中國古代の商と賈 : その意味と思想史的背景

Abstract

It has popularly been understood that the characters shang 商 and gu 賈 which express ideas of commerce and merchants can be separated in meaning such that shang refers to itinerant merchants (xingshang 行商) and gu refers to stationary merchants or shopkeepers (zuogu 坐賈). However, they cannot be restricted to these meanings. They were at times used interchangeably, and each author had a particular tendency in their usage. Moreover, in the Qin and Han periods, the words gu and guren 賈人 were technical terms used in legal documents to indicate commerce and merchants respectively. Without regard to this actual situation in his own time, Ban Gu 班固. in the Commerce chapter of his work "Explanations of the White Tiger Palace." asserted that shang meant "moving" (xing 行) and gu meant "stationary" (zhi 止). This was because he only considered the description recorded in the Zuozhuan and the Zhouli. His commerce chapter was written with the intention of showing that the Old Text Theory was superior to the competing New Text Theory. At the end of the Later Han, the idea that shang meant "itinerant" and gu meant "stationary" became an established theory due to the work of Zheng Xuan 鄭玄. Nevertheless, this distinction was not strictly followed even in later periods. In these periods, technical terms in legal documents indicating merchants changed from shanggu 商賈 in the Wei and Jin to just Shang in the Six Dynasty period. This latter term was then inherited by the Sui and Tang.