OE 49 (2010) Categories and Legal Reasoning in Early Imperial China: The Meaning of Fa in Recovered Texts Miranda Brown and Charles Sanft Few terms in classical Chinese are so nettlesome as fa ( or ), a word often rendered in English as law or penal law. 1 Its troublesome nature owes much to the pronounced multivalence it had acquired already in early times. Traditional sources show that the term fa had a variety of mean- ings, 2 including “penal law,” 3 “standard,” “model,” “method,” and so forth. Hence it is unsurpris- ing that scholarly opinion is divided about how to understand this term in various contexts, a situation reflected in the number of English translations currently in use. The newly recovered legal texts of Qin (221–207 BCE) and early Han (206 BCE – 220 CE) can help illuminate the sense of the word fa. Yet such materials have attracted little attention from Western scholars, whose discussions have focused on philosophical works such as the Mozi , or the text “Jingfa” discovered at Mawangdui (ca. 168 BCE). 4 In this paper, we will clarify what fa means in certain, specific contexts. We argue that, al- though appearing in legal texts, counter-intuitively the term is often not best understood as law. In those situations fa refers concretely and specifically to sections of the statutes that delineate decision-making processes for use by officials. Our study does not encompass the entirety of the early Chinese textual corpus. Given the sheer number of occurrences of fa and the differences between genres, a comprehensive study would be neither feasible in the con- text of a single article nor especially useful. Instead, we tackle a smaller but still significant part of the puzzle: recovered legal statutes and other legal materials from the Qin and Han periods. We are going to assume what philosophers sometimes call the principle of charity. 5 While we do not hold that the term fa can only be read in one way in all contexts, we believe that bureaucratic texts from Qin and Han times use the term fa in identifiable and relatively consistent ways. In this respect we follow scholars such as Hsing I-t’ien and Xu Shi- hong , whose work shows that authors of legal texts put great weight on the technical vocabulary they employed. 6 The arguments of this essay also have larger implications, for the interpretation of fa is no trivial matter. Derk Bodde many years ago asserted that fa is “by far the most important 1 Both orthographies are correct and in many instances interchangeable. There has been much scholarship on the relationship between the two graphs in recent years, and on the meanings of fa that are involved; for review and discussion see Zhang Yonghe 2009. 2 See Jingji zhuangu, s. v. “fa.” 3 Ames 2003, 247. 4 For examples of works that touch upon philosophical texts, see Hansen 1993; Fraser, “Mohism”. 5 Blackburn 1996, 62. 6 Hsing I-t’ien 1983, 52–54; Xu Shihong 1997, 66–67.