秦漢の社會と「日書」をとりまく人々

Abstract

There are many source books on fortune-telling known as rishu 日書 that have chiefly been excavated from the tombs of low-ranking government officials who lived in the last years of the Warring States, Qin, and the early Han periods. These rishu include many written fortunes of low-ranking government officials and people engaged in economic activities. Therefore, these people seem to have been main readers of rishu. Among them, the low-ranking government officials would have served as the terminal organs of a strictly enforced legal regime, but actually they had to take the local folkways into consideration and used rishu positively as the occasion demanded. Rishu for them was a quasi-textbook as was the Weilizhidao 爲吏之道, which contained maxims for government officials. By analyzing the composition of rishu, we find that they were originally texts for professional fortunetellers working in markets. As low-ranking government officials andpeople engaged in economic activities became increasingly literate, simple explanations were added to the texts, their content was elaborated, and the texts were finally transformed into manuals that these people could read and by which they could tell their own fortunes. Fortunetellers seem to have taken part in the distribution of rishu. They periodically adapted the contents of rishu in responses to changes in society and customs and language usage. Rishu were sometimes combined with a short-term calendars, zhiri 質日, when they were disseminated in the markets. So it can be said that rishu distinctly reflect the changes that occurred in the times and society. Fortunetellers made their individual styles of fortunetelling known through distribution of rishu in expectation of gaining more clients. Clients would visit fortunetellers and ask them to tell their fortunes when they were confronted with a problem they could not cope with by reading rishu themselves. In this way, low-ranking government officials and people engaged in economic activities were connected with fortunetellers through rishu. Some of the reasons why these officials increased their influence in local society are likely to have been that they won the support of others with fortunetelling using rishu and that they succeeded in building links with widespread networks of fortunetellers.