An unknown Lost Books 古佚書, the Baoxun 保訓is the first publication among the so-called Tsinghua Bamboo Slips 淸華戰國簡. The contents and expressions of the Baoxun are similar with those of the so-called Shangshu kind 尙書類such as the transmitted Shangshu 尙書and Yizhoushu 逸周書. This simply leads many scholars to equate the text with the Shangshu kind. As for the composition date of the Baoxun, they have proposed various ideas ranging from the late Shang to the early Warring States period. However, these views seem to depend only on weak evidence such as the contemporaneity of some vocabularies and expressions with those of other texts, lacking the comprehensive analysis of various characteristics of the Baoxun. Accordingly, in the following three parts, I try to analyze the Baoxun in its philological significance.
First, analyzing the text structure of the Baoxun from the perspective of Narratology, I first find its correspondence with those of the Shangshu kind. Especially, the similar narrative pattern between the Baoxun and “Guming” chapter of the Shangshu shows their probable connections. Based on the information from the Baoxun text, I further propose that the prime messages in the text would be the “cultivation to be a ruler” and the “principle of zhong” 中道.
Second, analyzing the incidents and the key vocabularies in the Baoxun comparatively with the historical linguistics, I find that the base narratives in the text were from the popular stories of the Warring States period. Their core conceptual terms in turn shared with those of the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods, especially in their implicative contexts. The major expressions and the syntax of the Baoxun further show that the text was created in the Classical Chinese of the Warring States period under the environment of solid literacy.
Third, classifying the Baoxun and tracing its historical development, I finally situate the philological position of the text. Above all, I propose to classify the Baoxun not with the Shangshu kind, which must have been viewed from the Han perspective, but with the Shu kind書類under the very textual context of the
Warring States period when the text was buried. Studying the historical development of the so-called Shu kind texts, I further correspond the Baoxun with those texts. Especially, its structural similarity with the “Taizi Jin” 太子晉of the Yizhoushu suggests that the Baoxun was a new text of the Shu kind created around the mid Warring States period. This finally leads me to propose with some reservations that the author of the text might be an intellectual (or a group) who had enthusiasm in the “cultivation to be a ruler” and “zhong.”