In his posthumous magnum opus, Scott Davis demonstrates how the compilers of three of the Chinese classics—the Yijing (Book of Changes), Lunyu (Confucian Analects), and Zuo zhuan (Zuo Tradition)— strategically deployed certain motifs and images as structuring elements, thereby melding these texts into a semantic continuum.
The author’s innovative approach is informed by an anthropological understanding of the social structures and the material realities underlying Chinese intellectual culture during the first millennium BC. The book uncovers the deep underlying structures of traditional Chinese ways of thinking about the world, and it yields important original insights into text production in ancient China.