Introduction
The wealth of manuscripts brought to light over the last few decades by archaeologists and tomb robbers alike has encouraged scholars fundamentally to rethink the production, circulation, and reception of texts in ancient China. In the light of materially attested early writings, issues such as variation, transmission, and textual identity have come to the fore.Footnote 1 Ancient writings have been described as “composite texts” assembled from shorter, mobile units rather than as extended unitary compositions, and their collage-like character has been stressed.Footnote 2 So has the supposed fluidity of composite texts, though perhaps too much or for the wrong reasons, as the material evidence increasingly suggests.Footnote 3 The role of orality in textual transmission, as opposed to that of writing, has turned into a matter of debate, in particular the case of the Odes (Shi 詩).Footnote 4 Performance has likewise been proposed as a key to interpretation, for the Odes, but also for more bookish environments in the Western Han.Footnote 5
From a text-critical perspective, oral transmission has been invoked to account for textual variation in prose writings.Footnote 6 The role of writing has been characterized as subservient to direct communication: “Teaching and transmission were largely oral, with most manuscripts prepared as aides to memory [sic], much like lecture notes today.”Footnote 7 Broader claims have also been put forward by Dirk Meyer to the effect that Warring States “manuscripts reflect merely local instances of realising … what may have been predominantly oral texts,” which had “nothing in common with the consciously edited recensions of imperial times.”Footnote 8 Meyer has posited a “gradually developing” Warring States “manuscript culture in which predominantly oral texts were occasionally written down,”Footnote 9 which may have engendered a “shift in thought.”Footnote 10 Before this purported shift was triggered by “the widespread use of lightweight stationery,” “texts, especially those that can be assigned philosophical purposes, were largely part of a wider oral performance.”Footnote 11 Somewhat contradictorily, Meyer has claimed elsewhere that the “contemporaneous” and “artless” language of the “philosophical texts”—as opposed to the “archaic” idiom of the Odes—was less suited to being orally passed on, so that their “transmission … was predominantly accomplished on a written basis.”Footnote 12
Aside from the ideological overtones—recently explored by Haun Saussy in his study of the genealogy of “oral literature”Footnote 13—which the concept of orality as a critical category opposing oral and literate minds has carried from its inception, it is also a slippery term prone to be invoked “as a kind of wildcard to play in default of any other explanation.”Footnote 14 Albert Lord observed that “Oralitas, sicut Gallia, est omnis divisa in partes tres,” distinguishing between a “philosophical” school of orality, which concerns itself with the respective cognitive and cultural ramifications of social life with and without writing; a school which considers “oral” anything communicated in spoken utterances; and a third, “philological” one, focusing on the linguistic and literary features specific to orally performed poetry, its composition and transmission.Footnote 15 When marshaling the concept of “orality” for analytic purposes, it would seem incumbent upon us to clarify what kind of problematic we are addressing, and whether we do so from a philological, literalist, or philosophical perspective.
More to the point, faithful long-term oral transmission of texts requires stabilizing mechanisms, linguistic as well as social ones. Texts do not survive unchanged unless measures are taken to protect their integrity. Even linguistic patterns conducive to memorization such as rhyme, meter, and formulaic language, unless otherwise controlled, tend to give rise to specific kinds of variation.Footnote 16 In this respect, debates about the textual genesis of the Synoptic Gospels, with their broad similarities accompanied by frequent and manifold variation, offer an illuminating point of comparison. As Eric Eve concludes, “if oral material is to be invoked to account for either detailed similarities or detailed differences in wording between synoptic parallels, it must be oral material that is stable enough to influence an Evangelist's choice of wording.”Footnote 17 We may assume analogous principles and mechanisms to be at work in ancient Chinese texts. Anyone positing influence of orally transmitted texts on the level of wording should be prepared to defend, as a corollary, that we are encountering in such instances reflections of an “oral tradition”—of “something” being “passed on in reasonably stable form through a number of people well beyond its point of origin,”Footnote 18 more precisely, of “a particular kind of oral tradition”: one “that is relatively stable not only at the level of gist but that of wording.”Footnote 19 Which, in turn, requires the existence of said stabilizing linguistic features and/or social mechanisms. The latter in particular are a function of cultural validation, of a decision by someone to invest effort into the faithful preservation of a certain text. Pace claims to the contrary, relatively loosely structured texts like “Masters” prose would not lend themselves well to oral transmission, though some parts of them may do. Oral transmission of entire texts regardless of their structure is, of course, possible; historically, it is a common enough phenomenon in China and beyond. But it requires a special effort. Like the question of these texts’ cultural appreciation, this one as well will need to be addressed on a case-by-case basis.
Instead of entering the fray to attack the twin problem of orality and performance head-on, I will suggest an alternative route, addressing the more general issue of textual production, exemplified by an in-depth study of a brief passage from the Huainanzi 淮南子. Whether “texts were more likely to be memorized than owned in manuscript form” is an open question, though the current evidence suggests that different modes of manuscript production served distinct purposes in different contexts, among them also the preservation of carefully edited versions of texts.Footnote 20 Regardless of any uncertainties on this point it is, however, clear that both textual production and reception—insofar as the latter involves genuine understanding—are dependent on the resources of memory. Texts become comprehensible on a basic literal level—and interpretable along more subtle stylistic, intellectual, or cultural dimensions—only if a recipient is able to call up linguistic elements of different shapes and sizes stored in memory.Footnote 21 Conversely, textual production requires such elements to rise to the level of consciousness in the course of composition. By default, originators of texts have to be aware of them to include them. And this pertains equally to different modes of production and reception: on the production side, in-performance extemporization—the main focus of oral theory—as well as typing in front of a computer screen; listening as well as silent reading, on the reception side. There are numerous complications to this basic conception, mainly to do with differentials regarding available time, limitations of short-term memory, reliability and types of communication channels, access to externally stored information, and the chance to revise linguistic output.Footnote 22 But despite all this, the basic outline holds, whatever may be the type or material carrier of linguistic communication in any particular case.
To explore what the concept of memory could offer to textual analysis, especially of the production side, the following will explore the nexus of intertextuality surrounding a passage in the Huainanzi chapter “An Overview of the Military” (Bing lüe 兵略)—a Western Han summa of pre-imperial military thought “highly derivative of earlier military literature” yet also “a unique synthesis of these materials”Footnote 23—which suggests a mode of composition based not so much on exercising mnemonically trained textual memory but relying, instead, on the aptness of phrases and linguistic patterns to spring to mind when cued by the conventions of particular discourses.
A notion relevant to such concerns has been explored by Boris Gasparov in connection with terms, phrases, and patterns he calls “communicative fragments.” These can assume various linguistic forms;Footnote 24 unlike quotations, they tend to be brief due to memory constraints,Footnote 25 and they always come with what Gasparov calls “texture”:Footnote 26 They conjure up “comprehensive scenarios” and “speech situations,”Footnote 27 consist of “remembered speech material,”Footnote 28 are “communicatively charged,”Footnote 29 and arise from “quotidian situations of language use” which are “casual, transient, and as such, not memorable.”Footnote 30 While these patterns emerge from and are reinforced by everyday linguistic usage, Gasparov traces their influence in literary works as well, and it appears sensible to assume that his concept of conventionalized communicative patterns with “texture” in the sense of strong but tacit contextual associations can also be applied to literary communication.
The Huainanzi passage to be discussed below exhibits elements and patterns akin to Gasparov's communicative fragments, use of which is encouraged by themes and topics which conjure up a certain discursive context, so much so, perhaps, that “context” in general may “be defined in linguistic terms proper as a plurality of compact, observable expressions whose repertory constitutes a legitimate component of the speaker's knowledge of a language.”Footnote 31 The composition of the passage in question, it would seem, results from a particular manner in which the author drew on the resources of memory: not by activating a mnemonically enhanced verbal storage offering up sustained, longer sequences of text, but rather through awareness of communicative fragments appropriate to the thematic context and rhetorical purpose at hand. This, at least, is what the study of a particular type of intertextual relationship—verbal parallels—suggests.
Intertextuality is a term widely and imaginatively applied in literary criticism.Footnote 32 But while the unrestricted concept of intertextuality transports us to the wilder and more exciting shores of the theoretical imagination, it seems to be of little analytical value.Footnote 33 Instead, the present article will adopt a more conservative, “tamed and domesticated”Footnote 34 notion of intertextuality by focusing on close verbal parallels. This limitation is partly owed to practical constraints and accompanied by a full acknowledgment that it is not without its “ideological implications” to decide on any “stopping place” along the potentially infinitely proliferating chains of associations a text might touch off in different readers.Footnote 35 The justification for this self-imposed restriction is that it seems to serve best the immediate purposes of this article which, in accordance with a useful functional typology of parallels in commentaries, might be conceived along such lines as “comprehending the text,” “establishing register within the text,” “contextualizing the text,” “identifying intertexts / allusions,” and “identifying topoi.”Footnote 36
A modern reader interested in the intertextuality of ancient Chinese writings relies perforce on the textual memory of Chinese scholars of the distant and more recent past, at least insofar as reflections of it have been externally preserved in the form of notes and commentaries. These scholarly monuments, which depend on the ability of the human mind to identify and recall multifarious linguistic correspondences, are now complemented by databases such as Donald Sturgeon's immensely useful, publicly accessible Chinese Text Project, thanks to which even the most obscure and arbitrary intertextual connections are at our fingertips.Footnote 37 More systematic intertextual inquiries will no doubt have to rely on digital approaches to develop comprehensive methods of “distant reading.” Fields such as Latin literature are already producing impressive amounts of scholarship based on large-scale quantitative analyses of intertextuality across substantial corpora, whereas such methodologies are, at the time of writing, comparatively less common in classical sinology.Footnote 38 The present article, however, still adheres to the familiar paradigm of close reading, but does so in full acknowledgment of the fact that this can only be a stepping stone on the way to developing more comprehensive and systematic methods in the future in which automated analysis will play a greater part.
A final note of caution seems in place. Even carefully controlled psychological experiments will not always yield clear and uncontested results about mental faculties and the exact manner in which they are exercised under specific conditions. Operating at a much lower level of precision and being, for the available data, at the mercy of uncontrollable, frequently unknowable long-term transmission processes, the analysis of ancient texts as traces of cognitive activity severed from their original context will by necessity remain tentative, if not tenuous. Penetrating and methodologically sophisticated work is possible but depends on propitious circumstances.Footnote 39
Huainanzi on the Three Foundations of the Military
The following Huainanzi passage, presented in Andrew Meyer's translation, is at the heart of a tangle of multifarious intertextual relationships resulting, I would argue, from various memory effects. For a contemporary reader trying to better understand the subtleties of quotation and allusion, memory and orality, the value of the passage lies in its high density of such phenomena.
Below follows a detailed, but by no means exhaustive—in fact, by necessity incomplete—discussion of intertextual phenomena. Among other things, the near-verbatim recurrence of this passage in the Wenzi 文子 will be ignored, as any analysis of this parallel would only make sense within a broader investigation into the triangular relationship between Huainanzi, the received Wenzi, and the excavated manuscript of the Wenzi, all of which have been the subject of intense scholarly debate.Footnote 43
Imaginary Battle Scenes
In one out of a group of interview scenes in which several followers of Confucius one by one introduce their aspirations to the Master or a noble, Zigong 子貢, of famed diplomatic talent, imagines himself at the center of a military standoff, which he deftly diffuses through his de-escalating rhetoric.Footnote 44
One recognizes immediately the similarity with the Huainanzi’s description of a similar situation (HNZ 15/20–22): both are tetrasyllabic; both end in the same rhymes—in identical words, in fact; both depict, with minor variations, the confrontation between enemy armies. The verses resemble each other so closely, they might be understood as variants of the same lines, just as the differing ways of reciting a ballad which has changed during its transmission are usually still taken to be versions of the same poem. In the present case, the overlap only covers two lines, though, which would make it difficult to argue that these are partial quotations from a single longer poem.
One notices, furthermore, that Huainanzi has other tetrasyllabic lines describing battle situations ending in *-aŋ or fairly close rhymes in back vowels with a nasal final (HNZ 15/13–14; 17, 19; 31–32; 34–35). We encounter some of the same phrases and lexical items as in Zigong's speech (HNZ 15/29: bai ren 白刃; 30: jie 接), though these correspondences are distributed across different units of the tripartite disquisition on the “optimal,” “mediocre,” and “worst” ways of deploying the military (HNZ 15/14, 23, 36: yong bing zhi shang / ci / xia 用兵之上 / 次 / 下). Taken on their own, the tetrasyllabic lines in Huainanzi represent consecutive stages of a battle. Initially, the opposing armies take their position, awaiting the command to strike. Then, the actual battle having been skipped, we are apprised of the gruesome aftermath—the blood shed, the soldiers maimed or slaughtered, corpses exposed to the elements. This order mimics the chronological unfolding of the event; it partially enacts the cognitive scheme of a battle. It also reflects the logic of the argument: The optimal way to deploy the military is to end a confrontation victoriously before the fighting starts. The worst, to let it run its course, any victory inevitably being overshadowed by bloodshed and death. This piece of strategic advice varies a principle which in its canonical form in the Sunzi 孫子 states:
百戰百勝，非善之善者也；不戰而屈人之兵，善之善者也。
It is not the most skillful of skills to fight hundred battles and win one hundred times. The most skillful of skills is to stunt the others’ troops without fighting battles.Footnote 46
In different guises, we will encounter this principle again as we make our way through the intertextual connections of the Huainanzi passage; it forms a recurrent theme suffusing the strands of discourse connected to Huainanzi by multiple textual correspondences. This is also not the only place in the Huainanzi passage which resonates with echoes of the Sunzi.Footnote 47
Further to the question at hand, though, we might wonder whether what we are observing here is a single text—a battle poem in tetrasyllabic lines—circulating in variant versions and split up in Huainanzi so as to be divided across different parts of an extended argument on strategy. While this would be a highly speculative reading of the evidence, the correspondences with Zigong's speech are substantial and salient. In conjunction with other, similar evidence discussed below, they suggest a mixed type of intertextuality, which is partly authorial and intentional but, at the same time, also partly systemic and, at most, semi-deliberate. On such an understanding, the texts under investigation “combine the purposeful and the serendipitous, the structural and the incidental.”Footnote 48 To approach these phenomena by searching for signs of verbatim memorization and reproduction alone would be mistaken, and so perhaps would be the search for precursor texts in each instance. But there are thematically related texts with shared elements, which suggests that there existed a consistent set of expressions—communicative fragments, in Gasparov's terminology—associated with these discourses.
Take the following self-appraisal by a certain Zhuji Ying 諸稽郢, officer at the court of King Goujian 勾踐 of Yue 越 (r. 496–465 b.c.e.) who, in this narrative, joins a long line of other officials introducing to the king their respective “business.”
望敵設陣，飛矢揚兵 [*praŋ]，履腹涉屍，血流滂滂 [*phâŋ] ，貪進不退；二師相當 [*tâŋ] ，破敵攻眾 [*tuŋh] ，威凌百邦 [*prôŋ] ：臣之事也。
Watching out for the enemy and setting up the battle lines, letting arrows fly and raising weapons, treading on bellies, wading through corpses and, while blood surges like a flood, to still be eager to advance without turning back; when the two armies confront each other to destroy the enemy, attacking his hosts, and thus to bear down on the hundred states with awesomeness: That is Your subject's business.Footnote 49
Lexical items common to battle descriptions which occur in Huainanzi make an appearance here as well: “weapons” (bing 兵), “battle lines” (zhen 陣), also “flying arrows” (fei shi 飛矢; cf. HNZ 15/30: liu shi 流矢). The verb wang 望 occurs, albeit in a slightly different meaning, and again the two sides are “confronting each other” (xiang dang 相當). As in Huainanzi and Shuoyuan, rhymes in *-aŋ or nasal finals preceded by other back vowels predominate. So does the tetrasyllabic meter.
But, as before, the resemblances are fuzzy. The shared vocabulary and common patterns—rhyme and meter—are not traces of a faithful, if partial, reproduction of the same text. Instead, a set of linguistic elements are recombined to produce utterances that fit a particular kind of discourse, a remarkably specific one, in fact. All three examples include descriptions of hypothetical battlefield situations which, in two instances, are embedded in a fictional declaration in which the speaker vaunts his own abilities.
We may also consider the following brief record, again involving a hypothetical battlefield situation and tetrasyllables in *-aŋ:
宋石，魏將也。衛君，荊將也。兩國搆難，二子皆將。宋石遺衛君書曰：「二軍相當 [*tâŋ] ，兩旗相望 [*maŋᴬ] ，唯毋一戰 [*tans] ，戰必不兩存 [*dzə̂n] 。此乃兩主之事也，與子無有私怨，善者相避也。」
Song Shi was a general of Wei, the Lord of Weih a general of Jing (Chu). When the two states were locked into a conflict, both gentlemen were in command. Song Shi sent the Lord of Weih a letter, saying: “When the two armies are confronting each other and the banners of the two [sides] are facing each other, we should not even fight once. If we do, we will not both survive. This is a matter for our two rulers; I bear no personal grudge against you. Good men will stay out of each other's way.”Footnote 50
Relating this episode to matches in Huainanzi and Zigong's speech does not exhaust the network of intertextual connections; we may note in passing, though will not further address, the fact that the phrase “when the two states were locked in a conflict” (liang guo gou nan 兩國搆 / 構難) is only attested in one other text—a Han shi waizhuan version of Zigong's speech, which above is quoted from Shuoyuan.Footnote 51 Moreover, xiang dang 相當 is frequently attested elsewhere in military contexts, sometimes in combination with xiang wang 相望. In these cases it is not exclusively, but predominantly used in tetrasyllabic lines. At one point, we even find the Yellow Emperor's sage adviser Qibo 歧伯 explaining that medical treatment by acupuncture requires time and patience, like disciplining troops. Qibo sets the scene for his elaborate comparison in a by now familiar way: “So it takes more than a single day of strategic planning for two armies to confront each other, their banners facing each other, glistening blades displayed across the wilderness” (故兩軍相當，旗幟相望，白刃陳於中野者，此非一日之謀也。).Footnote 52
This tangle of correspondences, echoes, and resemblances defies definitive contextualization. Unless we take literally the narrative frames in which Zigong and Zhuji Ying make their pronouncements, it is difficult to conjure a social setting in which it would be advantageous to have a knack for composing tetrasyllabic lines on hypothetical battles with frequent rhymes in *-aŋ. But while this case is odd, it is not unique. Recently, David Schaberg has drawn attention to a similar phenomenon. The kind of verse he terms “Laozi-style tetrasyllables,” which is scattered across the ancient literature, is also dominated by nasal rhymes as well as a particular vocabulary. In a repetitive and somewhat tedious way it addresses narrow thematic concerns related to the mind and self-cultivation.Footnote 53
In this case, as well as in that of the discourse repertoire of battlefield description, certain thematic prompts and perhaps specific settings—be they actual or fictional—elicit converging linguistic choices with regard to diction, rhythmic organization, and euphonic patterning. And while some such choices combine to produce a group of almost identical verses, as happens in a few lines in Huainanzi, Shuoyuan and elsewhere, other texts loosely replicate a set of interrelated conventions without substantive overlaps, yielding a less easily definable group of textual matches which resemble, in some respects, the similarities of vocabulary, diction, and literary form obtaining between the First Emperor's stele inscriptions.Footnote 54 What is common to all of these examples is a certain set of features shared across texts which also address similar themes. As a recent study of the Huainanzi’s intertextuality suggests, these observations very likely hold for the entire “Overview of the Military.”Footnote 55
Blood and Guts
If we inspect our Huainanzi passage further in light of Zhuji Ying's speech, more similarities become apparent. Zhuji Ying's “treading on bellies and wading through corpses, while blood surges like a flood” (lü fu she shi, xue liu pang pang 履腹涉屍，血流滂滂) calls to mind the following lines from Huainanzi:
Within the received corpus, Zhuji Ying's phrasing is unique,Footnote 56 but the underlying imagery clearly is not. It is reprised elsewhere with reference to different body parts. The bodyguard of a Jin 晉 general explains somewhat idiosyncratically, and in another self-appraisal: “Getting off the chariot and unsheathing the sword (?), wading through blood and stepping on livers, that is naturally my business!” (下車免劍，涉血履肝者，固吾事也).Footnote 57 King Goujian supposedly explained once about the fighting spirit he nurtured in his men that “if knights and grandees trampled on livers and lungs and died the same day” (士大夫履肝肺，同日而死), that was something he wished for.Footnote 58
Closer to the Huainanzi passage in imagery and phrasing, however, is a discussion of Marquis Wen 文 of Wei's 魏 “skill at using troops” (shan yong bing 善用兵), which is dramatically set off against the dire results of incompetent leadership.
野人之用兵也，鼓聲則似雷，號呼則動地，塵氣充天，流矢如雨，扶傷輿死，履腸涉血，無罪之民其死者量於澤矣。
When a crude man uses troops, the war drums sound like thunder, his commands and shouts shake the earth, clouds of dust fill the sky, arrows fall like rain, the wounded must be carried and the dead transported in carts, treading on guts and wading through blood, and so many innocent people die that they would fill a plain.Footnote 59
Familiar images are marshaled to paint the horrors of war in an indictment of strategic ineptness—the flying arrows as well as the blood and guts covering the battlefield so densely the soldiers cannot help but tread on them, and even the fairly rare phrase about the removal of the dead and wounded, which we will encounter again below.Footnote 60 While these phrases and images are yet again joined together in the context of a particular strategic argument, intertextual correspondences are patchy and fuzzy, consisting in similarities of themes and phraseology rather than the wholesale repetition of preformed textual sequences.
Naturally, flowing blood is a common image in war discourse, and Zhuji Ying uses it as well, though here too he picks a rare turn of phrase. The Huainanzi’s wording, by contrast, is repeatedly attested and thus rather conventional. More surprising is perhaps that, in the received corpus, the phrase “blood flows for a hundred li” frequently collocates with expressions which resemble, though do not match precisely, Huainanzi’s “exposed corpses fill the field,” thus forming a two-sentence unit which can be regarded as a semantic and positional variant of the Huainanzi lines in question.
Staying close to our Huainanzi passage, another Huainanzi chapter, “The Basic Warp,” describes the lawlessness of the “later ages” as opposed to the positively idyllic “ancient times,” claiming that during the latter-day era of decline “[l]arge countries set off to attack [others]” and in the end “carried off their weighty treasures, [so that] streams of blood flowed for a thousand li, and sun-bleached skeletons choked the wild lands” (大國出攻 … 遷人之重寶，血流千里，暴骸滿野).Footnote 61 This close correspondence may hint at a general stylistic coherence across different parts of the same work, for the phrasing in these two Huainanzi passages contrasts with the following.
In Zhanguo ce 戰國策, the king of Qin evokes the prowess of the Zhou king in a similar but differently worded expression: “When the Son of Heaven flies into a rage, prostrate corpses will number in the millions, and blood will flow for a thousand li” (天子之怒，伏尸百萬，流血千里).Footnote 62 Here, the “exposed” or “sun-bleached skeletons” (pu hai 暴骸) have become “prostrate corpses.” But though they conjure up a less vivid image, semantically the king's words do not differ much from Huainanzi. In the Han shu, we encounter a similar depiction of battle deaths: “Prone corpses filled the wilderness, and blood flowed for a thousand li” (僵尸滿野，流血千里).Footnote 63 This comes as part of a discussion between Liu An 劉安 (179?–122 b.c.e.), titular king of Huainan 淮南, and his close adviser Wu Pi 伍被 on whether or not to rebel against the Han court. Tantalizingly, Wu, who uses the image to characterize the campaigns of the Qin general Meng Tian 蒙恬, is listed by Gao You as one of the scholars with whom Liu An composed Huainanzi.Footnote 64 Lastly, in Heguanzi 鶡冠子, the general Pang Huan 龐煥 (also: Xuan 煖; c. 295–c. 240 b.c.e.) is asked by King Wuling 武靈 of Zhao 趙 (r. 325–299 b.c.e.) to elucidate the saying that “It is not the most skillful of skills to fight hundred battles and win. The most skillful of skills is not to fight battles and win” (百戰而勝，非善之善者也，不戰而勝，善之善者也).Footnote 65 Pang Xuan states, as part of his answer: “Nowadays, prone corpses sometimes number in the millions, blood flows for a thousand li, but victory is not yet determined. And even if it were over, it would not be worth it (?)” (今或僵尸百萬，流血千里，而勝未決也，以為功計之，每已不若。).Footnote 66 As will be remembered, Pang Xuan repeats here verbatim a principle which is set out in its classic form in Sunzi but which, differently phrased, also structures the entire Huainanzi passage under discussion.
The semantic content of the juxtaposition of dead bodies and flowing blood remains stable across texts, but the phrasing in which these combined images are presented varies between two groups of writings—the two Huainanzi chapters on the one hand and Zhanguo ce, Han shu, and Heguanzi on the other. Apparently, there was no idiomatic or canonical way of expressing this conventional combination of images at the outset. If we ignore the various imponderables involved and tentatively arrange the texts in a plausible chronological order, we arrive at Zhanguo ce as the earliest one, followed by Huainanzi and Han shu, while Heguanzi is difficult to place but could be older than Huainanzi. The phrasing in Huainanzi would then perhaps reflect a stylistic idiosyncrasy; one may even speculate whether it could be attributed to the book's patron and main editor, Liu An.
But speculation aside, what the group of recurring images as a whole suggests is a stylistic convention rather than a quotation, since there is no indication that readers are supposed to link the images to any particular authority, textual or otherwise. The recurring uses suggest a topos, one which is fairly narrowly circumscribed but not as rigidly entrenched as an idiom, which would tolerate variation only for ironic or other subversive purposes. This topos is, furthermore, embedded in a relatively stable manner into a specific discourse on warfare. It would be intriguing to know whether these contextual links were reinforced through reading and writing—that is, whether they were predominantly a phenomenon of literary communication—or whether they circulated in speech—oratory or conversation—or both. But this question seems impossible to decide. What is clear, however, is that the topos must have formed part of the memory resources available to those who composed these texts and their intended audience, regardless of possible channels of communication or transmission.
Exhortations to Unity
Emphasizing the harmonious unity between rulers and ministers, the people and their superiors, our Huainanzi passage explains about the “highest use of the military”:
The first two sentences are thrice repeated verbatim in two different Xunzi chapters; a variant version appears in a fourth one. All of these occurrences contribute to discussions about military strength, though from opposing perspectives. Like Huainanzi, two of the Xunzi passages promise domination over other states to the ruler who unites his ministers and his people behind himself. Two others warn against attacking a state which achieves such unity, for it will be invincible.
Holding out the promise of domination over others, the Xunzi chapter “Strengthening the State” explains that the “enlightened ruler” (ming zhu 明主) follows up success with generous rewards for subjects on all rungs of society.
是以為善者勸，為不善者沮，上下一心，三軍同力，是以百事成，而功名大也。
Thus, those who did good were encouraged, and those who did what was not good were obstructed. Superiors and subordinates shared one heart, and the three armies merged their strengths. Thus, the hundred tasks were successfully completed, and people's accomplishments and fame were great.Footnote 67
By contrast, the Xunzi chapter “Discussing Military Matters,” employing slightly different phrasing, argues that “when a [humane] person is in charge of those below, the hundred generals share one heart, and the three armies merge their strengths” (仁人上下，百將一心，三軍同力), making all members of society care for and protect each other like kin, so that “[t]rying to deceive such a person and ambush him will have the same result as if one first alerted him and then attacked him” (詐而襲之，與先驚而後擊之，一也。).Footnote 68 In a similar vein, the Xunzi chapter “Enriching the State” warns against attacks on a “person of [humanity]” (仁人) who “will open up farmland, fill up his granaries and make ready supplies. Then those above and those below will be of one mind, and the three armies will be united in strength” (將闢田野，實倉廩，便備用，上下一心，三軍同力。).Footnote 69 Taking the opposite perspective again, the same chapter advertises unity as a source of strength and preeminence:
必將脩禮以齊朝，正法以齊官，平政以齊民；然後節奏齊於朝，百事齊於官，眾庶齊於下。如是，則近者競親，遠方致願，上下一心，三軍同力，名聲足以暴炙之，威強足以捶笞之，拱揖指揮，而強暴之國莫不趨使。
Instead, he will surely cultivate ritual in order to set straight his court. He will rectify his models for conduct in order to set straight his officials. He will make his government evenhanded in order to set straight the common people. Only then will the regulations be set straight in his court, the hundred tasks set straight among his officials, and the masses set straight below. When the situation is like this, then those close by will vie to draw near to him, and those far away will send notice of their wish to submit to him. Those above and those below will share one heart, and the three armies will merge their strengths. His reputation will be enough to blaze over other states, and his authority and strength will be enough to thrash them. He need merely stand with hands clasped together and give directions, and then none of the strong and violence states will fail to hurry in doing his bidding.Footnote 70
The frequency with which the same two phrases are repeated together suggests that they form a recognizable unit, a set expression of sorts. This perception already existed in the Han, as an episode in Liu Xiang's 劉向 (79–8 b.c.e.) Xin xu 新序 shows. When both the king of Chu and his ministers sincerely blame themselves for attracting an attack by the state of Jin, the “people of Jin” (Jin ren 晉人) realize that a state with elites so united in their desire to take on responsibility for its fate is insuperable:
君臣爭以過為在己，且君下其臣猶如此，所謂上下一心，三軍同力，未可攻也。
When ruler and minister contest to find fault with themselves and, moreover, the ruler even humbles himself like this to his ministers, this is a case of what is called “Those above and those below are of the same heart, and the Three Armies unite their strength.” [Such a state] may not be attacked.Footnote 71
This statement not only repeats the phrases in question and explicitly marks them, metalinguistically, as a quotation or communicative fragment, it also replicates the negative injunction familiar from two of the above-quoted Xunzi passages not to attack a socially united polity. For the author of the Xin xu episode, the oft-repeated phrases come with a specific texture, a firm attachment to a recognizable discursive context—in fact, to a very specific argument about whether it is advisable to attack a particular kind of enemy. The passages in question are found in a number of different writings, mostly within the book Xunzi, but they are not randomly scattered across debates on varying topics. On the contrary, they display a stable relationship, not only with a general theme such as military matters—the use of jun 軍 “army” would make that rather unsurprising—but with a precise argument.
Gesturing Commands with Clasped Hands
The last Xunzi passage quoted above is interesting for an additional reason as well. To dominate other polities, it claims, the ruler of an internally united state “need merely stand with hands clasped together and give directions” (gong yi zhi hui 拱揖指揮). The same memorably paradoxical image of the ruler gesturing his commands while clasping his hands—exerting his power without having to take action—is also encountered in Huainanzi, not far from the lines on unity just discussed (HNZ 15/12). Assuming that “[p]hysical contiguity must be a plausible explanation for the intersection between sources,”Footnote 72 we may further note in passing that this characterization also appears in the conclusion to an anecdote about the power of sincerity (cheng 誠) in Han shi waizhuan, immediately preceded by a parallel to one of the Xunzi passages on unity.Footnote 73 The conclusion to the anecdote, furthermore, also records a saying by Confucius on personal rectitude (zheng 正), said to be a precondition for one's orders to be carried out by others, a statement better known as part of the Lun yu 論語.Footnote 74
Within the Huainanzi itself, the clasped-hands formula gong yi zhi hui appears in the chapter “Surveying Obscurities” as part of a discussion about rulership under the Han, stressing the pivotal position of the Son of Heaven, who makes the entire world submit to his aura of moral and spiritual superiority, gladly paying him obeisance.
逮至當今之時，天子在上位，持以道德，輔以仁義，近者獻其智，遠者懷其德，拱揖指麾而四海賓服。
Coming down to the present time, the Son of Heaven occupies his position on high, sustaining [his rule] with the Way and its Potency, supporting [his rule] with Humaneness and Rightness. Those nearby augment his knowledge; those far away embrace his Moral Potency. He folds his hands and bows, gestures with his finger, and [all within] the Four Seas respectfully submit to him.Footnote 75
This ideal of political rulership portrays the monarch as the eternally resting yet mysteriously omnipotent center of a world that he dominates exclusively by the centripetal force of his purified charisma.Footnote 76 Our passage from the military chapter of the Huainanzi promotes a similar concept of rulership, but in this case more narrowly confined to military matters. Now note how similar ideas are recombined in the following speech of a “literatus” (wen xue 文學) in the Discourses on Salt and Iron (Yantie lun 鹽鐵論):
孔子曰：有國有家者，不患貧而患不均，不患寡而患不安。故天子不言多少，諸侯不言利害，大夫不言得喪。畜仁義以風之，廣德行以懷之。是以近者親附而遠者悅服。故善克者不戰，善戰者不師，善師者不陣。修之於廟堂，而折衝還師。王者行仁政，無敵於天下， 惡用費哉？」
Confucius observed that the ruler of a kingdom or the chief of a house is not concerned about his people being few, but about lack of equitable treatment; nor is he concerned about poverty, but over the presence of discontentment.Footnote 77 Thus the Son of Heaven should not speak about much and little, the feudal lords should not talk about advantage and detriment, ministers about gain and loss,Footnote 78 but they should cultivate benevolence and righteousness, to set an example to the people, and extend wide their virtuous conduct to gain the people's confidence. Then will nearby folk lovingly flock to them and distant peoples joyfully submit to their authority. Therefore, the master conqueror does not fight; the expert warrior needs no soldiers; the truly great commander requires not to set his troops in battle array. Cultivate virtue in the temple and the hall, then you need only to show a bold front to the enemy and your troops will return home in victory. The Prince who practices benevolent administration should be matchless in the world;Footnote 79 for him, what use is expenditure?Footnote 80
This speech is itself a veritable patchwork of quotations and communicative fragments which I will not attempt to unravel here. Instead, I shall only highlight three points: (1) the conception of optimal warfare as victory without fighting (善克者不戰 …); (2) the presence of what we might call an “attraction formula” (in the present version: 近者親附而遠者悅服); and (3) the notion of cultivation in the temple and the deterrence of enemies at a distance (修之於廟堂，而折衝還師).
As Gale points out, the claim that the “master conqueror does not fight” and the sentences that follow it are a restatement of the principle that winning without fighting represents the highest form of military skill. The idea is presented here in a manner which does not so much resemble the canonical version in Sunzi, but instead has closer counterparts in a different set of works such as Laozi 老子 and Yi Zhou shu 逸周書.Footnote 81 The received historiography of ancient Chinese thought with its penchant for positing schools, each with a strong collective identity and neatly defined set of doctrines, would lead one to expect a strict separation between this idea—irrespective of how it is phrased—and the Confucian tradition. Yet we find this notion right at the center of a statement by a “literatus,” sandwiched between sayings associated with Confucius himself.
The passage in the Xunzi chapter “Enriching the State” (Fu guo 富國) which shares with the military chapter of Huainanzi the encouragement to unity (上下一心，三軍同力) has also with it in common the clasped-hands formula.Footnote 82 At the same time, another similarity catches our attention—a statement on the effect which the ideal ruler's influence has on those nearby and those in the distance which reads, in the Xunzi version:
近者競親，遠方致願。
[T]hose close by will vie to draw near to him, and those far away will send notice of their wish to submit to him.
An attraction formula in Yantie lun expresses a similar idea thus: “Nearby folk [will] lovingly flock to them and distant peoples joyfully submit to their authority” (近者親附而遠者悅服). As Esson Gale notes, the classic formulation of this idea is found in the Lun yu, where Confucius responds to an inquiry by the Master of She 葉公 about ideal government that “those close by will be delighted, those in the distance will come” (近者說，遠者來).Footnote 83 Versions of this saying with only minimal variation, all presented as advice by Confucius to the Master of She, appear across a number of texts.Footnote 84
Reprising some of the characteristic vocabulary of the Lun yu and closely related versions such as qin fu 親附 and yue 悅 / 說, Yantie lun includes the canonical form of the saying in the context of a Confucius quotation explicitly marked as such. The proximity of the two sayings suggests that their stable association with the Master motivated their being quoted together in Yantie lun; given its pervasive association with Confucius, we are entitled to assume that the attraction formula is an implicit quotation.
More generally, the concept of the ruler's moral excellence as a force that suffuses and structures the political world encourages a mingling of communicative fragments which find their place in discourses on both military success and virtuous rule. This is how we come to find varying intersections between such texts as Xunzi’s “Strengthening the State” with its own version of the attraction formula (近者競親，遠方致願), its exhortation to unity (上下一心，三軍同力), and its clasped-hands formula (拱揖指揮);Footnote 85 the Huainanzi’s “Surveying Obscurities” with yet another version of the attraction formula (近者獻其智，遠者懷其德) and the clasped-hands formula; and the Discourses on Salt and Iron with—among other quotations and communicative fragments—the canonical version of the attraction formula, but also with a restatement of the principle of optimal strategy as non-fighting, the organizing principle of the passage from the military Huainanzi chapter at the heart of this article and a key concept of strategic thought appearing in Sunzi and elsewhere.
What we observe on the level of intertextual echoes and correspondences, then, is not so much a reflection of strictly separate bodies of doctrine or lines of textual descent which could be represented by a stemma but, instead, an intertwining of shared components in thematically, though not doctrinally, determinate strands of discourse, which results in shifting but meaningfully interrelated configurations of recurring elements.
Up in the Temple
The Yantie lun passage just discussed turns out to be even further entwined with the tangle of intertextual relationship surrounding our passage from the military chapter of Huainanzi. Two sentences on cultivation and its military effects at a distance which, in Huainanzi, immediately precede the clasped-hands formula (脩政廟堂之上而折衝千里之外; HNZ 15/10–11) also appear in Yantie lun—in Gale's slightly modified translation:
修之於廟堂，而折衝還師。
Cultivate it in the temple and the hall, then you need only to show a bold front to the enemy and your troops will return home in victory.
The second part is in fact better rendered as “to turn back [the enemy's] assault chariots and bring home [one's own] troops,”Footnote 86 the underlying idea being that the ruler's purified virtue will radiate outwards and forestall attacks, though it is left open whether this is due to the mysterious force of his moral potency or to the enemy's realization that virtuous rulers command devoted troops which are hard to defeat. One should, in any case, beware of giving this statement a reading fixated on supposedly transcendent effects of virtue. As Wang Liqi underlines, referencing a number of military writings, the ancestral temple is a place for strategic deliberation,Footnote 87 just as it is the site of high-profile military rituals such as the “handing over of the axe [of command]” (shou fu yue 授斧鉞) to a newly appointed military commander.Footnote 88
The general notion of mindful rulerly activity in the temple conforming to ritual standards is open to either thematic contextualization, military or political, insofar as these two can be conceptually distinguished in the period under discussion. Hence, when asked by a ruler in Lüshi chunqiu whether “those who take care of the state simply do so up in the hall” (為國家者，為之堂上而已矣), Confucius responds in the affirmative, proclaiming that “the realm will be well-ordered without [the ruler] stepping out of the gate” (不出於門戶而天下治).Footnote 89 In a variant version, he affirms that “state and family will be well-ordered if one only takes care up in the hall of the temple” (謹之於廟堂之上而國家治矣).Footnote 90 In a memorial from around 128 b.c.e., advising Han Emperor Wu 武 (r. 141–87 b.c.e.) against large-scale campaigning, the contextual association with warfare is stronger, an impression reinforced in the crucial statement itself by the reference to “calamities” rather than the more general and connotationally less loaded terms for good governance used in the Confucius dialogues.
賢主獨觀萬化之原，明於安危之機，修之廟堂之上，而銷未形之患。
The worthy ruler alone observes the origin of the myriad transformations and is aware of the trigger which turns security into danger. Cultivating this up in the hall of the temple, he dispels calamities before they have taken shape.Footnote 91
Having taken this long intertextual detour, we finally arrive at a Lüshi chunqiu episode which takes us back to the more specific idea of forestalling attacks from a distance and thus obtaining victory without bloodshed. When an official from Chu is, on a visit to Song, invited by the local Master of Public Works, Zihan 子罕, he learns that Zihan tolerates his neighbors’ encroachment upon his property because he empathizes with them and shies away from harming them. Upon the Chu official's return, the king of Chu is preparing a campaign against Song. But the official alerts him that “Song may not be attacked” (宋不可攻也)—a cautionary remark resonating with similar warnings accompanying the exhortation to unity—because “its ruler is worthy and its chancellor humane” (其主賢，其相仁). In a separate comment, Confucius, who “hears about this” (wen zhi 聞之), proclaims: “‘Cultivating it up in the hall of the temple and turning back [the enemy's] assault chariots at a distance of more than a thousand li’—this surely refers to Zihan, the Master of Public Works!” (夫脩之於廟堂之上，而折衝乎千里之外者，其司城子罕之謂乎。).Footnote 92
A further echo which, again, carries with it various fragments of the contextual framework, appears in a dialogue between Confucius and Zengzi 曾子. The encounter reenacts the previous staged conversations between Confucius and a ruler of state as one between Master and disciple—or vice versa, given the shared use of the slightly overbearing phrase “I will tell you” (wu yu ru 吾語女).Footnote 93 Confucius explains about the ideal ruler:
明主之守也，必折衝於千里之外；其征也，衽席之上還師。
Defending, the enlightened ruler will always turn back [the enemy's] assault chariots at a distance of more than a thousand li. Attacking, he will bring home [his] troops [sitting] on his mat.Footnote 94
The halls and temples with their ritual and military associations have disappeared. Instead, the sitting mat marks the tightly circumscribed space from which an immobile and withdrawn monarch will exert his powers at a distance. Stylistically, the disappearance of the temple throws the sentences out of kilter—no longer does “a thousand li away” contrast with “up in the temple.” At the same time, one detects a lexical overlap with the Discourses on Salt and Iron: “bringing home [his] troops” (huan shi 還師) does not feature in any of the other versions.
Finally, Han Feizi takes the argument about rulerly non-action in a different direction. Here, inaction per se is not praiseworthy. “Sitting up in the hall of the temple with the complexion of a young maid” (身坐於廟堂之上，有處女子之色), it is stated, will do no harm to good government as long as the ruler possesses the right political “techniques” (shu 術).Footnote 95 The argument is about political leadership in general, not war in particular, and it is not unequivocally in support of non-action, which, as a strategy for governing, has to be supplemented by a body of practical knowledge.
Remarkably, despite the different nature of the advice given, even this text reproduces some characteristic elements of the other intertexts. We are still listening in on debates within the Confucius circle: the remarks are purportedly from a conversation between the disciples Fu Zijian 宓子賤 and You Ruo 有若. Indeed, the figure of Confucius is hovering in the background of more than just this communicative fragment, which connects the Master to the strategic principle of aspiring to bloodless victories canonized in Sunzi and repeated elsewhere. The attraction formula, implicitly quoted in the Discourses on Salt and Iron, also intersects with military discourses, blurring the lines between supposedly distinct schools of thought and their doctrines.
Conclusion
As a matter of principle, no investigation into intertextuality can ever be exhaustive. There is no factor to control according to objective standards the proliferation of associations in a reader's mind. In the present case, moreover, the focus on verbal parallels obviates from the outset identification of subtler phenomena—allusions and narrative templates such as the interview scenes, for instance, which do not consist in verbatim matches and may only become apparent to readers patiently scanning the entire body of ancient literature. But even with this restricted purview, the search for textual parallels to Huainanzi has yielded a number of insights.
With the exception of the matching passage in Wenzi—a case of wholesale copying—no other continuous, exact parallels longer than a couple of phrases are attested. Huainanzi does not contain any explicit quotations; the only potential implicit quotation I was able to identify is a tersely phrased strategic principle also occurring in Sunzi. This contrasts markedly with the intertextual patchwork of a related Yantie lun passage, which likewise addresses military strategy and features easily recognizable Confucius quotations. Huainanzi 15 as a whole has been convincingly portrayed as a summa of prior military thought, and the entire book of Huainanzi as a synthesis of older intellectual and textual resources. But in the passage under investigation there seems to be no direct evidence that readers were expected to recognize a particular authority as source of any statement in the text. And given the brevity of attested overlaps, there is no plausible argument to be made for Huainanzi being the immediate source of one of its intertexts, or vice versa.Footnote 96
Yet, though certain phenomena—quotations, longer parallels, clear genetic dependencies—cannot be positively identified, the reader encounters others which are of great interest, especially in view of the absences with which they contrast. Overlaps with other writings do exist, but they are brief rather than extensive, and fuzzy rather than precise; they cut across linguistic and stylistic categories; they have memorable formal or semantic properties; they are dispersed rather than concentrated; and they display distributional patterns which resist neat reconstructions of mutual influences. Taken together, these features suggest a particular manner in which Huainanzi adapted pre-existing linguistic material, a certain way of textual composition.
Similarities are sometimes lexical, and to the extent that the items in question are ordinary military terms (e.g., bing 兵, zhen 陣), their presence is not revealing. Set phrases such as “glistening blades” (bai ren 白刃) are comparatively more relevant, but even more so are combinations of typologically different features such as tetrasyllabic meter and particular rhymes, accompanied by characteristic phrasing. Conceptual similarities can likewise be of interest, for instance in case of the strategic principle of securing victory without bloodshed, which is distinctly phrased in different groups of texts—Sunzi and Heguan zi chapters standing against Laozi, Yi Zhou shu and others—and provides the rhetorical backbone of the Huainanzi passage.
Lastly, these similarities manifest themselves within a characteristic discursive setting: the hypothetical battle description, frequently employed in the service of self-praise. How peculiar this context is can be gauged from the fact that all texts under review deal in some way or other with warfare and even conjure up battle situations, but none of them describes or narrates an actual battle, or purports to do so. In reading these texts, we are privy to exclusively generic, hypothetical discourses. Whatever the phraseology of actual battle narratives looks like, it seems to be neatly cordoned off from the type of discourse reflected in our tangle of intertexts.
Most importantly, short verbal parallels—sometimes with semantic and positional variants—co-occur in unpredictable combinations across texts. In intersecting texts, we do not find distributional patterns allowing one unambiguously to group texts together, in such a manner that shared sets of elements mark particular sets of texts as belonging together. This, in combination with the texts’ shared themes, suggests the existence of a loosely interconnected set of discourse-specific phrases and linguistic-stylistic conventions reminiscent of Gasparov's communicative fragments. What links these elements is their “texture,” to use Gasparov's term, their conventionalized participation in a particular kind of discourse, rather than their being singled out as quotable utterances stemming from specific texts. It is, then, not the case that these elements appear in our texts as quotations. More likely, their texture would confer on them a shared propensity to rise to the level of consciousness while an author creates texts that participate in a certain type of discourse.
Contrasting orality and writing in absolute terms would seem, in the present case, to be positing a false dichotomy. What I would suggest instead is a process of composition that cannot be usefully characterized as “oral” in any of the three meanings specified by Lord, but which is not strictly dependent on text either, if we take a composition being dependent on texts to mean that it should be based (a) on writings which the author had physically in front of him or (b) on extensive verbatim memorization of prior texts, either as part of a purposely maintained oral tradition, such as the Vedas, or as the result of an individual effort, however motivated.
The composition process would, however, certainly seem to be textually mediated in that textual knowledge—though not necessarily systematically consolidated verbal memory—plays a crucial part in it. This would account for the observable thematic and linguistic convergences—in particular the highly specific common discursive background—as well as for the irregular distribution of multiple shared brief parallels across intertexts. What we are observing in these instances are, it appears, traces of remembering as opposed to recollection, the latter being, according to an influential Aristotelian distinction, an intentional act which involves deliberation and sustained, goal-directed mental activity, whereas the former is “a thing that happens to people.”Footnote 97 On the available evidence it seems most likely that the parallels arise from unintentional responses of long-term, semantic memory capacities prompted by cues such as the discursive setting, rather than from a sustained effort to faithfully preserve long stretches of text and keep them perpetually accessible to the author's mind in order to revisit and quote from them at will.
Before concluding this exercise in parallelomania,Footnote 98 I would like to call attention to some of the limitations of the present approach and briefly remark on how they might be remedied through more systematic and comprehensive research in the future.
First, the features of the Huainanzi passage in question, as outlined here, may well be atypical compared to other parts of the book itself (elsewhere, Huainanzi extensively quotes Laozi, for example) or within the early Chinese corpus. Also, the features described can result from deliberate stylistic choices. A text such as the military chapter of Huainanzi might have been considered too practical, too ordinary in its orientation to merit adornment with intellectual credentials and literary flourishes found to be apposite for other purposes. To find out whether this is the case would be precisely the goal of more systematic inquiries along the lines of the present article. Hence, stating that the Huainanzi passage does not reflect the workings of a mnemonically trained textual memory and betrays little interest in borrowing established authority through quotation is not tantamount to claiming that the author of the passage did not possess, or cannot have possessed, a mnemonically trained textual memory. He may have chosen not to exercise it in the present case.
Second, characterizing the passage in the way proposed here and heaping so much attention on it should not be construed to imply that, in the present example, we encounter a crucially important text type resulting from the predominant mode of textual composition. Rather, I would suggest that the passage represents one among a number of typologically possible texts arising from one conceivable mode of textual production which, if described at a sufficient level of precision, may be usefully contrasted with others for purposes of literary, historical, or philosophical interpretation.
Such a broader comparative approach will probably need to start out from smaller textual units on the sub-chapter level and thence proceed to eventually encompass chapters, entire works, and then relationships between works and groups of such. Given the effort required for the analysis of small sets of intertexts, it goes without saying that more comprehensive approaches will call for some form of computer-based distant reading. The greater the distance, however, and the higher the level of abstraction attained through large-scale quantitative analysis, the more important it will be concomitantly to maintain, at least in selected cases, detailed attention to the wording, phraseology and ideas, in short, to the texture of the works under scrutiny which only qualitative approaches can afford.
