than exception in early Chinese writings. Since its inception, the “composite nature” has garnered wide recognition; at the same time, the notion exhibits some conceptual inadequacy, which has come to surface in its applications. This article joins a small but growing number of critiques to further reconsider the notion of the “composite nature” by examining the conditions that make compositeness the norm in early Chinese writings. It points to a basic order of textuality, a kind of architectonics, as I call it, that informs, regulates, and sustains the formation of composite texts. This architectonics, I argue, offers us a way to rethink what constitutes a “building block,” how building blocks actually build a larger, meaningful whole, and how that meaning can be more reliably discerned and interpreted.