The "Real" Life (and Death) of King Wen: Biography as Authentication in the "Yizhoushu"

Reverence for Western Zhou figures such as Kings Wen and Wu, the Duke of Zhou, Taigong Wang, Duke Zhai, etc., was a major driver of claims of authenticity in certain pre-modern Chinese textual traditions. To lionize a non-mythical figure, however – that is, a historical personage whom one envisions to have been basically mortal – is to situate a body of wisdom and traditions connected to them within the chronological frame of a single human life, an act with normative-epistemological implications. At the same time, depicting a moral paragon in text molds their memory to fit a chronotope shaped, if not defined altogether, by further examples of the type of text one builds. The values driving these two acts of framing – biographical and textual – do not necessarily coincide. Caught within the tensions between them, one may find valuable information about how early composers viewed the social goals of texts, the origins of theoretical knowledge, and the relative value of the different stages of human life. Collections, in which multiple levels of editorial motive can be distinguished, offer an especially rewarding backdrop for these productive conflicts. 

This presentation explores how the biography of a single such figure, King Wen of Zhou, anchored different visions of authenticity within the collection known as the Yizhoushu, or “Remnant Zhou Writings”. Situating certain chapters depicting King Wen within the broader corpus of early Chinese “deathbed texts,” it considers the teleology of the last testament as a claim to superior textual authenticity. It further examines how the early portion of the Yizhoushu “preface” deploys the memory of King Wen as a structural principle, arranging formally and conceptually diverse writings within a particular version of King Wen's biography to create a maximally inclusive model of King Wen's “real” textual legacy. Juxtaposing these editorial motives, the presentation reflects on how the Yizhoushu preface relates to the collection itself; how genre factors into claims of textual authenticity; and how history and aesthetics become entangled through claims about the “real” significance of individual human lives. 

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