Comparison And Study On The Three Versions Of Laozi: Guodian Text, Mawangdui Manuscript And Wangbi Text

The main focus of this paper is on the comparison of three different versions of Laozi refered to as Guodian Laozi, Mawangdui Laozi and the Wangbi Text which is regarded as the most representive edition of the modern versions, the received versions handed down from ancient times . The expected aim of the comparison is to explore the version transformation of Laozi and the changes of philosophical thougts during the versions being handed down.Before a concrete comparison, we should first come to the determination of the nature of Guodian Laozi , which discusses the question of whether Guodian Laozi can be defined as a complete edition of Laozi in its time like other versions can, in other words, of what is the relationship between the bamboo slips called Guodian Laozi and the classical literature commonly refered to as Laozi. There are three main scholarly debates on the question in which I consider the view of"A Selected Excerpta of a Complete Version of Laozi"by Professor Wangbo as the most persuasive point of view after studying and analyzing the arguments of all. This view does not take the three bundles of Guodian Laozi as a whole unit because they can be proved to have based on different original versions. Any of them or the gather of them will not present a complete version of Laozi that time, but only an excerpta which selected only parts of Laozi and reassembled the selected material. On the relationship of the three bundles of Guodian Laozi, I raised a supposition that Part C may not be a copy of Laozi, but notes written down of some Taoist's lecture while explaining Laozi, in which the Taoist may have put his own thoughts into the original text and lead to a transformation of the version. The evidences supporting this supposition include the different shapes of bamboo slips of different parts, the last half-part of Chapter 64 ( bases on Wangbi Laozi ) that appeared in both Part A and Part C, the coming up of the thought of anti-Confucianism etc. By the supposition we get to know better about the version transformation of an old literature in the period of Pre-Qin.A comparison on the structure of the three versions is carried out in the third chapter of the paper by two steps. First, speculate the part-dividing and the chapter- dividing of the original version Guodian Laozi is based on by the given incomplete text. Then compare the three versions on the part-dividing, the part-sequence (the sequence of the parts), the chapter-dividing and the chapter-sequence (the sequence of the chapters). The comparison leads to a conclusion that in Guodian Laozi there is only a rudiment of the part-dividing of"Tao"and"Te"in later times and a few imprecisely divided paragraghs without a clear will of dividing the whole text into parts and chapters. Then in Han Dynasty a kind of version that completely abandoned the imprecise dividing of paragraghs, but clarifyed the two-part-dividing came up. Mawangdui Laozi B belongs to this kind of versions. But later during the finalize of the version, redactors made a legible dividing of 81 chapters which can be represented by Wangbi Laozi. To sum up, the version transformation have come through a process of"a rudiment of two-part-dividing→a clear dividing of two parts"on side of part-dividing and a process of"an imprecise dividing of paragraghs→non-chapter-dividing→a clear dividing of 81 chapters"on side of chapter-dividing.Chapter 4 focuses on comparisons of the lexical variants of the three versions. After a general introduction of the causes and categories of lexical variants I will analyse Chapter 41 ( according to Wangbi Laozi ) in details as an example and then educe a conclusion of the transformation of the three versions.