Page:Eminent Chinese Of The Ch’ing Period - Hummel - 1943 - Vol. 2.pdf/374

 It is a remarkable fact that Tai Chên made the same discovery in the summer of 1764 when he was pondering over the same seven paragraphs in chüan seven which had led Ch'üan Tsu-wang to make his discovery some fourteen years earlier. Half a century before the labors of Ch'üan, Hu Wei had found these paragraphs perplexing, but had "solved" his difficulties by transposing two words in one paragraph and by proposing a new punctuation in another. This solution did not satisfy either Ch'üan or Tai; both solved the problem by recognizing that the first parargaph belonged properly to the earlier Book (ching) and that the next six paragraphs should be restored to the Commentary (chu). By extending this principle to the entire text, Ch'üan and Tai, quite independently of each other, and Chao working on the suggestion of Ch'üan, all succeeded in giving a new order to hundreds of confused paragraphs of the Shui-ching chu.

Tai wrote of this experience in a rather long colophon to his newly rearranged text, of the Shui-ching chu. This colophon by Tai, the above-mentioned letter by Ch'üan, and Chao's bibliographical note on Ch'üan, afford a very interesting instance of independent though convergent discovery in the intellectual history of China. The fact that all three scholars began their work from the same seven perplexing paragraphs and the same unsatisfactory interpretations by Hu Wei, exemplifies admirably the universal law which underlies all such phenomena of independent but converging discoveries and inventions. This law may be stated as follows: Given a common cultural foundation, similarly trained minds working on similar problems can often achieve, at approximately the same time, similar or even identical inventions or discoveries. The history of science and the records of the patent-offices of all countries are full of such examples of almost simultaneous, parallel inventions and discoveries. Miss Dorothy Thomas, in her article, "Are Inventions Inevitable?" (Political Science Quarterly, Vol. XXXVII, i), lists 148 inventions and discoveries made independently by two or more persons. (See also William Fielding Ogburn's Social Change, Part II, Chapter 5.)

Tuan Yü-ts'ai was entirely correct and fair in recognizing the work of Chao I-ch'ing and Tai Chên on the Shui-ching chu as an instance of independent convergence in scholarly research. Using the standard editions of the sixteenth century, building on the historical-geographical scholarship of the seventeenth, and puzzling over the same intellectual perplexities inherited from s preceding age, Ch'üan Tsu-wang, Chao I-ch'ing and Tai Chên, within the space of two decades (1751–1772), naturally and almost inevitably arrived at more or less similar conclusions on many hundreds of problems—problems which involved not only the separation of confused texts belonging to two works of different age and authorship, but also of other and minor forms of textual emendation, reconstruction and transposition.

A fragment illustrating Tai Chên's method of textual restoration and emendation—worked out by him in 1765, and copied by an unknown admirer into a 1753 printed edition of the Shui-ching chu—has come to light in the Chinese Library of Harvard University. It shows clearly what form Tai Chên's text had at the time he first discovered the criteria which eventually guided him in his disentanglement of the entire text. Moreover, it confirms, many statements in Tuan Yü-ts'ai's biography of Tai which relate to Tai's text of 1765.