 Sima Qian relates that Xunzi polished his voluminous writings in his old age, but they do not survive in his own recension. All extant editions of Xunzi derive from a compilation by Liu Xiang 劉向 (79–8 BCE), a palace librarian who located 322 bamboo bundles of text (pian 篇) that he confidently attributed to Xunzi, of which he eliminated 290 as duplicates. These high numbers suggest that Xunzi’s essays had been circulating independently for about two centuries (Sato 2003: 27–36). The general consensus today is that Xunzi is a collection of predominantly authentic essays, but certainly not organized in a manner that Xun Kuang himself had authorized (e.g., Knoblock 1988–94: I, 105–28). One indication of the diversity of Liu Xiang’s sources is that a few chapters (notably “A Debate about Warfare” [“Yibing” 議兵]) refer to Xunzi as Sun Qingzi 孫卿子, “Master Chamberlain Sun”, a title that he himself would not have  used.[1]  The chapter divisions, in particular, seem unreliable: whereas some chapters read like self-standing essays, others do not. In “Refutation of Physiognomy” (“Feixiang” 非相), for example, only the opening lines deal with physiognomy; the rest of the chapter seems to consist of stray passages that Liu Xiang did not quite know where to insert. There are also some chapters with generic instructional material, as well as poems and rhymed riddles that are rarely studied (Knechtges 1989). One of the consequences of this arrangement is that reconstructing Xunzi’s arguments requires reading across chapter boundaries: taken as a whole, the book conveys a distinctive philosophical position, but individual chapters are inadequate, indeed sometimes incoherent, on their own (Kern 2016; Hutton 2014: xviii–xxiii).