Mediation of Legitimacy in Early China

Scholarship on early China has traditionally focused on a core group of canonical texts. However, understudied sources have the potential to shift perspectives on fundamental aspects of Chinese intellectual, religious, and political history. Yegor Grebnev examines crucial noncanonical texts preserved in the Yi Zhou shu (Neglected Zhou Scriptures) and the Grand Duke traditions, which represent scriptural traditions influential during the Warring States period but sidelined in later history. He develops an innovative framework for the study and interpretation of these texts, focusing on their role in the mediation of royal legitimacy and their formative impact on early Daoism.
Grebnev demonstrates the centrality of the Yi Zhou shu in Chinese intellectual history by highlighting its simultaneous connections to canonical traditions and esoteric Daoism. He demonstrates that the Daoist rituals of textual transmission embedded in the Grand Duke traditions bear an imprint of the courtly environment of the Warring States period, where early Daoists strove for prestige and power, offering legitimacy through texts ascribed to the mythical sage rulers. These rituals appear to have emerged at the same period as the core Daoist philosophical texts and not several centuries later as conventionally believed, which calls for a reassessment of the history of Daoism’s interrelated religious and philosophical strands. Offering a far-reaching reconsideration of early Chinese intellectual and religious history, Mediation of Legitimacy in Early China sheds new light on the foundations of the Chinese textual tradition.
Mediation of Legitimacy in Early China brings together two too often-overlooked sources to make fresh observations concerning the structure of early Chinese texts and what this structure shows about the process of their composition. It has far-reaching implications for understanding all aspects of the early Chinese literary tradition.
Edward L. Shaughnessy, author of Unearthing the Changes: Recently Discovered Manuscripts of the Yi Jing (I Ching) and Related Texts
Hidden in plain sight in the Yi Zhou shu, Yegor Grebnev has discovered the missing link between “religious” and “philosophical” Taoism. His elegant and philologically rigorous demonstration that the two are fundamentally of one piece will necessitate the rewriting of current textbook accounts of Chinese intellectual history.
Lothar von Falkenhausen, author of Chinese Society in the Age of Confucius (1000-250 BC): The Archaeological Evidence
Grebnev’s masterful study begins with a formalistic analysis of Yi Zhou shu and ends with a new history of religious Daoism and a new model for thinking about early Chinese philosophy. The very definition of groundbreaking, it is certain to reverberate in the work of early China scholars for decades.
Stephen Durrant, professor emeritus, University of Oregon