關於道的名、字、號：重讀《太一生水》

Rereading “Grand One Gives Birth to Water”

Abstract

LANGUAGE NOTE | Document text in Chinese; abstract also in English.

《太一生水》是1993年出土於湖北省荊門市郭店村一座戰國墓葬的竹簡文獻。本文爲之提出一個新的解釋，除了詳細檢討過去研究所提出的幾個主要觀點，更在新材料（包括新近發表的出土材料與過去沒有受到重視的傳世記載）的基礎上作出綜合論述：《太一生水》反映一場關於“道”與“一”的論辯。重構這場論辯，可以找回先秦思想史的一段被遺忘的故事，認識到《太一生水》與衆不同的獨特内涵，並且將之置入一個思想史的脈絡。

This study provides a new interpretation of “Grand One Gives Birth to Water” (“Taiyi shengshui” 太一生水), a manuscript discovered in the Warring States tomb in Guodian, Hubei Province, in 1993. Responding to earlier studies of this text and also taking into account relevant textual evidence that has only recently come to light, both among excavated texts and the received literary records, the present essay shows that “Grand One” is distinct from the Laozi and other materials that bear only a formal resemblance to it. In fact, “Grand One” was at the center of a debate about the Way and that other elusive notion in Early Chinese thought, “One.” The reconstruction of this debate restores a forgotten episode in ancient intellectual history and places “Grand One Gives Birth to Water” in a context vis-à-vis other textual sources.