Cosmology and the quotidian: Day books in early China

The aim of this dissertation is to identify and contextualize important features of the archaeologically-recovered early Chinese manuscript genre known as rishu ("day books"). Dating from the period between the late fourth century and the late first century B.C., these texts circulated widely among local elites, who used them to determine auspicious times and places for the affairs of daily life. Through inductive analysis of the second century B.C. day-book manuscript found at Kongjiapo in Suizhou, Hubei in 1992, I consider the social circumstances of day-book compilation and usage, editorial conventions in manuscript production, and the implied cosmology underlying the various systems by which day books assigned auspicious or inauspicious qualities to times and directions. Close attention is given to the final 21 slips of the Kongjiapo day-book manuscript, a cosmological text called "Sui" ("Year"). This text is shown both to broaden our current conception of the early Chinese genre of yue ling ("monthly ordinances") and to embody connections with other types of technical literature such as the well-known classic of Chinese medicine Huangdi neijing. These results in turn bring a significant new critical perspective to the reading of transmitted classics of technical literature such as Huainanzi.