224 Meyer Chapter 6 “Shu” Traditions and Text Recomposition: A Reevaluation of “Jinteng” 金縢 and “Zhou Wu Wang you ji” 周武王有疾 Dirk Meyer This essay analyzes the art of narrative in “Zhou Wu Wang you ji” 周武王有疾 (“King Wu of Zhou Suffered from Illness”) and in its counterpart in the mod- ern-script recension of the Shangshu 書 to reconstruct the rhetoric of persuasion in these texts. “Zhou Wu Wang you ji” is often misleadingly referred to as “*Jinteng” 金縢 (“Metal-Bound Coffer”) in reference to its Shangshu coun- terpart. The former dates to the Warring States period and is part of the Tsinghua collection of manuscripts (henceforth Qinghua Manuscripts). By making explicit the strategies by which meaning is constructed in “Zhou Wu Wang you ji” in comparison to its transmitted counterpart, I cast light on their different audiences as well as on their social use in the politico-philosophical discourses of their respective periods. In this, I develop and partly emend my previous reading of “Zhou Wu Wang you ji.”1 The Duke of Zhou and King Wu The tale goes as follows. Zhou Gong 周公, the famous Duke of Zhou, takes the place of King Cheng 成王 (r. 1042/1035–1006 BC) after King Cheng’s father, King Wu 武王 of Zhou (r. 1049/1045–1043 BC), fell ill and died.2 The Duke of Zhou holds a private divination where he consults the spirits with regard to his intentions and then stores the record of the divination in a metal-bound coffer. Much later, moved by suspicion, King Cheng has the coffer opened to find that the Duke of Zhou acted in good faith. Different texts tell the tale in various ways. The most prominent examples are the “Jinteng” chapter of the Shangshu and the “Lu Zhou gong shijia” 魯周公 1 As provided in Meyer 2014a. 2 My dates customarily follow Shaughnessy 1999a: 25. Note, however, that I do not consider these dates absolute but, rather, approximations with a margin of error of about thirty years. © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2017 | doi 10.1163/9789004343504_008 9789004343498_Kern-Meyer_01-inner_proof-01.indd 224 1/27/2017 2:08:58 PM