Presenter:
The first volume of the Tsinghua University Warring States bamboo-strip manuscripts contains a text with passages that match medieval quotations of a text referred to as Cheng wu程寤, or Awakening at Cheng, which in turn is said to be a lost chapter of the Yi Zhou shu逸周書, or Leftover Zhou Documents. The passages concern one of Chinese literature’s earliest interpretations of a dream, and were quoted in medieval encyclopedias in their sections on dreams. This presentation will discuss the significance of this discovery both for Chinese textual history and also for the early development of dream interpretation in China.