 Today I'd like to talk about this manuscript which was initially published by first written about and then published by Professor Kuchanov and the title, the Russian title is in English we could translate as record at the altar about Confucius's conciliation. It's very hard to explain what this means, what's Confucius's conciliation and that's basically the subject of my talk today. He translated the entire manuscript, this is a time with manuscript, we'll see images of it a little bit later and then he provided the translation. In his translation he noticed, well in his study that came before the translation he noticed how the text was similar to the Old Fisherman chapter of the Dronzl, and then he said possibly this is another version of that encounter of Dronzl in that case in the Dronzl. He's just an old man and Confucius and so he basically, especially when he first wrote about this he titled his article an unknown encounter of Dronzl Confucius, so it was actually quite widely read because people were interested in it. Later on this was translated into his book, well translated it's not a good maybe not a good expression, it was published in Chinese, so the authors are here, Kuchanov and Professor Niaongin. I'm not exactly sure how this book was put together because obviously the, well there's a translation of Kuchanov's study at the beginning but the text actually is a new translation, there's a transcription and translation into what we could call a reconstructive translation into classical Chinese, so which is customary to Professor Niaongin's method. He likes to kind of approximate the original Chinese that would have been there for the, for the tango translator. So there are these two studies, two books about this and in both cases the title is the same, so we have the title the which is basically the Confucius at the altar of, and this could be translated maybe if we follow Kuchanov as conciliation or achieving peace. Professor Nia felt that also that this word which appears in the tango to mean to make peace was a problem and he suggested that maybe this meant to play music, the same way as the Chinese character He could also refer to this, I think with the fourth tone, He to accompany somebody on a musical instrument. These are the last two pages of this manuscript and courtesy of Kiril Agnistin and Dr. Bopova and at the end you have a call-a-phone where you have the date and also you have the title of the text and so based on this, on this call-a-phone we know what the original title was in tango and the original title was this, so it's the Gournon Guwala and then this is what was translated into Chinese as this Confucius at the altar of. So the date is 1122, the date cannot be seen properly, you only see fractions of it but based on this Professor Kuchanov worked out that it must have been 1122 and this date actually works very well for this text and I will show you why in a little bit later. Now Levski was the first one in the 1930s to work with this text. He reconstructed, he translated the title as this record at the altar about Confucius's conciliation and then he reconstructed the original Chinese based on the tango which would have been Fuzi, so the master at the altar of reconciliation and then came Kuchanov who basically accepted Levski's translation and he later changed his translation a little bit but basically means more or less the same thing. The manuscript is known today under this title, so the altar, Confucius at the altar of conciliation. This is how in Chinese it's known and it basically does not match the tango title interestingly because the tango says as Levski already pointed out the first two characters, the Gournon two words actually don't mean Confucius, they mean the master. So the modern Chinese customary way of calling this manuscript is actually not entirely correct. It's based on the fact that the title was translated back into Chinese from Russian. So first it was translated into Tangut then from Tangut to Russian, from Russian back to Chinese and this is also as we've seen earlier the title of Professor Nia and Kuchanov's work but here it's not, it wasn't Professor Nia who called this but this title appeared initially in a translation, in Chinese translation, of Levski's works. So it all goes back to Levski. Now the text that's connected with this in the Zhuanzi is in the Yufu, so the Old Fisherman chapter, I have here an English translation, we don't need to read through this but basically the beginning is interesting because it says traveling at the forest of Zive, Confucius sat down to rest on the apricot platform or you could translate that word as alter. His disciples studied while Confucius sang and accompanied himself on the Ziver. Halfway through the tomb, a fisherman got out of a boat and came over and then Confucius sends over Zihun and Zihu, his two disciples and they start talking to the Old Man. This chapter in the Zhuanzi is actually not that long and does not really match the Tangut text. The beginning kind of matches, the whole situation matches but it's not entirely the same. Also in the Anilects of Confucius we have a similar set up, basically it's the same story, I don't know if I have a translation, yes, or a very similar story and both of these texts, so the Zhuanzi which is a Taoist text and the Anilects which is a Confucian text together seem to be related to the Tangut text. Now Professor Nia, known as several things, he tried to date the text. First of all he said Kuchang is probably wrong in saying that this might be another version of the Zhuanzi because this Tangut text probably goes back to a more recent precedent, to a more recent Chinese text. So he tried to date it and then he said, well there were bits of text in the commentary to the Yin Fu Ting, so a Taoist text and this commentary was written by somebody in the 8th century by Li Chun and then the whole thing is quoted actually in a 16th century text. So that was one thing. The other thing he said it's not specifically Taoist. There are other elements in it like Buddhist elements and even Confucian elements to the story. And then also one more thing, Confucius wears a sword in the text. So Confucius usually is very peaceful, he doesn't wear a sword, he doesn't fight. But in this text he is in conversation with the old man, he basically wears a sword. Now based on this Professor Nie also said, well in a depiction of Confucius from the 8th century by a very very famous painter Wu Dao Zi, Confucius wears a sword. So this text must have been later than this. Of course we don't have this later than this picture. Of course we don't have the picture, this is a much much later copy of the picture. So we don't actually know if Wu Dao Zi really, well he might have depicted or he might have drawn or painted Confucius, but we don't know if it's the same picture of whether it's a later reconstruction. But basically based on these things, Professor Nie, like based on this date here, thought that probably the text was written sometime in the late Tang dynasty or possibly later. Interestingly I found a related text in this collection. This is a collection of Ming and Qing scriptures related to secret societies. So Chinese sectarian movements from say the 15th to the 19th centuries. So in this collection which is called The Five Books and Six Volumes by somebody called Luo Zu, so patriarch Luo, who was the founder of the Wu Weijiao sect or the non-action teachings. He writes in one of the books, because these are five books in six volumes, so in one of the books which is below this book, which is called this, the scroll of the key to destroying heresy and manifesting evidence. He quotes a text called Laodun Xingtai, so record of the portable altar of the elderly lord. Now this is where actually the quote is here. This is, he quotes only this much from the text. It's about Zulu talking to the old man and asking him. I don't know if I would, yes I have the translation. So he bowed deeply and said, you must be a sage. The old man replied, okay, basically saying yes I'm a sage. Now this text appears in the Wu Bu Liu Zhe, in this text from the Chinese sectarian movements here. Fortunately for us there is a commentary in one of the editions from the late 16th century. There's a commentary and the commentary, this is where it begins, quotes the entire text. So this is how we have the text. This text is actually quite similar to the tango text, or it's not, even though it's not the same, it has a number of features that match the tango text. For example, well this is the beginning. I will not talk about that. But here's an example for it. Here you have, on this page, you have a section where the old man calls Zulu a general. He says, greetings old general. And Zulu gets completely upset. Zulu, the Confucian disciple, why are you calling me a general? I'm a man of learning. And then the old man explains like, yeah but you're so arrogant, I didn't presume that you were a man of learning. And the text in the commentary that we've seen is very, very similar actually. This is a detail that's absent from the Zhuangzi or other early versions of this text. So here we have something that kind of is quite close. Now I managed to find another version of this text in the case files from the Qing Court's investigation of secret societies. This is a 40 volume book or collection that came out just recently. And no library has it pretty much. Including the National Library of China for some reason. They said, oh we have it in Mongolia, so no problem. You can go there and look at it. I'm not going to, in Mongolia, to look at a book. But basically finally I was able to look at this and I found the text in it. It's the same text. Interesting that this was recorded by somebody who was arrested as being part of a secret society. And in his testimony he recorded this text. That's one of the things he received from his teacher. So he memorized it. Possibly because of the memorization it doesn't exactly fit the version that we've seen in the commentary. It's very close. Also we don't have a title for it. He just recorded it from memory. This is also the end asking walds and whether you're a sage and he says, indeed I am. I also wanted to show some parts where we see very clear Buddhist influence. Because this is from the flower garland sutra. Although it doesn't make any sense in this context. So somehow it's inserted and it's very hard to interpret it. So now we have this text in the commentary that's called Laojun Xingtan. So the record of the portable altar of the elderly lord. Again here we have a problem with Xingtan. The character or the word preceding the word altar. Just like in the case of the tango text. It should really be Xingtan. There's already the apricot platform. It's already attested in the Chinese, the earliest Chinese example in the Zhuangzi. But then it was, well in the tango it's not apricot. And in these Chinese versions it's not apricot either. But obviously the pronunciation of these two words were quite similar and possibly even more similar in spoken language. This is pasted by reconstruction of medieval Chinese. And then we have the tango which is called Fuzi zhe'ai ti. So I'm basically, oh we don't have, why don't we have tango? So here the character in question, the wording question is this one. Which is, I think this was Gua in tango. And this is translated as He or Peace, or to make peace. The problem is that actually this particular character, if you look at any dictionary it just tells you to go to another character, this one. Saying that it's the same as this one. The difference between these two is very small actually. You can see that it's only a, that this left component is dragged underneath longer. And this one doesn't have that. So initially I thought that maybe there's something else. And I wanted to look up the apricot in tango thinking that maybe this was the word for apricot. And it wasn't really an paragraph for this one. So in the Timely Pearl you have this word, the Bei, whatever he ate, and it's translated as Li Xian. But the word for chestnut is also translated as the same thing. Which is chestnut apricot. So that actually goes back to the idea that maybe the Timely Pearl wasn't reflecting how the Chinese people talked, or the Chinese-Chinese of people at the time. Maybe it was a tango-sized Chinese because words like chestnut apricot don't really occur in the Chinese context. But basically we have the difference between the word Xin and He. And Andrew West suggested to me actually that maybe the change or the corruption of this word was actually in Chinese and not in tango. So we have, if we look at variants of the character He also in the Longkai Shoujian, which is Qitan period, then we can see that we have variants that are actually quite similar to the Chinese character for apricot. So it's possible, or probably it's very likely that the change happened in Chinese before it was translated. So if I'm correct, then we actually have the original titles should be these. So the record of the Elderly Lord at the apricot platform, and the tango text should be record of the Master at the apricot platform. So this one would be the Chinese text quoted in the Secret Society scripture, and this one was the tango text. And in fact you have images that appear from 1130, so only a few years after they are attested, only a few years after the date of the tango manuscript. From the, for example, the Dongya Zatih, which was compiled by a descendant of Confucius in about 1130. So this has an image with this title showing Confucius underneath apricot trees. And at the beginning it has a short story, which is pretty much the same frame story that we have in the tango text and in the Chinese Secret Society text. Later on we even have the title, Fuzi Xinhang Tu, in the Song Dynasty Encyclopedia of Shunning Guangti from a little bit later. Okay, we need to run through. Later on, I wrote an article about this which is still under embargo, but we'll be freed one day. But later on I found modern texts circulating, printed in the 20th century, which describe the same encounter basically. So this is a third stage in the evolution of this text and they appear on all these Chinese auction sites. They don't exist in any library for some reason, but I found five different copies on auction sites with these titles. You see that they differ in a radical or Laozi is called Laojun, Kongzi is called, or he's always called Kongzi, but Du is sometimes with the water radical sometimes, without the radical. The title means Laozi saves or leads Confucius through salvation. So here are examples of this. So basically we have these attested versions. So we have the first one is the tangled text. I should point out that these are not the exact same texts, but a very, very similar text and a series of texts, which are closely related. So the first one would be the tangled one. So originally it was called Fuzi He Taiji in the Chinese version, but actually the original title in Chinese probably was Fuzi Xin Taiji. Then we have from the late 16th century a text called Laojun Xin Taiji and we have another version recorded from memory, but this was untitled. And then we have a mention also in the secret society files of a text where we don't have the text and then finally we have these 20th century texts and some of them are actually, I believe, are still being used today in Taoist societies, but they're not on the web anywhere. Now I'm running out of time, but I wanted to show you some examples how the Chinese text might help us to understand the tangled better meaning. I mean the Chinese text that, for example, the 20th century version of the Chinese text might help us understand the tangled text better. So we have Nie Hongyun's translation here about the cocoon. Well, we have Kuchanov, which I translated into English. So they are like silkworm which wraps its own body by spinning a cocoon. So Professor Nie had translated this completely differently and the 20th century Chinese text is actually quite similar to Kuchanov's translation and quite similar to the, well, seemingly similar to the tangled one. In Nie's translation it was basically the understanding of this character that is different and these two characters they are understood as abandoning and collecting. So here's another bit, my last example, about how I pitted the foolish person. The foolish person, the foundations for love were born and the foundations for greed and foolishness died. Again, Nie's translation is completely different, but then the 20th century Chinese translation, it says the foolish person only knows the joys of being alive. Probably Xiong Tian means in this case to be alive. How could he know sort of the pain of the samsara that comes after his death? So actually in this case, even the modern version, 20th century Chinese version is different and it probably would be interesting to kind of to work out how this is related to the original tangles, not the original, but to the tangled text. Okay, thank you.