A Patterned Past: Form and Thought in Early Chinese Historiography 0674008618, 9780674008618

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A Patterned Past Form and Thought in Early Chinese Historiography

Harvard East Asian Monographs 205

A Patterned Past Form and Thought in Early Chinese Historiography David Schaberg

Published by the Harvard University Asia Center and distributed by Harvard University Press Cambridge (Massachusetts) and London 2001

© 2001 by the President and Fellows ofHarvard College Printed in the United States of America The Harvard University Asia Center publishes a monograph series and, in coordination with the Fairbank Center for East Asian Research, the Korea Institute, the Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies, and other faculties and institutes, administers research projects designed to further scholarly understanding of China, Japan, Vietnam, Korea, and other Asian countries. The Center also sponsors projects addressing multidisciplinary and regional issues in Asia. Libraty of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Schaberg, David, 1964A patterned past : form and thought in early Chinese historiography I David Schaberg. p. em.-- {Harvard Bast Asian monographs; 205) Includes bibliographic references and index. ISBN o-674•oo86r-8 {cloth: alk. paper) 1. Zuoqiu, Ming. Guo yu. 2. China--History--Spring and Autumn period, 722-481 B.C.--Historiography. 3· Zuoqiu, Ming. Zuo zhuan. 4· Confucius. Chun qiu. $. Historiography--China. I. Tide. II. Series. DS747·I$.S32 2001 931'.o3'072--dc2I

Index by the author @I

Printed on acid-fi:ee paper

Last figure below indicates year of this printing II

10 09 08 07 06 0$ 04 03 02 01

things will not remain connected, will not heal, and the world thickens with texture instead of history, texture instead of place. - Jorie Graham, "The Geese" Yet it will not have been profitless to look into those things, at first glance trivial, from which the movements of greater events ofren arise. -Tacitus, Ann. 4.32

Acknowledgments

This book has benefited from the attentions of numerous discussants and readers. I am grateful to my professors and classmates at Harvard, to my colleagues in the Department of East Asian Languages & Cultures at the University of California, Los Angeles, and to scholars at other institutions who gave me the opportunity to test elements of my argument in talks and conference presentations. Several graduate students at UCLA have helped to make. this a better book. Zvi Ben~Dor, James Benn, Steven Day, Bruce Rusk, Lai Guolong, and others pointed out valuable bibliographical leads and electronic re~ sources. George Keyworth, Zhao Gang, and Guy Horton, all of whom served as research assistants at various points during the past years, helped me with the time~consuming task of obtaining and reproducing secondary materials from Chinese and Japanese periodicals. Research assistants' salaries and other costs of research were supported by grants from the Council on Research and the Center for International Studies and Overseas Programs, both at UCLA. The excellent Gateway Service Center of Chinese Academic Journal Publications, administered by the University of Pittsburgh, was immensely helpful in making out~of~the~ way Chinese articles available. Special thanks are due to my colleague Lothar von Falkenhausen, who with characteristic generosity read the entire manuscript and made extensive comments on it. I am equally indebted to David Keighdey, whose detailed remarks have done much to improve the clarity, logical consistency, and per~

viii

Acknowledgments

suasive force of the argument. My friends Michael Nylan and Haun Saussy have been constant sources of intellectual inspiration and support. Yuri Pines, whose own specialty is the Zuozhuan and Eastern Zhou intellectual history, has given friendly help and intelligent challenges; his work has raised the bar for this sort of study considerably. I also thank the anonymous readers of the manuscript for their timely and perceptive comments, and John Ziemer, whose excellent reputation as an editor is justified in every way. In many respects this book is a distillation of the love and support I have received from my family. My wife, Daphne Lei, and our sons, Milo and Rafe, have been a constant source of joy and encouragement. Both Daphne and her sister, Beatrice Lei, have given freely of their own research time to help this project along. Now that the book is done, I look forward to returning the favor. This book is dedicated to all of my many parents, who taught me to read. D.S.

Contents

Conventions

xi

Dukes of Lu in the Spring and Autumn Period Abbreviations

XV

Introduction

I

Part I I

xili

Speech and Pattern

The Rhetoric of Good Order

21

Speech and the Order of Prose 22/ Rhetoric in Practice 30/ Rhetoric in Theory 40/ Rhetoric in Philosophy 50 2

Wen and the Meaning of Verbal Art

57

Wen and the Burden of Artifacts 58/ Text as Artifact: Citing the Zhouyi 65/ Artifacts of the Zhou: Citing Shi and Shangshu 72/ King Wen and Wenci Br/ The Concert forJiZha 86 3 Intelligibility in the Extra~human World

Heaven and Earth g8/ The Five Phases and Yin-yang 104/ Theories of the Human: Music, War, and the Responsive Universe nz

g6

Conventions

In order to distinguish homophones and remove ambiguities, I have occasionally departed from standard pinyin. I follow the standards established in Loewe and Shaughnessy, Cambridge History of Ancient China, p. xxv, with some additions. Thus, King Jiing of Zhou ruled before King Jing, his son. W ey is the state founded during the Western Zhou, and Wei is the state that became an autonomous entity only during the Warring States period. Qi is the great northeastern state; Qii a much smaller neighbor. Han is the name of a dynasty; Hann the name of a Warring States polity. Both Xu and Xuu were small states associated with Chu during the late Spring and Autumn period; the territory of Xu was in present-day Jiangsu, and that of Xuu in present-day Henan. Shen was a region of Chu that produced several key advisors to the Chu kings; Shenn was further to the east, in present-day Anhui. Characters for these and most other Chinese words used in the text are given in a list at the back of the book. I include characters in the text and notes only for long translated passages, where they will be of interest to readers of classical Chinese, and for smaller passages or words where immediate reference to graphs is desirable. All references to Zuozhuan cite the name of the duke, the year of his reign, the section within that year, and page numbers as in Yang Bojun, Chunqiu Zuozhuan zhu. References to Guoyu show the geographical section, and the fascicle, passage, and page numbers as in the Shanghai guji edition prepared by the Shanghai shifan daxue, Guji zhengli zu; references to Wei

xii

Conventions

Zhao's (d. 273) commentary are to the same edition. "Zuo, Xi 22.8 (Yang, pp. Zuozhuan passage recounting the defeat of Duke Xiang of Song; "Guoyu, Zhou 3.2 (pp. 94-100 )" is the great speech on Sun Zhou. I have followed the convention of referring to most rulers of Spring and Autumn period states as "dukes," despite the problems and misconceptions that result from this convention; the latter are discussed in T ay, "On the Interpretation of Kung (Duke?) in the Tso-chuan." All rulers are referred to by posthumous names. Reign dates are based on the tables in Loewe and Shaughnessy, The Cambridge History of Ancient China, pp. 25-29. I use the term "Confucian" to refer broadly to thinkers who cited the words of Confucius approvingly; I do not see these thinkers as having formed a highly organized school during the Warring States period. 296-69)," for example, is the

Dukes of Lu in the Spring and Autumn Period

Yin~!

r. 722-712

Huanf][

r. 7n-694

ZhuangMf

r. 693-662

Min~

r. 661-660

Xifg

r. 659-627

Wen)(

r. 626-609

Xuan '§

r. 608-591

Che~g JJ)t

r. 590-573

Xiang~

r. 572-542

Zhao Bi§

r. 541-510

Dingk

r. 509-495

Ai:£{

r. 494-467

(Dao 'If

r. 466-429]

Abbreviations

BSOAS

Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies

CLEAR

Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews

EC

Early China

HJAS

Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies

HQJJ

Huang Qingjingjie Chunqiu lei huibian !J! 1! t~ ~~ fjc ~. ~ (Qing exegesis of the classics, Chunqiu section). 2 vols. Compiled by Ruan Yuan ~j[; ft et al. 1860. ReprintedTaipei: Yiwen yinshuguan, n.d.

JAOS

Journal of the American Oriental Society

MS

Monumenta Serica

SBBY

Sibu beiyao [9 g5 1rm ~ (Complete essentials of the four divisions). Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1936.

SKQS

Yingyin Wenyuan ge Siku quanshu ID ~p )( r.Wrl 00 [9 ~ :S: (Complete Collection of the Four Treasuries, photoreprint of Wenyuan pavilion edition). Taipei: Taiwan Shangwu yinshuguan, 1983.

SKQSZMTY

Wang Yunwu ±. ~ 1i et al., ed. Heyin siku quanshu zongmu tiyao ji siku weishou shumu jinhui shumu ir ~p [9 ~ ~ :;= *'~ § :l;ll1: ~ 7Jz [9 ~ !& :;: § ~ ~:;: § (General catalogue

*

w

*

xvi

Abbreviations and prefaces of works in the Complete Collection of the Four Treasuries). 5 vols. Taipei: Taiwan Shangwu yinshu~ guan, 1971.

+

SS]ZS

Shisanjing zhushu .::=J~?±m1t (Notes and commentaries to the Thirteen Classics). Ed. Ruan Yuan ~jj; ft. 1816. Re~ printed-2 vols., Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1980.

TP

T'oungPao

X]]

Xu jingjie Chunqiu lei huibian ffl ff~ ~tp lf f:k ~Ji: 1lt ~ (Sup~ plement to Qing Exegesis of the Classics, Chunqiu Section). Comp. Wang Xianqian .:f. 5'G ~ et al. 4 vols. 1888. Re~ printed-Taipei: Yiwen yinshuguan, n.d.

A Patterned Past Form and Thought in Early Chinese Historiography

Introduction

In 638 B.c.B., in an episode that was to become a matter of some difficulty to Confucian commentators, an army from the southern state of Chu de~ feated a force of the state of Song on the banks of the river Hong. Song's ruler, Duke Xiang (r. 650-637 ), had worked for some years to establish him~ self as hegemon (ba) of the central states, a role left vacant by the death of Duke Huan of Qi (r. 685-643). 1 His efforts had necessarily brought him into conflict with Chu, the threat against which the earlier alliance had been organized. On the battlefield, according to all extant versions of the story, the duke 2 displayed a fastidiousness that at first looks admirable, even heroic: ~·+-F.!·

as ·lftJ.J • *0&~A~-T8L· *A~.t!J)t:JU · ~A7K~%

•·~~8·•~a•·&~*••*·••~·08·~~·••oo

7KJJ)t:JU · XtJ* · 08 ·

*~

· ~H-*0013HJ~ · *gffiJ!UM · 0~H~ · F~

'§91~.

In winter, on the day jisi, the first day of the eleventh month, the duke of Song did battle with the Chu troops by the Hong. When the Song· troops had already joined ranks, the Chu troops had not yet finished crossing. The master of horse said, "They are numerous and we are few; allow us to strike them before they have finished crossing." The duke said, "It is not permitted." When they had finished crossing. but had not yet joined ranks, he again reported it. The duke said, "It is not yet permitted." Striking them only after they had made their formation, the Song army was routed. The duke was wounded in the thigh, and his gate officers 3 were destroyed.

2

Introduction

The difficulty of the scene lies in its unusual pairing of generous self~ restraint and disaster. In the moral universe of anecdotes about the Spring and Autumn period (722-479 B.c.E.), victory normally goes to the more decorous and ceremonious combatant; in the generic habits of these anec~ dotes, those who defer battles seldom lose them.4 In this context, the defeat at Hong is an absurdity. Why did a well~intentioned act fail so signally? How could a narrative tradition otherwise quite clear in its lessons preserve so striking an instance of misguided moralism? In the version we are reading, that of the Zuozhuan (Zuo tradition, Zuo commentary), the demand for an explanation is met by a pair of speeches. The duke explains himsel£ and a minister, perhaps the same master of horse whose advice was ignored, refutes him: ~A~~0·0S·~T~m~·~~=~·~Z~~~·~~rn~

~·-AU~~Z··~·~~~·T•S·~*~a·~RZA·~ ffi~~·~·8~·rnffi&Z·~#ey•·B~MB·~4Z~~·~

~-~·U&M~··~~Z·~~~=~·~~•a·*··~· ~*&~·~~~-·~~·~·~~~~·~~=~·~~~··= •~~m~·••~••~·~oomz·rn~ey~·•••~·•• ey~.

All the people of the state blamed the duke. The duke said, "The gentleman does not wound a man twice and does not take graybeards as prisoners. Those who un~ dertook military actions in ancient times did not do so by cutting others off in hemmed~in places. I am no more than the remnant of a lost state, but I do not drum my army forward against forces that have not formed their lines." Ziyu said, "You do not know how to do battle. That the troops of a powerful enemy were hemmed in and had not yet formed their lines was because Heaven was aiding us. Would it not have been permissible to drum our forces forward against them while they were cut off~ Even then we would have been fearful. Moreover, the powerful ones in this case were all of them our enemies. Even when it came to the aged among them, if we captured them then we must take them; what would it matter if they were graybeards~ "One elucidates what is shameful and teaches about battle because one seeks to kill the enemy. If you have wounded him once and he has not died, why should you not wound him a second time~ If you are sparing of a second blow, then it is as if you had never wounded him at all; if you spare their graybeards, then it is as if you are surrendering to them. "The three armies are used for the sake of advantage; the bells and drums are used for the sake of giving sound to the fighting spirit. If the use is advantageous, then it is permissible to cut them off in a hemmed~in place. If the sound flourishes

Introduction

3

and rouses morale, then it is permissible to drum an army forward against forces • d'1sarray.u5 m In the accounts in the Zuozhuan, as in many other early Chinese anecdotes, the longer speech and the last word carry the greater weight. Ziyu's inter~ pretation has the tacit sanction of this tale's teller. The duke has invoked the precedent of the ancients where it no longer holds; like a newcomer to the forms of prestige, he has misused the power of citation. In battle, if nowhere else, right action is whatever brings advantage, and advantage lies in de~ stroying the enemy. If in these terms the defeat still seems surprising, the complete Zuozhuan account of the duke's career before and after the battle makes its outcome seem overdetermined. The anecdotes in which the duke attempts to wield power among the states generally end with predictions of disaster from Ziyu and others. By ordering a human sacrifice, the duke shows himself to be un~ worthy; Song is too small a state to lead the alliance; and the duke will be punished for attempting to restore the status of his line, descended from the 6 overthrown kings ofShang. The Zuozhuan explains events, and prepares for catastrophes, by arraying signs, predictions, and interpretations in advance. Song's defeat justifies the premises both of the predictions and of Ziyu's military analysis. The reader is to conclude from this and from other narra~ tives of battle that received wisdom guides the successful ruler in the admin~ istration of his state, in the mustering of an army, even in the approach to the field; the practices of the ancients, however, cannot dictate tactics, which at times require unpredictability and deceit. In the Zuozhuan, then, Duke Xiang's failure at Hong is an exception that proves a rule, in this case the principle that adherence to precepts passed down from earlier generations brings success. The narrative practice that teaches this precept relentlessly, but with brilliant variety, also marks its limits; it sets apart a strictly circum~ scribed realm of practicality. For the muscular conservatism reflected in this version of the story, the lesson is one of practicality, and the anecdote does not call into question the overall value oflessons from the past. The Zuozhuan' s solution, arguably the earliest that we have, did not become the authoritative interpretation until much later, and during the centuries of the Warring States (479-222) period and Western Han (206 B.c.E.-c.B. 8) it was only one among several explanations of what had hap~ pened. For this event and for countless others, there was at the outset no force to prevent the proliferation of accounts. Documentary evidence con~

4

Introduction

cerning the original events was limited or nonexistent and, in any case, could often be disregarded; what primary sources there were did not control later interpretations. Equally important, no school of thought had the unity or power to impose a single, uncontradictory vision of the past. Even among the diffuse group of thinkers who saw themselves as followers of Confucius (Kong Qiu, 551-479 B.c.B.), there were differences about basic matters of fact and interpretation. The Gongyang zhuan (Gongyang commentary), for instance, can be called a "Confucian" text in that it frequently cites the authority of Confucius and shows reverence for a text-the Chunqiu (Spring and Autumn annals )-thought to have been the work of Confucius; in both these respects the Gongyang resembles the Zuozhuan. But the Gongyang sides unambiguously with the duke, praising him for his self-destructive rectitude and even likening him to King Wen, a culture hero and founder of the Zhou 7 dynasty (ca. 1045-ca. 249 B.c.B.). The third early commentary on the Chunqiu, the Guliang zhuan, tells the tale as the duke's punishment for a series of 8 unjust acts and includes an essay on the proper uses of war. An opponent of Confucian views, Han Fei (ca. 280-ca. 233 B.c.B.), sharpened Ziyu's perspective beyond anything imaginable in the Zuozhuan, seeing in the defeat 9 "the disaster of admiring humaneness and rightness.'' Sima Qian (ca. 145ca. 86) presented both views in the Shiji (Records of the scribe) but in 10 authorial statements adopted the Gongyang position. The differences over the battle at Hong disclose something that, for good reasons, we tend to forget when we read the Zuozhuan. The text was not born to authority but grew into it over a period of decades and centuries. The anecdote in which Ziyu lectures the duke on his misapplication of precedent is not the Urtext from which later writers departed to tell the story in their own tendentious ways; it is one among several tendentious tellings, each of which attempts to make sense of a set of historical givens. Historical anecdotes were polemical, political, and philosophical weaponry during the Warring States and Western Han periods, when the story of Hong was being retold, and the Zuozhuan was no less engage than any other text. New judgments often came to be attached to anecdotes as they were transmitted; other characters could appear to explain where Duke Xiang had gone wrong. 11 The anecdotes gathered in the Zuozhuan and the closely related Guoyu (Legends of the states) were distinguished from other versions by the relative inconspicuousness of the polemical framework surrounding them; their narrators, authors, and compilers never revealed themselves by name

Introduction

5

and rarely wrote directly of their own views. Instead, they worked through their anecdotes and through the characters who spoke in them, insinuating their variety of what we have come to call "Confucianism" into a depiction of the events of the Spring and Autumn period. For many reasons, but especially because of the association of both texts with the Chunqiu and because of the unequaled density of detail their anecdotes provide for the whole of the Spring and Autumn period, they came to overshadow the numerous rival accounts. 12 Canonized, they became history; seen as superfluous, the others came to be viewed as the origins of fiction. The Zuozhuan is a collection of anecdotes and exegetical comments related to the Chunqiu, a terse chronicle of events in the state of Lu and associ13 ated states during the years 722 through 479 B.c.E. In its current form, the Zuozhuan, like the chronicle, is organized around the years of the reigns of the twelve dukes who ruled Lu during that period. For each year the compilers give several anecdotes and comments, for the most part maintaining 14 chronological order on the level of seasons, months, and days. The anecdotes concern all the major northern states of the period, as well as such southern states as Chu, W u, and Yue. At just under 2oo,ooo characters, the 15 Zuozhuan is by far the longest of all pre-Qin texts. As early as the second century B.c.E., legend held, quite implausibly, that the work had been written by Zuo Qiuming, a contemporary of Confucius. The Guoyu, a collection of anecdotes having for the most part to do with events of the Spring and Autumn period, was also attributed to Zuo Qiuming. In content it is closely related to the Zuozhuan, but it differs in organization, in emphasis, and in many of the historical details it presents. The primary organizing principle in the Guoyu is geographic. Anecdotes are categorized by state, with three sections of material for the Zhou royal domain, two for Lu, one for Qi, nine for Jin, one for Zheng, two for Chu, one for Wu, and two for Yue. Coverage is less complete than this listing might suggest and less complete than in the Zuozhuan. Within sections of the Guoyu, the organization is chronological but not annalistic, and there are often gaps of years between recorded events. The selection is limited for some states: the section for Zheng concerns only the events preceding the founding of the state, the section for Qi covers only certain administrative measures during the reign of Duke Huan, and the Wu and Yue sections have largely to do with the period of conflict between those two states. Narratives about Jin, the Zhou royal court, and Lu (a distant third) dominate the work,

6

Introduction

which at just over 70,ooo characters is less than half as long as the Zuo-

zhuan.16 The two works have much in common and probably originated in the 17 same general milieu, alth~ugh perhaps at different periods. Despite numerous divergences-in minor matters of historical fact, in diction, and even in the preferred length of their speeches-the similarities between the two works greatly outweigh the differences between them, especially on the level of narrative and quoted speech. In scores of cases, they give similar or nearly identical versions of the same anecdote. Even when they are not telling the same stories, they use many of the same narrative techniques, adopt the same rhetorical figures in the formal speeches they attribute to characters, and uphold the same general philosophical principles for the administration and interpretation of the world. An old view holds that the Guoyu-the title of which is sometimes understood to mean the "speeches" delivered in the various states-gives more space to formal speeches than the Zuozhuan 18 does. Although the commonplace is true, it has been used to draw too sharp a distinction between the works. It is misleading to say that the Guoyu is dedicated to the recording of speeches and the Zuozhuan to the recording of affairs. Both works record speeches solely in the context of anecdotes, and in both works the centerpiece of most anecdotes is the formal speech or dialogue. The Zuozhuan includes extended narratives of a sort not found in the Guoyu, and a few of the speeches in the Guoyu are longer than any in the Zuozhuan, but the basic features of anecdotes in the two works are the same. At least since the Han dynasty, the works have been treated as a pair. For later ages, the literary habits and techniques embodied in the Zuozhuan and Guoyu had the appearance of a coherent historiographical whole: a virtually complete record of the major political, military, and ritual events in the most .powerful Chinese states during the first centuries of the Eastern Zhou period (770-222). I use the term "historiography" to denote both the process of writing history and the written works that result. In the latter sense, it often designates the Zuozhuan and Guoyu considered together as a single corpus. But this appearance of comprehensiveness resulted from a series of historical accidents and misunderstandings and was only tangentially related to the measures early Chinese courts took to preserve knowledge of the past in writing. As is known from the oracle bones, the rulers of Shang (ca. 1500-ca. 1045 B.c.B.) and pre-dynastic Zhou employed literate functionaries, and insofar as records of divinations and responses constituted his tori-

Introduction

7

cal writing, the duties of these functionaries were historical. But there was apparently no exclusive term even for "scribe," much less for "historian"; in the oldest writings, the graph that would later acquire both those meanings, shi, implies nothing about writing and is indistinguishable from graphs 19 meaning "to employ" (shi) and "to serve" (shi). The royal and local courts of the Western Zhou (ca. 1045-771 B.c.E.) greatly expanded the use of writing in official business and probably employed larger groups of literate officials, whose duties were perhaps distinguished by specialized titles. But we know very little about these officials and cannot say with any certainty how their writings resembled or contributed to historical documentation. 20 The earli~ est descriptions of this literate bureaucracy come from texts written centu~ ries later and appear to be attempts to systematize the disparate references 21 to scribal duties found in earlier sources. One late legend, for instance, held that the "historian of the left'' (zuoshi) recorded words, and the "historian of the right" (youshi) recorded events-or vice versa. However well such offices might account for the differences between the Shangshu (Writings of antiq~ uity) with its long speeches, and the later Chunqiu, with its complete lack of 22 quoted speech, the division oflabor appears to be a fiction. The Zuozhuan and Guoyu certainly benefited from recording practices de~ veloped in Zhou courts, most notably the maintenance of chronicles such as the Chunqiu and the transmission of written accounts of certain types of events. They may also have drawn on historical lore transmitted by the blind 23 scribes (gushi) reputedly employed in courts. But the perception that they are coherent and complete accounts was in large part a result of developments that took place not in the courts of the early Eastern Zhou but in other places and later centuries. The political and ethical attitudes embodied in many of the anecdotes strongly suggest that even if they had their origins in official court contexts, they achieved their final form in a milieu somewhat 24 removed from the direct control of any court. The perspective dominating the anecdotes is that not of rulers but of ministers, especially independent· I values."25 . d ed conservat1ves . mm wh o, as we shall see, espoused "trad'1t10na Because this orientation is expressed more forcefully and frequently than any other view, it informs even those elements of the texts in which it is not di~ reedy expressed. The feeling of coherence in the texts is thus an effect both of their origins and of the habits of reading they impose. The gradual proc~ ess that led to the canonization of the Zuozhuan as one of the central Confucian texts, with the Guoyu as a valued supplement, only strengthened the

8

Introduction

sense of coherence and completeness. As texts that were, for readers in the Han and ever after, the most authoritative account of the events of the Spring and Autumn period, the Zuozhuan and Guoyu had a prestige that implied regularity and comprehensiveness. In the following chapters, I read the Zuozhuan and Guoyu together as traces of a historiographical practice that flourished before, during, and perhaps after the fourth century B.c.E., almost certainly among thinkers who considered themselves followers of Confucius. Although little is known about the lives and habits of these thinkers, it is clear from the texts they produced that they were, like the Confucius of the Lunyu, concerned with the problem of rendering correct judgments of historical individuals and events. For the most part, they expressed these judgments not directly, as Confucius generally did, but through their narratives and especially through the speeches in these narratives: As the problems surrounding the dating of the texts (discussed in the Appendix) demonstrate, neither the Zuozhuan nor the Guoyu came into being at a single time; there are good reasons to believe that the anecdotes were composed, recomposed, and refined over a period of decades and even centuries, through a process of both literate transmission and unwritten teaching and discussion. By referring to the many anonymous authors of the works as "narrators" and "historiographers," then, I am being 26 deliberately-and necessarily-vague. The general consistency of perspective in the works derives not from a single controlling authorial consciousness but from the continuity that the generations of teachers and students who retold these narratives were able to maintain in their explanations of Spring and Autumn period history. It is possible to exaggerate the unity of perspective in the two texts. The compilers of both works drew on a variety of sources, and there is no reason to believe that those sources were uniform in every aspect of their philosophical orientation. As treatments of the episode at Hong suggest, historical narration in early China was neither static nor univocal. It was implicated in polemical projects of all sorts and was regularly used to provide new evidence for doctrines as they evolved. The emergence of philosophical schools and the debates among them during the Warring States period was accompanied by variation in historical accounts; not even shared allegiance to a founding figure like Confucius ensured uniform views of history and its events. Readers of Mencius and Xunzi know how deep the divisions among followers of Confucius were and how philosophical differences were as a

Introduction

9

matter of course expressed in divergent visions of history. It is apparent, too, that for much of this period the term ru denoted not only specialists in the thought and textual exegeses of Confucius-as it would later-but a much broader and more diffuse group of ritual experts and teachers whose roots were older than Confucianism proper. 27 As ru who followed Confucius by working through historical accounts, the historiographers of the Zuozhuan and Guoyu supported his authority both in direct references to his judgments and, more pervasively, in the val~ ues they wrote into their narratives. Without suggesting that anything like a sense of orthodoxy controlled the historiographers' retelling of historical an~ ecdotes, I hold that the viewpoints that receive implicit or explicit sanction in the anecdotes, as various as they are, can be called "Confucian," as long as it is understood how encompassing that classification is for the Warring States period. The term does not presume a deep uniformity of doctrine; rather, it implies that the narrators of the many anecdotes collected in these two works held similar views about the best political order, about the value of classical texts, and about ritual and were not convinced by objections to these views advanced by Mohists and other of their contemporaries. Confucian thought did not start out ideologically pure and develop through cycles of pollution and reform. Like any successful philosophy, it flourished by accommodating and assimilating different views and developed toward orthodoxy only in response to internal and external challenges.28 Only in its most practical~minded statements on administration-the Qi and Yue sections of the Guoyu-does historiography seem to defend views that many Warring States Confucians would have rejected. 29 However, given the ambivalence that even the Lunyu shows toward Guan Zhong, the seventh~century minister reputed to have introduced major political and economic innovations in the state of Qi, and given the accommodations between Legalism and Confucianism during the Qin and Western Han, it is not difficult to imagine some self~identified followers of Confucius endors~ 30 ing even those chapters. During the Han, arguments for the canonization of the Zuozhuan gained strength and finally prevailed over claims that it could not be read as a commentary on the Chunqiu. After this success, a pre~ sumption of correctness and coherence colored readings of the Zuozhuan and the associated Guoyu, and despite occasional challenges on grounds of style and content, both works were habitually understood-and continued to ex~ ert influence-as expressions of Confucian points of view.

ro

Introduction

Although the external events of canonization influenced the perception of the texts, the idea that they are coherent and systematic is also grounded in qualities of the texts themselves. That is, it is justified by textual or, prop~ erly speaking, literary characteristics. To borrow a distinction made by Pierre Bourdieu, the works are an opus operatum-a finished work-that be~ 31 speaks the existence of a modus operandi, a way of doing the work. This modus operandi was a practice of historical discourse, of storytelling, that accommodated events to a set of central values, which functioned both de~ scriptively (in narrative) and prescriptively (in political philosophy and eth~ ics) and were held as core beliefs by some followers of Confucius. Because practice apparently dictated that the transmitters of anecdotes remain silent about their own activities, the nature of the practice must be inferred almost entirely on the basis of the works it produced. This is not necessarily an un~ desirable state of affairs. 32 The reader of the Zuozhuan and the Guoyu as documents of intellectual history is forced to attend to the texts themselves, to internal patterns and intratextual connections, rather than to the little that is known about the origins of the texts. Conventional narrative and rhetorical techniques, type scenes, formulaic judgments of events, and other signs of constancy in practice represent the intellectual commitments of the historiographers and-in the near absence of other information-the histo~ riographers themselves. Constants in practice, expressed in the medium of narration, produce the consistent habits of the text. In historical narration, the result is a coherent representation of the past. As heterogeneous information about the past is gathered and incorporated into an account, it challenges and ultimately strengthens the unifYing perspective, which is forced to develop new means of explanation. In this sense, historiography does not merely share the tech~ niques of fiction writing, as Hayden White and others have argued; history (historia rerum gestarum) and the sense of a history (res gestae) arise out of fie~ tion. 33 Habits of representation and plot construction are highly durable, both because they belong to lasting communities that have a stake in them and because, as a mainstay of culture-our second nature-they tend to create invisible, self~evident standards of interpretation and judgment. Changes in the kind of facts they must encompass can alter them slowly, as can new theories of historical change, but for self~conscious reasons (like genre) and for unconscious reasons (like sott1e forms of ideology), they tend to last. The habits are logically prior to the data they control. The Zuozhuan

Introduction

II

and Guoyu cannot truly serve as sources for the history of the Spring and Autumn period until they are understood as intellectual and literary productions of the Warring States period. My emphasis on the fictional dimensions of historical writing may trouble some readers. It is widely agreed that avowedly historical texts represent worlds in different ways and, in some sense, make the worlds they represent. Yet a focus on the means of representation is sometimes equated with the morally repugnant claim that historical truth is impossible or even with actual skepticism about the world's existence. Like Johnson kicking after Berkeley, critics want to refute such an approach thus. But the declaration that there is nothing outside the text originated in a concept of writing that 34 such refutations ignore. By this concept, the stone that Johnson kicks is no less solid for being circumscribed, but its solidity is useful for particular purposes, which are determined from within the web of significations known as writing. Inert, kicked, tripped over, it fills needs alien to itself but central to some form of discourse, whether philosophical argumentation, conversation, or biography. Human beings do not necessarily do the same, since the needs they meet, even if they are produced from within discourses, are often needs they claim as their own. 35 But images of human beings most certainly do re. semble the stone; images, in any medium, come into being only by following the rules of the medium. Recognizing that image is not identical to reality and that experienced reality is itself shot through with images is hardly revolutionary and in no way invalidates the obligation, laid upon historians and others, to try to get the facts right. It does mean that the facts will always be just out of reach, that no representation will quite do them justice, and that a work will sometimes look most honest when it strains against its own conventions of depiction-but these complaints were common even before the recent panic about deconstruction's moral implications. Focusing on the images as images has the effect of shifting the targeted time frame of the investigation. Through the anecdotes, one hopes to learn about the thinkers, the time, and the intellectual circumstances that produced them. One sets aside the question of whether the depictions of people and events in the anecdotes are accurate. 36 In the process, one renounces 37 confidence in some historical details about the Spring and Autumn period. But for the study of the Warring States period, when most of the speeches and narratives included in the Zuozhuan and Guoyu reached their final form, one gains a rich trove of evidence about the intellectual habits of the thinkers

12

Introduction

who prepared these texts. In looking at a work of art, one may not know how accurately a scene is depicted, but one may nevertheless learn, from the brushstrokes or the marks of the chisel, how the image was made, what tradition of depiction it belonged to, and how it related to contemporary works of its kind. Something analogous is possible with early Chinese histo~ riography. The organization of this book is dictated by literary features of the two texts. In Part I, I examine the rhetorical tendencies and intellectual content of the more plainly philosophical mode of historiographical discourse, the speech. Speeches, in which characters express their judgments of events and individuals, provide the intellectual armature for historical narrative and al~ low the views of the historiographers to emerge in articulation with histori~ cal particulars. Narratives, which are the subject of Part II, set the stage for speeches and furnish the details on which speakers comment; they also as~ sert the existence of a world in which Confucian values, expressed in a Confucian rhetoric, make for predictions that are canny, criticisms that are just, and policies that are successful. The two discursive modes complement each other: speech without narrative would be the unmoored speech of an individual of unknown authority, and narrative without speech would have only mute means of controlling readers' interpretations. Ultimately, the speeches' explicit handling of ordering principles becomes a guide to the nar~ ratives' subtler didacticism. Chapter 1 sketches a rhetoric of the speeches in historiography. After considering the reception of these speeches by readers in imperial times and in our own era, I return to the origins of historiography's distinctive speech rhetoric. Although long, formal speeches are a feature even of texts datable to the early Western Zhou, the tropes peculiar to historiographical speeches first appear in texts dated to the early Warring States period. The makers of these speeches prized marked verbal patterning above all else; other tropes and techniques contributed to the marking of patterns. Two examples show how the rhetoric of good order worked in practice to draw observed par~ ticulars into regular structures governed by sanctioned values. Speeches in the Zuozhuan and Guoyu are designed to substantiate moral and aesthetic judgments through the application of principles (drawn from inherited knowledge and from received texts) to the particulars of historical events. The language of speeches has traits that serve the ends of patterned applica~

Introduction

13

tion; fluidity in the definition of philosophical shibboleths allows them to function in numerous contexts. Among the techniques used to produce marked patterns, the most prominent are enumeration and repetition with variation. No Chinese Aristotle, early or late, catalogued the tropes of this rhetoric. But several writers remarked on the problem of speaking well and on the difficulty of applying inherited wisdom and historical knowledge to matters under deliberation. More important, all early essayists, Confucians in particular, used some version of patterned rhetoric in their own writings. The utterances attributed to Spring and Autumn period courtiers exerted an enormous influence as models of principled discourse. In Chapter 2, I examine how pattern was made meaningful. The word that came to denote specifically literary patterns, wen, suggests connections between those patterns and a much larger set of markings, the signs that function in representation, imitation, and the preservation of cultural norms. Speeches had wen because speech, like flags and fabrics and the other accoutrements of ritual signification, was an inheritable .artifact that imposed responsibilities on its inheritors. After reviewing wen's status in early discussions of cultural reproduction and artistic representation, I show that its meanings are united around problems of correct signification and interpretation. In the narratives of historiography, which exalt hermeneutic acumen, wen in the surface of an object or an utterance opens its interior and its past to understanding. Considered from this perspective, the inherited texts that speakers cite to support their interpretations are wen-bearing artifacts that make their patterning available for application in new contexts. The most artifactual of these was the Zhouyi (Zhou changes), a mantic text that in the Zuozhuan and Guoyu is still closely associated with the manipulation of divination equipment to generate interpretable signs. The most important source of citations for speakers, the Shi (Songs, or Poetry), acquired its artifactual character not by association with divination but through long use in ritual exchanges. Like many passages cited from the Yi, Shi songs are memorable for their rhyme and for other obvious manifestations of pattern; adduced in speeches they become tokens of truth and tend to guide the interpretation of historical particulars. As a whole, the citations from the Shi and from the Shangshu in historiographical speeches suggest a mimetic devotion to one culture hero above all others. For the makers of the speeches, King Wen was both the embodiment of effective patterning and the founder of reproducible Zhou cultural patterns. As references to "patterned words"

14

Introduction

(wenci) indicate, speaking well was an act of devotion to the inherited order and to its founder. As a coda to this chapter, I consider the famous Zuozhuan scene in which the Ji Zha, a nobleman from the state ofWu, comments on a performance of traditional song and dance, including the Shi, during a visit to Lu. In his interpretations, the historiographers voice their conviction that the inherited textual artifact is primarily a vehicle of historical interpretation and cultural preservation. In Chapters 3 and 4, I shift my focus from the form of the speeches to their intellectual content. I begin with the extra-human world, or those dimensions of the world that are represented as largely detached from human control; these are not completely knowable to human observers and are the subjects of historiography's fragmentary, ad hoc investigations of the natural world. For the speakers depicted in historiography, whose rhetoric is an exercise in sanctioned interpretation, heaven and earth are suppliers of signs, with the human world, the political realm in particular, as the ultimate referent. Perhaps because of the centrality of the human, however, historiography imposes limits on signification in nature; several episodes imply that natural events do not always signifjr and that the regularity of ritual responses is more important than the omens themselves. Turning to uses of the Five Phases and yin-yang classifications, I show that these are best understood in the context of the other principles speakers apply; that is, they are flexible sources of ready-made patterns with mythologized roots in the practices of ancient rulers. Like the other, disparate elements of natural philosophy in historiography, music and war presume the existence of discernable patterns in nature; unlike the other proto-sciences, however, musical understanding and strategy are evocations of pattern through action rather than through interpretation alone. In no case is a pure scientific understanding permitted to invalidate commitments to traditional wisdom. In speculations on the extra-human world, expressed in the rhetorical patterns of good order, the historiographers hold up areas of experience that appear to be above or beyond the control of ritual propriety (li); ultimately, however, they measure all knowledge and action against the standard ofli. Chapter 4 takes up the philosophy of proper action in the human world. I begin with the edges of this world. On the margins of the living and the dead, in their ritual interactions with the ghosts of ancestors and with spirits, as in their interpretations of inhuman omens, the speakers tend to see everything as occurring for the world of the living. The order of sacrifice, in-

--------------------------------------Introduction

15

deed rhe whole order of ritual, exists for the sake of commemorating and preserving human distinctions. Content and correctness matter in all prac~ rices, bur they matter primarily because of public perceptions; the effective~ ness of ritual in historiography lies not so much in the real blessings ances~ tors might grant as in the apprehension, on the part of the governed, of their rulers' propriery. On the cultural borders dividing the Zhou world from its exterior, speakers again find in otherness the justifications for what they consider their own, the inherited order. Images of the Rong, the Man, the Yi, Chu, Wu, and Yue shift betwee:U two extremes. These groups lack knowledge of the old Zhou lessons and are therefore barbaric; they are isolated from the new Zhou depraviry and therefore exemplary. N able savagery is for the historiographers a productive oxymoron. From the periphery, I turn to the internal organization of the political world, presenting the major principles that speakers defend in their discussions of rhe royal court, of the fact of hegemony, of relations among states, and of relations within states. What underlies the speeches on all these subjects is a commitment to ritual propriery and, what is more significant, to an expansion of its range of signi~ fication. Perhaps the most important effect of the scores of policy speeches is the development of a flexible notion of 1i that encompasses everything from specific ritual practices to cosmic forces. At the end of this chapter, in a brief account of speakers' uses of the main Confucian ethical terms, I show that although all the terms retain the fluidiry of definition that speech rhetoric required, the historiographers imply that all are subordinate to the more encompassing value of ritual propriery. Beginning in Chapter 5, I consider how the explicit lessons of the speeches are borne out in the medium of narrative. In this chapter, as in Chapter I, I describe formal tendencies and their critical reception. The ba~ sic form of narrative in historiography is the anecdote, which has a regular morphology organized around the substantiation of judgments. In discussions of several well-known examples, I argue that the motive energy of narrative in the anecdote derives from the ubiquitous drive to interpret and from the value of exchanged gifts, services, and disservices. Anecdotes can be understood as experiments in interpretation and as demonstrations of the historiographers' success in constructing plots around Confucian assumptions about interpretabiliry. Chapter 6 extends the consideration of narrative to a higher level of organization. Although the Zuozhuan and Guoyu are anecdotal throughout and

------------------------------

r6

Introduction

recount events only by means of anecdotes, both works gather some of their accounts into series of anecdotes. This allows for the coherent narration of complex events involving multiple incidents and multiple groups of actors. The principle of exchange that operates within anecdotes becomes more marked in series, in which personal and impersonal forces of return and compensation (bao) establish the conditions for narrative completeness. The main exhibits in this chapter are the series constructed around the careers of King Ling of Chu (r. 540-529) and Duke Wen of Jin (r. 636-628 ). The king is destroyed by revenge, whereas the duke succeeds through rewards; in both cases, ritual propriety is the standard against which the reciprocal value of deeds is measured. In keeping with the roles ritual display, material value, and exchange play in the anecdotes, aesthetic judgment is of central importance in the historiographers' construction of historical meaning. In Chapter 7, I first discuss the aestheticization of the five senses and the perils and benefits associated with them and then turn to the topos of the banquet. As opportunities for synaesthetic enjoyment, banquet scenes in the Zuozhuan allow displays of a Zhou sensus communis that draws anecdote series together into narrative wholes and endows the interactions of states with hallowed significance. The most privileged of all cultural performances practiced at banquets is the poetry recitation, in which ministers represent their own and their states' aims in the shared medium of the Shi. Although the banquet and poetry recit~tion are most appropriate to times of concord, they have utopian echoes in certain battlefield gestures of noble warriors. In the military narratives, for which the historiographers of the Zuozhuan are famous, they tested ritual propriety under the stress of violence. As the tale of Hong showed, they esteemed tactical sense, but in their depictions of war and bravado they also suggested that a uniting structure of propriety subsists even between warring armies and forms the basis for peace. In the concluding chapter, I consider what historiography as opus implies about the historiographers and their modus operandi. The historiographers are all but invisible in these works; they do not draw attention to their role in the collecting, retelling, and arranging of their anecdotes, and they adopt a narratorial position that tends to obscure the distance between their own time and the time of the events. However, their depictions of the heroic actions of scribes in recording the immoral deeds of rulers probably reflect their own vision of the duties of the historian and imply that their own ef-

Introduction

17

forts are a similar form of judgment and correction of the historical record, however belated. History is so opaque that only a Confucian vision can penetrate it, but to an observer with the proper understanding, it illustrates that morality is constant even as it records an increasing departure from that standard. In their narratives of the ending of the Spring and Autumn period, the historiographers establish the conditions for the reception of their work through a drama of reification. Narrating a series of political crises and col~ lapses that mark the end of the classic Zhou order, they show how the val~ ues associated with the traditional order survive the catastrophe and make it intelligible. Finally, in tying the meaning of the ending to the rise of written law codes and to the death of Confucius, the historiographers make a place for themselves and their vocation; acting invisibly behind their anecdotes, they carry on Confucius' work of historical judgment and turn writing to its proper juridical uses. In an Appendix, I review theories about the dating and authorship of the Zuozhuan and Guoyu. The prevailing opinion holds that the works had mul~ tiple authors and were complete in content (although not in form) by the end of the fourth century and the beginning of the second century B.c.B., re~ spectively. Without challenging this view, I suggest, on the basis of the work of several Chinese and Japanese scholars, that oral transmission had an im~ portant role in the preservation and development of the anecdotes. The Zuozhuan and Guoyu are not straight transcriptions from lore; they are clearly based in part on primary written documents and on revisions of ear~ lier transcriptions. But pervasive features of the anecdotes-including the prevalence of true predictions, the prominence of well~crafted speeches, and the differences in the versions given in the two works-make it likely that many of them were transmitted by word of mouth for a period of decades or even centuries. Literary criticism and historical analysis work synecdochally; they claim to do justice to their subjects through informed selection and re~presentation. The length and complexity of texts such as the Zuozhuan and the Guoyu make such justice elusive. Some interesting particulars, whether of narrative or of philosophical principle, will always escape the attempt to characterize historiography as a whole. For this reason, a secondary study must be satis~ fled with approximate justice: a description of the general features of speeches and narratives, supported by closely read examples and references

18

Introduction

to corroborating passages, that approaches the truth and necessarily falls short of it. For every passage I have been able to discuss in depth in these chapters, there are ten or twenty others, equally intricate, equally unique, that constitute the real texture of historiography: a web of particular indi~ viduals, events, and judgments that embody the play of generalities without ever disappearing into them. As the narrative of Duke Xiang's failure at Hong shows, and as the constant testing of inherited values within the anec~ dotes implies, the historiographers' material was still alive for them; they were trying both to get the facts right in all their specificity and to see the rightness in the facts. My sketch of their sense of justice and of the literary forms to which they entrusted it is at best a prolegomenon to the works themselves and to the centuries of reading they inspired.

PART I

Speech and Pattern

1

22

The Rhetoric of Good Order

functions: dialogue reveals truths about the character and knowledge of the speaker and, often, the state he or she represents; narrative imports the events of the world into the text and in the process naturalizes assumptions of all sorts. But it is speech that makes assumptions patent. Reflections on the workings of the world, formulations of the laws of history, thoughts on morality, and elaborations of theory belong, in this historiography, to the speech; with very few exceptions, they are uttered by named speakers who 2 are -placed in and comment on particular situations. The speech is not the only mode of presentation for these things; other modes, narrative in particular, are used to establish the connection between event and meaning. Still, because it is in the speech that theoretical reflection becomes explicit, the rhetorical and structural habits that distinguish the speech as a literary form leave their mark on all enunciations of thought within this historiography. Although the rhetorical tendencies that operate in speeches underwent significant changes during the first millennium before our era, the centrality of quoted speech in literary representations was a constant. The endurance of these formal habits testifies to a lasting set of assumptions and activities among the people who produced the writings. In establishing the impor~ tance of quoted speech for these historiographers, I first give an overview of later critical treatments of the speeches they report and then survey uses of quoted speech in earlier Zhou writings. These historical sketches provide a context for the main business of the chapter, a detailed analysis of two major speeches and a general description of the rhetorical and structural principles at work in them. Speech rhetoric in the Zuozhuan and Guoyu tends toward an ideal of proportion and order, and since the speeches are quite clearly the most carefully composed passages in this historiography, it is worthwhile to see what heights this rhetoric could reach. This understanding of the surface characteristics of the structure will serve, in the following chapters, as the basis for discussion of the significance the historiographers attributed to structure itself and the implications speech rhetoric had for the development of theoretical knowledge.

Speech and the Order of Prose Although the Zuozhuan is now well established as a model of ancienHtyle prose (guwen), it was possible for Han Yu (768-824), whom Song literati saw as the founder of the guwen movement, to call the Zuozhuan "superficial and exaggerated" (juku a). Like other scholars before and after his time, Han

The Rhetoric of Good Order

23

evaluated the work according to two distinct standards.3 On the one hand, the fierce academic conflicts that preceded the Han canonization of the Zuozhuan as a commentary on the Chunqiu had never quite subsided. Although a thinker like Liu Zhiji could expose the inadequacies of the Chunqiu, far more common was the attitude that led to the work of Dan Zhu (72470) and his followers, who attempted to read the classic without reference to the supposed distortions of the three commentaries.4 On the other hand, even partisans in the debates acknowledged the Zuozhuan's stylistic excellence. Fan Ning (339-401), a proponent and annotator of the Guliang commentary, wrote of the Zuo that it was "beautiful and rich" (yan er ju) but overly interested in the extra-human business of spirit mediums (wu). The Jin scholar Xun Song (262-328) followed Zheng Xuan (127-200) in observing that the Zuo emphasized ritual propriety but noted that "in it luxuriance and lovely phrases abound" (duo gaoyu meici). He Xun (d. 320 ), also of the Jin, wrote: "The commentary of Master Zuo is the acme of historiography. It is as patterned (wen) and as variegated as the clouds and the moon, as 5 high and as deep as mountains and oceans.'' An ambivalence attends these praises, as it does Han Yu's judgment: the stylistic richness of the Zuozhuan is an abundance, yet it is also an excess that interferes with its function as commentary. The Guoyu, thought of since the Eastern Han as a collection of Zuo Qiuming's surplus material and as an "outer commentary" (waizhuan) to the Chunqiu, has been the object of a similar ambivalence, perhaps the more so because some of it~ speeches outdo the Zuozhuan counterparts in 6 prolixity and rhetorical ~omplexity. One occupation ofliterary critics is the making of anthologies. These, in conjunction with other factors, determine what part of the literary tradition is read. The history of prose anthologies during the past ten centuries shows how first speeches, then complete narratives from historiography, were accorded a specifically literary value as models for guwen prose and as uniquely interpretable traces of ancient minds. Although many important early anthologists of guwen deliberately avoided selections from the Classics/ even in the Song there were those who were willing to put passages from the Classics side by side with more recent writings. As the editors of the Siku quanshu (Complete collection of the four treasuries) noted, Zhen Dexiu (1178-1235) was the first to include passages from the Zuozhuan and Guoyu in a prose 8 anthology. In his Wenzhang zhengzong (Correct lineage of essays), he presented numerous excerpts from both works in his categories of diplomatic

24

The Rhetoric of Good Order

speeches (ciling), critical expositions (yilun), and narratives (xushi). Six fascicles contain anecdotes built around set speeches; only one is devoted to the narratives. Anthologists of subsequent centuries followed Zhen's lead in emphasizing speeches over narratives. In compiling the Miaojue gujin (Wonders old and new), Tang Han (fl. mid-thirteenth c.) selected eight anecdotes from the Zuozhuan and seven from the Guoyu, presenting them without categorization or commentary. In every case, his choices reflect an interest in set speeches and dialogues; he included none of the great battle narratives.9 In Wenbian (Compilation of prose), Tang Shunzhi (1507-60) neglected the famous narratives entirely, placing speeches and dialogues from the Zuozhuan and Guoyu under the rubrics of answers (dui), memorials of remonstrance (jianshu), discursive memorials (lunshu), memorials for requests (shuqing), discussions (lun), and diplomatic speeches (ciming). 10 Altogether these accounted for seven of the sixty-four fascicles of the work. The Y uxuan guwen yuanjian (Profound mirror of ancient-style prose, selected by the emperor), which contains pieces selected by the Kangxi emperor (r. 1662-1722) in 1685, devotes four of its sixty-four fascicles to the Zuozhuan and two to the Guoyu. The emperor included the battle scenes and a few other famous narratives, but most of his excerpts are remonstrances, discussions, and other types of formal speeches. The texts are accompanied by eyebrow commentary written by editors working under the emperor. The most influential of all guwen anthologies, the Guwen guanzhi (Cynosure of ancient-style prose), published in 1695 by Wu Chengquan (fl. 169517rr) and his great-nephew Wu Tiaohou, omits the battle narratives entirely; almost all of the thirty-four Zuozhuan passages and eleven Guoyu passages with which it begins are famous speeches and dialogues. 11 Yu Cheng's (fl. 1743) Guwen shiyi (Elucidation of ancient-style prose) resembles the imperial selection in the space it allots to Zuozhuan (two fascicles) and Guoyu (one), in its emphasis on speeches, especially remonstrances, and in the sheer quantity of commentary it adds to each passage. With the rise of the T ongcheng school, conventions of guwen anthologizing changed. At first, like some of their Song predecessors, T ongcheng adherents avoided excerpting passages from the Confucian classics and other pre-Qin works; this exclusion was intended to show respect for the Classics.12 The Guwen yuexuan (Ancient-style prose: a concise selection) of the

The Rhetoric of Good Order

25

school's patriarch, Fang Bao (1668-1749), starts from the Western Han and includes nothing from the Zuozhuan, Guoyu, or other Classics. Yao Nai (1732-1815) departed from Fang's precedent by including in his famous Guwen ci leizuan (Categorized collection of ancient-style prose; 1779) selections from the Zhanguoce (Stratagems of the Warring States), a Han compilation of clever diplomatic speeches and ruses. Many readers apparently regretted 13 the omission of the Classics. But it was only in the nineteenth century that another important Tongcheng figure, Zeng Guofan (18n-72), again presumed to anthologize the Classics alongside other exemplary prose. In his Jingshi baijia zachao (Various transcriptions from the Classics, the histories, and the Hundred Schools), he placed a total of twenty-eight passages from 14 the Zuozhuan in five categories. Although Zeng did include several famous remonstrances and letters, it is significant that most of his excerpts are narratives of battles, civil disorders, and treaties, which, although they encompass speeches, have generally been valued for their narrative style rather than for their speech rhetoric. A supplement to Yao's anthology, the 1895 Xu Guwen ci leizuan (Supplement to Categorized Collection of Ancient-Style Prose) by Li Shuchang (1837-97), has sixteen pieces from the Zuozhuan under the categories of memorials (zouyi), letters (shushuo ), edicts and orders (zhaoling), admonitions and inscriptions (zhenming), elegies and sacrificial orations (aiji), and detailed records (xuji). Narratives of battle and related subjects dominate.15 Commentarial works by Tongcheng adherents suggest an abiding interest in the narratives of historiography and in the ways they convey meaning through subtleties of style. 16 Late imperial anthologies and commentaries inculcated the assumption, still operative today, that Eastern Zhou historiography is properly the object ofliterary study. The work of the T ongcheng school, especially, established it as a given that style is intrinsic to historiography's methods of conveying moral judgments. Even in the midst of protracted debates over the authenticity of the Zuozhuan and its relation to the Guoyu, 17 admiration for the literary excellence of the two texts has not flagged. Especially in recent decades, Asian and Western scholars have devoted articles and monographs to the specifically literary characteristics of the works and the rhetorical features of the speeches. In some cases, their methodology builds on the techniques established by imperial-era readers. Other scholars apply European methods and categories. In what follows I adhere strictly to neither methodology and

26

The Rhetoric of Good Order

borrow from both in an attempt to identify the rhetorical values that the historiographers held most dear. As literary works and as intellectual documents, the Zuozhuan and Guoyu advanced the claim that a well~wrought speech stands in a privileged relation to truths about human beings, social situations, histories, and futures. This claim was written into what I call the rhetoric of good order. The main at~ traction of these texts for guwen reformers and prose anthologists was their tales of literary talent put to practical use. Even when Spring and Autumn period ministers failed to convince their immediate audience, their carefully crafted speeches generally had the tacit approval of the narrators; they were not mere models of style but examples of a literary activity whose value was not in question. Late imperial connoisseurs of the speech, like the historiographers them~ selves, were fascinated with the effect of eloquent speech on policy. The roots of this fascination are nearly as deep as the beginnings of Chinese writing. Long speeches are found in bronze inscriptions, and they are the rule in the earliest Shangshu texts. Poems in the "Greater Elegantiae" ("Da~ 18 ya'') section of the Shi sometimes include extended quotations of speech, and the texts of the 'Hymns" ("Song") are obviously to be imagined as utter~ ances, even when the speakers and audience are not identified. The Western Zhou elite cared about remembering words that had been spoken, and they found ways to preserve both speeches and the stories of how they had come to be delivered. As late as the Warring States period, when the lore of the Chunqiu was being collected in source~texts for the Zuozhuan and the Guoyu, that ancient work of preservation was effective: inherited words are the soundest source of authority for historiography and are constantly cited in speeches as unerring tokens of the truth. Who composed the speeches in the Zuozhuan and Guoyu? Were the speeches in fact delivered as recorded by the Spring and Autumn period statesmen to whom they are attributed? Are they late fabrications of the compilers of the historiographical texts? Or is there a mean between the lit~ eralist and skeptical readings? As I argue in the Appendix, some of the de~ tailed information in historical anecdotes of the sort found in the Zuozhuan and the Guoyu almost certainly derives from written sources-most of them now lost-whose accuracy we have little reason to doubt. In the case of the speeches, however, we have every reason to suspect revision, amplification, and even outright fabrication during the decades or centuries separating the

The Rhetoric of Good Order

27

supposed moment of utterance and the inclusion of the speeches in collections of historical anecdotes. It is notoriously difficult to transcribe speeches verbatim, and efforts to establish how Spring and Autumn period courts would have produced such transcriptions have so far relied upon circum19 stantial evidence. The speeches themselves, whether they are predictions or regular deliberations, frequently betray more knowledge of later events than would have been available to a real speaker. Different anecdote collections often record very different speeches for the same event, and even the Zuozhuan and the Guoyu, which are more similar to each other than any other two early Chinese works, always give at least slightly differing versions of the same speech. We know that speakers loved to recall and cite the words of their predecessors in their own speeches. Speeches were in circulation, as were memories of what had occurred on important historical occasions. We have no evidence that speakers checked their memories of speeches against written records, and we can only surmise that the speeches in circulation were subject to variation and revision to serve the purposes of the recollector. In recollection and repetition, the oration would become more suitable to its occasion and more prescient than any true utterance could be. Its rhetoric would acquire a perfection implausible in impromptu speech. Its grammar and diction might lose certain vernacular features they had had and become more formal. In short, even if the speech as it has come down to us in written form shared a great deal with what someone, say the great Zheng statesman Zichan, said in 548 B.C. E., it would have undergone a literary reworking that might well reflect specific intellectual needs of a later period. Given the difficulty of pinpointing a moment of composition for any of the speeches, it is impossible to write a history of the development of rhetoric during the Spring and Autumn period. It is possible, however, to outline the most common rhetorical features of speeches recorded in the two most important works about the period. This literary investigation is not without relevance to the continuing problem of determining the value of these texts as historical documents. Historical knowledge does not pass untroubled into and out of texts; rather, it assumes particular forms in response to the needs of historical individuals, some of whom are authors of historiographical works. The received accounts of Spring and Autumn history are selective, biased, and manipulative-because their authors and users needed them to be so. Their consciousness of history was affected both by what they knew

28

The Rhetoric of Good Order 20

about the past and by what they needed to be able to say in the present. The historiographers do some of their best work on the past in their recording of speeches. Although the Zuozhuan and Guoyu are not the earliest texts in the Chinese tradition to attribute lengthy speeches to historical individuals, they are the first in which the narrative frames surrounding the speeches amount to something resembling a continuous historical account. The oldest Shangshu documents are devoted to the words of founding Zhou luminaries and in21 clude only a few disconnected narrative passages. Certain chapters are thought to date from the same centuries as the Zuozhuan and the Guoyu, but 22 these, too, largely eschew narration in favor of quotation. Differences extend to the substance of speeches themselves. The grammar of the earliest Shangshu chapters, which perhaps date to around woo B.c.E., differs quite markedly from that of the historiographical speeches, a fact that is unsurprising no matter what dates are assigned to the historiographical texts. The rhetorical differences are at least as striking. None of the early Shangshu texts has an elaborate and obvious structure that subordinates all parts to a single principle. The style of harangue or injunction typical of the earliest texts favors the accumulation of imperatives rather than the systematic analysis of a 23 particular problem. Although speakers in the Shangshu emphasize the authority of the past models of behavior by speaking of them frequently, they do not generally quote them. In historiographical rhetoric, by contrast, clarity and elegance of structure are the pre-eminent rhetorical achievements, and the authority of the past is brought to bear through citations (especially of the Shi) that contribute to and influence structure. In only one Shangshu text does the rhetoric at all resemble that of historiographical speeches. The "Hongfan," generally dated to the Warring States period, is an exposition of the nine components of the "Great Plan," which Heaven denied to Gun and-then granted to his son, the sage I waterengineer Yu. 24 It begins by listing nine components ("The first is the Five Phases; the second is reverence in the Five Duties ...") and then elaborates 25 on the contents of each component. Thus for the Five Duties (wu shi): n*·-s~·=s§·=sm·~s~·ns~·~S$·§s~·m SI'IJJ · ~S!M! ·.JG!,S~ · $f'Fii · ~f'FX · I'IJJf'J={g- · !M!f'F~ · ~f'F~ ·

The Five Duties. The first is called appearance; the second is called speech; the third is called vision; the fourth is called hearing; the fifth is called thought. Appearance refers to being respectful; speech refers to compliance; vision refers to discernment;

The Rhetoric of Good Order

29

hearing refers to acuity; and thought refers to penetration. Respect makes for reverence; compliance makes for good order; discernment makes for intelligence; acuity makes for good counsel; and penetration makes for sage wisdom. 26 This passage, like the rest of the "Hongfan," works on a principle of substitution. Under the heading "Five Duties" is a list of duties ("appearance," etc.). Each of these is then matched with another term describing the proper form of behavior ("respectful"), and each of these is in turn matched with the result of such behavior ("reverence"). This pattern of listing and equating is found in longer speeches in the Zuozhuan, Guoyu, and in essays in some of the philosophers, but it is rarely pursued so doggedly as in the "Hongfan." Western Zhou and Spring and Autumn period bronze inscriptions possessed well-defined structural conventions that barely changed for several 27 centuries. Inscriptions frequently contained speeches, most commonly the remarks of the king or other political superior who granted the gift that occasioned the casting and inscribing of a vessel. Neither the inscriptions nor the speeches show the tendency toward marked pattern that is observable in historiographical speeches and in 'Hongfan." Only in one late and exceptional set of inscriptions does a speaker use techniques of organization and citation closely resembling those found in historiographical speeches. The inscriptions on three vessels associated with a late fourth-century king of Zhongshan, unearthed between 1974 and 1978, present relatively long speeches buttressed by appeals to aphorisms, to historical precedents, and to such virtues as "good faith" (xin) and "loyalty" (zhong). The speaker also draws a contrast between "former times" (xizhe) and the "present day" or "current situation" (jin), a rhetorical technique typical of historiographical 28 speeches but rare in bronze inscriptions and Shangshu speeches. Anecdotes in the Zuozhuan and the Guoyu often depict confrontations between a knowledgeable, hermeneutically talented observer and a set of events that are narrated as raw phenomena. Much of the interest of an anecdote lies in the speech that results from such a confrontation, especially in 29 the citation of authoritative texts to explain the meaning of events. These acts of interpretation, which are the focus of the next chapter, repeatedly open passages from the Shi, the Shangshu, and other received texts to new interpretations and, at the same time, find in the world evidence of the received texts' relevance. Even when a canonical tag is of itself perfectly applicable to the events at hand, the historiographers seem to have relished the working out of the problem: observed events are recounted and restructured

30

The Rhetoric of Good Order

to bring them into line with the order of the received language, the terms of the received language are applied to observed events, and the speech itself takes shape as it accomplishes the reconciliation of general truths from the past and particular events of the present. Between knowledge and phenom~ ena lies rhetoric, the set of habits that give the written speeches ofhistoriog~ raphy much of their literary value and intellectual authoriry. In historiogra~ 30 phy, knowledge finds expression largely in its application to particulars; since such applications always occur in speeches, we must examine rhetoric in order to see how it might affect the knowledge it conveys. There are worlds of Eastern Zhou wisdom here: natural and political philosophy, eth~ ics, mythology, and literary and cultural history. But all this knowledge is refracted through rhetoric, which has properties of its own. This rhetoric is not primarily an art of persuasion. These are not the records of oratory in action, and as analysis of these narratives will show, outcomes are frequently determined by circumstances that no degree of elo~ quence can change. Whereas a Greek rhetoric such as Aristotle's can justi~ fiably concern itself not only with the construction of a speech but also with the manipulation of the audience and the self~presentation of the speaker, the framing of Eastern Zhou historiographical speeches in narrative tends to make successful persuasion a secondary consideration: a speech can be good even when it fails to convince.31 For these speeches, erudition and structural elegance are paramount, both as they serve to import knowledge into the text and as they illuminate the qualities of the speaker.

Rhetoric in Practice To illustrate some of the more striking and pervasive features of rhetoric in historiographical speeches, I present here a pair of examples in w~ich the tendency toward structural balance reaches an extreme. Although few speeches are quite as intricate as these, all representations of eloquence share at least some of the qualities of verbal art these two examples epitomize. During a visit to the Chu court, Beigong Wenzi ofWey observes the be~ havior of the chief minister of Chu, Prince Wei, and delivers a series of re~ marks in which the ornate patterning of citations and observed phenomena forms the basis of reasoning and of rhetorical brilliance.32

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When the marquis of W ey was in Chu, Beigong W enzi observed the dignity and deportment of the Chu chief minister Wei and said to the marquis, "The chief minister has come to resemble the ruler; he will have ambitions of another sort. But even if he attains his ambitions, he will not be able to carry them through to the end. The Shi says: 'No one is without a beginning; few are able to have an end.' It is in fact quite difficult to make it to the end, and the chief minister will not be an exception." The lord said, "How do you know thist W enzi replied, "The Shi says: 'Respect and be mindful of dignity and deportment; be a model to the people.' The chief minister is without dignity and deportment, and the people have in him no model. One in whom the people find no model and who yet is above the people is not able to have a (good) end." The lord said, "Excellent! What do you mean by dignity and deportment?" W enzi said, "If you have dignity that inspires awe, that is dignity; if you have deportment that inspires imitation, that is deportment. The ruler has a ruler's dignity and deportment; his subjects are in awe of him and cling to him; they make a model of him and imitate him; thus he is able to keep his country and family and enjoy a fine reputation for long generations. The subject has a subject's dignity and deportment; those below him are in awe of him and cling to him; thus he is able to preserve his official position, protect his clan, and benefit his family. Relations follow this

32

The Rhetoric of Good Order

pattern all the way down, and in this way those above and those below are able to consolidate one another. The Shi ofWey says: 'Dignity and deportment are peaceful and harmonious; they cannot be calculated.' These lines say that ruler and subject, above and below, father and son, elder brother and younger brother, the inner and the outer, the great and the small, all have dignity and deportment. The Shi of Zhou says: That for which peers and friends give helpthey help each other to dignity and deportment.' These lines say that the way of peers and friends is necessarily to instruct one another in dignity and deportment. In enumerating the virtuous attainments of King Wen, the 'Writings of Zhou' say: 'Large countries feared his strength; small countries cherished his virtue.' These lines tell how people stood in awe of and clung to him. "The Shi says: 'Do not comprehend, do not know: follow the model of the emperor above.' These lines speak of making a model of and imitating the lord above. "[King] Zhou [of the Shang) imprisoned King Wen for seven years. The rulers of the states all followed him into imprisonment, so that Zhou finally took fright and released him. This can be considered clinging to him. "King Wen attacked Chong. He advanced twice and made subjects of their people. The barbarians were led to submit: this can be considered standing in awe of him. "All under heaven recite and dance and sing the accomplishments of King Wen: this can be considered making him a model. "The acts of King Wen are even today a law: this can be considered imitating him. "(King Wen) had dignity and deportment. "Thus when the gentleman is in office, he is to be held in awe; when bestowing gifts, he is to be clung to; in his entrances and withdrawals, he is to be regarded as a standard; in his ritual motions, he is to be treated as a model; in his facial expression and movements, he is to be observed; in his managing of affairs, he is to be made a law of; in his moral action, he is to be imitated; in his sound and air, he is to be enjoyed. His movements and risings have a pattern to them; his utterances and conversations have order to them. By means of these things, he oversees those below, and we consider him to have dignity and deportment.'m

The Rhetoric of Good Order

33

Not surprisingly, W enzi is proved correct. Prince Wei kills his king the next year and usurps the throne as the arrogant and doomed king posthumously . 34 name dLmg. A logic based on citation informs the speech itsel£ the brief dialogue that precedes it, and the narrative frame of the whole. "Dignity and deportment" (weiyi), which will provide the armature of the speech, are introduced in the voice of the narrator. Even before anyone speaks, weiyi is a matter for observa35 tion and judgment. In the dialogue, Wenzi uses two Shi lines to buttress his prediction of Prince Wei's imminent change of status. Questioned by the duke, he explains his prediction by quoting two more Shi lines, which allow him to connect weiyi and the notion of the ruler as a model for the people; as often happens, the mechanism that makes prediction possible in the political world runs through the people and presumes that they see their rulers' acts and respond to them on the basis of moral judgments. Asked to explain weiyi further, W enzi first relates wei "dignity" to awe and yi "deportment" to imitation and then establishes these two extended concepts as the basis of social hierarchy: the ruler who has U~eiyi inspires in his subjects awe and concern (or "clinging," ai) and becomes a model and an object of imitation for them. This section of the speech concludes with two citations that provide canonical evidence for the role of weiyi both in hierarchical organization and in the relations of equals. Both citations contain the word weiyi. Rather than seeing them as footnotes to an independently developed understanding of weiyi, we should recognize that they serve as the starting texts for W enzi's sermon, authoritative words understood anew and applied to the events of this moment. The second half of the speech goes beyond the evidence of individual citations to the general example of King Wen. As I show in the next chapter, King Wen was for these historiographers perhaps the most important model of political and literary behavior. W enzi first uses citations from the "Writings of Zhou" and the Shi to show that King Wen, in his virtue, did inspire awe, concern, modeling, and imitation. Then, going one step further, he cites incidents from the life and cultural legacy of King Wen to demonstrate that the Chinese states showed and continue to show each of these four responses to the king. This passage constitutes a complex syllogism in which the behavior of the king is juxtaposed with the preceding four-part definition of weiyi to prove the argument that King Wen had weiyi.

34

The Rhetoric of Good Order

In what remains, the behrior of the gentleman is prescribed; the terms used in the analysis of weiyi are central here, but others have been added to complete the picture of the gentleman as model. Most interesting among these are the terms that define the movements and words of the gentleman: the former have "elegance" or "pattern" (wen), a sort of palpable grace and correctness; the latter have "order" or "clarity" (zhang), which is pattern made perceptible for general observation. Later literary terminology originates with usages of this sort and conceives of a text as an elegant and orderly exposition (wenzhang). But in this context the terms have less to do with literary activity in particular than with the grand theme of the effective public image and the role it plays in the ideal society's mimetic organization.36 Although the speech seems to have left him behind, King Wen is still implicitly the subject of this section. In a larger sense, he is present implicitly at the beginning of the speech and in many other speeches that never so much as mention him. An extraordinary speech in the Zhou section of the Guoyu shows even more clearly than Beigong W enzi's speech the rhetorical value placed on marked structural integration. Like W enzi's and scores of others, this speech is prompted by a moment of observation and interpretation. Having seen a certain young nobleman of Jin who is serving in the Zhou capital, a high minister of the royal court speaks well of the man and predicts greatness for him. The speech includes no canonical citations, but is an extreme example of rhetorical habits of categorizing and enumerating. For clarity and convenience of analysis, I have labeled the elements of the introductory narrative and of the speech.37 'g !* ~ Z -1- JEfJ 3ii JEfJ • $ If!~ 0 · (ao] JL ~ JFB[ • [bo] 1.\'l ~ ~ · [col li ~ ~ · (do] ~ ~ ~ · (Eo] ~ :/iiX: ~' 7J. *. · (Fo] ~ -~ ~' 7J. ~ · (Go] ~ f~ ~' 7J. Jr · (Hol ~ f= ~' 7J. A · (Iol ~ ~ ~, 7J. flj · OoJ ~ ~ ~' 7J. $ · (Kol ~ ~ ~' 7J. lfflj • (Lo] ~ ~ ~' 7J. )\;=$ • (Mol ~ 1J: ~' 7J. 1$ · (No] ~;!; ~' 7J. ~D · (Oo] ~ ~ ~'

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Zhou, the son of Sun Tan of Jin, went to the royal domain, where he served Duke Xiang of Shan. [ao] When he stood, he never slouched. [b0] As he looked at something, he never glanced around wildly. [c0] Listening, he never pricked up his ears. [do] And in speaking, he never touched on the distant. [E0] When he spoke of reverence, he always brought up Heaven. [F 0] When he spoke ofloyalty, he always brought up intention. [G0] When he spoke of good faith, he always brought up the sel£ [H0] When he spoke of humaneness, he always brought up the human. [I0] When he spoke of rightness, he always brought up the

The Rhetoric of Good Order

35

benefits. UoJ When he spoke of intelligence, he always brought up affairs. [K0] When he spoke of bravery, he always brought up restraint. [10] When he spoke of the teachings, he always brought up discernment. [M0} When he spoke of filiality, he always brought up the spirits. [N 0} When he spoke of beneficence, he always brought up harmony. [0 0} When he spoke of yielding, he always brought up parity. [p0} When there was some matter of concern in Jin, he never failed to worry about it, and [q0} when there was cause for celebration, he never failed to rejoice.

So far we have only the description of a man, but a description so inflexibly symmetrical that it is clearly preparing the way for something else. Four parallel phrases, each of three characters, render in language the rigorous discipline by which the man controlled his appearance in court: neither posture, nor facial expression, nor utterance strayed from the implied norm. Then, in eleven parallel phrases, Sun Zhou's conversational habits are anatomized to show how he attended to what we must assume was consid38 ered essential in each topic. Finally, in two parallel phrases, the narrative notes that besides acting and speaking well, the expatriate Sun Zhou shared the sorrows and joys of his homeland. One might have suspected in reading Beigong W enzi's speech that the term weiyi was introduced in the framing narrative to justify the speaker's choice of topic and citations. Here the motivation of narrative is even more explicit. This framing narrative, like some others in the Zuozhuan and Guoyu, is designed not as a transparent account of matters of fact but as preparation for a rhetorical display. Well-crafted preludes of this kind, as well as the numerous concluding passages in which spoken predictions are fulfilled, must be read in conjunction with the speeches, not as wholly independent historical accounts. Given what follows the description of Sun Zhou's behavior, it cannot be doubted that the introductory passage is entirely infqrmed by the needs of the speech and its overall structure.

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The Rhetoric of Good Order

36

[E1] reverence is respectfulness in accordance with wen. [F1] Loyalty is following through in accordance with wen. [G 1] Good faith is correspondence through wen. [H1] Humaneness is concern through wen. [Ir] Rightness is restraint through wen. Ud Intelligence is the vehicle of wen. [Kr] Bravery is leadership in accordance with wen. [Lr] Teaching is the promulgation of wen. (Mr] Filiality is the root of wen. (N1] Beneficence is kindness in accordance with wen. [0 1] Yielding is the material of wen.

Duke Xiang begins his speech by commanding his son to be good to Sun Zhou, who will one day ru1e Jin. To support his prediction, Duke Xiang judges that Sun's behavior is "cultured," "elegant," and "orderly" (wen) and adduces a pair of principles: he who is capable of wen can win the help of Heaven and earth; and the one whom Heaven and earth thus bless may start in obscurity but will end up at the head of a state. If these principles are true, then to prove his prediction Duke Xiang must demonstrate the validity of his initial claim that Sun Zhou's behavior is in accordance with wen. The two sections that follow complete this demonstration. First, drawing on the introductory description of Sun Zhou's ways of speaking, the duke systematically matches the virtues Sun Zhou discussed in E0-00 with wen, isolating in t;ach case a term that somehow stands for the relation between wen and the virtue. Thus, taking up the framing narrative's statement that "when he spoke of ~everence, he always brought up Heaven" (E0), the duke now avers .that "reverence is respectfulness in accordance with wen" (Ed. The relation of wen and each of the eleven virtues discussed creates eleven medi~ ating terms (gong, "respectfulness," is the first) that will become indispensable in the ensuing argument. Returning to the details described in E0-0 0, Duke Xiang now shows how the directions Sun Zhou took in his discussion of the various virtues proved that he possessed those virtues: (Ez]

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[E 2] By making Heaven a model, one may be reverent. [F 2] By carrying out one's intention, one may be loyal. (G2] By thinking upon oneself, one may have good faith. [H2] By being concerned for humans, one may be humane. [I2] By reaping benefits from restraint, one may be right. U2J By handling affairs for success, one may be intelligent. [K2] By following what is right, one may be brave. [L2] By prom~ ulgating discernment, one may teach. [M 2] By bringing illumination to the spirits, one may be illial. [N2] By being kind and harmonious, one may be beneficent.

The Rhetoric of Good Order

37

[0 2) By pushing one's equal ahead, one may be yielding. This gentleman partakes of all of these eleven.

At the outset, the identifications that are accomplished in E 2-0 2 are left implicit; although each of the principles stated in the series relates two terms that appear in the description of Sun Zhou's speech (E 0-0 0), it is only at the end of the list that Duke Xiang declares in summary that Sun Zhou is virtuous in all eleven respects. The relation of specific topic and general virtue in E1-0 1 has created a set of mediating terms that overlaps to a certain extent with the set produced in E2-0 2• Three cases reveal the fundamental rhetorical drive toward pattern that accounts for the presentation of these parallel lists. In H, L, and N, the final iteration (H 21 1 21 N 2) weaves together the observed behavior of the first list (H 0, 1 0, N 0) and the wen-definition of the second list (H 1, 1 11 N 1 ) in the syntax of a single expression. For example, it was said of Sun Zhou that "When he spoke of humaneness, he always brought up the human" [H0); further, "humaneness is concern through wen" [Hl]; finally, "By being concerned for humans, one may be humane" [H 2]. The syntax of the culminating sentence completes a miniature chiasmus, or ABBA structure: [H0] humaneness-human [Hd concern-[H 2] concern for humans-humane. The notion of concern was introduced only in the second series (H 1), and served to relate the named virtue (ren, "humaneness") to the field of wen. In the third series, the "human" from the first series and the "concern" from the second series are brought together, producing both a more intricate definition of the named virtue and a demonstration that Sun Zhou possessed the virtue. That he made a habit of bringing up the human when he was speaking of humaneness shows that he understood both how the virtue should express itself (in a concern that accords with wen) and what object this expression should take (humans, other people). In the case of two other virtues, teaching and beneficence (L and N), the third series likewise applies the wen-defined behavior of the second series to an object or topic delimited in the first series, producing perfect chiasmatic structures. Although the treatment of the other eight terms does not yield such neat patterns, the significance of the three iterations is clear enough. The list of virtues and of their places in the order of wen (E1-0 1) suggests an implication of wen in the definition of each of the named virtues and in the observed behavior of this particular historical actor, while at the same time establishing wen as an entity with its own rules, forces, and boundaries. Although a

38

The Rhetoric of Good Order

fixed grammatical paradigm provides for the relation of each of the virtues with wen, the specific terms and order of that paradigm admit a great deal of flexibility. In every case, the virtue X is theY of wen. 39 Wen inflects the sev, eral virtues subordinated to it in various ways, either becoming the whole of which they are parts or characterizing the manner in which they show them, selves in behavior or serving as the object of a propagation or devotion. This flexibility of application is typical of the handling of the various hallowed terms that the speakers and historiographers used regularly and that Confu, cian philosophers would eventually claim as their own.40 A transition follows: ~n~n'~~~fu·~~~~,~~~~·~~~~,x~~fu·x

IKX'~~~~~~~·*~-~~-~~-Xlli·~~~~· Six for Heaven and five for earth: these are numerical constants. Heaven is taken as the warp and earth as the woof; when warp and woof do not clash, it is the image of wen. King Wen was wen in his substance, and so Heaven blessed him with all under Heaven. Now, this man has covered himself in it [wen] and is close in the order of generations: he can win his state.

Two moves of summation complete the first part of the speech. First, in "Six for Heaven and five for earth ... ," the listed virtues are counted and their number-eleven-is matched with Heaven and earth, whose unexplained "constants" are six and five, respectively.41 No identity berween the terms in each set of eleven is elaborated; number serves only as a transition from the virtues to the Heaven,earth dyad, which will permit certain developments. By matching Heaven with the warp threads in a fabric and earth with the weft, the speaker leaves behind the cosmic and returns to the level of culture: warp and weft in perfect order are the very image of wen. The definition of wen as pattern, unattested in bronze inscriptions, is central to the term's use in historiographical speeches, not least because it makes possible rhetorical transitions of the sort we observe here. 42 Second, in "King Wen was wen in his substance .•. ," the speaker exploits another element of wen's polysemy. King Wen is a part of the order of wen, its foremost historical embodiment and its first evangelist. From the recol, lection of his teachings and of his biography come precedents that guide right action in the present. In this case the precedent is simple: Heaven blessed King Wen with sovereignty over the earth because he personified wen. Since Sun Zhou has "covered himself' (pi) in the fabric of wen and has in this way repeated King Wen's moral achievement, he can expect a similar

The Rhetoric of Good Order

39

political reward. That he has the right genealogical credentials ("is close in the order of generations")-whether from King Wen or from the Jin duke-adds to his political eligibility. At this point another chiasmatic structure has become complete. Beginning with a prediction, Duke Xiang first brought wen and the Heaven-earth dyad into an explicit relationship. He then related each of eleven virtues to wen, defined for each of the eleven virtues a manner and focus of attention that characterized the possessor of the virtue, returned to Heaven and earth by way of the number eleven, reintroduced wen by way of the textile metaphor, and finally repeated the prediction. If it is noted that the series E2-02 begins by emphasizing Heaven as the focus of reverence and thereafter tends to make worldly, concrete phenomena the foci of more abstract virtuous attention, then the chiasmatic core of this section emerges: wen (E101)-Heaven/ earth (E2-02) - Heaven/ earth-wen. The initial prediction, repeated at the end of the section, may provide an additional frame, with the first enunciation of the wen- Heaven/ earth relationship inserted as a guiding principle. The structural and rhetorical effects achieved in the next section are still more complex:

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glancing around wildly is propriety. [c1] Listening without pricking up one's ears is stability. [diJ Speaking without touching on the distant is caution. Now, [a2] correctness is the way of virtue. [b 2] Propriety is good faith according to virtue. [c2] Stability is the completion of virtue. [d 2] Caution is the preservation of virtue. To preserve the completion pure and fast [= d 2, c2] and to make a way for correctness while serving good faith [ = a21 a2, b2] are to make good virtue bright. Being cautious about stability properly and correctly [ =d1, c1, b1, a1] is the help of virtue. Rejoicing and sorrowing for Jin [q11 p 1], he does not turn his back on his roots. Covering himself in wen and using the help of virtue, what could he take if not the state?

Duke Xiang now takes up aspects of Sun Zhou's observed behavior that had at first been set aside (a0-d0 and p0-q0). First, in a1-d1, each is equated with

40

The Rhetoric of Good Order

a moral attribute: "Standing without slouching is correctness" (a1). Next, in a2-d21 each of the attributes so produced is placed in the order of de, "virtue": "Correctness is the way of virtue" (a2).43 Finally, in two virtuosic passages, the ultimate consequences of the equations are summed up in an order that completes a chiasmus for this section. Thus the first of these passages takes the terms produced in a2-d2 and presents them in nearly perfect reverse order, producing a statement about virtue ("... are to make good virtue bright"); the second of these passages takes the terms produced in a1-d1 and presents them in strict reverse order, identifYing them as "the help of virtue." Taken with the first part of the speech and the material that precedes the speech, this section now completes yet another chiasmatic pattern: general behavior (ao-do)-speaking habits (E0-0 0)-treatment of speaking habits (E1-0 11 E2-0 21 with conclusions)-and treatment of general behavior (a1d11 az-d2, with conclusions). Duke Xiang handles Sun Zhou's thoughts for his country (p0-q0) simply, identifYing them with a devotion to his roots, 44 and then reasserts the two main justifications for his prediction in a pithy four-character phrase: "Covering himself in wen and using the help of virtue." Each half of the phrase is the result of logical equivalences established in the two halves of the speech. That Sun Zhou covers himself with or clothes himself in wen was the explicit result of operations involving E-0; that he uses the help of virtue was likewise established through the manipulation of a-d. I leave untranslated Duke Xiang's conclusion, in which he recounts various divinations and dreams that point to Sun Zhou's succession to the Jin throne. These remarks lie outside the tight structure that he develops in the first part of the speech and form a sort of coda for it. As always in historiographical speeches, the well-wrought prediction comes true: the composers of this speech knew that Sun Zhou was to become the very successful Duke Dao ofJin (r. 572-558).

Rhetoric in Theory European scholars have recently devoted considerable energy to the work of identifYing and cataloguing the distinct rhetorical figures used in pre-Qin 45 writings, including the Zuozhuan. Because they are primarily interested in figures that operate at the level of the sentence and that have analogues in the Greco-Roman rhetorical tradition, they have paid relatively little attention to the principles of taxis by which whole speeches are organized. Struc-

The Rhetoric of Good Order

41

tures of the sort identified in the speeches of Beigong W enzi and Duke Xiang, which are unparalleled in Western oratory, elude the available terminology.46 Yet the urge to create orderly structures is the most pervasive rhetorical characteristic of historiographical speeches and is more fundamental 47 than any of the particular figures through which it is achieved. As I argue in the next chapter, it contributes to the representation of the art of good speaking as a practice of virtue. G. E. R. Lloyd, in his comparisons of Chinese and Greek ways of proo£ has pointed out that the Chinese were on the whole less interested than the 48 Greeks in formal analysis of methods of persuasion. In analyzing speeches attributed to Warring States characters, he shows that Chinese writers tended to emphasize the psychology, rather than the logical basis, of persuasion.49 Lloyd is right about the speeches and texts he discusses: it is true that the Mohists did not formalize the syllogism as Aristotle did, and the orations from Zhanguoce that Lloyd examines do not incorporate it. But Lloyd's formulation does not entirely do justice to the speeches attributed (in the Warring States period) to Spring and Autumn period speakers. For these speakers, the psychological elements of the situation of persuasion-the interpersonal tactics of speaking-matter occasionally, but they matter far less than the rhetoric of good order and the application of inherited wisdom, 50 features that are both foregrounded and, on occasion, explicitly discussed. Apodeixis-logical demonstration-and epideixis-showy display-are intertwined in the historiographical texts. 51 The speeches analyzed above show that the syllogism was among the techniques of proof available to early Chinese speakers and writers. Beigong Wenzi's syllogism takes the following form: one who is the object of awe, concern, modeling, and imitation has weiyi; King Wen was the object of awe, 52 concern, modeling, and imitation; therefore King Wen had weiyi. The eleven terms in the first part of Duke Xiang's speech are not treated syllogistically, since the conclusion-that Sun Zhou possesses these virtues-is left implicit. But it is easy to see how the three iterations of each term function just as W enzi's pairing of definition and historical fact did. Sun Zhou speaks of human beings when he speaks of the virtue of humaneness; the virtue of humaneness, in one definition, is a concern (no doubt for human beings) characterized by wen; one who is concerned for human beings is capable of being benevolent. The implication, then, is that Sun Zhou has revealed his own humaneness by speaking correctly about humaneness. Such

42

The Rhetoric of Good Order

structures of proof are hardly emphasized in historiographical speeches. As in both of these examples, opportunities for patterned presentation seem to upstage the mechanics of logical demonstration. Perhaps a faith in the in, controvertibility of received definitions and texts-a faith that the writers, who were actively defending it, must never open to question-encouraged a looseness of form in proofs. 53 As long as the starting definition or text could not be denied, the work of proof lay in demonstrating that the particular at hand could be matched somehow with the starting generalization. The re, sult would be the rhetorical tendency one observes in historiographical speeches, a steady alternation between authoritative generalities and their application to the specifics at hand. Had Eastern Zhou scholars desired, as did Aristotle and many before and after him, to name and categorize the techniques exemplified in the best speeches, they could perhaps have compiled an impressive list of effective tropes, not to mention a guide to the parts and construction of a speech and advice on the self,presentation of the speaker and the manipulation of the audience. As Lloyd notes, however, abstract discussions of rhetorical tech, niques are rare and brief; some of these are discussed below. The recounting of remembered speeches and anecdotes differs from the agonistic oratory of the Athenian agora, and recollection of particular words and incidents seems to have mattered more during the Eastern Zhou than did reflection on rhe, torical technique. Even in the tales of eloquence and deception collected in the Zhanguoce, with their explicit thematization of rhetorical brilliance, the celebration of the abilities of a few orators abounds, and the genre seems to rule out abstract consideration of their skills. Unlike music, ritual, and cer, tain sciences such as the study of the calendar, rhetoric was not one of the fields of knowledge to which early Chinese thinkers devoted lengthy theo, redeal treatises. In the absence of extensive early discussion of rhetorical techniques, it is necessary to develop a description of rhetorical habits on the basis of the speeches themselves. The historiographical speech is built from the follow, ing elements: a judgment of present events; general principles; citations from canonical works, aphorisms, and the like; historical precedents; observation and description of events at hand; matching of principles, citations, and precedents with these events; and a prediction of future events. Like other literary morphologies, this list is more comprehensive than most specific ex, amples, which need not contain every one of the available elements. The

The Rhetoric of Good Order

43

elements fall into two groups: knowledge and application. Principles, citations, and precedents are knowledge, and the others are application. Taxis, or the arrangement of the given elements, is neither strictly determined nor entirely free. Perhaps because the rhetorical art of the speech lies in its pairing of inherited tenets with observed events, abstractions and historical particulars are normally deployed in alternation, so that knowledge in its various forms can surround kernels of observed reality and control their interpretation. . Other principles of order operate within the separate sections of the speech. Some forms of knowledge inevitably affect taxis. When a citation is cited in the analysis of a contemporary event, historical particulars must be presented in the order suggested by the citation. The same is true when a historical precedent is cited. But many types of theoretical knowledge do not have a given order and could be arranged to fit the material at hand. A flair for enumeration produced many texts in which speakers expound and apply sets of abstract terms, as the speaker does in "Hongfan." Loose relations of entailment among individual principles are presented in sorites, a chain-like structure in which each phrase repeats the ending of the phrase that precedes it. The most intricately structured speeches use several ordering techniques, and the result is a tightly woven fabric of knowledge, citations, and observed events. The grandest and most memorable speeches in historiography are mostly of this type. The parts of speeches in the Zuozhuan and Guoyu, as well as some of the more common rhetorical techniques adopted in them, serve to distinguish them from speeches quoted in other works and attributed to individuals of other eras.54 The character and function of these elements of the speech derive from the textual impetus behind speech-making: the concern with weaving together general knowledge and particular observation in a clearly patterned structure.

Judgment. Unlike orations preserved from the law courts and public assemblies of Greece and Rome, speeches in Chinese historiography are normally framed by anecdotal material that establishes relevant facts and identifies, if only implicitly, the question that the speech will address. For this reason, speeches often lack introductions and begin with the most succinct statement of the speaker's contention: bu ke "That (policy] won't do"; ... qi wang • Duke x·1ang's speech , "You hu "[Th'1s state or person] IS. doomed";55 or, m must treat Zhou of Jin well." Considered as part of the speech, such utter-

44

The Rhetoric of Good Order

ances are statements of the case to be proved, and the remainder of the speech is the argument proper. Considered within the historiographical system as a whole, these statements are judgments; strategically placed at the junction of straight narration and speech~making, they serve to introduce the historical text's theoretical reflections on the historical detail it has pre~ sented. Judgments do not always come at the beginning of the speech; they may be presented at the end, as the result of the reasoning that makes up the argument. Depending on the circumstances of the speech, judgments may be predic~ tions. When the speech is deliberative, 56 as in Duke Xiang's case, the predic~ tion is subordinate to the policy recommendation: "You must treat Zhou of Jin well, for he will win the state ofJin." In the many speeches devoted to the display of knowledge and to the interpretation of preceding anecdotal mate~ rial, prediction of good or bad consequences may constitute the judgment on which the entire speech is built. Another important type of judgment is the aesthetic, which neither engages knowledge with policymaking nor isolates it in prediction, but encourages rulers or social superiors to accept simultane~ ously aesthetic and moral interpretations of their acts. Because of its role in the construction of the historiographical system as a whole, I defer full dis~ cussion of this variety ofjudgment.57

Principles. The demonstration of the truth of a judgment depends on the successful assimilation of the particulars of the occasion (which may be acts observed or policies contemplated) to truth. The latter always makes its ap~ pearance in the form of specialized statements, well suited to the matter un~ der consideration and often presented in balanced, gnomic phrases. These phrases are the principles of the speech and often, as in Duke Xiang's case, account for a large portion of the text. Perhaps the purest example in that speech is the series E 1-0 11 in which each of the eleven virtues is assigned a relation to wen. Principles are represented as utterances that admit of no de~ bate. Despite the frequent disagreements between speakers built into the an~ ecdotes of this historiography, these tokens of a larger truth never come under attack. In a minority of cases, statements of principles import truths into a speech without citing an authority or a source. In such instances, the literary form in which the principles are presented-parallelism, antithesis, rhyme, and sorites-may imply a basic sort of authority and truth value. But such unattributed principles seem to belong to the same general category as

The Rhetoric of Good Order

45

quotations from titled works. Principles thus include citations, which vary from the barest attribution of the truths adduced (chen wen zhi "I have heard that •.•") to full citation (Shi yue "The Shi says . . ."). The first style of reference merely attributes the principles to received wisdom, while per~ haps retaining traces of the oral character of education and wisdom. The second style marks the difference between the speech and the source of the cited truth, while inevitably demonstrating, through the application of prin~ ciples to particulars, that distance does not impair the validity of the text cited. Another variety of principle is the type implicit in a precedent, which as~ signs a normative value to historical events. By the conventions of this histo~ riography, historical examples of triumph are repeatable, whereas failures are bound to recur. Citing an example either guides a policymaker toward pos~ sible success or warns him of inevitable failure. The use of precedent differs from that of other types of principle only in that its summary or fragmentary narrative form does not lend itself to textual elaboration as plain principles and citations do. Although a series of principles can become the basis of the sort of text~making Duke Xiang did, precedents are events first and language second, and they do not normally yield a set of terms upon which a matrix can be built. The precedent is useful as a token of the truth because of its general correspondence with the matter at hand and because of an intrinsic faith in history's repetitiousness. 58

Application. Finally, it is useful to distinguish application from judgment and principles. Because principles and the literary structures they make possible dominate these speeches, there is little effort to distinguish the statement of facts from the application of principles to those facts. As we have seen in Duke Xiang's speech, even the anecdotal material that precedes a speech can at times obey the rhetorical dictates of that speech, with facts disposed in readiness for rhetorical use. Thus narration, considered a separate category in Greek and Roman forensic oratory, does not constitute an independent section in an Eastern Zhou historiographical speech, since much of the nee~ essary information is provided before the commencement of direct dis~ course, and any reference to events in the world directly serves the purposes of application, that is, of the substantiation of principle. Like precedent, nar~ ration is dominated by principle and its application. Application itself is only partly distinct from the statement of principle, since, as in the passage E2021 it is the process by which facts and principles are woven together.

46

The Rhetoric of Good Order

Historiographical speeches are distinguished not only by their parts but also by certain stable rhetorical tendencies that they display. Besides citation, full consideration of which I reserve for the next chapter, the animating tendencies of the rhetoric of good order are fluidity of definition, enumeration, and repetition. All these are aspects of a single tendency, the drive toward manifest verbal patterning. They are unlike the tropes identified in traditional Greek and Roman rhetoric in that they pertain not to the local effects of language but to the overall shape of an utterance. In these tendencies, structure acquires a meaning of its own and becomes much more valuable than any single technique of persuasion.

Fluidity of definition. Duke Xiang's speech, as intricate as it is, exemplifies rhetorical habits that are characteristic of historiographical speeches in general. Despite his focus on wen and de and despite his extended treatment of various canonical virtues in their relation to those two master terms, it is unlikely that any reader would be tempted to identifY this text as a central statement of Eastern Zhou moral philosophy. The texture of the speech affects the quality of the terms. Even wen and de are rendered more diffuse and less weighty than they would be in, say, a Lunyu apothegm. At the same time, because there are so many similar weavings of terminology throughout early historiography, this particular articulation makes no claim to the authoritative status a saying of Confucius might have. It is instead one among many distinct performances in a single rhetorical-historical genre. Seen from another perspective, the flexibility of terminology is the very thing that makes possible the characteristic brilliance of these speeches and the pervasive application of Confucian principles to the problems of the world. The matching of concepts that goes on in Duke Xiang's speech, as for instance when he identifies each of the eleven virtues as a part or effect of wen, resembles definition. Yet in some respects it is the antithesis of the drawing of limits implied in definition. Far from establishing a closed pocket of meaning represented by the defined term, these matchings open the term to transmutation. Matchings are crafted to fit the rhetorical architecture that is under construction. Essential definitions give way to relational definitions, which take on solidity in the structure of any given speech but have a calculated fluidity in the corpus of speeches as a whole. A named virtue, or any other term from the various bodies of knowledge that support speechmaking, is a bundle of possibilities loosely organized around a theme: it is a variable or tool whose usefulness depends on its adaptability to rhetorical

The Rhetoric of Good Order

47

circumstance. This is not to say that basic concepts like ren (humaneness) and xiao (filiality) or shibboleths like wen and de are empty categories. They 9 do have a delimited referential force. 5 But in practice that force depends on the cultivation of a certain openness at the heart of any matching or definition: differing rhetorical needs fill the same open term with different signifying contents. To put it another way, the corpus of speeches implies a vision of language as a vast network in which each term is related to all other terms and placed at the intersection of many possible paths of significance. Any single speech isolates a subset of these connections that is appropriate to the historical circumstances of the occasion. Thinking and speaking about events evoke truths that are already latent in language's internal relations. 60 Although Duke Xiang's speech is an extreme case, fluidity of definition and the weaving of equivalences that fluidity permits are defining characteristics of the speech form in historiography. The speech differs from narrative and dialogue in foregrounding complex, highly marked patterns, which constitute a rhetorical feature in their own right.

Enumeration. Another technique that contributes to the crafting of large rhetorical structures is enumeration: the terms making up one section of the. speech are counted, and their number is stated, either before or after they are presented.61 In Duke Xiang's speech, for example, the number eleven was first mentioned as the sum of the virtues in E-0. By the logic of equivalence, the number was then available as a mediating term and permitted a transition to Heaven and earth, which had numbers of their own. In the Zuozhuan, to give only a small sample, one reads of the "six defiances" (liu ni) and the "six compliances" (liu shun); of the "five crimes" (wu zui) of the Di tribes; of the "five advantages" (wu mei) of a large state's visit to a smaller state; and of the "six breaths" (liu qi) of Heaven, the "five flavors" (wu wei), the "five colors" (wu se), the "five sounds" (wu sheng), the "six illnesses" (liu ji), the "four seasons" (si shi), and the "five sections" (wu jie). The Guoyu provides many . ilar examp1es. 62 s1m Enumeration raises a basic problem of interpretation: some enumerated sets appear in a wide variety of texts (e.g., the "five flavors") and some are obviously of purely local utility, resulting from the circumstances of the occasion (e.g., the "five crimes" mentioned above), but most belong to neither extreme. In many cases, it is impossible to determine whether the speaker is applying an existing categorization to historical contingencies or drawing a provisional abstraction from these contingencies. The difference is the one

48

The Rhetoric of Good Order

marked by the translator's definite article: "six defiances" or "the six defiances"? Since enumeration has a role both in the rhetoric of individual speeches and in the process of abstraction that allows knowledge to become systematic, it lies at the junction of knowledge and application. In this respect, it resembles the virtues as they were presented above. Like the named virtues and principles from other fields of knowledge, to be examined in Chapters 3 and 4, enumerated sets claim some of the status of universal truths while at the same time showing their responsiveness to particular facts. 63 Facts are details imported from the narrative surroundings of the speech and matched with abstractions in the weaving of the rhetorical structure. As Duke Xiang's anecdote demonstrates, the requirements of rhetorical structure seem, at least in certain cases, to precede and define the narrative approach; facts seem frequently to be recorded for their anticipated rhetorical utility. The flexibility of principles and the uncertain status of enumerated sets facilitate the accommodation of general truths to particular historical events.

Repetition. Speeches like Wenzi's and Duke Xiang's require calculated repetitions of words, structures, and concepts. The authors of these speeches valued choices of diction and arrangement that drew attention to the language itself and to the skill of the speaker in using it. Perhaps the simplest figure of repetition is anadiplosis, in which the word that ends one phrase is repeated at the beginning of the next phrase. The "Great Learning" ("Daxue") chapter of the Liji (Record of rites) furnishes a canonical example of the figure in its simplest form: "Only when knowledge is sufficient does one have stability; only when one is stable is one capable of calm; only when one is calm is one capable of tranquility ..." ~D JJ:. fffi )§ l'f 5E · 5E )§ ~g 1!1¥ • 1!1¥ fffl ]§ ~g 3i:. A little further on the figure reappears, this time with slight complications: "Those who, in the past, wished to make bright virtue shine throughout the world first brought order to their states. Those who wished to bring order to their states first regulated their homes ..." E ~

rm

~ ~ 1~ ~ 72:. T ~ · :$t ~t! ;It~ · ~ ~tl ;It~ ~ · :$t '/!f ;It

*·

64

z

When anadiplosis furnishes the basis for a chain of reasoning, as it frequently does in these examples and in historiography, it is termed sorites. As a literary effect and a persuasive tool, sorites seems to imply that the structural sameness of consecutive phrases captures real relations of logical implication among the phenomena described in the phrases.

The Rhetoric of Good Order

49

Although the repetitions in the Zuozhuan and Guoyu can be quite as sim~ pleas in these examples, Duke Xiang's speech is more typical in its use of the form in combination with other ordering principles. The progression from one instantiation of a particular element to the next (as from a1 to az or from E 1 to Ez) is exemplary. In the case of a1-az, the progression is rather straightforward and depends on mediating terms like zheng, "correctness"; the procedure is discussed above. The transition from E1 to Ez is more com~ plex: whereas analogous phrases (e.g., H 1 and Hz) show the perfect recom~ bination or weaving together of terms from H 0 and H 1 in Hz, Ez is only im~ plicitly the result of a chain of reasoning: that "by making Heaven a model, one may be reverent" (Ez) has no explicit connection with the assertion that "reverence is respectfulness in accordance with wen" (E1). But the distribu~ tion of formally perfect examples of chains among the E 1-z-01-z series may train the reader to understand each element in Ez-Oz as the product of chain reasoning and to infer that the respectfulness mentioned in E1 neces~ sarily involves an imitation of Heaven's ways. This form of sorites is a great deal more sophisticated than the rudimen~ tary series of the "Daxue." Now the same operation is being carried out in up to eleven analogous phrases at once, and the total operation comprises sev~ eral smaller operations, some of them requiring the presentation of earlier results in reverse order. This is something like a rhetorical algebra, the set of skills by which a text may transform observed behavior into moral vision, interpretation, and truth; it is the technique by which the text brings into play the truths that are immanent in the network of language. The practice of this technique is nowhere more advanced than in the speeches of the Zuozhuan and the Guoyu. Duke Xiang's comments on Sun Zhou exemplifY the measured, even structure that is a standard feature of speeches in historiography and in cer~ tain other Warring States texts. More than the word yue ("say") separates narration and direct discourse in historiography. Except in rare introductory passages like the one preceding Duke Xiang's speech, narration is almost de~ void of repetition, parallelism, and patterned phrasing. Speeches, on the other hand, employ all these techniques, with the result that they stand out 65 from the surrounding material as conspicuous structures. These examples of verbal art, which clearly cost their authors more time and effort than the narrative passages did, are the jewels of the text. They invite the reader to

50

The Rhetoric of Good Order

delight in linguistic pattern both for its own sake and for the sake of what it represents. Well-worked language is a pleasure to contemplate: the symmetries of a speech, with its parallel phrases and orderly progressions, bring the joys of architecture or geometry to a linguistic performance. But these joys are not without purpose. The meaning of the form here is decreed by content, namely by the theme of wen, which, as I show in Chapter z, relates good speech and the beautiful manipulation of language to the cultural legacy of the premier Zhou culture hero. Since the speech serves to bring togyther observed details of reality and learned principles of knowledge, rhetoric acquires a hortative force. The perfection that is possible in language is something we wish for, and occasionally claim to observe, in reality. Good speakers, it is implied, seek the beauty proper to language in the hurly-burly of political life, whether through learned interpretations of events or through performance of official duties in accordance with received prescriptions. Lying behind Confucius' theory of the "correct use of names" ( zhengming) is a large corpus of anecdotes in which admired speakers show how linguistic 66 order corresponds to moral behavior and administrative practice. Rhetorical tendencies, the customary parts of a speech, and the narrative habitus of historiography help to determine the sorts of speeches that are made. The majority of speeches are deliberative; this type includes remonstrances on rulers' misbehavior, military planning, and more general strategic advice. Speeches of prediction are also common, with visions of doom for a state or individual outnumbering good tidings by a substantial margin. Finally, a small number ofspeeches (always accompanied by at least a thin deliberative justification) are excursions into recondite learning. These are the most purely epideictic of all speeches, and their authors apparently exulted in the beautiful display of knowledge and verbal skill. All three types of speech share a basic function provided for them by narrative: they are readings of the world (the military situation, the enemy's intentions, the future) that make it 67 intelligible by bringing it into linguistic contact with principles.

Rhetoric in Philosophy The speeches of Beigong W enzi and Duke Xiang of Zhou, for all their length and complexity, are hardly anomalous. They represent an extreme toward which formal discourse in most texts of the early Warring States period tends, and the rhetorical principles they exemplify are to be found in all kinds of writings, albeit not commonly on the same scale. As I noted above,

The Rhetoric of Good Order

51

the "Hongfan" and the bronze inscriptions of the Zhongshan king employ a rhetoric of patterning and citation rather than the looser forms· of the West~ ern Zhou Shangshu texts and inscriptions. Many of the longer utterances in the Lunyu do the same. One familiar example is Confucius's advice to Zi~ 68 zhang, whose goal in studying is to earn an official salary:

7 B · :ff, liD

~

WE , 'i:Ji;

~ ~~

, JIU ;!¥ 1t · :ff, ¥e.

~

'frs , 1~ ff ~ ~ , JIU ;!¥

·~. ~~1t 'ff;!J'~' ff~f:E~'**. The Master said, "If you listen widely, exclude what is doubtful, and speak carefully about the remainder, then you will make few errors. If you observe widely, exclude what is perilous, and carefully put the rest into action, then you will have few re~ grets. When there are few errors in your speech and few regrets about your actions, that is when an official salary is to be found."

Although this remark, like others in the Lunyu, stops far short of the com~ plexities of the grand examples, it nonetheless shows the same pattern of 69 parallel listing and final integration. The speeches attributed to Mencius (Meng Ke, late fourth c. B.c.E. ), the Confucian famous for his belief in the goodness of human nature, have even more in common with the speeches in the Zuozhuan and the Guoyu. The Mencius (Mengzi), like the historiographical works, prizes symmetry, balance, and regular progression in language and uses many of the same figures of speech to achieve these effects.70 The Mengzi is known for its use of Shi cita~ 71 dons and for its passages of overt reflection on the practice of citation. Mencius weaves citations into his argument, developing connecting tissue that relates the content of these citations to the specific issue at hand. An ar~ gument can also culminate in a citation, which is then revealed as a secret objective of the whole speech. Both techniques are also found in historiogra~ phy. But one of the implicit programs of historiographical speeches has be~ come even more pressing in the Mengzi. The relevance of canonical texts to practical questions of political stability and power must now be displayed at every opportunity. The "pointed style," by which so many of Mencius' speeches seem to head inevitably toward closure in a capping citation, re~ fleets the urgency of this project. Mencius' most important Confucian opponent, Xunzi (Xun Qing, ca. 335?-ca. 238? B.c.E. ), adopted many of the same rhetorical techniques. Whereas Mencius and his followers preferred to transmit his words as speeches with anecdotal frames, Xunzi presented his ideas in essays. Like Mencius' speeches, these essays rely on the techniques of verbal art exempli~

52

The Rhetoric of Good Order 72

fied in the historiographical lore about the Spring and Autumn period. Xunzi is even more regular than Mencius in his stereotyped employment of 73 citations, especially from the Shi. These appear most frequently at the end of sections within larger essays, marking the ends of paragraphs and a shift in direction. The rhetoric of good order was not confined to the writings of thinkers who associated themselves with Confucius. Mozi (Mo Di, late 5th c. B.C. B.) and his followers were the first thinkers to mount a coherent critique of Confucian thought. Although they generally avoided rhetorical flourish in their writings, certain passages of plodding repetition suggest a reduction of pattern-making to its simplest and least flexible extreme?4 A passage from 75 the first of three chapters on "Promoting unity" ("Shangtong'') is typical:

· !ILtf=At!L ·

"EHi · El·iit5*rm::f* ·

~i!oU[~ot3 ![~~i&![z ~ ~~~~·~·•~zM~·~w~z·n~zM#·~W#z·~~

::f*~·••~z*~·~~::f*fi·••~z*fi·~•w•~• ~·RRZ.Mfflot3Wt!L·R~~~-~-z··~~-fflt!L·ft~

ot3 · ~~~z i=A tiL·

For this reason, the village head is a humane man from the village. The village head exercises administration among the hundred families of the village, saying. "When you hear of something good or something not good/ 6 you must report it to our district head. What the district head affirms, you must all affirm. What the district head rejects, you must all reject. Eliminate words of yours that are not good and imitate the district head's good words. Eliminate behavior of yours that is not good and imitate the district head's good behavior." How could the district then be persuaded by chaotic (speech)? If one examines the means of the district's governance, one sees that it is because the district head is able to unify the rightness of the district. Therefore the district is governed. The district head is a humane man of the district.. , .

The next two paragraphs repeat the wording of this long passage, substituting only the word for the appropriate political rank: the district head encourages the people of the district to heed the words of the state ruler, who encourages the people of the state to heed the words of the Son of Heaven. As is apparent even in translation, the Mozi displays an extraordinary tolerance for repetition, for obvious antithesis, and for monotonous diction. These characteristics, perhaps a reflection of the Mohist interest in linguistic precision, are stylistic choices that speakers in historiography avoid despite their passion for conspicuous pattern. I£ as I argue in the next chapter, liter-

The Rhetoric of Good Order

53

ary patterning in speeches was conceived of as an image of the order that cultural achievements would bring about in the world, then the order Mozi envisions is one of flawless conformity on all levels, including that of language. As were the texts early Warring States philosophers cited to support their arguments, many rhetorical techniques seem to have been common property, not yet marked as the sole possession of any single school. The Mozi and other texts show that the common style could be adapted for speciflc philosophical ends that differed from those of historiography. As I have suggested above, early Chinese thinkers did not write treatises about the rhetorical techniques they were using. A few writers did, however, consider such techniques in connection with the problem of persuasion. Xunzi was the first to remark at length on the proper forms and practices of speech. Having demolished the claims of fortune-tellers in his essay "Against Physiognomy" ("Feixiang"), Xunzi reasserts the value of inherited standards, social hierarchy, and moral absolutism. He then writes of the great pleasure the true gentleman takes in words that conform to ancient principles and advocate the good. To him they are more valuable than precious objects, more beautiful than the patternings (wenzhang) of brocade. Wen is indispens77 able in these words of the gendeman. Next Xunzi considers the speech itsel£ in which the primary problem is the choice of" references" (ju ). Xunzi assumes that in persuasion one adduces the best examples of the past to encourage change in the worst situations of the present:

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54

The Rhetoric of Good Order

Next follow several lines on the gentleman's tolerance in his judging of others, culminating in a Shi citation. In the next section, provided with its own '1e, X unz1. returns to rhetonc . proper:79 tlt ~rotZ1ifq · ~ilfJ;J~Z · 14fii~!-:J.~Z. · !§BIJ;J~Z · 5t73UJ;Jotuz. · Wm J;J i3J3 Z · fi!JZ ~ 13= ii J;J ~ Z · :W Z rt Z · it Z t$ Z · :till ~ !'!U rot 1¥.; ~ /f\ ~ · lBl /f\ rot A · A~ /f\ it · ~ ~ ~ t.b ~~it ;it: mil · f' B · lifE ;g- -=ft.b ~~ it;it:fiJT:il · JltZ~t!L ·

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The Proper Methodology for Debate and Persuasion: Introduce the topic with dignity and earnestness, dwell on it with modesty and sincerity, hold to it with firmness and strength, illustrate its meaning with parables and praiseworthy examples, elucidate its significance by making distinctions and drawing boundaries,80 and present it with exuberance and ardor. If you make it something precious and rare, valuable and magical, your persuasion will always and invariably be well received, and even if you do not please them, none will fail to esteem you. This may indeed be described as "being able to bring esteem to what one prizes." A tradition says: It is only the gentleman who is capable of bringing esteem to what he prizes. This expresses my meaning.

The chapter concludes with a consideration of different types and levels of "discriminations" (bian). This material has less to do with the internal organization of a speech, but Xunzi's statement that the utterances of the sage "are well composed yet convey realities" (wen er zhi shi) is worthy of note. 81 Good 82 speech is an adorned artifact, a work that is both beautiful and effective. The rhetoric Xunzi outlines in these passages is one appropriate to his time, but one also shared by historiography and early Warring States phil~­ sophical writings. In identifying the choice of examples as the greatest challenge facing the speaker, he emphasizes one of the oldest and most enduring features of persuasions, the adduction of historical precedents, a practice with roots in the mimetic injunctions of bronze inscriptions. We will return shortly to this matter of polemical uses of the past. In the second passage cited, Xunzi anatomizes the speech, hinting at a division of its parts (introduction, development, illustrations) while also dispensing morally colored tips on delivery. The well-made speech becomes a treasure to be esteemed above all else. Its wen surpasses all other beauties, and by the play ofhomography, the "persuasion" (shui ID't) brings a righteous "pleasure" (yue IDt). Throughout the passages, Xunzi, whose prose is as sophisticated as that of the Zuozhuan, employs a rich, metrical style full of balances. In some pas-

The Rhetoric of Good Order

55

sages, the reader is reminded of the Zuozhuan's carefully composed remarks 83 on the delights of the Chunqiu. Other pre~Qin philosophers touch on the problems of persuasion. In one scene in the 'Human World" ("Renjianshi") chapter of the Zhuangzi, Yan Hui explains to Confucius how he plans to convince the ruler of W ey to change his stubborn ways. Among the methods Confucius rejects as im~ practical is "drawing comparisons from the past" (shangbi), which Yan Hui believes will allow him to criticize without incurring blame. From Yan Hui's description, it appears that he intends to cite ancient examples, as Xunzi 84 proposed. Xunzi's student Han Fei, who was patently concerned with the problem of using historical examples in persuasion, comments on rhetorical techniques in the chapter "Difficulties of Speaking" ("Nanyan"). The last item in a long list of ineffective sorts of speech-the glib, the stodgy, the presumptuous, and so forth-is "recitation": "If you continually cite (cheng) from the Shi and Shu, making a path and model of ancient times, then it will 85 seem like a recitation (song).'' By the time Han Fei was writing, increasing complexity in the worlds of politics and philosophy had brought a prolifera~ tion of argumentative techniques, and the rhetoric that both Xunzi and the 86 historiographers practiced and praised was something of a relic. Part of what Liu Zhiji, Han Yu, and the late imperial anthologists re~ sponded to in the speeches of the Zuozhuan and the Guoyu was the rhetoric of good order, for which these texts were the earliest and richest sources. Whether they idealized this rhetoric or (as did Han Yu and some others) found it excessive, they recognized that its importance lay in the way it crafted patterns from words. In this respect, later readers gave the speeches their due. As the preceding analysis of the speeches of Beigong W enzi and Duke Xiang has shown, much care was given to the creation of verbal pat~ terning, and patterning was organized around the problem of defending judgments, substantiating principles, and justifying citations from received texts. Evidence from Warring States philosophical texts demonstrates that the morphology of speeches is relevant outside the study of historiography, since it would appear that Confucian and non~Confucian thinkers alike em~ ployed a similar morphology and similar patterning in their essays. The rhetoric of good order was in many ways the starting point of the classical prose tradition in China and was understood as such by many later readers. Xunzi's repeated references to wen in his discussion of persuasion attest

56

The Rhetoric of Good Order

to the significance he and others ascribed to pattern. The intricacies of speeches are not unpurposive adornments. As I have suggested, the possibil~ ity of substantiating a judgment by matching received principles with the ob~ served particulars of a case implies a view oflanguage as a treasury of truths. Good speakers, far from being criticized as glib, are almost always repre~ sented as morally upright and correct in their judgments of affairs. They are in fact the heroes of historiography in the sense that they make possible the continual explanation of historical events in the light of received knowledge, of historical precedents, and, most important, of inherited texts. They are 87 masters of wen; they know their texts. But they also perform wen in the more general sense of bringing their learning to bear in every one of their speeches. It is to wen as the significance of pattern that we turn in the next , chapter.

TWO

Wen and the Meaning of Verbal Art Since King Wen has already passed away, is wen not here among us? -Confucius

All under heaven recite and dance and sing the accomplishments of King Wen: this can be considered making him a model. -Beigong Wenzi

The term wen, which has a pre~eminent place both in Confucian philosophy and among the virtues named in the Zuozhuan and Guoyu, is notorious for the complexity of its semantic range. In oracle bone and bronze inscriptions, it functions largely as an epithet for deceased ancestors and rulers and appears to mean something like "accomplished."1 In references to artifacts, it denotes stripes of the sort found on cowry shells or patterns woven into 2 cloth. It is the preferred pre-Qin word for "logograph."3 In the writings of certain philosophers, most notably Xum;i, it becomes a more abstract sort of "pattern," 'the gestures and acts that constitute correctness and give due ex~ pression to the performer's emotions.4 And, as in the remark by Confucius quoted in the epigraphs to this chapter, it denotes a kind of cultural accomplishment-the preservation of inherited learning. In this chapter, without joining the debate over the original meanings of the word wen ;md its graph, I investigate the crucial uses to which the word was put by the historiogra~ phers, who drew links all along its semantic range, connecting decoration, writing, the classical curriculum of elite education, ritual, the characteristic poise and ceremonial competence of the good man, and the king whose

58

Wen and the Meaning of Verbal Art

posthumous name was Wen. By the assumptions they wrote into the use of their term and by the connections they forged among its various meanings, the historiographers laid the foundations for much of China's later literary and historical thought. What the several meanings of wen have in common in the context of historiography is a set of aesthetic assumptions that operate in the speeches and narratives. As I will demonstrate in detail in Part II, it was the habit of these writers to construct plots around moments of interpretation that re~ veal truths hidden behind the visible things of the world. Typically, a tal~ ented observer sees in the historical particulars of an incident a meaning in~ visible to others and then defends his interpretation in a speech of prediction, remonstrance, or, more rarely, praise. Because what is perceptible is interpretable, the precise control of appearances counts for everything. The public image-the way rulers and their ministers look to the people they rule and to their peers in other states-amounts, in the historiographi~ cal imaginaire, to inescapable surveillance and an effective reality that can 5 bring political success or disaster. Every deed of the ruling elite is visible, and every visible image affects the attitudes of political subordinates and colleagues. In this society, which places such importance on vision, wen is the sign on the surface of things that both invites the best possible interpretation and ensures that interpretation in general is possible. An individual, an ob~ ject, or a deed that strays from inherited specifications becomes interpretable because it departs from wen. The decoration of a ritual object and a sacrifi~ cant's controlled gesture are called wen because they are manifestations of a cultural legacy's survival in the objects and practices of the present; as I will argue below, a speaker's manipulation ofliterary artifacts is wen for the same reason.6 In this context, the texts that would become the Confucian classics closely resemble other sorts of cultural artifacts. As with the bronzes and the other paraphernalia of ritual display, the texts themselves are wen, and using them correctly is wen.7

Wen and the Burden of Artifacts The Zuozhuan and Guoyu, like most other texts from before the middle Warring States period, identifY correct behavior with imitation of past practices and precedents. Whatever real changes institutions were under~ going during the Eastern Zhou, speakers most consistently appeal to con~

Wen and the Meaning of Verbal Art

59

formity with the past as the best guide to present action, and narratives tend to back them up. Wen is a part of this ideology of mimesis or cultural reproduction. In using the term "mimesis" (instead of "imitation" or another synonym), I have in mind Athenian usage during the fifth and fourth centuries B.c.B. 8 For Greeks and for pre-Qin Chinese, conceptions of imitation linked two distinct types of behavior. On the one hand, mimesis was the imitation of past models for the sake of cultural reproduction. The terms for "memory," "imitation," and "paradigm" employed in inscriptions and other early Chinese texts amount to a rich vocabulary of mimesis. The objects of mimesis were several, but the activity was in principle always conservative. Memory was a matter of constant attention to past models, and was designated by the word nian, "to think on." The nature of this attention was indicated by the compound jingnian, which adds the notion of "continuing'' or "carrying on" to the basic concept of attention: one thinks on things so that 9 these things, which belong to the past, can be preserved in the present. Other words that establish the commemorative aspect of mimesis are zhui, "to direct (action or thought) back toward,"10 and two terms for forgetting, 11 always used with a negative to yield the meaning "do not forget." Imitation or replication of past behavior is designated by such words as xiao, "to imitate," and shuai, "to follow." 12 The paradigm preserved through commemoration is the "standard" (xing). 13 Whether the object of commemoration and imitation is an ancestor, a king, or an abstract model of behavior established by such figures' deeds, the mimetic vocabulary always directs attention to the 14 past and to the problem of conforming the present to the past. Although historiography adds a number of terms to this vocabulary, it retains the assumption that mimesis is the basis of cultural continuity. Both narratives and speeches represent correct and successful action as the result of imitation. The citation of inherited texts is the rhetorical manifestation of this assumption. On the other hand, for the Chinese historiographers, as for Plato, terms for mimesis could also denote the representation of reality in an artistic medium.15 The texts that speakers might cite in fact belonged to a larger category of cultural artifacts that were thought to embody both fe~tures of the physical world and the hierarchical relations of the inherited order. The flags and other markings reserved for the ruler, for instance, signify his preroga16 tives by the objects they represent. Predictably, discussions of such artifacts regularly make mention of the abstract wen, in this context often translated

6o

Wen and the Meaning of Verbal Art

as "adornment." Wen designates both the readable markings by which an object refers to things other than itself and the sumptuous quality of decoration by which the object signifies social status. More generally, it is decoration of every sort, the feature added to an object or a quality to make it visible, valuable, and readable. Just as the patterns woven into the clothing of the perfect ruler serve to "exhibit his wen," words can be understood as the wen of the body. 17 In a famous scene, King Zhuang of Chu (r. 613-591), campaigning against Rong tribes near the border of the Zhou royal domain, reveals his own hegemonic ambitions by asking a Zhou minister about the nine cauldrons, legendary symbols of royal dynastic legitimacy. W angsun Man's account of the cauldrons' history links mimetic representation, political centralization, and display. 18

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~·*~~-·~ffi~~·d.:E:xi::~~-~·~~~+·~~tTI·* ffi$~·~•u•·*•*&·~z~m·*~~~· King Ding (of Zhou) sent Wangsun Man to greet and congratulate the ruler of Chu. The ruler of Chu asked him about the size and weight of the cauldrons. He replied, "It is a matter of virtue, not of the cauldrons themselves. Long ago, when the Xia first had their virtue, they made pictures of things from distant places, had metal presented as tribute by the masters of the nine regions, and cast cauldrons to represent the (distant) creatures. All the hundred creatures were made complete so that the people could know spirits and monsters. Thus when the people ventured among the rivers and swamps and the mountains and forests, they encountered nothing harmful, and goblins and demons could not get to them. For this reason there could be cooperation between the rulers and the ruled to receive the bounty of Heaven. "The virtue of Jie was bedimmed, and the cauldrons were transferred to Shang. Six hundred annual sacrifices followed. Zhou (the last king) of Shang was violent and cruel, and the cauldrons were transferred to Zhou. "When virtue is good and bright, though (the cauldrons) be small, they are heavy. When there is depravity and darkness and disorder, though they be large, they are light. "Heaven blesses the virtue that is made bright, and (the blessings) have a determined place. King Cheng established the cauldrons at Jiaru. He divined thirty gen-

Wen and the Meaning of Verbal Art

61

erations; he divined seven hundred years. That was what Heaven commanded. Although Zhou's virtue is in decline, Heaven's command has not yet changed. The weight of the cauldrons cannot yet be asked about."19 W angsun Man does not use the term wen. Yet the order of display he describes is the same order of ritual acts and objects in which wen becomes effective. The passage is a very rich one, bringing together mythology, mimesis, a semblance of art history, and a sketch of cultural history. The cauldrons, forged as a material representation of the tributary sway Yu wielded, function as aesthetic objects par excellence. They concentrate the freely given wealth of the world, but they are designed for the benefit of the people, who see on them depictions of their fears and are prepared by this vision to venture into frontier regions as bearers of culture. The vessels are richly decorated, but their mimetic luxuriance is blameless. The marks on their surfaces, like Fuxi's first wen in China's myth of the invention of writing, are imitations of phenomena from the animal world, and knowledge of 20 them arms its possessors against threats from beyond the human realm. As the treasures are passed down from lines whose virtue is "bedimmed" or "clouded over" (hun) to lines whose virtue is newly "clear" or "brilliant" (ming), they mark the success of another sort of mimesis, the imitation of predecessors' excellence. They are vehicles for a circulation of generous services between the kings and the spirits who receive their sacrifices and, as before, between the kings and the people who benefit from and uphold the ruling line's prestige. The first act of tribute, which produces the cauldrons themselves as depictions both of the world and of its hierarchical relations, initiates a history of faithful and failed imitations. Artistic representation and cultural reproduction converge as every new generation attempts to renew the old exchanges of wealth, learning, and loyalty. All ritual objects resemble the cauldrons in that they represent the world of social relations and, when passed to later generations, demand the repro21 duction of that world. Historiography condemns objects that do not perpetuate the ritual order by functioning within it. In one well-known example, the Jin minister Shu Xiang's condemnation of the law codes cast in bronze in the state of Zheng, the speech culminates with a direct reference 22 to King Wen and the order of mimesis. The speakers of historiography are silent about most forms of aesthetic pleasure. They barely register the changes in artistic conventions that the archaeological record shows took place during Eastern Zhou times. The one

62

Wen and the Meaning of Verbal Art

function of art that they do discuss (and at length) and that they view as legitimate is the effectiveness of artifacts as vehicles of display within the system of public imagery and mimesis. 23 Wen and associated terms designate the qualities of an artifact that make it socially effective for its whole audience, from noble connoisseurs to lowborn spectators. When Duke Yin ofLu (r. 722-712) expresses his intention to visit the fisheries of Tang, his minister Zang Xibo explains in his remonstrance that the ruler properly concerns himself only with the objects and activities that constitute his military and sacrificial order. According to the "system of old" (gu zhi zhi), the rlller makes one hunting expedition in each season, using it to exercise his troops and to demonstrate good order. "He displays the patterned insignia (wenzhang), clarifies the noble and base, discriminates levels and ranks, establishes obedience between the young and the elders, and exercises his dignity and deportment ( weiyi)." The ordinary products of the mountains and lakes are not the ruler's business. 24 Zang Xibo's son Zang Aibo delivers an even grander remonstrance when Duke Yin's successor, Duke Huan (r. 711-694), commits the ritual impropriety of placing the cauldrons of Gao in Lu's Great Temple (taimiao). The articles used by the ruler are designed to show his own frugality and the rank distinctions among his subjects, and the patterns (wen), colors, sounds, and astronomical figures used in his own accoutrements serve to impress on his ministers the stability and clarity of the system. Enshrining the Gao cauldrons, a bribe from the state of Song, advertises not good order but Lu's openness to bribery and the very failures that brought Gao's annexation by Song. As Zang notes, even the most celebrated display of cauldrons, King Wu's installation of the nine cauldrons in Luo, still had its principled detractors, and Duke Huan's action falls far short of the king's.25 Speeches concerning gifrs exchanged between political superiors and inferiors also emphasize the effectiveness of display. Confucius, for instance, is made to criticize a duke's gift of bells and a caparison to a minister; the items are a prerogative of the ruler, and by sharing them he endangers his own po6 sition and ritual propriety itsele Writing, whether or not it is termed wen, is one among several effective means of display. When Ji W uzi of L~ commemorates a Lu victory over Qi in an inscription on bells cast from captured Qi weapons, a member of the Zang family explains that inscriptions are properly used by the various ranks to remind descendants of ritually sane-

Wen and the Meaning of Verbal Art

63

tioned gifts, achievements, and military campaigns. Lu's questionable deeds 27 in this campaign do not bear commemoration. Persons described as wen have in some sense made themselves artifacts, and like other artifacts they help to reproduce the cultural inheritance. In a fine commingling of several of the word's meanings, the young Zhao Wu (posthumously named W emd) is told of his ancestor Zhao Shuai: 'He adduced the records of old (qianzhi) to aid our former ruler, followed the law, and finally administered the government; how could he not be considered wen?'' Zhao Shuai was great because he imbued himself and the state he served with the inherited standards of behavior that were handed down in 28 records of normative ambitions (zhi). On another occasion, Zhao Shuai is described as wen because of his mastery of the Shi and his ability to use the 29 poems correctly in ritual settings. The ruler Zhao Shuai serves, Duke Wen ofJin, is only one of the many characters whose posthumous name (shi) appears to glorify his cultural achievements and to identify him with the most 30 · emment possessor of t he name, King en. The body is a vessel for personality, and the words and gestures by which a person expresses himself reveal the otherwise hidden contents of his heart. An aide to the Jin ducal heir Shensheng, who has been given strange clothing and sent on an inappropriate military expedition by his father, explains that "clothing is the marking (zhang) of the self' and that his father is thus disowning him. 31 Elsewhere, "regalia" (in this case halberd-bearing bodyguards) "are the wen of the heart; like the turtle shell, when there is a burning within, there must be wen without." The character observed is Prince Wei of Chu, whose hidden ambitions and checkered career are the subject of much interpretation by speakers. To the talented observer, the prince's halberd32 bearers are the sign of his intention to make himself king of Chu. Considered as accoutrements of a person, words are wen in the sense that they reveal to a good interpreter the meanings that a principled or perfidious speaker might intend to keep concealed. Jie zhi Tui, a follower of Duke Wen of Jin who goes into reclusion after refusing to claim a reward for his efforts during the duke's years of exile, explains to his mother why he cannot make his objections known to the duke: "Words are the wen of the sel£ When the self is about to go into hiding, what use is there for adorning it 33 with wen? That would be seeking fame." Yang Chufu of Jin maintains fine appearances, but unintentionally reveals his deficiencies in his words, which

w-

64

Wen and the Meaning of Verbal Art

are described, exactly as in Jie zhi Tui's case, as "the wen of the sel£"34 In all cases, a character's choice of expression-in clothing, accoutrements, ges~ tures, and words-is a performance that through the readable element of wen ineluctably reveals an inner intention. The best wen is adornment in ac~ cordance with the standards of display, but by extension the term applies to empty fas;ades and to improper displays as well. Speeches on gifts and ritual artifacts imply that all the objects used in rit~ ual performances were in principle made according to inherited specifica~ dons and, in many cases, were themselves handed down from generation to generation. 35 In their materiality and in the functions their forms implied, they are imagined as a bulwark against ritual change and as a force for mi~ metic stability. Although it is not the sort of point historiography could make, changes in practice had to be accompanied by time~consuming and 36 expensive reworkings of ritual equipment. Texts, despite their special properties, also functioned as ritual artifacts, and like other objects involved their users-singers, readers, citers, reciters, exegetes-in negotiations be~ . tween text and use, "original" meaning and application, mimetic faith and mimetic extension. The ritual system not only included texts among its paraphernalia but has itself come down to us in textualized form. Much of what we know of it comes from texts, and specifically from the most highly patterned and self~ consciously crafted portions of texts, the speeches ofhistoriography.37 Ritual practice cannot be separated from the rhetoric of good order in which it is described and defended. The symmetrical rhetorical forms one finds in well~ made speeches on ritual and other subjects are not simply the results of faithful representation; they exploit the grammatical, semantic, and rhetori~ cal resources of the language. By the same token, the marked orderliness of ritual practices as they are represented in the speeches cannot be a fiction perpetrated for its rhetorical advantages. Ritual practices and the spoken or written discourse describing them worked together and influenced each other; ritual practice was informed by writing (or at least by orderly lan~ guage), and certain types of discourse, including many of the speeches re~ corded in historiography, were ritualized. If texts, like bronzes, temples, and official ranks, are passed down from generation to generation, binding every new possessor in a commitment to those who created the texts or transmitted them, then citations are one way speakers in historiography fulfill their obligations. Citations are special ob~

Wen and the Meaning of Verbal Art

65

jects in the texture of the well~wrought speech. By their archaism and by the whole formal apparatus of quotation, they mark the distance between origin and reception, a distance that is overcome only through the continual efforts of devoted ritualists and good speakers. Wen is the system of cultural repro~ duction in all its parts: it refers equally to the texts cited, to the speeches that result, and to the learned individuals who carry on the work.

Text as Artifact: Citing the Zhouyi The citation of received texts and sayings, a common rhetorical technique of the historiographers in presenting speeches and more than likely of the speakers of the Spring and Autumn period whose speeches they are pur~ portedly recording, attests to the status of traditional learning during the Eastern Zhou. To judge from the range of quotations and isolated state~ ments in Warring States period accounts, a noble education included tuition in a number of techniques, including reading, and in a number of specific 38 texts. It is hardly surprising that the texts said to have been included in tht: curriculum are precisely the ones that are quoted most frequently in the speeches of the Guoyu and the Zuozhuan. The conclusion generally drawn is that elite education was designed in part to prepare students to speak elo~ quently. Although there is little reason to challenge that conclusion, it does beg for amplification. The two historiographical works do not stop at re~ cording the events and speeches of the Spring and Autumn period. They are also continually involved in a struggle to legitimate certain kinds of knowl~ edge and to exclude other kinds. This is not to say that ideology is unitary within the texts; it is not. But no one who has read the two works carefully can deny the sheer tendentiousness of their narratives, which work through historical facts to demonstrate the validity of certain views, most of them readily understood as elements of Confucian thinking. One unchallenged tenet is that verbal compositions inherited from previous generations are di~ reedy relevant to contemporary problems of policy. Beigong W enzi's speech, discussed in the preceding chapter, showed how the fabric of a speech could be woven around a set of citations. The use of weiyi and the careful description of Sun Zhou's behavior further demon~ strated that framing narratives were sometimes pretexts for speeches, subtle legitimations of the citations and elaborations taken up in the speeches. A more general consideration of the phenomenon of citation as it is depicted in the Zuozhuan, the Guoyu, and other texts makes possible a sketch of the state

66

Wen and the Meaning of Verbal Art

of textual and historical knowledge during the late Spring and Autumn and early Warring States period. Citations give us a sense of what speakers and writers thought they knew about the past, how they knew it, and why they thought it was important. The evidence suggests that speakers did not have a comprehensive, even knowledge of their texts; rather, they favored some parts of those texts over others. Continuities between the interpretation of received texts and the reading of physical signs in the world are clearest in the use of the Zhouyi,.the divi~ nation manual also known as the Yijing (Changes classic).39 Divination links the system of artifactual display to the purely textual practices of citation and interpretation. Unlike other texts, which in historiography are cited more often than they are put to practical use in ritual, the Zhouyi is repre~ sented as one of several texts whose primary purpose is to make sense of divination results. Although the Zhouyi is mentioned less frequently than such texts as the Shi and the Shangshu, it forms part of a social and religious practice of finding and interpreting relevant words, and in that sense it es~ tablishes the very possibility of the rhetorical use of citation. The historiog~ raphers do not always tell how the outcome of a divination-auspicious or inauspicious-was determined, but when they do, they take for granted the initial reading of the physical evidence of bone or stalks. What they stress instead is the problem of interpreting the language that goes with that evi~ dence. Passages from the Zhouyi and otherwise unknown divination~rhymes (yao) are handled in identical fashion: the task of the scribe or diviner who issues the prognostication is to cite the relevant language and to relate it to the matter under divination. The authoritative speech explaining the results takes the same form as a speech woven around Shi or Shangshu citations. Sometimes speakers cite the Zhouyi for its exemplary language even in the absence of a divination, a sign that the process that would transform the work into one of the Classics had already begun when these speeches were 40 composed. Besides the regular techniques of matching inherited language and pres~ ent events, Zhouyi divinations and citations exemplifY another rhetorical tool: the use of conventional imagery. Each of the sixry~four hexagrams in the Zhouyi is formed from a combination of two trigrams. Associated with each of the eight possible trigrams are several conventional images. Although prognosticators do read the Zhouyi's divination~rhymes, hexagram state~ ments (guaci), and line statements (yaoci) as they would read a Shi tag, they

Wen and the Meaning of Verbal Art

67

also explain the hexagrams' meanings by way of their constituent trigrams, finding in the latter and in their images the terms that pertain to the matter at hand.41 This method of interpretation, most familiar from the "Judgment" ("Tuan") and "Image" ("Xiang") commentaries on the Zhouyi, reaches virtuosic extremes in the Zuozhuan and the Guoyu. Speakers exploit the intrinsic flexibility of the system of trigram images, piling interpretation on interpretation and demonstrating finally, in the overdetermination of the prediction, that the composers of the speech knew full well the outcome of the events being divined. Divination speeches, like many of the other speeches in historiography, were composed or revised in hindsight and for the sake of making events intelligible through citation. One of the more spectacular divinations in the Zuozhuan shows how thoroughly hexagrams and the language of the Zhouyi could determine retrospective readings of events. Shusun Bao (Shusun Muzi) of Lu was forced into a brief exile because of an affair between his elder brother and the 42 mother of Duke Cheng ofLu (r. 590-573). After spending a night with a woman in the Lu town of Gengzong, he dreamed that Heaven was crushing him and that he could not escape. Catching sight of a dark, hunchbacked man with deep-set eyes and a nose like a pig's snout, he cried, "Niu (Ox), help me," and was saved. On waking, he could not identify the man among his followers but had a description of him recorded. After he returned to Lu, the woman of Gengzong reported to him that she had had a son, whom she sent to him. He was the man Shusun Bao had seen in his dream, and his name was Niu.43 Although an illegitimate younger son, Niu hoped to control the Shusun lineage. Brought to Lu, he moved against his elder brothers, starving his father to death when he opposed him. The following is the Zuozhuan account of a divination performed at the 44 birth of the father, Shusun Bao: W·~rZ~~·M±~~~~~Z·~~~Z~·~m~~IT·~IT

B·m~fi·W-·r~·~·AA·~~B~·$~E~·~~·B ~·BzS+·~~+~·#W+ffi~~IBT·~=-0·~~­ B·B~~~·*B•=·HB-~·~~Z~·~W*··~WH ~·~B·r~·BZ~·WA·~B~~~m·~W*··~Bm~ •·asz~·~B~r~fi·•~~H·~a=s~*·•·* ~·~·W~·••*·*~W·W~·~A-i·~i-··~8~ ~tt·~A~i·i~·~····~·ma•&·&~a··~B~ ~B~·~~~·m~•:m~•··~-·~8~-r-~·~

r . :szg~p~ : :I'LJJ0'~*~.

68

Wen and the Meaning of Verbal Art

Earlier, when Shusun Bao was born, his father, Zhuang Shu, performed a milfoil divination with the Zhouyi about him. Receiving Mingyi's Qian as his response, he showed it to the diviner Chuqiu. Chuqiu said, "This child will go into exile and return to perform ancestral sacrifices for you. He will bring a slanderer into the state, whose name will be Niu, and in the end he will starve to death. "Mingyi is the sun. The number of the suns was ten, so there are ten periods in the day, which also correspond to the ten official ranks. From the king down, the second is duke, and the third is the minister. The sun at its height is in the center; the time of eating is second; dawn is third. In the first line of Mingyi, it is bright but not yet high; would this not correspond to dawn? Therefore I say, 'He will perform ancestral sacrifices to you.' "It is the first line of the sun trigram, which corresponds to a bird, so (the line statement) says, 'The calling pheasant is in flight.' It is bright but not yet high, so (the line statement) says 'It lowers its wings.' This resembles the movement of the sun, so (the line statement) says, 'The superior man is traveling.' Corresponding to the third place is dawn, so (the line statement) says, 'He does not eat for three days.' "The Li trigram is fire. The Gen trigram is a mountain. As fire, the Li trigram burns the mountain, and the mountain is destroyed. In the human world this refers to words. Destructive words are slander, so (the line statement) says 'He has somewhere to go. The ruler has words.' These words will necessarily be slanderous. "Accompanying the Li trigram is the Niu (ox) trigram. In a chaotic world slander will prevail, and when it prevails it will attach itself to the Li trigram, so I say, 'His name will be Niu.' '"Modesty' is insufficiency, and in flying (Shusun Bao) will not soar far. 'Lowering' (his wings) means they are not high; his wings are not broad. So I say, 'He will be your successor.' You, Sir, are a secondary minister; but he will fall short of having a good end.'A5

In this complicated prognostication, the diviner Chuqiu claims to see details of the newborn child's future successes and sufferings in the figures of the hexagrams and in the words and images associated with them. Each point of the opening prediction-exile, return, the introduction of the slanderer, the slanderer's name, and the death by starvation-has been confirmed in the narrative that precedes this anecdotal flashback. But Chuqiu's speech purports to show how a skilled reader, given only the physical signs and texts divination makes available, could nonetheless see things that would otherwise remain hidden behind the barrier of time. The process of decoding and exposition follows the same rhetorical proprieties as the speeches examined in the preceding chapter. A text, here the first line statement of the Mingyi hexagram, is anatomized, and each of its elements is matched with

Wen and the Meaning of Verbal Art

69

some element of the particular events under consideration. The speaker invokes separate systems of knowledge along the way (official ranks, periods of the day, trigram images), but his speech is unified by the problem of matching the readable signs of the hexagrams and the line statement with the extratextual reality being read, the future of the child. Like the speeches of Beigong W enzi and Duke Xiang, Chuqiu's is both extreme and typical. Few speakers venture such bold reaches of metaphor and inference, but in most speeches based on citations it is taken for granted that events will prove the speaker right and that the correctness of the speech will justifY all apparent interpretive liberties. More than any other commonly cited text, the Zhouyi establishes in the act of divination a magical connection among physical signs, cited language, 46 and interpreted events. This text is an artifact. It is one of the few texts of 47 which historiography can claim that someone saw a written copy. And in practice it forces the diviner to attend to the marks made on or by the sacred tools of divination and to assume a necessary connection between these marks and specific passages of received divinatory language. No other early text is so closely associated with the precious material possessions of Zhou courts. But the fundamental claim of divination practice-that properly cited language makes for the understanding of historical particulars-underlies all citations in the speeches of historiography. The citation of passages from the Zhouyi raises the question of how the historiographers viewed the authorship of the texts they cited and why these texts were authoritative. Various anecdotes make it clear that the Zhouyi 48 belongs to and supports the Zhou cultural order. Yet the Zuozhuan and Guoyu make no reference to well-known legends of the text's authorship. In particular, they do not overtly associate any part of the text with King Wen and do not stress the role of the text as a means of reproducing the king's teachings for future imitation. 49 As patterns in the citation of other texts will show, the Zhouyi is in this respect somewhat unusual. Perhaps the impersonality imputed to the association of divination results and mantic language discouraged the identification of authors of that language. It is even possible that particular attributions were common knowledge, and there was no reason for them to surface in the relatively few instances of divination and citation included in Zuozhuan and Guoyu. Despite their silence about the authors of the Zhouyi, however, speakers in historiography leave no doubt that citations obtained through divination and citations chosen from this

70

Wen and the Meaning of Verbal Art

and other texts for rhetorical purposes belong to the same method of making sense, the same accommodation of present facts to old language. To cite is to assert possession of an inheritance. But to take possession of a text is problematic. If the cited texts are artifacts, then who made them? And who controls them now? Authorship as speakers in historiography seem to know it differs fundamentally from later, more familiar models. Named attributions are the exception rather than the rule. Although one might speak about "authors" in the case of the bronze inscriptions, where the caster of the vessel and the composer of the inscribed text name themselves openly, authorship even there is far from simple, since the caster frequently incorporates the text of an investiture order bestowed, usually with other gifts, by a king or other political superior. That is, the origin of the text lies not in a single act of literary composition but in a complicated social inter~ action reminiscent of the casting of the nine cauldrons. In many composi~ tions, the value of the text derives both from the status of the giver and from the prestige gained by the recipient. All chapters of the Shangshu, along with most Shi poems, are strictly anonymous compositions in the sense that they include no internal claims of authorship. The text is narrated in the third person by an unknown ob~ server; no one will ever be able to name the person who wrote "The king spoke to the effect .. ."(wang ruo yue) at the opening of a Shangshu speech. Yet many of the earliest of these texts resemble the bronze inscriptions in that they are associated with figures of enormous political and cultural pres~ tige. The speech that follows the framing words is far from anonymous. At the minimum the tradition is prepared to assert that it was uttered by an unnamed king, and historical details in the speech often make it possible for 50 later readers to determine which king is meant. Some chapters name speakers other than the ruler; the most prominent of these in the earliest chapters are the Duke of Shao (referred to as T aibao, the Grand Protector) and the Duke of Zhou, both of whom are also credited with certain Shi po~ ems.51 Only gradually does the exegetical tradition come to include authori~ tative identifications of the speaker and the historical occasion of each speech. As with the Shi and the Yi Zhoushu, these identifications take the form of prefaces to the individual sections of the text. 52 A few of the Shi poems do seem to name their own authors. 53 But such claims are rare, and the persons who identity themselves as singers or authors are in most cases otherwise unknown to us. Most of the Shi poems

Wen and the Meaning of Verbal Art

71

got their authors after the fact, from a readership that seemingly could not tolerate the tradition's silence on the matter. The Zuozhuan and Guoyu ex~ plain the circumstances under which several of the poems were composed and name groups or individuals as authors. A Shangshu chapter likely written during the Warring States period gives another attribution, and other pre~ 54 Qin texts provide a few more. To the small extent that it has been ex~ plored, the question of orality in early China is a vexed one, but at least in this respect comparative evidence from other oral literatures is relevant. 55 In the milieu of oral performance and transmission, there is no "author" in the literate world's sense of the word. No single individual is identifiable as the \ sole originator of a given text, which is performed-and recomposed in performance-by successive transmitters. If an authored text is the legacy of a creator, an oral text is a different sort of possession, one that owes its exis~ tence to the inherent interest of its subject and to the ca're of its many own~ ers. Not all such texts are attributed to a particular author, since they can circulate without a legend of authorship. When the later tradition does at~ tribute a text to a particular individual, often decades or centuries after the first appearance of the text itself, that individual is generally a figure who has won enough cultural prestige for his non~literary endeavors to warrant the 56 attribution. The particular characteristics of authorship matter because they reflect the historiographers' conceptions of intellectual property and its circulation. A literate model of authorship, including the one that prevailed in China start~ ing in theWestern Han, ensures that texts are for the most part read with ref~ erence to their authors and the historical occasion of composition. Although it is beyond the scope of this study to investigate the relative importance of orality and writing in the transmission of texts during the Spring and Autumn period and after, the way these compositions were acquired and used, their character as possessions, sets them apart from texts that originated with historical authors in a literate age. 57 As I note above, many of the texts that would later become the Confucian canon were, according to the Zuo~ zhuan and the Guoyu, a major part of the curriculum for any formal education during the Spring and Autumn period. Patterns of citation from the texts do complicate the picture, but historiography leads its readers to believe that court officials of the period were, almost without exception, so well versed in the texts that they could recite portions of them from memory and could ex~ pect their listeners to understand the most oblique references to them. 58

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Wen and the Meaning of Verbal Art

It is implicit in the representation of educated speech and behavior that the value of the learned texts derived not from the status of their authors, who are rarely mentioned, but from their moral and philosophical lessons and from a general association of these lessons with extraordinary historical moments such as the early Western Zhou and the halcyon days of earlier dynasties. Even texts associated with other periods, or with no period at all, were understood to convey the values of the best era. From times of moral imperfection, the tradition preserved remonstrances based on the good lessons. 59 Texts of unknown provenance, like aphorisms, could be transmitted only if they were cited, and by rhetorical convention could be cited only for their didactic worth. Citations brought an unimpeachable authority to bear both because the texts from which they were taken originated in times of cultural, political, and moral health and because generations of learned people had applied their lessons to contemporary problems. Perhaps because they were not inflexibly associated with particular authors or historical incidents, the texts were available for use as the common property of all learned men and women, past and present. This condition no doubt prepared the way for their eventual canonization.

Artifacts of the Zhou: Citing Shi and Shangshu Beigong W enzi's speech shows how citations from the Shi and other texts could be woven together with more general principles and with observed particulars (like the Chu representative's weiyi) to form a fabric in which rhetorical elegance it~elf constituted a claim to validity. The nature of cited texts as common property partly explains the status they acquire in speeches, where by rhetorical or historiographical convention their authority is sheltered from challenges. But it is a mistake to assume that the speakers are equally familiar with all parts of the inherited texts, or that all the principles that might be implicit in passages from those works are defended in the speeches. Citation, like rhetorical speech itsel£ is a tendentious practice, a way of molding and delimiting the meaning of the received text. The historiographers work through the speakers to uphold the authority of the classicto-be, but they do so on their own terms. The inherited text that holds the greatest rhetorical and cultural value for speakers in historiography is the Shi, which they put to two related uses. Speakers frequently cite short passages to bolster their arguments; as Beigong W enzi's remarks on weiyi showed, speeches seem in some cases to

Wen and the Meaning of Verbal Art

73

have been composed for the sake of reasoning through such passages. They also use complete poems or excerpted stanzas in recitations delivered on diplomatic occasions, usually as part of ritual feasting. As a social and aesthetic practice, recitation is a subject properly reserved for Chapter 7· Here I focus on citation, a technique that is intrinsic to the verbal art of historiography and that implicates the Shi in the construction of knowledge in rhe60 torical contexts. The available data do not permit the precise dating of any act of citation, which may owe as much to the practices of historiographers themselves as to habits of Spring and Autumn period speakers. But it is clear that citation was influential both for its concrete contributions to knowledge and for the way it exemplified formal techniques of precedent-based argument. As noted above, citations operated within and to some extent determined the shape of speeches, which become important models for prose writing in later periods. The creation of diverse fields of knowledge in historiographical speeches is the subject of the next chapter. In the present chapter, I consider the overall rhetorical utility of the Shi. What do patterns of citation tell us about speakers' and historiographers' conception of the Shi? Underlying both citation and recitation is the assumption that to quote a Shi poem lends authority to one's speech in one of two ways. 61 On the one hand, quotation is a historicist enterprise, an attempt to introduce into present discourse authentic tokens of past excellence. The scattered attributions to named authors ground the poems in eras of good government or of just censure; the Mao school's "Great Preface," with its theory of the "changed odes" (bianfeng), belongs to this line of thought. On the other hand, to the extent that they become vessels for contemporary expressions of heartfelt determination or intent (zhi), poems cited or recited are liberated from the 62 occasion of their composition. Yet the value of the poems as common property rests on their ties to originary occasions, and the tradition predictably includes defenses against free decontextualization. The Qi nobleman Lupu Gui attempts to excuse an incestuous marriage by comparing it to uses of the Shi in recitation: "As in reciting the poems we break off stanzas (jushi duanzhang), I have taken what I wanted." Certainly reciters did just that, and the Lupu Gui's comparison may mean that the practice was thought unobjectionable. 63 But the narrative may imply that Lupu Gui's attitude toward recitation is as wanton as his choice of a wife and that danger accompanies certain kinds of literary activity. 64 When Mencius rebukes his

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Wen and the Meaning of Verbal Art

disciple Xianqiu Meng for what he perceives as a harmful reading, the trou~ ble arises from a contradiction between the words of the poem ("To all the edges of the earth, there is no one who is not a subject of the king") and a normative view of history in which the sage~king Shun cannot be said to have ruled over his father. 65 Such evidence of tensions reminds us that his~ toricism and free application are hardly independent aspects of Shi reception, but go hand in hand. The theatricality of a recitation and the rhetorical force of citation originate in the stretch between a shared, revered past and the contemporary aims of individuals. Speakers and historiographers do not invoke the example of the past in~ discriminately. The Shi is valuable to them for its embodiment of one era, 66 the early Zhou, and for one example above all others, that of King Wen. Speakers cite "King Wen" (Mao 235) more often than any other poem or in~ 67 herited text. They also frequently cite other poems that either mention 68 King Wen or can be interpreted as relating to him. When speakers weave Shi lines into the fabric of a speech, they sometimes fashion a connection between the citation and King Wen. 69 By contrast, speakers in the Zuozhuan and the Guoyu neglect Shi poems concerning other important pre~dynastic Zhou heroes. Hou Ji is mentioned a number of times, but the poem that de~ scribes his miraculous birth is never cited, and speakers refer to him some~ 70 what vaguely as a Zhou ancestor and the recipient of sacrifices. Another hero, Gong Liu, is not so much as mentioned, and the poem bearing his name is never cited.71 As matters of common knowledge, the legends about the early Zhou may have been beneath citation. But the deeds of King Wen and his contemporaries must also have been familiar, and the question re~ mains why citations of the poems connected with him, rather than with other heroes, carried such rhetorical weight. The answer lies in the way King Wen is characterized in the Zuozhuan and Guoyu. Although numerous other individuals are presented as exemplars of virtue and good sense, King Wen stands at the center of the mimetic sys~ tern as the object of imitation par excellence.72 In Chapter 8, I will argue in connection with narrative that the historiographers conceived of historical change as the result of aberrations from ritual propriety, an order that, if maintained properly, would rule out the changes in political fortunes, mili~ tary confrontations and annexations, and civil strife that are the stuff of Spring and Autumn history. Li-ritual propriety-names an ideal order of mimesis in which prescribed social structures and procedures outlive the

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75

successive generations who use them. In the view of the historiographers, this order begins with a devotion to King Wen, and to act in conformity with it is both to honor the founder and to do what is right. By the conventions of the speakers' favorite imagery, King Wen is so bright with de, "virtue," "virtuous attainment," or "inward power," that he illuminates all around him. Wherever the light of his virtue reaches, in his own time or after, it draws people to him and causes them to re-form themselves in his image. When Duke Xiang of Song fails to take the capital of Cao after a prolonged siege, a minister reminds him that King Wen, failing after thirty days to reduce Chong, retreated and "improved his teachings" (xiujiao ). When he renewed the siege, the people of Chong surrendered immediately. The minister cites lines from "Solemn" ("Siqi," Mao 240) to show that King Wen exerted a virtuous influence by providing models of behavior to his wife, his brothers, his family, and the state.73 Praising an official reward made by Duke Jing of Jin (r. 599-581), the Jin noble Yangshe Zhi compares the act to the bright virtue (mingde) and generosity of King Wen, who was (in the words of a citation from the "Zhoushu") able to "use the useful and to respect the respectable." By adhering to the model, one is assured of success: as Yangshe Zhi asks in the same speech, "If one follows this path, in what will one not 74 succeedt But one who departs from this model faces difficulties. Whereas King Wen led all the rulers loyal to him in serving the Shang king, Jin has prematurely encouraged the state of Chen to break its ties with its powerful neighbor, Chu; King Wen understood timeliness, but "now that we have in75 troduced a change, it is hard!" The very rise ofZhou is understood as theresult of an imitation of the excellence embodied by King Wen.76 In his every 77 virtuous action, King Wen is the central object of mimesis. Speakers in the Guoyu often relate the historical King Wen to the quality he is understood to embody, wen as cultural accomplishment. Praising Sun Zhou, Duke Xiang of Shan makes an important transition by implying that the possessor of wen partakes in all that made King Wen successful and will himself succeed: "When warp and woof do not clash, it is the image of wen. King Wen was wen in his substance, and so Heaven blessed him with all under Heaven. Now this man has covered himself in it [wen] and is close in the order of generations: he can win his state." The imagery of woven silk, which here completes the link between Sun Zhou's eleven virtues and King Wen's triumphs of wen, establishes a homology between cosmic order and human order and implicates Heaven itself in wen's patterns.78 Similarly, when Duke

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Wen and the Meaning of Verbal Art

Wen ofJin asks Xu Chen about a tutor for his son, Xu Chen answers with a short biography of King Wen: his birth was painless for his mother, he caused his tutors no trouble, he was a model to his family and to the state, and he pacified the spirits and the populace by heeding his advisors. Does the example of King Wen mean that excellence is innate and teaching su~ perfluous? No, answers Xu Chen. He adeptly replaces the historical figure with the abstraction: in the practice of wen the student's substance (zhi) is adorned and augmented; teaching is a matter of exploiting the student's na~ tive abilities.79 In another discussion of tutors and the problem of education, this time between King Zhuang of Chu and his minister Shu Shi of Shen, the latter recommends methods for instilling various virtues in the truly re~ fractory student. It is not surprising that to lead the student to humaneness, for instance, one should explain kindness and cherishing. But the advice to "explain the illumination of benefits (li) in order to lead him to wen" makes little sense unless one discerns behind the abstract virtue the figure of a king who was thought to have acquired influence through unwavering evenhand~ . 80 edness an d generosity. The Zuozhuan provides the most impressive example of the conflation of abstract and historical wen in a rhetorical fabric that must itself be described as wen. When W e1 Shu of Jin, appointing local magistrates, puts his son in charge of Gengyang, he worries that this move will be seen as evidence of nepotism or factionalism. Another official assures him that it will not; his son Wei Wu is a fine man, and there is a precedent in King Wu's appoint~ ments, which were based on excellence alone and included both kinsmen and members of other families. The question furnishes the pretext for an extended bit of exegetical speech~making. As above, I mark the text to make 81 its structure clear:

B • 'llJl:t)C.:E · [a1J W IJL~;;{,, • [bd ~~1iif • [c1J ~1!% Sjj • [d1J% fJF.J % ~Ji • [e1][f1J % *% ;g· • .:E Jl:t ~ [gd %II~% .It • [h1][i1J .It-T :>c .:E · U1J~1!Jt1H~ · [k1U%:¥l:W1.I1: • [ld:lil!!-T:r%-T • [azH_:.,~glli'J~B/3t • [bzJ

* ·

~

-~-~B~·~~-~$BfJF.J·~~~-~BM·~--~MB

* • [fz] :;: IJt JFU 1MB Jl5 • [gz] ~ ;fO ~ m~. B II~ • [hz] ~ ~ iiD f;£ Z. B .It • [iz] ~JUt :7( :l:iB B )C . [az-iz] fL 1! ~ UzlfF ••.,~ • [kz] i!& ~ :7( ff0'< • [lzJ-T 3'%

m.

Mz·~z•~·lli:>ce*·m&~•a·

The Shi says: There was King Wen: The emperor above gave him discernment in his heart. [ad

Wen and the Meaning of Verbal Art

77

Concordant was the news of his virtue, [bd And his virtue could shine. [c1] He could shine; he could be good; [dd He could lead; he could rule. [e1] [ f1] He reigned over these great states, And could bring compliance and unity. [gd They united with King Wen, [hd[id In whose virtue there was no cause for regret. Od Having received the blessings of the Lord, [kd He bestowed them on his sons and grandsons. [11] [a2] When ,the heart can take its ordering principles from rightness, that is discernment; [b2] when virtue is correct and the response harmonious, that is concordance; [c2] radiating light down upon all in the four directions is shining; [d2] giving assiduously without concern for oneself is being good; [e2] teaching tirelessly is being a leader; [f2] by rewarding, congratulating, punishing, and inspiring awe, one is a ruler; [~] when through kindness and gentle harmoniousness one brings general submission, that is compliance; [h2] when one elects the good and follows it, that brings unity; [i2] establishing the warp and woof of Heaven and earth is wen. [a2-i2] Never erring in these nine virtues, Q2] one acts without bringing regrets; [k2] thus one wins rewards of Heaven [h] upon which one's sons and grandsons can rely. Your appointments come close to this virtue of wen and will have far-reaching 82 effects.

Devotion to King Wen takes various forms in this passage. First, his name has perhaps replaced that of his father, which in the Mao edition of 83 the Shi appears in the first line. The twelve lines here refer solely to King Wen and his moral and political virtues. Second, the rhetoric of good order has here produced a structure in which the twelve lines yield an equal number of terms for virtues and successes, which the speaker expounds as if they arise naturally from the order of the cited text.84 As in the examples in Chapter 1, the joining of highly patterned prose (especially evident in the first nine lines of interpretation) with support from classical citations seems to have constituted a singularly compelling sort of proo£ Finally, the speech reasserts the ubiquitous identification of the historical king with all the separate elements of the abstract wen. As with the other principles found in speeches, the speakers or historiographers resist limiting wen or specifYing its meaning closely; they develop its truth value in conjunction with many particular concerns. The system of

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Wen and the Meaning of Verbal Art

nine virtues here attributed to King Wen, for instance, does not correspond in any systematic way with the eleven virtues related to wen in the encomium of Sun Zhou. Rather wen, which is a concept of cultural conformity and elegant accomplishment and at the same time tied to the historical individual who most perfectly embodied it, is insinuated into the anecdotes and speeches of historiography by being adapted to the particular conditions of narrated moments. Kept flexible by constant use, wen serves the historiographers well in their efforts to extend the sway of Zhou values over as broad a field of phenomena as possible. The most carefully crafted speeches, the speeches that weave the most elegant tissue of prose around poetic citations, do not always mention King Wen or use the term wen. But there is a sense in which all poetic citation, like all competent handling of citations within a deliberative or remonstrative speech, is a wen-informed activity; good speech, as I will show, is praised as wenci. Like the Shi, other inherited texts, including some that may not have circulated in written form, become vehicles of what we might call, with the historiographers, "the order of the former kings" (xianwang zhi zhi). 85 Although King Wen does not figure as prominently in these works as he does in the Shi, he nevertheless remains a focus of devotion and imitation. What is more significant, citations from these texts tend to support the mimetic imperative that is voiced most clearly in connection with King Wen. Good speakers lived in and defended the remnants of King Wen's order, but they did not refrain from citing texts associated with the best periods of the Xia and Shang. Unlike Shi. poems, many of these citations cannot refer to the particular relations ofZhou states. Instead, it is implied, they bespeak values that all good kings have upheld. More than half the passages cited from the Shangshu in speeches in the Zuozhuan and Guoyu are not to be found, even in variant form, in the extant 86 text of the Shangshu. As has long been known, the Shangshu that circulated in the Warring States period, when our historiographies were taking shape, contained much material that did not survive the Qin-Han transition. The substance of the citations, however, suggests that speakers and historiographers were not working with a larger set of written texts but may have cited as "writings" (shu) even texts they had not read but had instead heard. The fluidity that characterizes the historiographical use of certain types of inherited speech suggests that the Shangshu texts that people knew and cited when

,---------------------------------------------------------------------

Wen and the Meaning of Verbal Art

79

the histories were being written were far from fixed. Words attributed in one place to the Shangshu are elsewhere identified simply as sayings, as in the Zuozhuan passage in which the famous Chu exile W u Zixu advises King Fuchai ofWu (r. 495-477) not to grant the state ofYue a peace treaty but to annihilate it. He says, "I have heard, 'In setting up one's virtue, it is best to be generous; in removing trouble, it is best to be thorough."' He then re87 counts the rise and fall of a famed Xia dynasty usurper. Yet one edition of the Zhanguoce identifies the saying as a citation from the Shu, and another 88 attributes it to the Shi. Such vacillation, which is not uncommon, perhaps indicates that the speakers and writers who built inherited language into speeches during the Eastern Zhou were often uncertain of or indifferent to 89 the provenance of that language. Perhaps Wu Zixu, or the person who formulated his speech, merely puts the matter imprecisely, referring to a Shangshu passage as if it were an aphorism. More probably, Wu Zixu's citation hints at the state of textual knowledge during the Warring States period. The extent of the "Writings" was for a long time unclear, with a great mass of inherited language, regularly circulated by word of mouth, capable of being classed either as Shu or as aphorism. Patterns in the citation of ancient texts contribute to the impression that writing was not the foremost medium of dissemination. Written versions of the Shangshu, the "Writings of Zheng" ("Zhengshu"), and numerous other little-known works cited by speakers may well have existed, even in numerous copies, but speakers in the Zuozhuan and Guoyu never mention that they 90 have read them. The convention for introducing a quoted aphorism is "I have heard it said that" (chen wen zhi). Sayings of former worthies such as Zhong Hui, Zhou Ren, Jizi, or the Scribe Yi play the same role in speeches 91 as Shi or Shangshu citations. Speakers even recall the words of more recently 92 deceased wise men, such as Zifan of Jin or Zichan of Zheng. Fragments from shadowy collections of historical records, maxims, and ritual proprieties are preserved here and there. When it is possible to compare speakers' citations with counterparts in the extant Shangshu, the two versions often differ. In itself that is hardly surprising, given the likelihood that the Shangshu chapters circulated in many different versions, as did most early texts. Yet the citations in historiography seem especially well suited to repetition from memory; they have been turned into aphorisms. The citations are often simpler and tidier than the

Bo

Wen and the Meaning of Verbal Art

corresponding passages in the received text, and they often revise phrasings to create metrical regularity. 93 Rhyme, which may well be the quality that makes the Shi especially quotable, occurs with greater frequency in citations 4 from the Shangshu than it does in the received text of the Shangshu itselC Quoted passages do not come in equal proportion from all parts of the Shangshu; as Matsumoto Masaaki has noted, the largest number come from c . passages are cite .d two or more times. . 96r· t he "Kang gao...9 sertam t IS en~ tirely understandable, given the technical inconveniences that attended early writing, that the words of the Shangshu, always conceived of as written, would also circulate by word of mouth and would show traces of their oral . . d and recopie . d .97 existence as t h ey were co pie Phrases and ideas that are stressed through repetition in the authentic chapters of the Shangshu tend to have mimetic themes. Speakers regularly enjoin one another to model their behavior on the best examples of the past. Citations of the Shangshu in historiography show a similar tendency, but the themes are adapted for new discursive surroundings. King Wen and wen as abstraction are again prominent, although less so than in the Shi citations. As one Guoyu speaker says, to follow the normative records of former times 98 in helping a ruler is wen. King Wen is held up as a model of action espe~ dally, but not exclusively, in the many citations from the "Kang gao.''99 Even when he is not mentioned, accounts of the radiant virtue and generosity by which the best rulers attracted the obedience of their people recall his exam~ 100 pie above all others. The order of ritual propriety founded by King Wen's immediate successors is everywhere in historiography understood as the sin~ gle legitimate standard for interactions of all sorts; citations from ritual texts stress the faithful reproduction of the old models.IOI Citations from the most diverse sources not only are proposed as objects of study and emulation but themselves thematize the imitation of standards and exemplary rulers from the past, or show how a family's decline and loss of political power result from its failure to adhere to the old models. 102 Finally, despite a marked op~ position to written law codes, speakers in historiography cite several codes, including one attributed to King Wen, which we are perhaps to understand 103 as unwritten bodies of legal principle. Beyond Shi citations lies a much larger category of inherited language, which is the vehicle of speakers' and historiographers' project of establishing mimesis as the basis of valid thought and successful political action.

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King Wen and Wenci Speakers refer to King Wen and the values associated with him even when reflecting on the decline of Zhou prestige and the rise of other powers. A visit ofJin ministers to the Zhou court ofKingJiing (r. 544-520) becomes a dialogue on the various functions of wen.104 When the king asks why Jin does not present tribute vessels to the royal house, Ji Tan explains with stylized humility that Jin, in its remoteness from the capital, is beyond the reach of the king's blessings, and cannot submit gifrs. Jin, they imply, lies outside the system of exchange that constitutes political affiliation. The king then rebukes them, recounting gifrs Jin rulers have received from former kings, including King Wen: commemoration in historical records, lands, vessels, chariots, and flags (wenzhang). How is it, the king wonders, that Ji Tan, scion of one of two old scribal families in Jin, can have forgotten such 105 clear evidence of gift exchanges? In an aside, the king correctly predicts that the Ji family will not last long, since Ji Tan claims to cite precedents but • C has rorgotten C h'ts ancestors' vocation. , 106 m ract In his own aside Ji Tan foresees quite accurately that the king will not die well, since he has feasted his guests and requested tribute from them at a time when he should be mourning for his heir and his queen. 107 It is ritually proper even for the king to wear mourning for three years, he says, and the king has now defied ritual, which is the "great warp-thread" (dajing) of the true king. "Speaking is for consulting the canons (dian), and canons are for recording (zhi) the warp-thread. When one forgets the warp-thread but talks a great deal, what use is it to cite (ju) the canons?" Both speakers cite historical evidence for their arguments. Ji Tan may have forgotten his ancestors' vocation and neglected the facts ofJin's relation with Zhou, but the king does greater damage, since he mimics propriety in speech while violating its basis in practice. Behind the sniping and predictions of doom lie the more basic questions of Zhou's sway and the worth of Zhou values. Does Jin owe the royal house anything at a time when the system of gift exchange initiated by King Wen has broken down? Parallel to this question is a literary and philosophical question: Does a rhetorically impeccable speech replete with references to King Wen carry any persuasive force when the speaker and the occasion violate more fundamental ritual prescriptions? What is wen without the legacy of the king?

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The Guoyu hints at an answer to these questions. The founder of Zheng, Duke Huan (r. 806-771), foresees the disaster of King You (r. 781-771) and 108 the fall of the Western Zhou and asks Scribe Bo about the future. The Zhou will collapse, the scribe says, because the king has "discarded harmony (he) and adopted identity (tong)," that is, he prefers sycophants to ministers 109 who will maintain a healthily critical perspective on his actions. Without internal differences, nothing comes into being, since nothing can be differentiated. "When the sound is one, there is nothing to be heard; when the material is one, there is no wen; when the flavor is one, there is no good taste." The relevance of this theory of productive difference to history is implicit in Scribe Bo's answer to the duke's next question: Who among the Jisurnamed states, kin of the royal house, will rise ifZhou goes into decline? It will be Jin, Scribe Bo predicts: it was King Wu who made King Wen's achievements illustrious, and now that the line of King Wen is failing, it is to be expected that descendants of King Wu will rise. Power will not remain with the Zhou royal house or with other lines that owe their origins and their ancestral sacrifices to King Wen, but will shift to one of the lines descended from King W u. Among these, Jin, a state whose founder was a son of King W u, is the best candidate. Scribe Bo's first use of wen illuminates the second. If wen is a productive mixture, then even wen itself must enter into combination with other terms. Here, as in many other texts, the proper c wen 1s · wu, "mart1'al" · of miXture . . mateh ror . 110 But t he norton comes to expIam the progress of history rather than a division of labor within a single administration. To return to the dispute between King Jiing and Ji Tan, wen survives the fall of King Wen's line by becoming an abstraction that refers to ever larger phenomena of patterning in political affairs, cosmology, and art, including verbal art. These reflections on the transformations of wen return us to the question of the meaning of rhetorical beauty. Despite the famous reservations about glib speech voiced by the Master of the Lunyu, perhaps echoed in one pas111 sage in the Zuozhuan, Confucius as he is depicted in historiography makes much of good speech and takes pains to establish its connections with wen. · z·1chan, whom c onfu ems · pratses · on severa1occas10ns, · 112 preAt one pomt, sents prisoners from Chen at the Jin court. Jin challenges him, asking what crime Chen committed to deserve attack. Zichan responds by recounting the terms under which Chen was enfeoffed and the recent history of Chen's

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relations with Zheng, justifYing the attack both as a result of failed interstate obligations and as a service to ancestral spirits. Asked why Zheng should bully smaller states, he points out that the large states Qin foremost among them) have grown far beyond their original proportions through successive annexation of smaller states. Jin finally asks why Zichan has worn his mili~ tary uniform during the audience; Zichan cites orders given by Duke Wen ofJin after the great defeat of Chu at Chengpu. The Jin questioner can think of no further challenge; as one of his colleagues says, "His words (ci) flow smoothly (shun), and it is inauspicious to oppose what flows smoothly." Zichan succeeds in presenting his captives and maintaining Zheng's autonomous position in the Zhou order. Confucius' comment follows. 113 #ffiB·~~~·i~~~·~~~i·~i··~~~·i~­ ~·fiffi~-·~•m·•AM·#~fi~·~·Sfi&·

Zhongni said, "The 'Zhi' has it: 'The language is to be adequate to what is on the person's mind; And the wen is to be adequate to the language.' If one did not use language, who would know what is on one's mind? And if the lan~ guage lacked wen, it would not go far. Zheng's invasion of Chen duringJin's hegem~ ony would not have been any sort of accomplishment if it were not for words of wen. Take care with words!"114

What precisely is the wen ofZichan's speeches? Why are "words of wen" (wenci) important? Zichan has remembered both the obligations among states and the basis of these obligations, he has defended an action that struck observers as improper by appealing to invincible standards of propri~ ety, and he has stymied his challenger by hinting at Jin hypocrisy. Finally, and what is perhaps most significant, he has said that Zheng, which adheres to the old orders of Duke Wen of Jin, "does not dare abandon the com~ mands of the king." What is referred to as "smooth" (shun) in Zichan's words is also an "obedience" (also shun) to authoritative mandates. Chen has been punished because of its service to Chu and its neglect of obligations to the Zhou center. Wen is not only the pattern that makes Zichan's words elegant but also the cultural associations that make these words compel~ . 115 Img. That eloquent speech is meaningful as a practice of wen and is properly termed wenci is also apparent in praise bestowed on good speakers elsewhere in the Zuozhuan and Guoyu. According to the Zuozhuan, Confucius was im~ pressed by certain ritual procedures followed during a banquet preceding the

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great treaty at Song in 546 B.c.E., "because he considered it to have an abun116 dance of cultivated speech (wenci).'' In a comment reminiscent ofJi Tan's, Min Mafu of Lu remarks on a long proclamation sent to local rulers by Zichao, a son ofKingJiing ofZhou and a rival to KingJing (r. 519-476) for the throne: "Cultivated speech (wenci) is for implementing ritual propriety. Zichao has opposed the commands of King Jiing and kept Jin's greatness at a distance so that he may devote himself to his own aims (zhi). As a failure of 117 ritual propriety, it is already excessive; what will cultivated words dot Even as he rejects Zichao's claims, Min Mafu acknowledges in his choice of the term wenci that the proclamation is exemplary for its archaic style and its 118 citation of the most hallowed precedents of early Zhou history. The word wenci appears so rarely in pre-Qin documents that it is open to doubt whether it refers precisely to the rhetoric of good order. The modern scholar Qian Zhongshu argued that the Zuozhuan used the term to refer to public, official speech, whereas Warring States philosophical writers tended 119 to use it in connection with private rhetorical skills. In an example Qian does not cite, Han Fei recounts a conversation between an unspecified king 120 of Chu and a certain Tian Jiu about the prose style of Mozi. Why, the 21 king asks, are his words for the most part so inelegant (bu bian )l Tian Jiu recalls that Qin sent the duke of Jin a bride accompanied by seventy concubines dressed in adorned (wen) clothing; in Jin they welcomed the concubines but treated the bride poorly. On another occasion, a man from Chu who wished to sell pearls in Zheng put them in a box carved of magnolia, scented with cassia and pepper, inlaid with pearls and jade, and decorated 122 with red gemstones (wengui or mingui) and kingfisher feathers. His customer bought the box and returned the pearls. Mozi has learned the lesson of the anecdotes; fearing that rhetorical beauty (wen) might distract his audience from the utility of the message conveyed, he writes with deliberate plainness. "In discussions nowadays," Tian Jiu notes, "everyone speaks with elegant discernment and words of wen (wenci); the ruler of men is dazzled by 123 their wen and forgets their utility.'' This attack on literary skill is itself an extraordinary display of literary skill. Tian Jiu's two nonliterary analogies seem to present a contrast between distracting surface loveliness and putative interior value, but in each case Han Fei has included a sly allusion to wen (the costumes of the concubines, the gemstones) in the details of the anecdote. Rhetorical beauty of the sort favored by some speakers and writers is equivalent to the luxuriant and

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superfluous decorations Mozi regularly associates with Confucian ritual practice. Neither Han Fei nor Mozi draws a connection between the literary quality that is wen and the name of the king. But Xunzi, whose philosophical 124 sympathies with the Zuozhuan are everywhere apparent, uses just such a connection in his defense of the Confucian tradition against the Mohists and other schools, including the intellectual forerunners of his student Han Fei. In the "Feixiang" chapter, just before he introduces his formal observations . 1teeh mque, . h e wntes: . 125 on rh etonca A~~~~~·~mM•·•z•~·••·~~~•·$~~·mM ····~·ftW~~~·~·~·~#~M±&·~~~z~~ &·~~Z·fi~Z·M~Z·~~~M·AAX~~~~M-·W~

~-~·~MA~~·-~~£~~··A~~·~~--~··· A~~·•~••~•·~~~z~~••·•*~~·~~-~~ ~~· Every doctrine that is neither consistent with the Ancient Kings nor in accord with the requirements of ritual and rightness is properly described as a "treacherous doctrine." Although it may be the product of a discrimination, the gentleman will not heed it. If one models himself after the example of the Ancient Kings, is in accord in his actions with the requirements of ritual and rightness, and is a partisan oflearning. but nonetheless is not fond of advocating the truth and does not take enjoyment in it, he certainly is no true scholar. Hence the gentleman's relation to advocating the truth is such that his innermost mind loves it, his actions find peace in it, and his joy is in approving it. Thus, the gentleman must engage in discriminations. Every man without exception is fond of discussing what he finds to be good, but this is especially so with the gentleman. Accordingly, to make the gift of true doctrines to another is more valuable than gold, gems, pearls, and jade. To show them to another is more beautiful than the embroidered emblems on the ceremonial court robes of the king. To cause him to hear them is more enjoyable than the music of bells and drums and of zithers and lutes. For this reason, the gentleman never grows weary of advocating his doctrines. The uncultivated rustic is opposed to such things because he loves only the bare actuality and cares nothing for refinements of form. 126

Prominent among the ancient kings (xianwang) is King Wen. By the end of the passage, Xunzi has related the legacy of these kings, through the joys of well-crafted speech, to the world of artifacts and the textile patterns (including wenzhang) that mark royal status. By finally rejecting the sorts of arguments the Mohists had advanced (arguments that would reappear in Han Fei's anecdote), he shows that he, too, classes rhetorical brilliance with the

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other artifacts of elite culture and that it is among the inherited forms he 127 defends. Evidence from a century later reflects the semantic connections established around wenci during the Warring States period. Sima Qian's use of the term confirms that among the literate classes of his age it denoted literary or rhetorical elegance, usually in the service of Confucian ideas. The term is linked with Confucius and with his composition of the Chunqiu, in the writing of which the sage "made its words (ci) and wen concise"; the traditions connected with the Chunqiu had at first to be transmitted orally because they contained "words of wen" (wenci) with explicit statements of 128 praise and blame. One can expect to hear wenci from good speakers of the Confucian persuasion and, more generally, from anyone talented with 129 words. Finally, Sima Qian uses the word to describe a very formal set of 130 official investiture decrees rich with resonances ofZhou models. In the historiographers' depiction of the world of the Spring and Autumn period, speaking well is the premier expression of cultural competence. In principle, any educated man or woman should have acquired the materials of eloquence, including the texts to be cited and the faith that their lessons were relevant. But in fact rhetorical mastery is unevenly distributed. Rulers seldom possess it, and it is even rarer among men with evil intentions. The powerful, with the exception of extraordinary characters like Zichao, speak beautifully only when their actions are as true to inherited practices as their words. Eloquence as a manifestation of cultivation is almost exclusively the property of that class of ministers whose duty it was, in the historiographers' view, to uphold the mimetic order and to guard against the aberrations that would lead to ruin. That the Zuozhuan and Guoyu record the speeches of these ministers at such length is one sign of the historiographers' sympathies; the way they assemble their narratives from discrete anecdotes that foreground speeches is another sign.131 It was the nature and perhaps the purpose of this historiography to commemorate acts of cultivated eloquence and the continual reinterpretation and reanimation of inherited texts in well-crafted speech. Historiography celebrates wen and is itself wen.

The Concert for ]i Zha The order of wen and its aspirations inform the greatest episode of cultured performance known from the Spring and Autumn period. In this performance and in the qualified observer's response to it, literary form becomes

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the key to interpretation and action, and the order of a classic is understood as the pattern of history. According to the Zuozhuan, Prince Zha of Wu (also known as Ji Zha), arriving in Lu in 544 B.c.B. during a tour of the central states, asked to view the canonical song, music, and dance of Zhou. The guest, endowed with a kind of wisdom sometimes found or imagined in characters from the outlying regions, is entitled by his supposed distance from Zhou culture to review it in a kind of pageant, which has no precedent in normal ceremonial entertainment.132 Lu, as the fief of the Duke of Zhou and storehouse of the Zhou cultural legacy, is the place for such a review to take place.133 Although Ji Zha's responses to the performance are arguably the most important aesthetic criticism found anywhere in pre-Qjn writings, scholars of early Chinese aesthetics and poetics have largely ignored the episode.134 In the figure of Ji Zha, the historiographers represent an ideal of aesthetic judgment, and through his remarks on the performances, they give 135 voice to their image of the Shi as the perfect vehicle of cultivation. The overall structure of the exhibition is determined according to generic differences and an implicit chronology. In the first half of the performance, singers, perhaps with instrumental accompaniment, perform melodies with words. These songs are collected in groups that correspond closely to the text of the Shi as it survived into later ages. 136 The airs of the states come first: 137

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the virtue of Kang Shu and Duke W u of W ey was just so; these must be the airs of Wey!" When they sang the "Royal Domain" for him, he said, "How beautiful! They are thoughtful but unafraid; these would be from Zhou's move to the east." When they sang the "Zheng'' for him, he said, "How beautiful! Already they are very trivial, and the people cannot bear it. Surely this will be the first to perish." When they sang the "Qi" for him, he said, "How beautiful! How expansive! They are indeed great airs. It is one who faced the eastern sea-this would be the Grand Duke. The state cannot yet be measured." When they sang the "Bin" for him, he said, "How beautiful! How grandiose! They are joyous but not lascivious. These would be the Duke ofZhou's move to the east."

When they sang the "Qin" for him, he said, "This is what is known as the grand sound. What is capable of being grand is great, and these are the perfection of greatness: these would be from Zhou's past." When they sang the "Wei" for him, he said, "How beautiful! How buoyant! They are great yet subtle, rugged yet easy to traverse. With virtue to support these things, there would be an enlightened ruler." When they sang the "Tang" for him, he said, "What profundity of thought! These would be the remaining scions of the T aotang line! Otherwise, how could their concern extend so far? If not the descendants of fine virtue, who would be capable of this?" When they sang the "Chen" for him, he said, "The state is without a master. How can it last long?" For "Kuai" and the others, he made no remark. 138 Although in the case of the Zheng airs, for instance, Ji Zha may distinguish the beauty of the music from the disaster it portends, the distinctions are not so clear elsewhere, and his remarks must be understood as applying 139 . . equa11y to word s, tunes, mstrumentatlon, an d d ance. ]'1 Zhas gemus 1s h'1s ability to recognize in the music and words of each section of the "Airs of the States" ("Guofeng") signs of place, of history, of moral quality, and of destiny. The narrative implies that he knew something about the regional differences within the "Airs." But like the renowned Jin master of musicians, Shi Kuang, Ji Zha knows how to hear regional differences expressed in the medium of music, and his success in identifYing each place of origin as the 140 performance unfolds is an act of hermeneutic brilliance. The sounds of place as Ji Zha hears them always signifY a historical period, namely, the moment when the region figured most prominently in the fortunes of the Zhou house. In other words, J{ Zha's commentary repreI

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sents the "Airs" as something other than an anthology of songs from the several regions of the realm; for him, it is an anthology of the music of Zhou's history in these regions. As elsewhere in historiography and other writings, music functions as a tympanum sensitive to whatever is on the other side. What Ji Zha hears on the other side is the shape of Zhou history. In the first sections he hears the beginning of the Western Zhou, the assiduousness of the founding kings, and the devotion of the loyalists in a time of rebellion. Next he hears the transition to the Eastern Zhou and the founding ofZheng. In the "Qi," "Bin," and "Qin" sections, he hears echoes ofZhou's greatness in the early period and at the same time recognizes in the regions of Qi and Qin the sound of a renewed grandeur. Similarly, the "Wey" and "Tang" airs signify to him the promising survival of ancient lines and inherited virtues. In "Chen," however, he hears only the coming extinction of a 141 Zhou fie£ In one sense Ji Zha historicizes the "Airs" by reading the individual sections against particular places and times that belong to a history of the Zhou. But at the same time he imposes on history and place the order of the text. The words and music assembled in the Shi are true not for the single moment of composition, but for all time, and nothing prevents Ji Zha from reading the central states of his own day through texts inherited from an earlier period. As in citation of the Shi, as in wen activity of any sort, the inherited artifact is both linked to a time of origin and true for any moment of reading. With the "Airs" the canonical rereading of Chinese history has only begun. The musicians next sing the remaining sections of the Shi:

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When they sang the "Lesser Elegantiae" for him, he said, 'How beautiful! They are mindful and not rebellious; they have complaints but do not speak them. This would be the waning of the Zhou's virtue. There are still remaining adherents of the former kings there." When they sang the "Greater Elegantiae" for him, he said, "How broad! How resplendent! Although it turns, it has a straight basis. This would be the virtue of King Wen."

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When they sang the "Hymns" for him, he said, "Perfection is reached! Straight but unpresumptuous, turning but unbending; close but not intrusive, distant but not separated; moved but not lascivious; repeating but not tiresome; somber but not melancholic, joyous but not dissipated; they are used but are not depleted, are spread abroad but do not make themselves conspicuous; they give generously without wasting and take without being greedy; they settle without becoming fixed and travel without wandering. The five notes ate harmonious, the eight airs are even, the intervals are measured, and there is order in each position held. These are things . h'mg v1rtue . have .m common...142 t hat all moments offlouns

Some of the remarks on the "Airs" suggest a loose chronological order in the text; it begins with the preliminary efforts of the early Zhou kings, proceeds to the fall of the Western Zhou and the founding of Zheng, and ends with the prospects for Wei, Jin, and unlucky Chen. In the second half of the Shi performance, sections of the text are organized in reverse chronological order but in order of increasing virtue. This part of the text begins, as Ji Zha understands it, with the decline of Zhou virtue ("Lesser Elegandae"), then proceeds to the virtue of King Wen ("Greater Elegantiae"), and finally to perfected virtue ("Hymns"), which as a common possession may transcend period distinctions and unite the founders of the three dynasties with successors still to come. Ji Zha again comments on several aspects of the performance at once, si· multaneously appraising the music he has heard, the words he has under• stood, the dance he has seen, and the moral moment he has found embodied in the performed work. His remarks consequently have a marked vagueness of reference, and hover above all the particular objects of appreciation. But, as is especially clear in the final section, on the "Hymns," his comments are unified by a figure of moderation. Each four-character phrase describes a trait stopped short of excess, and the phrases are for the most part arranged in pairs (e.g., "somber but not melancholic, joyous but not ecstatic"). Although this figure appears in other well-known passages of aesthetic com. 1s . never use d so extens1ve . 1y as m . t his passage. 143 The most conment, 1t spicuous formal effects in Ji Zha's remarks are reserved for the most exalted section of the Shi. Although we cannot know if Ji Zha is responding to the music, the words, the dance, or the total performance in his comment on the "Hymns," his judgments presume a familiar conception of musical harmony as a figure for stability in the political hierarchy. 144 Before reaching the "Hymns," Ji Zha has related texts to specific moments in the history of Zhou's virtue.

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But now, perhaps because the "Hymns" includes not only Zhou hymns to deities and ancestors but also hymns for the Shang and even for Lu, Ji Zha hears in the songs a representation of perfected political relations and of the behavior proper to any position in the hierarchy, whether king or minister. Everyone, king or commoner, serves both particular superiors (ancestors, kings, feudal lords, noble families) and the hierarchy itsel£ Any of the descriptions in Ji Zha's comment can be taken as an ethical prescription. Like much early Chinese aesthetic criticism, Ji Zha's commentary discovers the meaning of a work of art in its political suggestiveness. Unlike readers in the Mao tradition of Shi exegesis, however, he emphasizes not coded political critiques but the utopian embodiment of political ideals in a perfect literary 145 work. Last in the performance are the dances of the great rulers:

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When he had seen the dancers of the "Elephant Pipes" and the "Southern Flutes," he said, "How beautiful! There are still regrets." When he had seen the dancers of the "Great Martial," he said, "How beautiful! The Zhou at its height was like this!" When he had seen the dancers of the "Shaohu," he said, "This is the grandeur of the sage, but there is still a flaw in the virtue: the difficulties of the sage." When he had seen the dancers of the "Great Xia," he said, "How beautiful! It is assiduous but does not hold sway by its virtue. If not Yu, then who could have composed itt When he had seen the dancing of the "Shao Pipes," he said, 'Virtue has reached its perfection: how great it is! It is like Heaven in that it covers all; it is like earth in that it supports all. Even a virtue that flourished luxuriantly would have nothing to add to this. Here my observation has come to an end. If there is any other music, I • ul46 dare not request lt.

For information on the dances mentioned in this section we are dependent on the great Jin dynasty Zuozhuan commentator Du Yu (222-84). If has identified the pieces correctly, then the dance section is more tightly organized than the Shi program, proceeding in reverse chronological order, with one divergence: from King Wen forward to King W u, then back to Cheng Tang, then Yu, and finally Shun. The series not only traces virtue

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back to its acme (as described in the encomium on the "Shao Pipes") but also shows the lineaments of historical periodization. King Wen and King Wu are taken together as founders of Zhou culture and power; they are followed by the founder of the Yin, the unwitting founder of the Xia, and one of the three pre~dynastic sage~ kings. What Ji Zha outlines in his comments is and is not history: it is literary history. How can the irreducibility of time be preserved in the structure of a canonical collection whose implied goal is the promulgation of a virtue not dependent on time? The different moments in which the pieces were com~ posed are reactivated in the concentrated present of performance. Music, and by extension poetry and dance, has the power to represent qualities of the distant past accurately in the present. The musical canon as a whole, then, permits the concentration by proxy, in a single performance space, of many times (the history of civilized peoples from the earliest times to the present day) and places (the territory brought under civilization's sway). But other rationales rule the ordering of the canon: it is based on a known chronology but does not make the preservation or justification of this chronology its end. Instead, the canon (in Ji Zha's authoritative judgment) returns again and again to de, "virtue," a word that appears with some fre~ quency in his remarks and a concept that is implicit in most of them. The beauty (mei) he first perceives and remarks is everywhere matched with a de, a quality both of moral and of political power that is embodied, for instance, in the Zhou's move to the east or in the region ofZhou's predynastic ado~ lescence. Ji Zha thus defines beauty as the correspondence of a work to the conditions of moral and political dominion in which that work ·originated. Instead of the familiar hermeneutic of personality, which in Confucian thought and in Shi criticism makes the song correspond to the interior state of the singer, Ji Zha's is a more sweeping version that encompasses the more 147 limited version and makes it possible. This grander hermeneutic accounts entirely for the judgments of beauty in this scene, which are dependent on learning in general and on the special ability to identify the present work with the distant object of correspondence-be it a composer, an age, or a re~ gion. This aesthetic also functions in anecdotes and circumstances that do not overtly concern aesthetics. In the fine remonstrance, which the ruler must decode and take to heart, and in the well~crafted anecdote, for which the reader must puzzle out a judgment, the same hermeneutic competence is presumed and the same aesthetic pleasure recommended. 148

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Aesthetic claims hold the structure together. The pleasure that the qualified observer feels, and that he expresses in his repeated "beautiful," belongs equally to each part of the corpus. But his most eloquent judgments and his most intense pleasure come at the ends of the two halves of the performance. Both the commentary on song and the commentary on dance culminate in shengde, "flourishing virtue" or "virtue at its height," which in the one case belongs to the 'Hymns" section of the Shi and in the other to the "Shao Pipes" dance of Shun. In these passages, virtue's heights are matched by the extraordinary stylization of the prose itself; as in other speeches, literary patterning signifies the presence of cultivation, wen. And both passages propose an idealized synaesthesia in which performances of every sort offer immediate aesthetic pleasures (they are beautiful) but refer necessarily, as if through the very language of appreciation, to precedents of harmonious political order. It would seem that in Ji Zha's view, and in the view of the historiographers, political relations themselves are to be brought within the purview of aesthetics and that aesthetics acquires from this political dimension an inter. appropnateness, . h'1erarch'1cal regu1atlon, . and mo derat1on. · 149 In £act, est m this moderation is the epitome of the historiographical aesthetic. As I will argue in my discussion of the narratives of historiography, genuine pleasure is always pleasure restrained in accordance with rules, and this restraint originates outside the aesthetic object itsel£ in the Confucian moral program, in the condemnation of luxury for its own sake, and in the stories that connect subsequent ruin with prior aesthetic excess. But comments like Ji Zha's derive restraint from within pleasure and purport to explain beauty as the acme of balanced virtue embodied in art. Thus, free judgments of taste must always imply corresponding (Confucian) judgments about historical events and their moral mechanics. Here is what all ages of perfect virtue hold in common; here is the end ofJi Zha's viewing of the performance, the point of aesthetic and historical culmination beyond which no audience should wish to go (guanzhi). When Ji Zha leaves Lu, he travels to Qi, Zheng, W ey, and Jin. Figuratively, he travels in the historical moment of 544 B.C.E., and each of his enCOUnters seems designed to show the place of a particular state or noble line on its own historical curve. The implied construction of the interstate system and the synchronic historical moment echoes that of the Shi, and Ji Zha's tour again allows him to witness a series of performances and to judge

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them wisely. In every state he visits, he meets the governing elite and re~ sponds to them and comments upon them as if they were another move~ ment of music or dance. With the best of them he is "pleased" (yue), and for all he has prescient advice on coming perils and triumphs. In Jin he is even made to foresee, in his liking for the heads of the Zhao, Hann, and Wei 150 lineages, the coming division of the state among them. Ji Zha's visit to Luis an enactment, in narrative, of the conceptions of in~ herited speech that were examined in the first parts of the chapter. As the adornment of an inherited cultural artifact, wen always signaled that the ar~ tifact was implicated somehow in the mimetic reproduction of a cultural or~ der. More generally, wen patterning signified the presence of signification it~ sel£ with its separation between a surface (the patterns visible or audible in the artifact) and a remote point of reference. For most examples of wen in historiography, this point of reference was the inherited social order, with its clearly marked hierarchy. In an extended sense, however, wen was any sur~ face patterning that could be read for information about truths behind the surface, whether these were facts about remote places and times or psycho~ logical and moral facts about an individual. Texts can be described as wen because they partake of these more general qualities. As historiographical uses of the most artifactual of the early texts, the Zhouyi, show, citation of texts in speeches presumed the possibility of interpreting the particular events of historical experience with reference to inherited language. This was a way of making knowledge that sought to accommodate the world to wen. In the case of citations from the Shi, from Shangshu, and other texts, the spirit of the premier Zhou culture hero, King Wen, presides over this textual work. Finally, in the term wenci, eloquence itself-the rhetoric of good order described in the previous chapter-is associated with the king and with the moral and political meanings ofbeauty. What made Ji Zha a good reader of the songs and the dances, his ability to discern historical origins and moral potential in performance, also makes him an authoritative appraiser of persons, and in that sense a peer to certain eminent characters in historiography and to the Confucius of both the Zuozhuan and the Lunyu. Speeches, with their continual recontextualization and reperformance of inherited wisdom, do not fail to affect the narratives that frame them. Ji Zha's tour bridges the gap between the recuperation of the Classics in speeches and the legitimation of the Classics in narratives about the world. As I will argue in the next two chapters, the historiogra~

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phers used the remembered speeches of Spring and Autumn period characters as rhetorical and intellectual laboratories for a wide variety of theories. But these theoretical explorations never lose their connection to the authority of the Classics. And as my account of the narrative habits of historiography will demonstrate, an aesthetics of the sort exemplified in Ji Zha's comments remains one of the historiographers' favorite themes.

THREE

Intelligibility in the Extra~human World

Although speakers in historiography do much of their reasoning through citation and application of the Shi and other texts, they also call on many types of knowledge beyond the reach of inherited language. The Zuozhuan and Guoyu show a more sustained interest in the workings of the natural and supernatural worlds than any extant earlier works and go well beyond early Zhou texts in reasoning about the cosmos and its principles. When speeches incorporate this sort of knowledge, they put it to political and moral use, if only because the position defined for speeches within this system requires such use. In doing so, speeches formally acknowledge the existence of causes outside human influence or control, and they grant this extra~ human realm a partial independence, a regularity that guarantees the value of morality in the 1 human world by being amoraL It is true that Heaven and earth work for moral balance, but they, having no higher standard to preserve or to undo, 2 are not moral but regular. Although historiographers' investigations of the world's rules are dis~ persed in scores of individual speeches, these draw their principles of regu~ larity from a limited number of distinct areas of knowledge and may be loosely categorized according to subject matter and type of principle ad~ duced. There are, for example, speeches in which specific judgments are sub~ stantiated with astronomical principles, and others that assert rules based on geological events. Yin and yang and the Five Phases (wu xing) provide still other forms of regularity, as do music and the physical world. Although

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these speeches do sometimes codifY truths about the extra-human world in inherited language, traditionality and the obligation to preserve the human achievements of the past are here pushed into the background. These are the regularities of a proto-scientific discourse, and even though they are, like all abstract knowledge in historiography, applied to the interpretation of the particular and temporal, they pretend to eternal truth. As they appear in historiographical speeches, theories about the natural world reveal both underlying unities and unique qualities that account for the rhetorical utility of each type of knowledge. The most important unity among these theories is the semiotic assumption everywhere apparent in the narratives of this historiography: the certainty that the natural world has meaning, that phenomena in the world can and should be correctly interpretable. As a consequence of this assumption, predictions and policy recommendations, the two main types of judgment substantiated in speeches, become aspects of a single activity, the production of signs. The ruler, like Heaven and earth, produces signs; the problem for the ruler is to produce signs that conform to moral regularity. The details of this imperative will become clearer as we examine various discourses. The examination of narratives in subsequent chapters will show further that storytelling, like governing, draws its energy from revelation and visibility. Beyond the unities surrounding sign production, theories differ in the way they conceive of the production of signs and in the habits of knowing they reveal. Rather than explaining the objective knowledge Warring States historians had obtained concerning the physical world, I focus here on the habits of mind and discourse that their techniques reveal and that may inform the whole field of historical knowing. Theories about the natural world emerge in this historiography only as they contribute to its discursive regularities. As with other forms of knowledge, they identifY what is explicable in the world and offer techniques of explanation. At the same time, every theory, at least as it is expressed rhetorically, resists a totalizing interpretation. Despite the references in any given speech to an independently existing realm of truth and to a theory that makes that truth accessible, the various representations of a single theory (astronomy, for instance) in separate speeches do not necessarily add up to a coherent body of knowledge. System is held in abeyance for the sake oflocal rhetorical force.

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Heaven and Earth Pride of place among historiography's theories about nature must be granted to the study of Heaven and the earth. In the texts the historiographers and their characters preferred to cite, Heaven ( tian) was sanctified for its role in shifting the command (ming) of dynastic legitimacy from Shang to Zhou in response to the brightness of King Wen's virtue. But in the speeches themselves, conceptions of Heaven had clearly shifted. On the one hand, some of the anthropomorphism of the Shi and Shu references to tian remains; the extra-human world is not all blind mechanism. 3 On the other hand, speakers 4 are increasingly interested in cosmic regularity. Although anthropomorphized Heaven responds to human propitiation and is associated with the spirits and sacrifices discussed in the next chapter, the rule-bound cosmos is the subject of quasi-scientific theorizing. Speeches frequently include highly detailed observations of the natural environment in its grandest manifestations: the movement of Jupiter among the constellations, comets, eclipses, unseasonal weather patterns, earthquakes, landslides, and floods. That the physical world of these texts teems with interpretable signs has long been remarked by scholars of these works; the speeches exemplifY a use of the universe that would strongly influence later political thinkers and historiographers. But a consideration of the rhetorical conditions and circumstances of these utterances shows that the interpretability of the physical world is not unbounded. Moreover, the limits of interpretation are apparently motivated, at least in the sense that they are to the advantage of other interests at work in historiography. The way the world means is meaningful, as a matter of course; but the way the world is forbidden to mean is also meaningful, and perhaps more interesting. The incorporation in speeches of observations of the heavens is most impressive in historiography's many astronomical predictions. The appearance of a new star or comet, or the position of the year-marking planet Jupiter (sui) in its twelve-year course among the fixed stars, is assigned a specific historical meaning, which is then confirmed by subsequent anecdotes. 5 The function of such speeches is to write human events, especially events that have not yet taken place at the dramatic moment of speaking, into the table of regularities represented in the nighttime sky. Assumed as truth but revealed only as circumstances require, permanent correspondences between the stellar territories of the heavenly plane and the political territories of the

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human plane make it possible to draw parallels between events on the two planes and to extend to the human some of the cyclical predictability of the 6 heavenly. Some exemplary instances of astronomical prediction are found in the anecdotes surrounding the fall, restoration, and final extinction of the state of Chen: Chen was annexed by Chu in the year corresponding to 534 B.c.E., had a fire in 533, was restored in 529, and was ultimately swallowed up in 7 478. Chen first fell when the Chu army, summoned as an ally by a contender for the ducal succession, instead annexed the state in 534 B.C.E. At this point, Duke Ping of Jin asks his scribe Zhao if Chen has now disappeared forever. Zhao answers in the negative, beginning with an astronomi8 cal observation:

···-~·fu··~·*·~~~---~~~-~~~*~··· M~1~EI3

•

Chen belongs to the line of Zhuanxu. It was when the year-planet was in Chunhuo that he perished, and Chen will be the same. Now [the year-planet] is at the ford of Ximu: [Chen] will be restored. 9

Further details are provided in the entries for the next year, when there is a fire in Chen, and the Zheng erudite Pi Zao predicts that Chen will be restored in five years and perish finally after fifty-two more years. Asked by Zichan for an explanation, he says:10

~*

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fu·~~E~·~BE~·ME&D*·fff.i··~~·~%~~-*~ 31tfu·~BE+=~· Chen belongs to water. Fire is the counterpart of water and is what Chu serves. Now, at the appearance of fire, there is a fire in Chen: Chu is expelled and Chen established. I say five years because counterparts are completed by fives. When the year-planet comes around to Chunhuo five times, Chen will finally perish and Chu will annex it, as is the way of Heaven; thus I say it will be fifty-two years. 11

The speech-maker generates meaning in the human and extra-human world by connecting a set of memories and observations. (1) Chen was conquered but was restored five years later and finally perished fifty-two years after that; (2) there was a fire in Chen the year after the first Chu conquest; (3) Chen belongs to the line of Zhuanxu, who died when Jupiter was in ChunhuoF (4) Chen is associated with water, as Chu is with fire. An ad hoc science is born as these givens are manipulated according to the habits of

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rhetoric. Since Chen's extinction occurred in a Chunhuo year, the historiographers remember, promote, or invent the legend that Zhuanxu died in a Chunhuo year. Turning then to the earlier five-year occupation of Chen, they insert a prediction in two parts at the beginning of that period. The first part is merely negative: the initial annexation of Chen cannot be permanent because it has not begun in a Chunhuo year. The second part must account for the end of the occupation and for the exact length of the restoration. The theory of the Five Phases, which is, as we shall see, a rich generator of correspondences, supplies the required intermediate steps. "At the appearance of fire" indicates the time of year, early summer. The function of the term "counterpart" (jei) and the source of the number five are more obscure, but the point is that the five is needed to explain both the length of the occupation and the number of times Jupiter will pass through Chunhuo before Chen's fmal extinction. The pair of predictions exhibits a mode of reasoning that claims general validity even as it is weighted in favor oflocal requirements. Necessity in this case begins not in a progression through the terms of a syllogism but in the frame of historical truth and in the assumption that the universe displays meaningful signs. Speeches like the ones concerning Chen imply a strong, though entirely incidental, confirmation of the accuracy of some aspects of Eastern Zhou historical accounts: the contrived nature and extreme adaptability of theoretical explanation are the best evidence that certain facts were stubborn and could not be changed or made up at will. Had the facts been negotiable, then they would presumably have yielded to theory, allowing symmetry, system, and perfectly stable abstractions. But the events and their chronology were apparently givens. The transmitters of these events, perhaps wishing to make them as readable from the beginning as they are from the end, seized on the tools of astronomical correspondence and supplemented them with the much more adaptable connective tissue of Five Phases theory. This bricolage is a feature of rhetorical and quasi-scientific method in historiography and has a certain utility. The heavenly and the human are part of the same order; stellar periodicity and human historical contingency can make a single sense. Like other astronomical phenomena, eclipses are treated as readable signs that refer to specific human events. Yet the theory of eclipses is subtler than certain other theories in that it admits the possibility of insignificance. The Chunqiu records a total of thirty-seven solar eclipses (two of them incor-

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reedy); the Zuozhuan remarks on only ten of these, five of which prompt 13 predictions. The predictive mechanism is again flexible. In four of the five eclipse predictions, it is apparent that an eclipse has been matched with subsequent events to generate significance. By refusing all advice on the proper ritual responses to an eclipse, for instance, the Lu nobleman Ji Pingzi signifies to a canny observer, his colleague Shusun Zhaozi, that he will come to 14 dominate the lord ofLu. In another case, the use of an eclipse and of ritual in the crafting of the prediction is more ingenious. Asked by Duke Zhao what a particular eclipse signifies, Zi Shen ofLu remarks that eclipses falling on the solstices and the equinoxes betoken no disaster at all, since these are the days when the sun and the moon take the same path or pass each 15 other. What would be unnatural and disastrous in other months is acceptable on these days. Even though theoretical understanding appears to have forestalled the interpretation of this eclipse, as well as the attendant prediction, signification creeps in at the end of the anecdote. A certain Shu Zhe, not privy to Zi Shen's explanation, weeps ritually in appeasement of the heavens; his death, predicted immediately by Shusun Zhaozi, comes in the 16 next month. The pattern is one we will see repeated in various forms. Theoretical understanding of a phenomenon appears at first to replace or limit moral interpretation, but in what follows it becomes clear that the amoral theoretical reading is being subordinated to the moral lesson. This particular eclipse signifies nothing, but it is not thereby excluded from the general system of ritual responses. The deadliness of Shu Zhe's mistake shows that ritual prescribes even the non-action that theoretical understanding can make advisable; this establishes ritual's power on a very high level. Ritual will in fact finally be revealed as the basis and end of all learning, the theory that underlies all theories. 17 Comets are treated in the manner of eclipses. Of the four comets whose appearances are recorded in the Chunqiu and Zuozhuan, one is noted without comment, two are used for straightforward predictions, and one becomes the occasion for another subordination of theory to virtue. 18 The first of the predictions is presented without theoretical justification or the rhetorical connective tissue that joins such justification to the facts. 19 The second-a prediction of disastrous fires in four states,_ discussed below-employs both astronomical and Five Phases theory. 20 The last of the Zuozhuan's remarks on comets, like Zi Shen's explanation of the limits of eclipse interpretation, emphasizes not a theoretical or mantic

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understanding of astronomical phenomena but the place of these phenomena within a cosmic system responsive to virtue. A comet has become visible in Qi, and when Duke Jing (r. 547-490) prepares a ritual response, his famous advisor Yanzi tells him that supplication will do no good. Heaven does not change its orders, even in response to prayer; a comet is Heaven's way of sweeping away filth and is no cause for worry for the ruler whose de (here "moral status" rather than "virtue'') is not filthy. He then cites six lines from the Shi poem "Darning" (Mao 236) to show that it was King Wen's moral status that brought him sovereignty. He closes with four lines from an otherwise unattested poem on losing one's people by failing to use the mirror of 21 Xia and Shang. Pleased, the duke abandons his plans for supplication. No comet is recorded in the Chunqiu for this year, and it is difficult to under22 stand why a comet would be visible in Qi alone among the states. It would seem, in fact, that the text is affording Yanzi an opportunity to deliver a speech on the primacy of earthly virtue. The astronomical event, itself perhaps a fiction, is the pretext for a set piece on virtue, a confection of relatively long poetic citations and connecting rhetorical extensions like the ones examined in Chapter I. Prediction, and the theory that goes with it, is not ruled out, but the last word on comets in the Zuozhuan belongs to the order of virtue, which promises not just an understanding of comets but a defense against their implications. The theory of earthquakes and landslides is much less developed in historiography than are theories of Heaven. Of five earthquakes reported in the Chunqiu, only one receives further comment in the Zuozhuan. 23 The sudden death of King Jiing of Zhou has sparked a succession struggle pitting Prince Chao (Wangzi Chao), who is for a time called the Western King, against 24 the future King Jing, here referred to as the Eastern King. When the earth moves in the territory of one of Wangzi Chao's adherents, the eminent minister and supporter of the future legitimate king, Chang Hong, bids one of his companions take heart, since the portent promises success: "When Zhou fell, there were earthquakes among the three rivers. Now there is an earthquake in the territory of one of the Western King's great ministers: Heaven is abandoning him, and the Eastern King is certain to win a great 25 victory.'' The end of the Western Zhou period and the failure of King You were presaged by earthquakes, as is the failure of the new Western King. This is theory at its barest: an earthquake in a particular location means ruin for the holders of that place, and the meaning of the phenomenon observed

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is determined by precedent. For certain rhetorical purposes, the historiographers assume that the history of the earth and its significations, like that of the strictly human world, repeats itsel£ For a fuller account of the theory behind earthquake prognostication, one must turn to the Guoyu, in which the omens Chang Hong spoke of are recounted in a separate anecdote. The response to the omens is set in their own time, the reign of King You, and includes a speech of interpretation.26 According to the Zhou minister Bo Yangfu, disorder in the qi (essence) of Heaven and earth arises only because of human irregularities. When these cause the yang to be trapped beneath an oppressive yin force, they give rise to earthquakes. The resulting obstructions of the sources of rivers are a further omen of the fall of a state, since when water and earth do not interact properly, there is a shortage of resources for the people of the state, and the state falls. Despite the appeal to yin-yang and Five Phases theory here, historical precedent still has force: the story of the femme fatale Bao Si and her domination of King You may well determine the details of the yin-yang analysis, and the speaker refers to dry rivers that foretold the falls ofXia and Shang.27 Theoretical elaboration does not so much displace reasoning on the basis of . 28 precedent as supp1ement It. One of the Zuozhuan's two landslides is handled quite simply: a Jin diviner predicts without explanation a disaster the following year that will 29 nearly destroy the country. The other landslide, however, elicits a telling renunciation of interpretation. The place is again Jin; there has been a landslide on Mount Liang. and Duke Jing of Jin sends for his minister Bo Zong by express chariot. As he rushes to court, Bo Zong encounters a wise commoner?0

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Bo Zong came to a heavy cart, which he ordered out of the way, saying. "Make way for the express chariot!" The carter said, "It would be quicker for you to take another route than to wait for me to move." [Bo Zong] asked him where he lived. He said, 'T m from Jiang." [Bo Zong] asked for the news from Jiang. He said, "There's been a landslide on Mount Liang. and Bo Zong is to be summoned for consultations about it." [Bo Zong] asked what should be done.

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Intelligibility in the Extra-human World

He said, "Mountains erode and have landslides: what is there that one could do about it? A state makes its mountains and rivers its support. Thus when a mountain has a landslide or a river runs dry, the ruler desists from feasting, decreases the splendor of his clothing, rides in a plain chariot, stops court music, and lodges apart. The priests present sacrificial goods, while the scribes pronounce words for the ritual. That is all that is done. Even ifBo Zong should be there, what could he do?" Bo Zong asked to present him to court, but he would not permit it. So (Bo Zong] reported what he had said, and it was followed. 31

Attracted by the frank good sense shown by the commoner in their first exchange, Bo Zong slows his pace long enough to ask for news and more general advice. The carter responds with a description of a ritual response in which impeccable verbal order (the series of parallel two-character phrases) corresponds to orderly public acts on the part of the court. As in other anecdotes concerning wise commoners, the energy in this passage derives from the unexpected reassertion of the traditional. 32 The theoretical explanation of landslides-here a simple recognition of their physical causes-does not expose the ritual response as mere superstition. Instead, it becomes a part of the common sense that prescribes the ruler's actions. This common sense, which also contains virtue (de) and ritual (li) as general categories, emerges in its distinction from the Jin court's haste and confusion. As the speeches on eclipses, comets, and other phenomena indicate, Heaven and earth were sources of regularity and signification. The historiographers read stellar, solar, and terrestrial phenomena against historical events but always in the context of speeches, which impose their own rhetorical conditions on the elaboration of theory. By appealing to the natural world in the speeches, the historiographers founded their vision of human order on evidence that was more than human.

The Five Phases and Yin,yang Some of the examples cited above have shown how yin-yang and the Five Phases (wu xing, wu cai) were used in the construction of speeches.33 In his prediction about Sun Zhou, Duke Xiang of Shan (see Chapter r) was perhaps referring to the Five Phases when he spoke of"five for earth." Pi Zao of Zheng, foretelling Chen's impending doom, spoke of fire as the counterpart of water. And the Guoyu speech on the Zhou earthquakes explained them in the terms of both systems, as the result of oppressed yang and as signs of a failure in the interaction of water and earth. These theories provide a set of

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terms for manipulation in the speeches' rhetorical algebra. Loosely determined and adaptable, they are nevertheless relatively limited terminologies to which historical contingencies of all kinds can be assimilated. Theory and rhetoric work together: once the particulars of an event are interpreted in terms of a particular theoretical system, they are easily accommodated to the order of rhetorical structures favored in the speeches. The formalization of Five Phases theory is credited to Zou Yan {late fourth-third century), a scholar active mainly in the state ofQi, where for a time he participated in the philosophical discussions that were supported by the king at Jixia. 34 Historiography does show evidence of a rather fully developed theory of the phases and their workings, but this theory obeys the rhetorical proprieties to which all theories in historiography are subject, and autonomous systematization of the sort Zou Yan seems to have introduced is forestalled. In the Zuozhuan and Guoyu, the Five Phases only rarely appear as a complete set, whether listed together or summed up in a name. Rather than mobilizing the whole theory-whatever it was-in the construction of speeches, speech-makers ordinarily chose the one or two terms they needed for a particular occasion, exploiting the privileged status that wood, fire, metal, water, and soil had begun to acquire. Thus fire, which seems to show up more regularly than the other phases, can stand alone or in combination with one of the others. When there is a fire in the state of Song, Duke Dao of Jin tells his minister Shi Ruo that he has heard that the fire demonstrates the existence of the Way of Heaven (tiandao ), and he asks for an explanation.35 Shi Ruo's answer includes some of the lore discussed in connection with the annexation of Chen. He explains how in very ancient times the ministers for fire (huozheng) received their sacrifices and the spring plowing began, at the first appearance above the horizon of either the Heart (xin) or 36 the Beak (zhou) asterism. The stars determined when farmers were to use fires in the open (for burning fields) or indoors (for kilns). For this reason, both asterisms were identified with the stations of Jupiter named for fire: Heart with Dahuo and Beak with Chunhuo. Later the fire minister ofTaotang (better known as Yao) sacrificed to Dahuo and designed the calendar according to its movements. According to Shi Ruo, Shang's astronomers followed this practice, and it was noted early on that Shang's disasters tended to be conflagrations. Song, as keeper of Shang's legacy in the Zhou period, may be expected to share Shang's vulnerability to fire, and the most

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Intelligibility in the Extra-human World

recent conflagration, by demonstrating that vulnerability, confirms the connections established between the Shang order and celestial and earthly fires. Although fire iri the heavens and fire in Five Phases theory are normally kept separate, passages like this suggest a unified approach, with fire linking the regularity of the heavens, human religious and political history, and the real flames that destroy cities.37 As in theoretical remarks on comets and landslides, the theoretical order that the Zuozhuan attaches as a commentary to the Song fire is immediately subordinated to moral order. When Duke Dao asks if this tendency for Shang disasters to originate in fire can be treated as a necessity (ke bi hu ), Shi Ruo reasserts the priority of political order. "It is a matter of the way. When the state is in disorder, there are no signs (xiang), and one cannot know." That is, some states have so departed from the Way that it is impossible to determine the significances of an 38 omen, which may indicate temporary troubles or final destruction. As in any semiotic system, only the stability of the system itself allows individual signs to be interpreted. Without political intelligibility, there can be no mantic certainty. When fire is joined with another of the Five Phases in the theoretical portion of a speech, it becomes even clearer that the interpretation of the phases, as privileged terms of analysis, is flexible, and that this flexibility is logically prior to the systematic interrelations of full-fledged Five Phases theory. In the year before the great fires in Song, W ey, Chen, and Zheng, the appearance of a comet near the star Dachen (also known as Dahuo) prompts a flurry of prediction, as the resources of astronomy, mythology, and Five Phases theory are mobilized to connect the fact of the comet with the fact of the widespread fires. 39 The passage again shows how the makers of historiography did their finest work in speeches attributed to contemporary observers of recorded facts. The comet appears in a part of the sky that, 40 as we have seen, is associated with Shang and its Song descendants; because Chen and Zheng are associated with the early rulers T aihao and Zhurong, respectively, and because these rulers are associated with fire, 41 these states will also be affected. W ey poses a special problem, since nothing in astronomy or mythology links it with fire. But by moving into the celestial River Han, the Milky Way, the comet opened a connection with water. That water is the counterpart of fire has been demonstrated under other rhetorical circumstances, and Wey's terrestrial location corresponds to stel42 lar features linked with water. Five Phases terminology further allows one

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speaker, Zi Shen ofLu, to propose two days on which the fires might occur: bingzi and renwu.43 The fires occur on the renwu day of the fifth month of the 44 next year. As conceptualized components of the physical world, the Five Phases are joined not only with astronomical wisdom, mythological lore, and the sexagesimal cycle but also, and quite powerfully, with the system of the Zhouyi. In the Zuozhuan account of the divination concerning the newborn Shusun Bao, discussed in Chapter 2, fire was one of the terms the interpreter used to justify his prediction. The Guoyu account of the Ducal Son Chong'er's return to Jin includes a divination and interpretation that make 45 use of two more of the Five Phases. While still in Qin, Chong'er divines with the milfoil stalks, asking if he will gain possession of Jin. He gets the hexagrams Zhun and Yu, a result that the attending diviners judge inauspicious.46 One of Chong'er's own men, however, cites the Zhouyi hexagram statements for these hexagrams, which in both cases include the sentence "It is beneficial to install a ruler." He proves his point through a manipulation of the hexagrams themselves. As noted in Chapter 2, each trigram is associated by convention with images or objects in the material world. In Zhun, the lower trigram (Zhen) is the carriage (che), while the upper (Kan) is water (shui); in Yu, the lower (Kun) is soil (tu), while the upper is again the Zhen 47 carriage. Zhun is richness or abundance, and Yu is pleasure. Since the carriage appears in both the inner and the outer (i.e., the lower and upper) parts of the two hexagrams and is moved and nourished by water and soil, success is certain. The presence of the thunderous carriages indicates military prowess (wu), and water stands for the flowing compliance of the masses, which is wen. Wen and wu taken together are the "abundance" associated with the hexagram Zhun. The "pleasure" ofYu, meanwhile, results from the pairing of an elderly mother (the Kun trigram) with a strong eldest son (Zhen). As the analysis continues, it encompasses the virtues of the hexagrams themselves; the speaker justifies citations ftom the Zhouyi in terms of the phases 48 associated with the trigrams and finally repeats the prediction of success. In the interpretation of Chong'er's hexagrams, certain of the phases and a few objects become metaphorical middle terms that allow the speaker to link events in the physical and historical world with the well-wrought order of theory. That such interpretive situations do not display the Five Phases as a closed system of complementary terms probably indicates that the formalizing efforts of Zou Yan and others had not yet gained currency when the

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speech-makers were remembering history. 49 It would seem that despite the occasional use of collective terms for the Five Phases in the Zuozhuan and Guoyu, 50 the value of the terms derives as much from their use in a specific context as from their systematic order. Thus one or two of the phases show up in a speech when rhetorical requirements of the sort we have examined make them useful. Sometimes there are six rather than five terms in the set, 51 sometimes only four. The aim of historiographical speeches is the elegance of rhetoric, not of science, and beyond that the vindication of an overarching moral order manifested in historical events; the material world and the Five Phases must be accommodated to that aim. 52 Although the Five Phases and their theoretical possibilities are most useful to historiography in partial applications, the complete system is not, 53 as some have claimed, entirely unattested in the Zuochuan and Guoyu. By far the most impressive treatment of the Five Phases (here referred to as wu xing) is a Zuozhuan passage that begins with the following notice, absent from the Chunqiu for this year: "In the fall, a dragon appeared on the outskirts of Jiang." 54 Jiang was the capital of Jin, and Wei Xianzi, the chief minister of that state, asks Cai Mo (also known as the Scribe Mo) if it is true that dragons, which cannot be captured alive, are the wisest of all creatures. No, says Cai Mo, it is not that dragons are wise, but that humans are no longer wise; in days of yore states had hereditary ranks devoted to dragon husbandry. Cai Mo's lengthy explanation of the early history of dragons and bureaucracies amounts to a historical justification of the Five Phases system. Under Shun and the rulers of the Xia dynasty, the Huanlong (Dragonraising) and Yulong (Dragon-rearing) families were named for their knowledge of the care and feeding of dragons. The last of these adepts fed the Xia ruler the pickled meat of a female dragon (one of four sent by Heaven) that had died; when the lord demanded more of the delicacy, the dragon warden departed, and founded the Fan line (forebears of the Fan family of Jin nobles). When Wei Xianzi asks about the disappearance of this bureaucratic order, Cai Mo returns the Zuozhuan's most complete vision of the Five Phases and their place in the world: ~~·~~~W·W8~~·~~2~·-B~8·~~&~·~W~ •·wm~•·~~~~·~~•~·~~fi~··~~•·~~Efi ~W·mnEW·W~~a~·M-~0·~-·~·tlWE~·m• m~·*~B~~·*~Bm~·~~B~~·*~B~~·±~BFo

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Intelligibility in the Extra-human World

109

Z · ~ r 13 · U ~ 1i ffrB · mE.Eli; Z 1i '§ -IQ. • Jt 13 · o/ S.f: .Ek 1I 1m if;)( • 13 f§g ~ • & 1.t m: ~ 1iJ -c · ~ ~ ~ !& • 1~

m: · 13 ~ · 13 ~~ · 13 w~ · •

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~m•·#I.Ek1Ir131Uft·~§±·~~=m-!Q.·§±~U·~·ffi ~-!Q.·1I~W.EkZrl3tt~~·~·~~~zm•#~~·~~~*

ffrBZ·

"Each material thing had its officer. These officers perfected their methods, thinking on them day and night. If for one day they gave up their duties, then death came to them; one who had given up his office did not eat. When the officer remained in his duties, then the material thing with which he was concerned would emerge. If he abandoned his duties, the!l the material thing would hide away, becoming obstructed and infertile. "Thus there were the officers of the Five Phases, known as the Five Officers, who were granted hereditary tides and surnames, enfeoffed as the highest nobles, and sacrificed to as the most esteemed spirits. At the altars of earth and grain and in the five sacrifices, these are the ones who are revered and exalted. The officer for wood was known as Goumang; the officer for fire was known as Zhurong; the officer for metal was known as Rushou; the officer for water was known as Xuanming; the officer for soil was known as Houtu. "The dragon is a material thing of the water. Since the office of water has been 55 abandoned, dragons are no longer taken alive.... If (dragons) did not appear day and night, who could have thus treated them as material things?" Xianzi asked, "At the altars of earth and grain and the five sacrifices, to what hereditary lines do the five officers belong?" He replied, "In the time of Shaohao there were four men, named Chong, Gai, Xiu, and Xi, who were talented with metal, wood, and water. He made Chong the Goumang (wood officer), Gai the Rushou (metal officer), and Xiu and Xi the Xuanming (water officers); through generations, by never giving up their office, they preserved Qiongsang. These account for three of the sacrifices. "Zhuanxu had a son named Li, who was the Zhurong (fire officer). Gonggong had a son named Goulong, who was the Houtu (soil officer). These account for the other two sacrifices. "Houtu (the soil officer) is the altar of earth, while the altar of grain is for the officer of fields. Zhu, a son of the Lieshan rulers, was in charge of the altar of grain and was sacrificed to until the Xia. Qi of Zhou was also in charge of the altar of grain and has been sacrificed to since the Shang.''56

It is significant that this, the most comprehensive elaboration of the system of the Five Phases, is not part of a justification of a prediction or even a policy deliberation. Although such occasions would have imposed the limits

no

Intelligibility in the Extra-human World

of factual particulars on the rhetoric of the speech, the occasion here looks like the merest pretext. Unless we imagine that some other creature was mistaken for a dragon, this is an event that never happened and that, moreover, is not attested in the Chunqiu, where some part of the factual framework of each year's anecdotes is established.57 But in a larger sense, the occasion of the speech is the same occasion that generally controls the use of theory in rhetoric. Like other forms of regularity in the world, the Five Phases, even as they display their conceptual force, must put that force at the disposal of a moral vision of human history. The Five are an absolute system, but their theoretical truth is demonstrated only by the cultural achievements of early dynasts. The disappearance of living dragons from the world proves a point that is not so much theoretical as moral and historical: the contemporary order, which falls short of the standards of the ancients in many ways, also fails in lacking the office of water. Aetiology here ascribes to the Five Phases a priority that thinkers like Zou Yan would have found useful, but it subordinates them to history by noting the moments of their entrance on (and, in the case of water, exit from) the historical stage of political and cultural institutions. Zou Yan's theory of ages keyed to the different phases, on the other hand, would subordinate history to Five Phases theory, something that the Zuozhuan and Guoyu never do. 58 Despite its close association with the Five Phases in later Chinese thought, the yin-yang dichotomy is one of the lesser theoretical tools in histo59 riographical speeches. The terms can be used for a quick prediction, as when an eclipse prompts a prediction of flooding from Zi Shen ofLu and a refutation by Shusun Zhaozi: "It will be a drought. If even after the equinox the yang still does not prevail, it must be excessive when it does finally prevail. How could there not be a drought? Since the yang is not prevailing over the dark, it will accumulate." 60 The Chunqiu notes a sacrifice for rain directly after the eclipse itself; yin-yang theory seems to have provided a handy means of relating the two details of the historical record, and the drama of false interpretation and correction lends to the authority of the theory. 61 Yin-yang can provide a rationalistic explanation of prodigies, as when five stones fall from the sky and six birds fly backward in the state of Song. Asked by Duke Xiang of Song what the omens mean, a visitor correctly predicts deaths in 62 Lu, turmoil in Qi, and mixed military success for Song. But afterward he denies that the strange events were interpretable: "This was a matter of yin and yang, not a cause for good or ill auspices; good and ill auspices arise from

Intelligibility in the Extra-human World

III

humans." The Zuozhuan has it both ways. The natural world, understood by means of theory, is independent of humans. But like anything that produces visible signs, it still makes correct interpretations possible, largely because any rumor of omens indicates unrest among the people, whose dissatisfac63 tion is the true source of trouble for an unjust ruler. As a dichotomy, yin-yang lends itself especially to circumstances that favor the thematization of balance. The ailing Duke Ping of Jin consults a Qin doctor about his illness after Zichan of Zheng has given an immensely erudite but apparently unhelpful diagnosis. The doctor explains the use of balance in music and in other number-based discourses. Excess in any single term invites disaster, and it is the duke's passionate devotion to his concubines that has brought on his fever. 64 In one of the several Guoyu speeches on music in its relation to political and cosmic order (more on which subject below), the orderly workings of yin and yang are among the effects of the right sort of music, and the excess represented by the kings new bells will result in obstruction and disorder.65 In the natural world, yin and yang wax and wane in constant complementarity, with occasional excesses on one side or the other; in analyses of human behavior, the emphasis seems to be on the 66 danger of excess. In a speech probably written later than most others, the Guoyu ascribes to the Yue King Goujian's (r. 496-465) famous advisor Fan Li a yin-yang theory 67 of military engagement. On Fan Li's advice, Goujian has invaded Wu and then refused a definitive battle. Fan Li interprets the situation on the basis of ancient precedents. The W u forces' willingness to come out for a battle indicates steely strength and a remnant of yang force that must be exhausted before Yue can seek to destroy the state. To conquer Wu, Yue must, like the ancients, balance aggression and defense, yang and yin, in accordance with 68 the natural constants of the world. Yin-yang and the Five Phases, like the regularities of the heavens, are in theory prior to human culture and are integrated into human understanding through gradual cultural advancement. In their role as signifiers, especially in predictive speeches, these aspects of the universe are required to be responsive to successes and failures in human virtue, but part of their value always derives ttom their more-than-human orderliness. One may therefore distinguish in the rhetorical application of these theories two distinct modes of signification. First, there is the complete system (the Five Phases taken together, for instance), which can always furnish a model of the order to which

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the human political realm must aspire. Cosmic order, in which observational insight is combined with projected ideals of political order, signifies an overall regularity that human activity should, but usually does not, reproduce. Second, there are individual elements (comet, eclipse, fire, water), which are borrowed from their respective systems for the occasional purposes of rhetoric and are used to endow particular events in the human world with significance. The receptivity of these elements, their metaphorical openness to all sorts of signification, allows easy transitions from historical particular to theoretical order and thence to specific prediction or policy recommendation. But whether a speaker expounds cosmic regularity or merely adduces it to facilitate the connection of observation with prediction or counsel, the cosmic provides the speech with its infallible signs by being more than human and by not changing in response to human effort or failure. In these theories, human thought has postulated an order that is exemplary in its regularity precisely because it is not human. Historiographical speeches also apply a number of theories that acquire their regularity from action in the human realm. These are not yet the political and cultural precepts that the majority of speeches appeal to, but they do take us one step closer to the unique order of the human world.

Theories of the Human: Music, War, and the Responsive Universe Some cosmic regularities would remain unknown if it were not for the human activities that evoke them. On a general level, observation, interpretation, and rhetoric are themselves activities that reveal unseen order, and the theories we have examined so far are attempts to reveal and apply hidden truths. But endeavors other than theorizing also engage these extra-human truths; the difference is that theory follows human activity and is not only knowledge of the world but also knowledge of the human. Although historiography, as it subordinates all forms of knowledge to certain central tenets concerning virtue and tradition, gives prescriptive wisdom (political precepts and the like) a theoretical status equal to that of descriptive knowledge, there are nevertheless certain areas of prescription in which described cosmic order is presented as being more directly effective. The structure and balance of cosmic forces may be a common metaphor for political order, but in music, war, and a few other areas, the relevance of these forces is more than metaphorical.

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II3

Music, like the discourses examined in the previous section, is a source both of comprehensive models and of isolated terms adapted to occasional use. There was, beyond and above these texts, a musicology that had its own 69 technical coherence. My concern here is, however, to show the form theories of music took when adapted for presentation in the context of historiographical rhetoric. Eastern Zhou historiography's greatest systematic expositions of the regularities of music can be found in two grand Guoyu passages, one of which 70 has already been mentioned in connection with yin-yang theory. King Jiing ofZhou is preparing to cast a great bell array, known as the Wuyi.71 Three speeches of remonstrance follow, each focusing on a different aspect of music's centrality in the universal order. The first speech, by the king's noble advisor Duke Mu of Shan, makes aesthesis, or perception, its theme. The new bell set, whose sound exceeds the capacity of human ears, outstrips aesthesis; the bell whose sound is too great to hear institutes an unknowable and therefore useless harmony, betraying music's raison d'etre. Further, as the proper judgment of properly limited beauty, aesthesis should be the beginning of a lord's good public image. When he hears and sees clearly, he wins the adherence of the people, and music becomes the beginning of successful government. By violating these aesthetic standards, the great bell instead becomes a cause of excessive aesthesis, impure taste, and disharmony; government fails as the people lose faith in what they hear.72 The king does not heed this first warning, but does ask his musician (ling) Zhoujiu about the matter.73 The latter repeats what he has heard concerning the proper tonal sizes and ranges of various types of instruments and explains a fundamental principle of economy. The sages made their musical instruments in such a way as to conserve resources, reserving the heavier and more expensive instruments, including bells, for relatively minor harmonic and rhythmic roles. Although Zhoujiu, unlike Duke Mu, speaks here of music in its own terms, his justification of musical practice necessarily takes him outside the system itself to a realm that is, perhaps inevitably, political. In the next section the interpenetration of the musical and the political becomes more emphatic. "Administration,:' says Zhoujiu, "makes a model of musicr music derives from harmony, and harmony derives from even tonality. The tones are what give music its harmony, and the pitch-standards are what make tones even" 'X_ iBc ~ ~ • ~ 1::£. itO • itO 1::£. Sf • § ~.J itO ~ • 1~ ~.J Sf§. When the musical instruments, along with lyrics (shi) and

II4

Intelligibility in the Extra-human World

singing (ge) and all the other components of the performance, are handled correctly, the result is a perfection that can bring about the eight airs (ba feng); whether these airs are simply the winds of the eight directions or something more surely tied to music is uncertain, but the effect extends . hout question . to nature:75 Wit ~~~~~~~·#~~~·~~ff*·~ffi~¥·~~~~·A~~

~·~•w•~·~~~··~s•~· And then there is neither obstructed yin nor scattered yang in the qi; yin and yang proceed in order, winds and rain come at the appropriate times, there is fine growth and abundant blessings, the people are harmonious and prosperous, nothing is missing and music is complete, and neither the rulers nor the subjects are fatigued. Thus it is said that the music is proper.

Now, however, with the improper casting of bells that the traditional music system cannot justify, the proper is obstructed and resources are squan, dered. These failures in turn mean that the bells will provide no musical pleasure. Further, the character of the new bells' sound will permit neither harmony nor evenness of tone. In his peroration, Zhoujiu connects the musical and economic characteristics of the proper bells with the most revered concepts of the inherited mimetic order. When music is harmonious and even in tone (heping), re, sources multiply and the virtue and sound of the center (zhongde, zhongyin) lead the way. 'Virtue and sound do not err, and spirits and humans are brought together; spirits are at peace because of this, and the people are heedful because of this" 1~ if~ ni · J;) if t$ A · t$ ~ J;) $ · ~ ~ J;) lll[\. The alternative to this incantatory vision of perfection, with its echoes of the Shi, is waste, fatigue, excess, dissonance, the alienation of the people, and the rage of the spirits. This, says Zhoujiu, is something of which he has not heard; that is, it is not part of the inherited learning for which he is responsible. The rhetorical outlines of the speech should be clear even in paraphrase. After explaining proper instrumentation and harmony on the basis of tradi, tional authority (chen wen zhi, "I have heard"), Zhoujiu introduces and sub, stantiates the likeness between a government and the music it produces. The terms most prominent in the thematics and structure of the speech are har, mony (he), even tonality (ping) and, to a lesser extent, pleasure/music (le/yue, both written ~). The double meaning of this latter term dominates the middle section of the speech. When the instruments are used correctly, the

Intelligibility in the Extra-human World

II5

result is a perfect pleasure and music (leiyue ji) embodied in the harmonic responsion of sounds to one another and in their even gradation. This perfection brings about all the excellent results-cosmic order, fruitful harvests, popular contentment-that constitute pleasure and music being correct (leiyue zheng). By the end of the passage, music is more than itsel£ As long as it is correct, it is a guarantor of the continuation of pleasure, its own shadow . 'ficatlon. . 76 s1gn1 The significance of harmony and tonal evenness extends from music to the political realm. As Shakespeare put the matter, "Government, though high and low and lower, I Put into parts, doth keep in one consent, I Congreeing in a full and natural close, I Like music.'177 In the Chinese context, the relation is not only metaphorical, but (in a Confucian ideal) real Harmony, as the "mutual responsion and preservation of sounds" (sheng ying xiangbao), and tonal evenness, as the "non-transgression of small and great" (xida buyu), combine musical and political meanings: harmony is both the juxtaposition of tones separated by given intervals and, as often in historiography, the healthy difference of opinions in a court where words circulate 78 freely. Evenness is the musical and political tuning by which givens (do, re, mi, lord, minister, commoner) maintain their identity in a stable hierarchy. The speech is not finally about music theory, although in certain sections it accurately reflects musical notions current at the time of its composition. Musical knowledge is displayed to figure forth and support a vision of virtuous government. The final speech on the W uyi bells,79 also put in the mouth of Zhoujiu, first matches the twelve pitch standards (lu) with cosmic, political, and moral functions: Huangzhong, for instance, which is the first of the twelve and tonic, is "that by which the six airs (liu qi) and the nine virtues (jiu de) are broadcast and cultivated.'' According to Wei Zhao, the numbered sets include, in the case of the six airs, yin-yang, wind, rain, dark and light, and, in the case of the nine virtues, the Five Phases plus grain, virtue, prosperity, 80 and fertility. This passage is of interest to musicologists and in fact conforms with non-historiographical, non-rhetorical written evidence on War. states mus1c. . 81 nng What follows relates to music's rhetorical uses. After Zhoujiu has restated the rule, here attributed to the former kings, that the greater instruments are to be reserved for lesser rhythmic and harmonic elements of the music, the king asks what the seven pitch-standards (lu) are. These have

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Intelligibility in the Extra-human World

been identified as the seven pitches that defined the Chinese heptatonic 82 scale. Zhoujiu explains their origins in history and in observed astronomical phenomena. He recalls the positions of Jupiter, the moon, the sun, the conjunction of the sun's and moon's paths, and Mercury at the moment of King Wu's conquest of the Shang; these he names the "five positions" (wu wei). He then establishes "three placings" (san suo) specific to Zhou, its history, and its territory. One aspect of the celestial configuration refers to the Duke of Feng, a nephew of the Zhou ancestress T ai Jiang. Another, marked by Jupiter, is the heavenly region that corresponds to Zhou's earthly homeland. Still another refers to farming, the specialty of the ancestor Hou Ji and all his descendants. According to Zhoujiu, King Wu observed these five positions and three placings; wishing to make use of them, he measured the celestial distance among various of the observed positions and obtained the number seven, which then became the basis for his seven pitch standards.83 Finally, Zhoujiu recounts the famous morning of the battle itself, matching four distinct types of music with the military uses to which they were put: one for the pre-dawn marshaling of the troops, another for whetting the valor of the troops, another for broadcasting the virtue of the Zhou and the crimes of the Shang, and another for demonstrating generosity to the victorious troops. Zhoujiu's speech is an extreme example of the regulative functions assigned to theories of nature in rhetorical circumstances. Music, although it originates in human culture, depends on extra-human laws of mathematical proportion. Perhaps because of the way it crosses the frontier between the human and the cosmic, music became a master metaphor, with an indeterminacy and adaptability that facilitated correspondences in several intellectual realms and innumerable rhetorical situations. The numerical specifics of musicology, adduced in speeches, acquired a rhetorical usefulness that was no less important than music itself as a component of the culture of the time. Similarly, musical terms with built-in political overtones, like he and ping, generally reveal less about music itself than about the methods and obsessions of rhetoric; music, more than any of the other realms of theoretical knowledge, permits a detailed and extensive regulative reflection on politics. Finally, since it is not only a matter of inherited propriety but also an object of every ruler's personal taste, music becomes applicable to personal conduct, where most theories of the natural world rarely reach. King Jiing dies two years after the casting of his W uyi bells, which then go out of tune. One

Intelligibility in the Extra-human World

II7

cannot help but imagine that the importance accorded to the bell in the Guoyu and Zuozhuan derives not so much from contemporary (whether sixth century or later) strictures on music as from the wide range of regularities that music and the coincidence of the king's death could bring to rhetoric. Both because of music's rhetorical possibilities and because of the status accorded to musical skills in the societies that produced the texts, officials with musical duties are remarkable characters in historiography. As keepers of music's regularities, these shi "masters of musicians" are the human personae through which music's metaphysical truths express themselves. Most famous among them is Shi Kuang of Jin, whose expertise in musical and related fields is the subject of several anecdotes. His career as glimpsed in these anecdotes outlines the range and character of music's importance in the soci. . h y commemorates.84 ety t h at h1stonograp Shi Kuang strikes the reader of the Zuozhuan and the Guoyu first as one gifted with an ear for sounds natural and human, a talented listener. All music is for Shi Kuang what the Shi and traditional dances were for Ji Zha of Wu, a medium in which the learned listener can hear truths about other places and times. Accompanying Duke Ping of Jin on a military campaign against Qi, he announces what the narrator has just confirmed, the retreat of the Qi army: "The sound of the crows is delighted; the Qi army will withdraw.''85 If nature does not provide the interpretable sound, he can make it himsel£ as he does in the same year as the Qi campaign. When Chu attacks Jin's ally Zheng, Shi Kuang promises his Jin comrades that the Chu army will not pose a great threat: "I sang northern airs several times and then sang southern airs. The southern airs were not vigorous (bu jing), and included many dead sounds (sisheng). Chu will not achieve anything.''86 The interest of Shi Kuang's remark lies not only in its exploitation of a correspondence between musical nomenclature and the map but also in the handy term sisheng, which means both "dead sounds" and "the sound of death" and thus becomes the crux of the prediction. Typically, Shi Kuang's theoretical determination is not made to stand alone; it is first supplemented with an as87 tronomical prediction and then subordinated to virtue. Shu Xiang, chief minister ofJin, gets the final word: "It is all a matter of the ruler's virtue.'' In a passage I have discussed elsewhere, Shi Kuang gives his most comprehensive explanation of the social order established under the sage-kings 88 and of the place of musical practice within that order. Having enumerated the ranks of the hierarchy from king to commoner, he then focuses on the

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circulation of information toward the center. Among the figures responsible for submitting the news and opinions of the periphery are the blind musicians, the gu, who present new or traditional songs. Shi Kuang's competence to remark on general matters of political and social organization seems to derive in part from his official duties, especially his responsibility for the Jeng ("wind" or "air"), which is to be understood in this connection as the primary medium for the circulation of information in both geographical and social space. This notion ofJeng was implicit in Shi Kuang's use of the pitch-pipes to learn from their timbre the likely outcome of Chu's attack on Zheng. Criticizing the Jin Duke Ping's liking for the new music, Shi Kuang fills out 89 the concept ofJeng as a medium of circulation:

x ~ J;J 1m LIJ JII Z 100, -1:11 • J;J 'IIi ~! 1n JJi ~ -1:11 • 100, ~! J;J JJi Z

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Music is that by which the airs of the mountains and rivers are laid open and that by which virtue is made to shine far and wide. Virtue is sung of in airs to spread it abroad; the mountains and rivers are sung of in airs to make (virtue) go far; things are sung of in airs so that (virtue) can be heard; songs are crafted to sing about (virtue); rites are crafted to give (virtue) form. When virtue is spread far and wide and 90 has timeliness and form, the distant will submit and the nearby will not waver.

In Shi Kuang's account, which nicely complements his other major description of the social order, Jeng is a natural phenomenon that cultural performances make accessible to the virtuous ruler. Although songs and ritual are not directly associated with the sounding of Jeng, Shi Kuang makes them part of the same system of public image-making, as if once a ruler has used the proper music to open the channels ofJeng, song and ritual are a necessary part of the message of virtue that the airwaves will carry. To he, ping, and leiyue, the key terms in the speeches on the W uyi bells, Shi Kuang adds Jeng, another flexible metaphorical term by which the regularity of music informs the human activities of politics. Other anecdotes in which Shi Kuang plays a role do not directly concern music but may illuminate some of music's implicit associations as a realm of knowledge. That the music master can comment authoritatively on general political matters is demonstrated by the anecdote in which he watches as Jin ministers nearly come to blows over the question of a diplomatic assignment; he remarks that the replacement of virtuous competition by open power 91 struggles bodes ill for the ducal house. Shi Kuang wins explicit praise for

Intelligibility in the Extra-human World

ng

his good sense and good speech when stones have been heard to speak in a certain part of Jin. Asked by Duke Ping why the stones would speak, Shi Kuang answers: 92 E~~~·····~~·~RM*·~~XMZB·~·~~-a~ -~~-~~~~Z~W~·~g~-~-~~~--a~*~·K§ ~'1:1· £~

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Stones cannot speak. They may be possessed by something, or, if not, then the people's hearing may have exceeded itsel£ I have also heard: "When one is untimely in attending to affairs, grudges and enmities stir among the people, and mute things speak." Now your palace is lofty and luxuriant, but the strengrh of the people is exhausted; grudges and enmity arise together and nothing maintains its original nature. Is it not appropriate that the stones should speak?

By citing a suitable aphorism, Shi Kuang is able to turn his explanation of the speaking stones into a criticism of Duke Ping's construction of the Siqi 93 palace, which has taken the farmers away from their agricultural work. Speech does not originate with the stones; rather it is either spoken through the stones by some other entity or, in what amounts to the same thing, arises from the people's current inclination to identify omens. With this formulation Shi Kuang draws the stones into the general order offeng. Improper behavior on the part of the ruler creates a disturbance in the people's opinion of the ruler; his reputation among the people-an abstraction normally referred to as wen "what is heard," as in lingwen, "good repute"-is here literal as the people begin to hear things. The theory of music and of the whole related order of sounds gathers strength as it draws even such bizarre occurrences as the speaking stone into the moral order. Shu Xiang, chief minister of Jin, praises Shi Kuang as a master of speaking who avoids offense by speaking the truth and matching it with proo£ 94 It is not musical or intellectual skill alone that makes Shi Kuang great but the combination of these with tradition-minded eloquence. Shi Kuang's mastery of music may lie behind the feats of memory and 95 calculation he performs in another anecdote. When the widow of Duke Dao ofJin feasts laborers in her entourage who have undertaken the walling of the city of Qii, one of the guests is a very old man, who does not know his exact age. He is able to remember the day of the sexagenary cycle on which the year of his birth began, and he knows how many cycles he has lived through; sending this information to court, the banqueters ask how old the man is. Shi Kuang, whose response is the first given in the text, determines

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that the man was born in the year that the Lu nobleman Shuzhong Huibo (Shu Pengsheng) met with Xi Chengzi (Xi Que) of Jin; it was in that year that another Lu nobleman, Shusun Zhuangshu (Shusun Dechen), defeated a Di tribe, naming three of his sons after vanquished Di warriors; the man is 96 thus seventy-three years old. Other ministers determine through multiplication the number of days the man has lived, and he is given an honorary position in the local government. 97 When the news of this incident is carried back to Lu, it impresses the chief minister Ji Wuzi, who declares that Jin cannot yet be treated lightly, since its court includes so many learned gentlemen (junzi); Shi Kuang himself is one to whom the court can turn for advice and standards (zidu). This anecdote, the only one in the Zuozhuan to focus such attention on the problems of calculation, once again establishes theoretical aptitude as an adjunct to political and moral order. By virtue of its connections with the regularities of nature and with the proprieties of human cultural organization, music brings to the historiographical speeches a set of metaphors that serve finally to ground the political order in the natural order. Harmony, the steps of the scale, the delight of listening, and sound itself all become metaphors for administration, and administration is figured as a public performance in which the sound of the ruler's and ministers' music reaches the ultimate audience, the people. The regularities of the universe underlie the pleasures of aesthesis, which can last only if it is appropriately limited. With music and its theory, historiography creates a means of extending a moralizing understanding of the universe beyond mere prescription of action; the nascent Confucian discipline now dictates pleasures. Like music, war involves both human action and larger principles of the 98 universe. Whereas musical principles are normally adduced in rhetorical circumstances that favor themes of social harmony, personal restraint, and the circulation of information in the world, different sorts of principles are appropriate to the military situation. Deliberative and predictive speeches uttered before or during battles emphasize that the world works on behalf of virtue and tends toward equilibrium. These principles are reconciled in the theme of excess, which explains how the virtuous may avoid the cycle of complacency and decay that brings the powerful down and restores equilibrium over time. Demonstrated in dozens of anecdotes, the historiographical view of impersonal moral forces in the world alters the conception of an active Heaven presented in Shangshu speeches, making Heaven impersonal but

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no less powerful, and extends its workings to events of less epochal importance than the rise of the Zhou. The principle of equilibrium is equally effective in the military and the moral realms of behavior. When Duke Zhuang of Qi plans a sneak attack on Jin, his minister Cui Zhu warns against the move, citing a saying: "A small state that takes advantage of a great state's difficulties to do it harm must incur blame as a result.''99 The idea shows up frequently and amounts to an injunction against foolhardy attacks on the most powerful states. Depending on the historical context, small states' victories can even be interpreted as harbingers of coming defeat rather than signs of superior virtue. When Duke Xiang ofZheng (r. 604-587) manages to defeat the Chu army, one of his ministers recognizes the victory as a disaster for the small country; looming just three years ahead in the historical record is the battle of Bi, at 100 which Jin and her allies, including Zheng, will be routed by Chu. At least when virtue is left out of the calculations, the triumph of the small over the great violates common wisdom and must mark a temporary excess that will in time be corrected. 101 Excesses in other areas of military action invite similar interpretations. During aJin invasion ofQi, Duke Ling ofQi (r. 581-554) prepares to flee, but his heir and the minister Guo Rong seize the reins of his horses and explain that the Jin army will stop short of occupation: "The army is moving quickly and hastily: this is pillaging, and they are going to 102 retreat. What are you afraid oft A law of retribution allows the extension of this physics of equilibrium into the moral realm. When the evil prevail, it is sometimes enough to let them prevail, since continued success will lead to excess and reversal. So it is when Red Di (Chi Di) tribes attack Jin and the minister Xun Linfu counsels Duke Cheng (r. 6o6-6oo) not to meet the attack: "Let them tire their people out and thus fill up their measure (guan); then they can be destroyed." The "meas103 ure" is the cord on which money or cowries are strung. In this vivid metaphor of excess, every new battle endangers all past gains, which will fall away like beads from a broken string. That the people as exhausted warriors are the medium by which equilibrium is re-established is in keeping with historiography's hedging of its bets concerning the extra-human. Xun Linfu's certainty about the workings of universal balance on the battlefield is vindicated nine 104 years later, when he and Duke Jing destroy one whole tribe ofRed Di. The force that re-establishes moral equilibrium is observed and predicted with as much regularity in the individuals who direct armies as in the armies

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themselves. Given a suitable narrative context, a series of perfect tactical successes can bode the worst for a commander's future endeavors. During a campaign against Wu and Lai, King Ling ofChu reduces a walled city, executes the infamous Qi rebel Qing Feng, and treats the surrendering nobles ofLai with perfect virtue. True, Qing Feng manages to mar the occasion by proclaiming the hypocrisy of the king, who himself killed a legitimate ruler to usurp his place. But he is silenced, and the Chu army completes its maneuvers. Nonetheless, Wuyu of Shen, a loyal minister of the king, predicts • 105 rum:

~mz~~~~~·BR~W*·~~W%····~·£~~-·~ ~m~·~z~•·~•mz·~m£$·~m~&· In this lie the beginnings ofChu's disaster. He summoned the allies and they came; he attacked walled cities and prevailed; he built walls at the border and no one defied him. When nothing goes against the kings desires, will the people take their ease~ If the people do not abide by it, then who will be able to bear it~ When the commands of the king cannot be borne, then there is disaster and turmoil.

Looming behind the prediction is the kings suicide nine years later, after rebellious former allies attack the Chu capital and kill the heir. Although this culminating event likely accounts for the prediction, it does not diminish the significance of the terms in which the prediction is framed. Unchecked success is the beginning of imbalance, which, when it affects an individual as powerful as a king, arouses counterbalancing forces that work through the people. These latter examples show that the world's counterbalancing tendency supports the moral order even though it originates beyond that order. By one principle of equilibrium, the victory of the small state over the large bodes ill, and the swift march of an army indicates that it will not advance far. The principle, duly substantiated in narrative, has nothing to do with the moral rectitude of the actors involved. But the same principle extends into the human realm, where imbalance is treated as a moral matter. As a matter of principle, variance from inherited norms of behavior, especially ducal behavior, is an individual, human version of imbalance and is subject to the counteracting forces of the world. So it is that the world in this historiography works on behalf of virtue, both in military confrontations and in all other interactions among people. As with other theoretical principles, a link is established between the extra-human world and the realm of human behavior, in which individuals are to control themselves in accordance with

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norms. The theory of virtue and excess enunciated in speeches is borne out in the workings of narrative, as examples in Chapter 6 will show. Because the world works in favor of the virtuous, a great deal of military counsel is based on assessments of the relative morality of the combatants. Just before the battle of Bi, where Jin and its allies are to be routed by the Chu army under King Zhuang, the Jin minister Shi Hui counsels 106 against battle in a long and carefully constructed speech. One cannot, he says, successfully attack a state that does not err in the areas of virtue, punishment, administration, occupations, regulations, and rituals. Chu has achieved perfection in each of these areas, as Shi Hui demonstrates with detailed evidence of Chu practices. Further, as two Shi citations show, it was the practice of the Zhou founding sages to attack not the morally competent but the disorderly and depraved. An abundance of human factors, both in Shi Hui's speech and in the whole battle narrative, may draw our attention away from the moral bias of the world. Running an administration in accor· dance with the norms entails actions that would likely increase efficiency and troop morale. We have noted already that the people, especially as they are affected by the circulation of images, can become the instrument of the world's moral forces. But behind these certainties and behind Shi Hui's judgment on the situation lies the much more basic conviction that the world will not let a state as well-ordered as Chu fail. Again, historical context means everything. Whatever deliberations were remembered from before the battle of Bi, it fell to later transmitters of the tale to explain the Jin allies' loss and to make it support rather than undermine the promises of inherited moral norms. How could Chu defeat Jin? Because at that moment Chu was morally and administratively superior. That is how the world works.107 The notion that the world can respond to virtue in any area, not only on the battlefield, is a guide to action in many of the deliberative speeches of histo· riography. At the same time, it is the assumption that makes many of the predictions in these texts possible. The world's intelligibility, its whole availability as a source of infallible signs for the rhetorical treatment of human action, is informed by the assumption that it works for virtue and that it is readable on the basis of training in traditional knowledge. Thus portents and theoretical manipulations of the natural world are placed in a frame· work of moral meaning. Discussions of the heavens, earth, the Five Phases

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and yin-yang, music, and war are peripheral in that they extend to the world from a center that is human, public, and political. Although these realms of knowledge are made in some cases to provide a quasi-scientific, extra-human basis for what is right in the human world, they regularly return to the practical considerations of human behavior in society. At the center of the world are inherited human norms that guide the organization of states, societies, courts, and individual selves. Wisdom concerning the organization of the human realm is the single most important source of principles in historiographical speeches and reveals more about the historiographical system than any other area of knowledge. We turn now to the heart of the historiographers' teachings.

FOUR

Order in the Human World

In the perspective of the Zuozhuan and Guoyu, the known world is a space cleared in the wilderness by culture. Culture, which is both a system of prescriptions and the legitimizing account of their origins, establishes the distinctions that define the human world. This world is bounded on one frontier by the spirit world and on the other by the non-Chinese world. It is organized internally according to nested structures of kinship and obligation, which are made to account for geography and fealty. And it finds itsel£ in the times recounted by historiography, in a consciously late Zhou moment. Although the norms established or sanctioned by the dynastic founders still guide both the behavior of actors in the world and correct interpretations of the world itsel£ they are now being extended to account for deviations and anti-Zhou alternatives. The cultural principles by which the human world is to be organized and understood assume a perfect clarity about place and time: these are the central states under Zhou rule. But this clarity is established in opposition to the surrounding uncertainties of cultural otherness and historical change. The principles advanced in speeches prescribe cultural practices of religion, politics, and morality in the central realm and also begin to describe events beyond its edges. What unites the many specific principles of human relations is a flexible and encompassing concept of ritual propriety (li). In the hands of the historiographers, this concept was the key to interpretation of the world and narration of its history.

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Spirits and Ancestors In five major speeches and many shorter passages, the Zuozhuan and Guoyu establish the principles that guide the relations between humans and spirits (shen). 1 As might be expected, these principles have largely to do with the proper rituals for sacrifice. The sacrificial commerce by which humans ren~ der spirits their due for past and future benefits establishes a connection between the well~understood human center and the half~unknown spirit 2 world. Because it commemorates benefits bestowed on humans in past times, whether by spirits or by human forebears, sacrifice locates the wor~ shipper in a particular historical moment and in a particular lineage. 3 Since this commerce takes different forms depending on the time and place of sac~ rifice and the identities of worshipper and recipient, it is possible to match the overall order of sacrifices with the social hierarchy and thus to establish an extra~ human basis for human relations of power.4 Although every sacri~ fice has a historical justification, the total system of sacrifices and its corre~ 5 sponding social hierarchy is presented as complete. History is woven into the fabric of the perfect society in the form of constitutive obligations, but this society itself is for the most part represented as immune to historical change. Finally, sacrifice is justified not only as a preservation of tradition and an obligatory recognition of spiritual aid but also as a public act with di~ rect benefits in the human world. The theme of effective public images, which we have encountered before, turns up regularly as a justification of principles of order in the human world. A speech in the Guoyu includes an account of the beginning of all sacrifice and reveals fundamental assumptions about the commerce between humans and spirits. King Zhao of Chu (r. 515-489) asks his minister Guan Shefu what is meant in the passage in the "Writings of Zhou" ("Zhoushu") that says that Chong and Li blocked communication between Heaven and earth.6 Could humans once have climbed to Heaven? No, says Guan Shefu: in an~ dent times, the people and the spirits did not mix. Appropriately qualified people were chosen as mediums (xi and wu), as priests (zhu), and as lineage priests (zong). Heaven, earth, spirits, ancestors, and certain of the things in their world thus had their proper officials; these were the five officials, and they did not interfere with each other.7 Later, during the disorder that at~ tended the decline of Shaohao, this rigid specialization was thrown into confusion as people took upon themselves sacrifices they should have left to

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the competent officials, and sacrifices ceased to bring the desired results. Zhuanxu restored order by making Chong, his officer of the south, respon~ sible for Heaven and spirits, and Li, his officer of fire, for earth and ances~ tors. This distinction between spiritual and ancestral sacrifices was retained through the Zhou, when the Sima family, descendants of the competent of~ ficials, inflated the claims of tradition to make it seem that Chong and Li had separated Heaven and earth.8 The interest of this speech lies in the particular form it assigns the crisis that challenges the sacrificial order. Unlike the literal krisis (decision) by which the Greek sacrificial order is established in the Hesiodic aetiology, 9 the work of Chong and Li is not the separation of humans from the recipi~ ents of their worship or the apportioning of sacrificial offerings. In the Guoyu, such separations are assumed as the achieved ideal of an indefinitely early time. The crisis comes when the distinctions by which the sacrificial system works-the distinctions among the various officials and their du~ ties-break down, allowing chaotic mingling, usurpation, and evasion of ob~ ligation. Both human ancestors and spirits are the rightful recipients of sac~ rifice, but these sacrifices must be performed by separate, specially qualified individuals in the human world. Although the distinguishing of spiritual and ancestral sacrifices is not especially prominent among the principles of sacri~ flee elsewhere in Eastern Zhou historiography, the theme of rigid distinc~ tion and the abhorrence of chaotic innovation are important. The crisis of Chong and Li teaches not a particular distinction but the general necessity of maintaining distinctions in the religious and political spheres. Insofar as the sacrifices performed by an individual or a state are deter~ mined by history, the maintenance of proper sacrifices serves to reinforce the inherited order and its distinctions. Under the sage~kings, according to Zhan Qin ofLu, the only proper recipients of sacrifice were those who had established law for the people, died in service, brought order to the people, prevented disasters, or eliminated evils; all the great founding heroes and certain others are included (among them Gun, Yu's father and failed prede~ c~ssor as water manager).10 Through sacrifices, humanity recognizes and repays (bao) the services of these heroes. 11 Although this structure itself re~ mains the same over time, there is no universal or timeless devotion. The Zhou, unlike any of the preceding royal lineages, sacrifices to the legendary Lord Ku (Di Ku) and to Kings Wen and Wu, who are its own benefactors. One does not sacrifice outside the historically defmed obliga~

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tions of one's lineage. One does not sacrifice to strange seabirds, as did the man rebuked by Zhan Qin.12 One does not sacrifice to the demonic spirits worshipped by barbarians or even to recognized heroes who are not of one's own lineage. 13 States like Jin, however, which gain power and territory, may acquire new religious duties shed by the moribund Zhou or by annexed 14 states. Both among states and within states, religious behavior makes historically determined hierarchies manifest. In one of the longer speeches relating to sacrifice, a representative of the state of W ey insists that Cai should not be permitted to precede W ey in the making of a covenant against Chu. Since the covenant is designed partly to secure the allegiance of Cai, which has been threat~ned by Chu, the allies are prepared to advance Cai in the order, arguing that the founder of Cai was an elder brother of the founder of W ey. Responding to this historical justification, the W ey representative, Priest Tuo, recounts at great length the details of early Zhou enfeoffinents, taking pains to demonstrate that it was virtue, not age, that the Zhou sages promoted in their selections. By using history as a source of moral exempla and by pointing out that a previous treaty document demonstrates the proper 15 order, the W ey speaker carries the day. The role of sacrifice in the articulation of social distinctions within states is elaborated in a long speech by Guan Shefu, the same man who explained the separation of Heaven and earth to King Zhao of Chu. Asked if sacrifices can be eliminated, Guan expounds a material and social justification for the practice. Sacrifice, he says, teaches filiality (xiao) and brings peace to the people. If the qi energies of the people are not directed, then they settle and are obstructed, so that nothing grows prosperously. Thus the kings of former times performed specific daily, monthly, seasonal, and annual sacrifices and made devotions to the whole range of spirits. Feudal lords did not perform daily sacrifices and made their offerings only to Heaven and earth, the sun, the moon, and the stars, and the mountains and rivers of their territory. The lower the worshipper's social position, the more limited his sacrifices; lower officials and commoners did not perform even seasonal sacrifices and were permitted to sacrifice only to their own ancestors. The careful preparation of sacrificial goods by the royal couple and common couples alike ensured that this aspect of worship worked as a public exchange: the king and queen taught piety by their actions, and the people of the state practiced and demonstrated obedience and loyalty. 16 In Guan Shefu's idealized portrayal,

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sacrifice, like all ritual, is a performance and confirmation of social divisions. Although it is only one of many practical expressions of hierarchy, it gains extra force because it concerns the nature of the human as well as certain re~ sponsive aspects of the extra~ human world. Like all elements of the inherited order, sacrifice is supposed to be pre~ served unchanged, since change may threaten the social and historical dis~ tinctions sacrifice expresses. According to the Zuozhuan and Guoyu, no sub~ 17 stitution of victims is permissible. Human sacrifice is entirely unacceptable, since sacrifice is done for the sake of humans, and no spirit will relish a hu~ 18 man victim. Less menacing changes in sacrificial practice are also forbid~ den. Personal taste cannot determine the details of sacrifice.19 Nor is a ruler 2 free to choose which sacrifices he will attend. ° Finally, capricious change in the system is a violation of principle.21 The emphasis here is on the strict preservation of an inherited order. All the speeches on sacrificial regularity pose alternatives as foils for that order and for perfect devotion to it. The public aspect of worship is a central theme in the principles that guide sacrifice and the treatment of spirits. Although it is a fundamental as~ sumption that the ruler of a state is always in the public eye and must always calculate the effect of his actions on the populace, which is bound to imitate him, the theme of effective public imagery is intensified when the spiritual audience is added to the human audience. Duke Xian ofWey (r. 576-559, 547-544), driven out of his country, plans to pray to his ancestors at the border and to claim, falsely, that no crime of his own led to his expulsion. The wife of the former duke reminds him that there is no point in lying: if spirits do not exist, then prayer is useless; if they do exist, they cannot be de~ ceived. Implicit in these principles and in her litany of the crimes Duke Xian has committed is the notion that the spirits serve as a sort of exaggerated, omniscient figuration of the people's ubiquitous observation.22 The ailing Duke Jing of Qi looks favorably on a plan to punish his priests and scribes in order to demonstrate to his allies that his illness is not the result of some failure of his own in sacrificial duties. Yanzi responds to this blinkered anxi~ ety about interstate reputation by offering a vision of true virtue and the benefits of an excellent reputation among the people of one's own state. When the state is well managed, the priests can report the truth to the spir~ its and share in the bounties thus secured. When the state is poorly run and the ruler exploits his people, the spirits will know, and the priests cannot ex~ pect to deceive them. The only remedy for the current situation is to ease

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the exploitation of the Qi people, which has led them to curse their superi~ ors. Apparently convinced of the correspondence of popular and spiritual 23 opinion, Duke Jing takes steps to make life better for his subjects. The spirit world, which humans experience primarily through sacrifices instituted at specific historical moments, helps to produce the structures of human society by distinguishing states, lineages, and classes. At the same time, the spirit world is largely opaque to humans and surrounds them with an inescapable gaze and a rigid commitment to inherited propriety. Both as protector of the religious and social status quo and as all~ seeing observer, the spirit world provides unquestioned principles for historiography's rhetorical constructions and irrefutable demonstrations of certain of historiography's cherished truths.

Cultural Others Just as the human world is bounded by the spirit world, the cultural world created by the achievements of the three dynasties and their predecessors is bounded by territory and societies in which, according to one line of 24 thought, those achievements have not yet been accepted. Although these "barbarians" have their own languages, in the historiographers' representa~ tion of them they for the most part speak the lingua franca of the central 25 states flawlessly. As Herrlee Creel pointed out, the primary distinction is cultural; the Rong, Di, and other groups that surround and in some cases live among the Chinese do not fully accept the inherited values and institu~ tions that the historiographers say the central states should devote them~ selves to preserving. 26 This ethnic and cultural otherness makes the non~ Chinese world doubly useful to historiography. On the one hand, successes in battle against non~Chinese groups demonstrate the superiority of Chinese 27 values and the bestial privation of the barbarians. On the other hand, in~ stances of wisdom and moral betterment among peripheral groups reveal the decadence of central culture under the late Zhou. In the case of the state of Chu, which is never quite Chinese and never quite barbarian, the doubleness of the historiographers' depiction leads to a lesson in the universal utility of Chinese culture and ofZhou culture in particular. Disputes across the frontiers of Chinese political and cultural sway bring out commonplaces about internal cohesion. Diplomatic and military en~ gagements with the non~Chinese world tend to produce speeches on broth~ erhood among the Chinese. One must help a Chinese state against a non~

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Chinese state and may not do the opposite. The proper targets of military action are barbarian tribes, not Chinese states, as the Zhou king reminds a duke ofJin when he attempts to present Qi prisoners of war at court. 28 The Chinese states are bound by real and figurative family relations, which must prevail over the claims of non-Chinese groups. When King Xiang of Zhou 29 (r. 652-619) wishes to send a Di army against the state ofZheng in retaliation for certain offenses, the king's minister Fu Chen remonstrates at length, detailing the whole familial basis of the Zhou polity: founded by sons of King Wen and King Wu, the states are bound in a brotherhood; the traditional sanction for this brotherhood is crystallized in the poem "The Wild Plum" ("Changdi," Mao 164), composed by Duke Mu ofShao; and nothing can justify the use of military forces from outside this community against a 30 member. As often, a use of power that is not supported by tradition or that originates outside traditional structures provides a pretext for an embattled · defense of the inherited system. Alienation from central culture means a general privation that, in certain rhetorical situations, calls into question the very humanity of non-Chinese groups. On at least two occasions, these groups are described as or compared to beasts (qinshou). 31 Their ignorance of Zhou values and distinctions accounts for their lack of both virtue and power. Fu Chen, for instance, after listing four virtuous accomplishments of Zheng, lists four moral failings on the part of the Di? 2 Ej:::n~.li§Z.5fD~~

·§

/f'JJU.liiSZ.~~~

· ,L.,/f'ffilH!~Z.*~~jij1f · 1:1

/f'm~Mz~~··~W~z·~§~~· Ears that do not hear the harmony of the five sounds are deaf; eyes that do not distinguish the displays of the five colors are blind; hearts that do not follow the constants of virtue and right are perverse; and mouths that do not speak the words of loyalty and good faith are raucous. The Di make a practice of all these, and their four failings are complete.

The implications of cultural privation are boundless in this presentation. The Di not only lack the avowedly cultural values of virtue, right, and so on but fail even in the fundamental skills of perception. In grand depictions of the world, which tend to give it the form of a series of concentric zones focused around the Zhou king, non-Chinese groups occupy the outermost orbits, there to send their tribute and to respond, if slowly, to the moral radiance of the royal center.33 A Zhou minister, the Zhai duke Moufu, remonstrates with King Mu ofZhou against plans for an

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attack on a certain Rong tribe and notes that the former kings secured the loyalty and tribute of their feudal dependents and of the outlying regions through proper use of virtue and military punishment. The Rong, who, with the Di, reside farthest from the center, beyond even the Man and the Yi, have consistently sent proper tribute and maintained their own position in the system of circulation that gives the world its structure. An attack will not serve Zhou interests. King Mu carries out the attack and returns with booty, 34 but from that time on the periphery sends no tribute to the center. By the tribute goods that they send, the most distant non-Chinese tribes acknowledge their position in the world order. Confucius, asked about a strange arrow brought to the Chen duke's court by a wounded hawk, identifies it as belonging to the Sushen tribe of the far north and says that the Chen treasury contains a similar arrow, which the Sushen presented to the former kings. With its provenance inscribed on its shaft, it was given to Chen by the Zhou kings, who distributed tribute gifts from afar among feudal lords not of the Zhou blood to remind them of their tributary status. 35 In this way the kings made the obedience of the most distant groups an object lesson for nearer powers. The Zuozhuan and the Guoyu treat peripheral and culturally different groups less as subjects of interest in themselves than as foils for Zhou culture. Incidents involving non-Chinese groups serve as pretexts for celebrations of inherited culture and the brotherhood of the Zhou states. This centripetal significance takes a more surprising form when the Zhou's nonChinese neighbors rebuke the Chinese with an image of what they should be or once were. The wise barbarian is as common a figure as the wise com36 moner and serves some of the same purposes. It is a Rong leader who gives historiography's most explicit account of the differences between the Chinese and non-Chinese peoples.37 When Jin gathers its allies to make a treaty against Chu on behalf ofWu, Jin prepares to place the leader of a Rong group that lives in Jin territory under arrest, accusing him of weakening Jin by revealing its secrets to the allies. The Rong ruler, Gouzhi, reminds the Jin administrators that his tribe, long ago expelled by Qin, was granted territory in the wilderness by a Jin duke who recognized them as descendants of Siyue, Four Peaks, a ruler or rulers who lived under Yao. 38 The Rong have served Jin faithfully in many battles; Jin's weakness must be the result of some deficiency in its own forces. After all,

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8R~~*~~~W-~·WM~~·im~a·WRZ~-·~ft~

~·#~·~· The food, drink, and clothing used by our various Rong tribes are not the same as those of China; gifts do not pass back and forth; and language is not understood. How could we do any evil? Even if we do not participate in this meeting, we will not be distressed.

With that he withdraws, reciting the poem "Green Fly" ("Qingying," Mao 219), apparently for its lines on the gentleman who does not believe slander. The text does not explain how Gouzhi is able, despite the purported absence of every sort of cultural commerce between the Chinese and the Rong, to deliver this rhetorically perfect speech and to cap it with the appropriate act of recitation. What his speech and the anecdote achieve, however, is a confirmation of central values that would have been impossible for any other speaker. Despite the disjunction of the two cultural worlds, Gouzhi subscribes to, and insists that his Jin audience subscribe to, the values of good faith, recognition of good service, and the strength of historical precedent. These are values that historiography upholds under the most diverse circumstances and that gain universality in the process. The figure of the virtuous barbarian ruler reappears when the leader of 39 the state ofTan visits Lu. Asked why the ancestor of his people, Shaohao, used the names of birds as titles for his officials, the Tan ruler explains that the appearance of a phoenix marked the beginning of his ancestors' ascendancy, and that similar auspices-clouds, fire, water, and dragons-provided official titles for the same reason under the lines of the Yellow Emperor (Huangdi), Yandi, Gonggong, and T aihao. He also explains why the practice has fallen into desuetude. Confucius is so impressed by reports of the interview that he arranges to meet and study with the Tan ruler.40 Afterward, Confucius comments: 'T have heard that 'when the Son of Heaven has allowed official ranks to lapse, learning about official ranks remains among the barbarians of the four quarters.' It would appear to be true.'' -BOO Z • ::R. -T "*. '§ · '§ ~ 1:E 12:9 ~ • ~®' {~. 41 Confucius makes the case even more forcefully than Gouzhi did. It is not merely that non-Chinese may share in and uphold certain Chinese values, which then become universal. When such values have disappeared from the center, the periphery may be the only place where one can find their traces. 42 Dividing the attributes of the bestial and the sagely barbarian, the state of

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Chu becomes a living exhibit in the Zuozhuan's and Guoyu's case for universalized Zhou values. On the one hand, certain speakers see Chu as originally and essentially barbaric.43 On the other hand, although the state preserves certain institutions that distinguish it from the central states, its officials are sometimes represented as being fully versed in Zhou culture.44 Archaeological investigations have shown that Chu elites shared many of the cultural 45 practices of its northern neighbors. The historiographers appear to have used that fact in their defense ofZhou values. Chu ministers show the same ready knowledge of central values and inherited speech as did the Rong ruler Gouzhi, and their mastery of these cultural skills brings them benefits. As Shi Hui argued before Jin's disastrous engagement of Chu at Bi, Chu's handling of all aspects of administration, including the two crucial areas of virtue and ritual, at times makes it militarily invincible. As a rule-a rule of narrative sense-Chu's power increases in proportion to its adherence to Zhou values. This power sometimes leaves behind its basis in virtue and is revealed in all its raw ugliness as the grasping of outsiders for the goods of the center. Chu kings want the Zhou treasures that signifY political power: they want the cauldrons (ding). But one of the two men who longs for Zhou cauldrons, King Zhuang, is told that they will not move until the Zhou has lost its mandate, and the other, King Ling, is so lacking in administrative virtue that a rebellion in his own state forces him to commit suicide after he expresses 46 his desire for the treasures. Only when Chu's power is supported by the continuing exercise of virtue, the historiographers imply, can it hope to win out over Jin and the other central states. To the extent that it is possible, Chu does win out. Composed before the resolution of the Warring States power struggle, the Zuozhuan and Guoyu see Chu's final victory as a distinct possibility. Although in the days of King Cheng of Zhou, Chu could do no more than provide menial service at treaties among the feudal lords and could not itself take part, it has risen through virtue's force to the verge of absolute precedence, and sacrifices even 47 before Jin at the treaty of Song in 546 B.C.E. There is at times an implicit comparison between the Zhou sage-kings and the contemporary Chu kings; King Wen of Zhou is a model for every ruler's imitation, and it sometimes seems that Chu hopes to use this model to win a new mandate and thus to 48 replace the Zhou by imitating it. From a contemporary point of view, the hope was not vain. Although speakers generally recognize that power has accrued to Jin in Zhou's decline, one passage looks to Chu as the successor to

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49

Zhou's royal power. Historiographical speeches were composed in an era when Chu was still a power. Yet these speeches manage to make these facts signs of the universal relevance of the Zhou sages' virtue rather than indica, 50 tions of its irrelevance.

The Royal Center The principles that operate at the center of the Zhou order and govern in, terstate relations complement the principles expressed at the frontiers. The king is defined not as an individual endowed with power but as the occupant of a special position within an inherited hierarchy. As in the transactions commemorated in bronze inscriptions, the king is the center of political and economic circulation. From the plural, the peripheral, and the inferior flow tribute, words, service, and fealty; receiving these, the king returns gifts, rec, ognition, model behavior, good administration, and the light of virtue. Con, tinning circulation both depends on and contributes to the structural integ, rity of the system.51 But there is, in historiographers' utter devotion to the idea of devotion, a recognition that it will be impossible to support the Zhou order as such, since the royal house is in decline. In this area, as in many others, the historiographers succeed in extending the force of principles be, yond their particular origins and casting values as universal. As suggested in speeches on the non,Chinese world, the geography of the royal order is permeated by ties of kinship, loyalty, and historical obliga, tion. 52 The fantasy of a world built of concentric zones of allegiance, elabo, rated at greatest length in Moufi.is remonstrance with King Mu/ 3 lies be, hind the dead metaphor that makes of the feudal lords a hedge or fence (Jan) dividing the royal house from the wilderness. In remonstrating with King Xiang when he plans to use a Di army against Zheng, Fu Chen recalls that the early Zhou kings enfeoffed their relatives to serve as hedges to the Zhou. 54 More remarkably, when people from Jin and people from the royal do, main contend over a piece of land, King Jiing is able to present, through a messenger, a principled vision of the world that prevails even though it de, scribes the actual situation very poorly.55 The messenger begins by listing the territories the Zhou house has occupied in the four directions during the long course of its rise. The enfeoffment of brothers of the first kings as hedges to the Zhou did not constitute an alienation of territory. The former kings exiled criminals from the center to the periphery, where they were to

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hold the frontier against the demonic forces beyond;56 it was Duke Hui of Jin (r. 650-637) who allowed the barbaric descendants of one of these criminals to occupy territory near the Zhou capital. Jin must recognize that the royal house is to Jin as a cap is to clothing, the root to the tree, the source to the stream, or the leader to the people. These are the loftiest principles the historiographers know: the moral imperative that all civilized people must recognize the truths contained in early Zhou precedents, and the doctrine that acceptance of that imperative brings real political power. In his response, the Jin minister Shu Xiang accepts the king's principles, which are understood as the basis of the survival of Zhou kingship during the period the Zuozhuan and Guoyu cover: ~~--~S·~Zffi*·~~&~···*~·W~Z~#·~~~

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Shu Xiang said to Xuanzi (Han Qi), "When Duke Wen was hegemon, could even he make changes in practices? He aided and supported the Son of Heaven and showed him added reverence. Since the times of Wen, our virtue has declined with each generation, and we have treated Ancestral Zhou with violence and despite, publicizing our excessiveness. Is it not appropriate that our allies are disloyal? And . "57 t he kings' words are senst"ble. PIease cons!"der tt.

The king' s power, although neither grounded in military force nor entirely under his control, is nonetheless quite real, at least according to this story. By showing reverence for the living king and by conforming to the standards promulgated by his ancestors, the feudal lord stands to win the power that attends virtue. Even as the physical space controlled by the royal domain diminishes, the geographical expanse of the world comes under the symbolic and increasingly abstract control of Zhou values. The royal ho-qse was not always forced to rely on symbolism. Historiography depicts the original perfection of the interstate system. As passages al58 ready discussed show, the Zhou holds its domain against opposing forces by entrusting family members and other loyal houses with lands surrounding the center. The rule of bao, or recompense, guides the course of history. Because lands are granted in recognition of service and devotion, they are permanent grounds for gratitude and loyalty on the part of those who hold them. The claimed historical fact of the gift is to guide every state's relations with the center for all time. 59 The original royal system-as it is remembered in the speeches of historiography-functioned without coercion be-

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cause of the real prestige and power that the royal center possessed. Although that power has long since disappeared, and the principles of early Zhou rule now survive mainly as effective memories, as handy justifications for current practice, and as pretexts for aggression on the part of the hegemon, the historicity of the founding moment plays a powerful role in historiographical speeches. Any action that has a precedent in the measures of the kings from Wen to Kang can be justified; that moment of the past is sacrosanct, the temporal equivalent of the royal center itsel£ An unstated but omnipresent principle of these speeches insists that right action seeks-even in trivial ways or without hope of success-to return the world to the early Zhou status quo. This devotion to origins manifests itself most commonly in the metaphor of brotherhood, which seems to have come to historiography from the Shi. According to this metaphor, the contemporary rulers of states carry on the familial commitments of the founders of the states; the kinship relations by which the early kings built their hedges against the barbarian world remain in force in the rhetoric of diplomacy. In remonstrating with the Zhou king who planned to use Di forces against Zheng, for instance, Fu Chen cites two pas60 sages from the Shi that speak of brothers' devotion to one another. The historiographers have little to say about relations among real brothers, and evocations of brotherly love occur most commonly in figurative circumstances like the ones described here, where an affection assumed to be natural among children of the same parents is asserted as a force of unity among the states. As heir to his rank, the king is, in principle, the acme of the world's hierarchy and the holder of certain exclusive prerogatives. When Duke Yin of Luis preparing to have the Wan dance performed, he asks one of his ministers how many rows of feather-holding dancers he should have. The minister recalls the rule: the Son of Heaven uses eight, the feudal lords six, higher 61 ministers four, and lower ministers two. Similar orderly proportions gov62 ern the size of armies and territorial holdings. The royal position is fundamental to these structural ideals in that it is the basis of proportionality and of a mathematical vision of the world's order. In principle, every king is heir to a set of numbers that define his place at the top of the interstate hierarchy and prescribe the usages of all his subordinates. And because prerogative is measurable, so is presumption.63 Every king inherits the reverence owed by subordinates to his rank itself and to the whole order it supports. The key factor in the Jin Duke Wen's

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rise to the hegemony is his respect for the king's orders, as King Xiang's minister, the "Inner Scribe" (neishi) Xing, suggests when he reports to the king after a visit to Jin: "Jin must be treated well; its ruler will certainly become hegemon, since he receives the orders of the king reverently and 64 serves ritual and rightness completely." When King Jing, beset by war with the usurper Prince Chao, asks Jin to wall his city, he recalls the services that Duke Wen and the earlier Marquis Wen (r. 780-746) performed for Zhou in times of trouble. Jin ministers agree to the plan, acknowledging obedience 65 to the king's command as their duty. Reverence is the proper attitude of all who surround the king in the interstate arena; it is an attentiveness both to the individual who now occupies the throne and to the cultural order he represents. In principle the king is the focus of the world's attention, a model of behavior and a source of magically effective public images, who can change the world for the better or for the worse. In this sense, the king, like rulers of the various states, inherits not power per se but a set of duties and limitations. He can establish harmony throughout the world by conforming to protocol or endanger all of civilization by resisting. When Fu Chen urges King Xiang to recall his brother, Prince Dai, who has fled to Qi after an abortive coup attempt, he first cites lines from the poem "The First Month" ("Zhengyue," Mao 192) and then reads them as a statement of principle: "If we brothers do not get along, how can we complain that the lords of the states do not re66 main close to us?" Even real familial affection is valuable, in the king's case, for its inevitable public effect. Perhaps the grandest vision of the king's role as a model for human action comes in the schematic description of the royal 67 plowing ritual. By correctly managing all the arrangements surrounding this ritual and by plowing the first row himsel£ the king demonstrates attitudes and actions that are to be imitated by all below him. Like him, his ministers, who also plow their rows, will act without thought of profit, and the people in their turn will perform their agricultural labor without cause for resentment. Once the king has animated the entire system by accepting his role in it, the system ensures the compliance of its other human components. As the pinnacle of the interstate system and the center of public scrutiny, the king is above all a preserver of inherited norms. Recall the words of Ji Tan after his visit to King Jiing of Zhou: "Ritual is the king's great warpthread (jing); if in a single action he abandons two ritual requirements, he

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lacks this warp~thread."68 The force of the condemnation derives from the systemic imperatives that surround the king. Although no individual, even the king, is above the system, the king comes closest to embodying its power. Born to the royal blood, he is the living instantiation of the continuity of tradition denoted by the "warp~thread," and the position he occupies is the crown of the whole system of ritual. Even more than the feudal lords, the 69 king endangers himselfby failing in his duties to tradition and ritual. The king appears to uphold inherited norms in the style of his speech, which on some occasions differs quite markedly from that of other speakers. It is an unstated principle of the king's speech (and a function of his office) that he is privileged to use an archaic, highly balanced phraseology with ech~ oes of canonical texts. When Guan Zhong of Qi declines extraordinary rit~ ual honors offered him by King Ling, the latter enjoins him in royal language marked by four~character phrases and archaic diction: "Scion of my mother's line: I exalt your achievement, rewarding your excellent virtue. It is deemed proper and not to be forgotten. Go, carry out the duties of your position, and do not disobey my command" ~ .E£; • ~ ;J; J!; I}] • ~ J!; f~ 1~ • ~ 'I /f ~ • ff ~ J!; !ffi\l • 11\02! !* $.70 In one instance, the king is able to speak in the language of the Shi without marking the words as citations. Asking Jin to wall his city against the rival Prince Chao, King Jing speaks of his feudal lords as "not having had the leisure to rest'' (bu huang qichu) for ten years, and refers to his enemy as "vermin" (maozei), in both cases alluding silently to the Shi.71 As I have shown in my discussion of citation practice, inherited Ian~ guage carries with it an unquestionable authority, and citations are usually carefully marked and matched with the points of a speaker's argument. King Jing's direct use of canonical language is quite unusual and is imitated in 72 other speeches only during highly formal diplomatic audiences. In his speech, as in all his actions, the king plays a role with lines partly scripted by tradition. In principle, only a successful performance elicits the proper re~ sponse from nobles and commoners alike and maintains peace and prosper~ ity throughout the Zhou world.

The Hegemon Despite frequent invocations of the royal order in historiographical speeches, it is already accepted as a matter of principle that the Zhou house 73 is in decline. No matter how often rhetoric recalls a time when kings had the military wherewithal to punish departures from the inherited system,

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the court becomes increasingly irrelevant in interstate events and is depen~ dent on subordinates for enforcement whenever it does assert its relevance. The first among these subordinates is sometimes recognized by the king as ba-conventionally translated "hegemon"-or, in typically familial terms, "elder uncle" (bo ).74 Ambiguity surrounds the position. On the one hand, the principles adduced in historiographical speeches insist that a ruler can win and maintain the hegemony only through virtue, that is, through reverence for the king and conformity to the moral norms of the interstate system. On the other hand, the might of the hegemon always threatens to exceed the standards of right. Hegemons use their power to oppress the other states and are fully capable of making their position in the royal order a pretext for self~interested aggression. The double possibility inherent in the hegemony gives it a function similar to that of the state of Chu. Whereas in Chu the historiographers see central culture being tested against the barbaric other~ ness it replaces, the hegemony pits the morality of the royal system against raw power. Because they have at their disposal both prescriptive principles that insist on the morality of the hegemon and descriptive principles that show how power can threaten that morality, the historiographers are able to tell all sorts of stories about hegemonic power without relinquishing their central thesis that Zhou values confer strength. Although they maintain a distinction between the moral and the power~ ful, the historiographers do not oppose the hegemonic to the royal as texts like the Mengzi do; rather, they adopt a view similar to that of the Xunzi. 75 As a matter of principle, the way of the hegemon is part of the royal way, established through the recognition of the king and solely concerned with the preservation of Zhou allegiances throughout the world. Both Duke Huan of Qi and Duke Wen of Jin have their hegemony confirmed in audi~ ences with King Xiang or one of his representatives, receiving from him gifts that demonstrate the king's recognition of their achievements. 76 The Icing's words to Duke Wen, presented as a formal command to be "leader of the lords" (houbo ), are especially interesting: "Reverently obey the commands of the king in order to pacifY the states of the four quarters; correct and govern those who err against the king'' ~ m~ ±. $- · J;) ~ 12:9 ~ • *lf ~ ±. ~. Be~ cause the hegemon is endowed by the king, he and his state have a duty to protect the king, not only by policing the other states but also by contribut~ 77 ing direct military aid when it is needed. The words and rituals of hege~ mons' and other local rulers' encounters with the king promote a fiction of

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fealty based on the king's recognition of service and the local ruler's grateful receipt of ceremonial rewards. In speeches, a concept of recompense (bao) that will prove important in historiographical narratives provides overt justification for the relations between the center and the periphery. Only rarely does the hegemonic state find itself supporting the king directly with military force. Most of its activities bring it into contact with other states, with whom it exchanges treaties and visits, meeting at covenant sites and on battlefields. In principle, the hegemon is leader of an alliance of 8 the states that belong to the Zhou order, and the enemy is ordinarily Chu? But the mustering of power requires power, and much of the speech-making surrounding the hegemony focuses on the moral restraints that should prevent abuse of power. Bullying is a constant danger, and one to which the historiographers respond by elaborating the moral strictures binding the hegemonic state, foremost among them the strictures that guide its relations " states can with its treaty partners. Although the absence of a leader for the lead to chaotic uses of power, the hegemonic state is itself frequently the 79 source of misdirected force. Because of the potential for abuse, historiography regularly emphasizes principles that make the hegemon's success dependent on virtue and ritual propriety. Although the hegemony usually belongs to the state with the largest army, speech-makers present this power as evidence for a worldview in which right justifies might. As a Jin minister says in arguing that Jin should return confiscated lands to W ey, "Without virtue, how will we act as leader of treaties?"80 As always, virtue has its real effect on an observing public, which in the case of the hegemon is the states of the alliance. As for ritual propriety, I have already noted the royal audiences with which the careers of Duke Huan of Qi and Duke Wen of Jin culminated; the frequent disputes between Zheng and Jin also concern matters prescribed by ritual. In one instance of ritual necessity, a Chen ambassador dies while en route to W u. The W u king Fuchai sends a man to turn the embassy back, but the survivors remind the W u messenger that ritual means serving the dead like the living; if the corpse is not accepted as an ambassador, Wu will have aban81 doned ritual and will not be able to lead the allies. Fuchai relents. Ritual both limits the hegemon and furnishes the formal means by which he establishes his position. When King Ling of Chu gathers the allies for a treaty, one of his ministers reminds him how many different ritual precedents exist for this event, including examples from the Xia, the Shang, three early Zhou

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kings, and Dukes Huan of Qi and Wen of Jin. Deciding to use Duke 82 Huan's form, the king gets the details from two of his northern visitors. Whether it is conceived of as the result of exceptional virtue in a ruler or as an effect of power that must somehow be made to accept the constraints of virtue, hegemony appears to have fascinated the historiographers as the end point of a grand political Bildung. Dukes Huan and Wen represent the two poles of this Bildung. As depicted in the Qi section of the Guoyu (the "Qi yu"), which is devoted entirely to his rise, Duke Huan, aided by his wise counselor Guan Zhong, wins hegemony through excellent management of the material and popular resources of his country. Although virtue always 83 matters, the narrative places greater emphasis on administrative means. In Duke Wen's case, however, personal moral scrupulousness plays a greater 84 part. One can discern in the speeches surrounding these two rulers and others, like Kings Fuchai ofWu and Goujian ofYue, some of the forces that molded historiography during the last centuries before the Qin conquest. As tales of how power is accrued and managed, anecdotes about the hegemons must have appealed to politicians of every rank. But as the substance of a tradition that depended for its transmission on an educated rather than a purely powerful class, these anecdotes were also the site of a moralizing vision of power. Especially in the speeches made to and about the leaders of the allies, Zhou values are rescued from the decline of Zhou prestige and made to account for power of every sort.85

Interstate Relations The relations between the hegemonic state and its treaty partners are a special subset of interstate relations. 86 Some of the principles that guide these relations have already been mentioned: the influence of the historical moment of the early Zhou dynasty, the geographic conceptions by which the Chinese states are distinguished from the groups surrounding them, and, above all, the model of brotherhood. Most of the anecdotes in the Zuozhuan and Guoyu concern either the relations among states or the internal administration of individual states. The diplomatic and domestic policy speeches that result apply a vast body of inherited and practical principles to the myriad problems facing rulers. Since these principles and variations on them were also the main concern of non-historiographical writers of the Warring States period, a full account of politics within and among states in historiography would require extended comparison with contemporary political phi-

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losophy, a comparison that is not feasible here. One pattern, however, seems to guide the application of political principles in historiographical speeches and also characterizes much non-historiographical Confucian thought on the problems of governance. In the view promoted by the Zuozhuan and Guoyu, the interstate and domestic system of ritual propriety is at all times on the brink of collapse but still defensible. It is forever failing and being restored as local, temporary crises allow irruptions of power, immoral caprice, and greed. Ritual propriety flickers; the principles argued in speeches and the moral contentions encoded in anecdotes seem designed to keep it alight. Ritual propriety is invoked everywhere in deliberations over the relations among states, especially in connection with three activities: visiting, mourn87 ing, and lending aid. The visits that Chong'er, future Duke Wen of ]in, pays to various states during his long return from exile occasion several speeches on the rituals of interstate entertainment. Where he is not treated appropriately, local ministers remonstrate with their rulers on their obligations to the Jin exile and on the danger of abandoning ritual. Ning Zhuangzi of W ey tells his duke that "ritual propriety is the ordering principle of the state; mutual affection is what keeps people close; goodness is what establishes virtue." He goes on to develop these three points and to show that Chong'er, who is likely to succeed as duke of Jin (itself the most powerful 88 state in the Zhou realm), must be treated correctly. Similar speeches are delivered in Cao and Zheng, and in Song, a minister's speech on li convinces the duke to treat Chong'er well. 89 At least as these speeches are recounted in the Guoyu, they make genealogy the basis of the ritual imperative. Because of ]in's historical origins in the royal house and because of their own connections with such origins, other Zhou states owe the Jin exile proper treatment. This pattern of thought resembles the one that underlies another area of ritual, sacrificial practice. History is a treasury of obligation, the sum of data that explain who owes what to whom and why; ritual is designed for the acknowledgment and repayment of debts. We have already touched on certain aspects of the ritual of visiting. According to the historiographers' principles, the former kings had a set schedule for various types of visits and meetings among the states, and visits outside the ritual system are suspect and dangerous.90 A state's treatment of its visitors is limited by a ritual propriety every bit as fearsome as the xenia, or "guest-friendship,'' that binds hosts and guests in Homeric epic. The eloquent Zichan of Zheng, who visits Jin with a delegation presenting tribute

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to the hegemon, is kept waiting for a time. When he tears down the walls of the diplomatic hostel and moves his horses and chariots inside, the Jin minister takes him to task. No time has been set for Zheng's audience with the Jin duke, Zichan explains, and since the humble guest quarters provide no protection against bandits who might steal Zheng's tribute goods, he had no choice but to do what he did. Jin apologizes to Zheng for its deficient virtue 91 and builds better inns for its visiting allies. Another confirmation of the obligations of the host comes in response to an abomination contemplated by King Ling of Chu. When Jin sends two of its great ministers, Han Qi and Shu Xiang, to escort a bride to the king, the king considers humiliating Jin by cutting off Han Qi's feet, castrating Shu Xiang, and making them both household slaves. He reasons that such actions would allow Chu to have its way with Jin in the future. Upon hearing this proposal, the Chu ministers are at first stunned and cannot respond. One of them, Wei Qiqiang, finally answers with a speech that re-establishes the value of ritual and defuses the suggestion that political goals might best be accomplished through trickery and expediency. The plan will work, says Wei Qiqiang, provided the king is prepared to face the consequences of humiliating an opponent. Historical precedents show that the state that lacks li fails. Jin has treated Chu with perfect propriety, even to the point of permitting this marriage. The two ministers in question are well connected, and Jin will muster all its forces to win a well-justified revenge. Thus the king must be prepared. The king desists.92 In this speech, a fine irony serves as a foil for the hallowed message of virtue's power. Historiography does occasionally emphasize the importance of preparation against enemy attack, but preparation without virtue is never a sufficient defense. 93 In this argument for adherence to li, the world's bias in favor of virtue blends with mundane considerations, including the rage of the humiliated enemy.94 States have specific duties to each other during periods of mourning. When the Zheng minister You Ji explains the ritual conventions of interstate mourning during a visit to Jin for the burial of Duke Qing (r. 525-512), he cites the "system of the former kings" (xianwang zhi zhi): "For the deaths of state rulers, officers mourn, and lower ministers attend the funeral; only for court meetings, visits and baO:quets, and ,nilitary affairs is a high minister sent.''95 An unusually long quote from the shadowy early figure Scribe Yi prescribes mourning as one of the duties brothers owe each other: "Brothers bestow fine things and help in times of need; they congratulate excellence and commiser-

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ate over hardships; they sacrifice reverently and mourn sorrowfully. It is true that the feelings involved differ, but their affection is never interrupted. That 96 is the way ofkinship.'' Mourning for a deceased ruler keeps a state from un~ dertaking military actions of most types, but one anecdote justifies attacks if the target state failed to send a mourning delegation. 97 That mourning for no~ ble deaths in other states was as important to the practice of historiography as it is in speeches is shown by the many passages that simply record a mourning 98 visit and judge it ritually correct. Since funeral visits allow the formalized confirmation of quasi~familial ties among the states, they are important enough that their propriety is defended both through the explicit rhetoric of speeches and through the evidence of well~ crafted anecdotes. The substantive aid that states lend each other is normally military 99 power, which gathers around the hegemonic state. But states trade in other sorts of aid too, as anecdotes concerning grain purchases show. When fam~ ine strikes Lu, Zang W enzhong convinces Duke Zhuang that it is proper, according to the "system of old," to buy grain from Qi; all states are bound by an imperative to help their neighbors, to establish ties through marriage, 100 In the years leading up to and to maintain these ties with treaties. Chong'er's triumphant return to his state, Qin agrees to sell grain to famine~ stricken Jin because it knows it cannot lose. Either Jin will reciprocate when Qin needs grain or Jin will refuse (as it does in the next year), and Heaven 101 and the people will destroy Duke Hui ofJin for his impudence. As the grain speeches suggest, interstate relations are a matter of obliga~ tions remembered and acted on, asserted and denied. The mimetic preser~ vation of the old order against extinction seems to depend both on the commemoration of historical moments in which affiliations were established and services rendered and on the continual circulation of recognition and re~ ciprocation. In receiving an official visitor from Qin, the Lu host speaks of how the Qin duke "does not forget the ties of our former rulers, bestows a 102 visit upon the state of Lu, and brings stability to its altars.'' In this and other examples, military and diplomatic encounters involve a rhetorical or narrative performance of Zhou unity, reassertion of old mimetic themes, and a demonstration of the continued viability of tradition. But memory retains more than the successes of the early Zhou. Impor~ tant diplomatic communications between states often include litanies of service. Perhaps the best example of this rhetorical form comes in the famous letter written by Lii Xiang of Jin to sever that state's relations with

a

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Qin. He begins with the friendly relations between Dukes Xian of Jin (r. 676-651) and Mu of Qin, then recounts in order services exchanged, es~ pecially under Duke Wen of Jin, and the battles fought, after his death, at Yao, Linghu, the Yellow River bend (hequ), and several other sites. Starting with Duke Mu, Qin rulers have continually taken steps to reduce Jin's power. Now Chu, disgusted with Qin's perfidy, has told Jin that Qin is seeking allies against Jin despite a recent treaty. By assembling such a mass of historical detail, Lii Xiang shows that Qin has fallen short of standards of reciprocity, leaving Jin with the preponderance of moral credit; in every state's relation with every other state, such accounts are kept with great care. The letter is an ultimatum, and when Qin refuses to accept a new treaty, Jin and its allies attack and defeat Qin soundly. For interstate relations, as for the hegemony and other components in the world's structure, the historiographers supplement the tenets of ritual propriety with more hardheaded principles of cunning. self~defense, and Re~ alpolitik. These are generally vindicated in the anecdotes in which they are enunciated, even though they seem to represent a departure from strict ob~ servance of ritual. Small states, for instance, face a constant threat of bullying and even annexation by large states, and scattered speeches in historiography present a sort of mirror of diplomacy for the ruler of a small state. As noted in the preceding chapter, the world's tendency toward equilibrium can make it dangerous for a small state to defeat a large one unless the latter's moral. 104 laxity invites punishment. The small state is more dependent than the large one on the maintenance of the moral order and the suppression of vio~ lence. Meng Xianzi ofLu convinces Duke Xuan that Lu should pay a ritual visit to Chu, whose forces have recently defeated the Jin alliance and are now besieging the state of Song. Speaking of the visits that states exchange, he explains the function of the tribute gifts-the "fine appearances and colorful displays (caizhang)" are the means by which the small state protects itsel£ Although the historiographers represent Chu's achievements under King Zhuang as the results of virtuous policy, Meng Xianzi does not concern himself here with what virtue requires. Currying favor is good policy, a pol~ icy informed by the principle of effective images. Lu's gifts and the loyalty they represent are to shine in the powerful state's treasury as a reminder that Lu does not need to be attacked. The loveliness of the objects and the open~ ness of court visits will restrain aggression, given the uncertain applicability 105 ofZhou ritual restraints.

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Zichan of Zheng is frequently depicted defending the interests of his small state against pressures &om its powerful neighbors, Jin and Chu. The resoluteness of his administration during various crises suggests a set of principles for the management of beleaguered smaller states, as do some of his own speeches. 106 One speech in which the distinction of small and large states is made central is Zichan's justification of his decision not to build an altar during an official visit to Chu. A servant remarks that this move is unprecedented; Zheng has always built altars when visiting other states. But Zichan argues that building an altar is appropriate only when a greater state visits a smaller state, since the greater state thus makes a monument to its achievement in teaching and aiding the smaller state. But when the smaller state visits the greater state, it is apologizing, pleading, presenting tribute, or receiving orders, and it has nothing it should wish to publicize with an altar c fu ture generations. . 107 Agam, . cons1'derat10ns . or to commemorate ror of t h e effective image remain when Zhou standards of behavior do not prescribe a specific course of action. One final aspect of interstate relations in which principles of power rather than of ritual propriety generally obtain is in ordinary states' relations with very small polities. Historical precedent has established the principle that states grow only through the annexation of smaller states. Asked by Jin why Zheng has attacked the somewhat smaller state of Chen, Zichan recalls that the early kings' scheme of the world gave each of the local rulers a territory one-tenth the size of that of the royal house; decline (shuai) began &om this ideal proportionality. That the great states are now several times larger than the original royal realm is the result of innumerable annexations of smaller states.108 When the widow of Duke Dao ofJin, a woman &om the little state of Qii, criticizes a Jin ambassador for allowing Lu to keep Qii territory it has annexed, the ambassador recalls the many states that Jin swallowed up as it expanded, even though their rulers bore the royal Ji surname.109 Although self-serving arguments &om expediency are often overruled in speeches and in anecdotes through a reassertion of Zhou values, the historiographers appear to make certain allowances, especially for smaller states like Zheng and Lu. The principles of the sage-kings should and do make the interstate system work, but .good speaking and the clever use of historical precedent can in some cases win an argument even without the support of moral principles. The handling by small states of the double rhetoric of vir-

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tue and of expedience was likely as interesting to Warring States observers as were accounts of the rise ofhegemons; the principles in question were still useful to politicians and to scholars.

Internal Administration Within states, the historiographers assume a fundamental analogy between the local ruler and the Zhou king. The state is its ruler's version of a king~ dom. 110 But the analogy depends upon certain much~stressed points of similarity and leaves others unclear. Like the king, the ruler of a state is a model for the behavior of all his subordinates, who surround him like an audience. As the center of his own state's li system and living embodiment of its traditions, the ruler is the object of all service within a state. In return for this service, he grants ministers and members of the ducal and other noble families lands from which to draw their sustenance. A miniature system of circulation of goods, services, and words mimics the large scheme according to which the world is idealized. But the concentric geography of the king's realm is not reproduced within states, whose borders are marked not only against the non~Chinese world, but also against the frontier towns of their Chinese neighbors. And there are local traditions, determined by the par~ ticular genealogy and history of each state, that have no parallels in the Zhouorder. One effect of the analogy of king and duke is a continuity of normative values in all levels of society and in all types of anecdote. It is easy to conceive of a worldview in which, say, obedience and good faith are owed the king, whereas lesser rulers merit no similar commitments. One could, in other words, imagine a version of the Chinese hierarchy that does not insist on a single attitude of attention and control informing every social inferior's ser~ vice to his or her immediate superior. But, as I show at the end of this chap~ ter, Chinese thought as formulated in historiography and other texts has fa~ vored a model of analogous commitments linked in hierarchical chains, 111 with the result that all the enunciated values of Confucianism-good faith (xin), loyalty (zhang), humaneness (ren), ritual propriety (!i), and a host of lesser virtues adduced as the situation requires-are as valid in relations among commoners as they are in relations between the king and his minis~ ters. The analogy of king and duke, by which the state is established in a sort of political autonomy that separates it from the king's direct say, neverthe~ less establishes a unity on the level of values. This is not to say that all who

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lived during the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods held the same values; nor do all the figures represented in historiography hold the same values. Rather, the historiographers did what they could to make these values the center of contention and the key to success for everyone whose story they told. The traditional definition of his rank binds the ruler of a state, like the king, in reciprocal relations with the spirits above, with the people below, and especially with the ministers who deliberate for him and remonstrate with him when he errs. And like the royal system, the organization of a state works not only because the extra~human world favors its workings but also because the public effect of images enlists the opinion of nobles and com~ moners alike as a controlling and correcting force. Since the Zuozhuan and Guoyu are concerned far more with the workings of government within states and with the breakdown of that government than they are with the theory of royal government, the speeches made in response to internal crises present these texts' most important explicit principles of political philoso~ phy. Here more than anywhere else historiography articulates and defends traditional structures and values against the forces that are destroying them and, by its depiction of the conflict, embodies a conservatism that would be~ come extremely influential. According to principles enunciated in speeches, the ruler of a state is re~ sponsible simultaneously to the spirit world peculiar to his state (e.g., ducal ancestors, the spirits of mountains, rivers, and local· shrines) and to his sub~ ordinates, especially the mass of commoners-farmers, merchants, and arti~ 112 sans. The spirits and the populace not only favor the same policy of good management and moral correctness but also work in concert, so that each group represents the will of the other. Again, a form of omniscience by way of public images lies at the heart of the portrayal. Any failure on the duke's part in his ritual duties to the spirits will inspire seditious thoughts that can lead the commons to avenge the wrong done to the spirits; inefficient or ex~ ploitative management of the commons automatically comes to the attention of the spirits, who may punish the duke either directly, by illness, or indi~ reedy, through the people.113 The duke's every action places him between the spirits and the people. Asked about the Chu army's prospects for victory when it sets out against Jin, a Chu nobleman, the wise Shu Shi of Shen, describes the scru~ 114 pulous administration ofJin, which makes the state invincible:

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Thus the spirits send down blessings, and there are no seasonal disasters; the people are prosperous in their livelihood, and heed orders harmoniously and concordantly. There is no one who does not give his all in following his superiors' orders, and they would risk even death to compensate for their shortcomings. That is how one wins battles.

Despite the division between them and the constraints placed on direct communication (which must ordinarily take place through sacrifice), the people and the spirits form a single audience for the duke's actions and act together to maintain each new duke in adherence to the practices established by his predecessors. The spirits and the people together are, at least in the theory implied by historiography, the source of the violence that preserves the old structures of rule and standards ofbehavior. 115 The most intense relations depicted in historiography are those binding the duke and his ministers. 116 An important aetiology of the official order has it that ministers were placed around the duke by Heaven to prevent him from overstepping the inherited standards. 117 On the stage that is the court, the duke is at all times observed by his ministers, whose duty it is to comment on his performance. In turn, ministers can perform a remonstrance for the duke as audience. What they act out in one another's presence is devotion to the inherited structure. Obedience to the duke's orders is as much a matter of principle for ministers as receptivity to remonstrance is for the duke. 118 And in the closely watched space of the court, where the distinctions of status supplied by the inherited hierarchical structure are continually expressed in words and actions, difference and its dangers cannot be denied. Instead, they are exalted and subjected to attempts at regulation. As Yanzi contends in a long and carefully crafted speech whose themes are echoed in many other texts, the ideal relation between the views of the ruler and those of his ministers is not identity (tong)-since that would mean that no error on the part of the duke would be corrected-but harmony (he), which provides for the transcendence of differences in an underlying unity, as when 119 sounds or flavors are blended skillfully. 120 Although the ruler owes the minister recognition for his services, the minister, idealized as an upholder of traditional standards and structures, may refuse rewards, particularly when accepting them would mean usurping unsanctioned privileges. Xiang Xu of Song, declining a city that Jin has

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taken by siege in order to present to him as a reward for good service, says it should instead be given to his lord, Duke Ping of Song (r. 575-532): "If you give it to me alone, then I would have called out the allies for the purpose of 121 enfeoffing myself; what crime could be greater than that?" Such virtuous speeches of refusal carry a special force of principle, especially in the context of the later years of Spring and Autumn period history as it is narrated here. Even as these ministers were renouncing privilege, others in Lu, Qi, Jin, and elsewhere were seeking it and overturning traditional hierarchies to get it. 122 Together, the duke and his ministers are required by ritual propriety to maintain order in the state according to inherited standards and practices. In the aggregate, speeches imply that tradition prescribes every type of administrative action. In practice, however, speeches and their political principles cluster around a few problems that were likely sites of real political tension in the states of the Spring and Autumn period and that also made for especially strong literary tests and demonstrations of received values. One such problem is the choice of a successor, whether as head of the ruling line (and hence of the state) or as head of another leading family. The guiding principle, departures from which generally bring trouble, is that the heir should be selected on the basis of primogeniture and moral excellence.123 Instances of conflict between the two criteria do exist, of course, but it is the ruler's misguided selection of a younger and worse son a8 his heir that gives rises to 124 speeches. The famous beguiling of Duke Xian ofJin by his Di concubine, Li Ji, leads to the neglect and wrongful death of a suitable heir, Shensheng; the several principled speeches the latter makes during the course of his 125 martyrdom prove his worthiness as a successor. In speeches made during succession debates, the historiographers demonstrate that the tradition of primogeniture need not conflict with the imperative to choose an heir for his 26 fine observance of traditional morals/ Another aspect oflocal rule that receives extraordinary attention in historiographical speeches is orderly administration, which, as we have already noted, is strongly sanctioned by the spirits and the people. Although the theme of proper governmental order is ubiquitous, certain speeches and speech-like passages in the voice of the anonymous narrator present principles of administration in a language whose extreme formal symmetry reflects the perfection of the imagined order. The commoner who advises Bo Zong on the proper reaction to a landslide at Mount Liang, for instance, sums up policy in five phrases of two characters each: the ruler "desists from feasting,

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decreases the splendor of his clothing, rides in a plain chariot, stops court 127 music, and lodges apart" /f ~ · ~Jl ~~ • i%lf • ~ ~ • 1:1:!1;(. When the states of Song, Zheng, and Lu suffer disastrous fires, carefully crafted de~ scriptions of the measures taken in response show that principles of order in states, which in speeches tend to be rendered in orderly, symmetricallan~ guage, can have a similar effect on the text that surrounds speeches. In narrative as in speech, patterned language signals the realization of wen as controlled and orderly behavior in accordance with models given by prede~ cessors. 128 Public images are as important in the proper administration of the state as they are in other affairs of the world. Like the king, the duke is a model of proper behavior for all his subordinates; given the assumption that certain virtues transcend social hierarchy, the ruler may always be imitated. More often than not, mimesis becomes an issue when the duke has somehow failed. When Duke Ling of Chen (r. 613-599) and certain of his ministers carry on an outrageous affair with a noble lady and even take to wearing certain articles of her clothing at court, a minister remonstrates: "When the duke and high ministers make their lasciviousness (yin) known far and wide, the people have nothing that they may imitate (xiao ), and they will not heed 129 their orders. Hide that [clothing]." As argued in Chapter 2, the preroga~ tives of rank make social stratification visible, and the populace takes its moral cues from the propriety or impropriety that diffuses downward to it from its superiors. The ruler uses specified articles of clothing, caparison, fabrics and patterns, colors, bells, and flags as elements in a comprehensive system for expressing hierarchy and keeping his officials in an attentive state of unchanging discipline. No problems arise as long as this system is in place, since the officials make it their model. 130 But when the ruler places an illegitimate gift in the ancestral temple or wears his lover's clothing in court, the transgression is publicized and imitated, just as hierarchical orderliness is, and trouble results. This prospect of social upheaval is the most consis~ tent argument for preserving clearly defined ranks and the sumptuary re~ strictions that make them visible. In the nested hierarchy of structures, the next level beneath the state is 131 the family. Since historiography is concerned largely with public affairs, the Zuozhuan and the Guoyu have relatively little to say about relations within families. Succession is, as I have noted, a theme of many speeches and anecdotes, and we are occasionally afforded other glimpses oflife in the lin~

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eage and the household. For the most part, however, the historiographers assume solidarity in a family when it acts publicly and do not concern them~ selves with domestic derails. An exception to this tendency is the treatment accorded female characters. In her examination ofWarring States and Han representations of women, Lisa Raphals has identified the major topoi that informed narratives about women.132 Women in the Zuozhuan and Guoyu (and in the Lienuzhuan, Raphals's focus) tend to be represented either as wise advisors or as dangerous beauties. That is, they appear in historiography only as their characters and deeds affect public life. As wise advisors, their image is barely affected by their gender, except in the sense that their move~ ments outside the home are on the whole more constrained than those of men.133 Although their gender seems often (but not always) to limit their ac~ cess to public discourse, the wisdom that they present to their husbands and other sanctioned channels does not differ overtly from the wisdom attrib~ ured to male speakers, and their rhetoric is of a piece with that of their male counterparts. 134 It is in speeches and anecdotes concerning dangerous beauties that hisro~ riography marks women as gendered. 135 Even here, however, the quality of gender is elusive. The longest single speech concerning women, a listing of the blessings and disasters that marriage brought various historical rulers, indicates that the reason beloved consorts have ruined so many rulers is that they seek to benefit not their husband's house but their birth family. 136 Women of the aristocracy (and the historiographers pay little attention to women of any other class) can be dangerous because of the role they fulfill in diplomatic exchanges; as permanent guests of the court or family they marry 137 into, they may, like other guests, have suspect loyalties. Only rarely, as in the case of the Chen beauty Xia Ji, are women represented as being funda~ mentally different from men; and in the case of Xia Ji, gender matters far less 138 than historiography's aesthetic stricrures. The Zuozhuan and Guoyu are so profoundly public~minded, so concerned with the ruling classes and so an~ drocentric, that it is impossible to reconstruct from them more than a sketch of gender principles, not to speak of an idea of women's lives. As the abundance of speeches specifying principles of administration in~ dicates, the old system by which states were governed was being threatened. As it is defended in scores of speeches, this system rakes on an elegant and systematic form that is as much a reflection of the idealism, practical inrel~ lecrual involvements, and literary habits of irs larter~day exponents as it is an

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accurate depiction of actual historical mechanisms of power. Despite the rhetorical work devoted to formulating the principles of the old order and showing their relevance to the materials of history, alternative principles also emerge to explain the failure of that order, the shift of power away from the symbolic heads of hierarchies, and the rise of ministerial families as powers threatening ducal control in various states. Once again, historiographical speeches develop principles that account for the other side of a dichotomy. Just as the state of Chu and the institution of the hegemony allowed for the extension of certain traditional values-ultimately to be known as Confu~ cian values-into the uncouth realms of barbarism and power, the rise of the ministerial families became a means for these values to prove themselves in the context oflocal power struggles.

The Confucian Virtues To complete this account of the principles underlying the depiction of the human world in historiographical speeches, it is necessary to review, how~ ever briefly, the meanings assigned in these speeches to the several terms that were, by the Warring States period, the mainstays of the Confucian ethical vocabulary: yi (rightness), xin (good faith), zhong (loyalty), ren (humaneness), zhi (knowledge), 139 de (virtue), dao (the way), and li (ritual propriety). One 140 might easily add other terms to the list. These, however, are the terms that were most important to the historiographers and that have most occu~ pied recent interpreters of Confucian thought. Historiographical speeches present challenges to the project of characterizing early Confucian ethics, which has normally proceeded through attempts to expound and defend 141 systems grounded in the Lunyu and the Mencius. The speakers and the historiographers quite apparently valued the terms not only for their defini~ tive and systematic value but also for their vagueness. They used the terms much as they used citations from the Shi, that is, as authoritative inheri~ tances whose significance was in part determined in the context of particular applications. In this respect the historiographers resembled the Confucius of the Lunyu, whose multifarious and sometimes contradictory remarks on such subjects as humaneness have often frustrated systematizing commen~ tators. What the historiographers and Confucius gained from their cultiva~ tion of terminology was a flexibility that fostered precisely the sorts of highly patterned rhetorical structures discussed in Chapter 1. The ethical terms were ready~made interpretive tools; provided with the right kinds of prose

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links, they helped speakers and readers assign value to the historical phe~ nomena discussed in a speech. It is significant that these terms almost never appear in rhetorically unmarked contexts in historiography, as we might ex~ pect if the historiographers were concerned primarily with the propagation of an ethical system; instead, they almost always appear in symmetrical or parallelistic structures that recall the value of wen. Speakers rarely adduce a single ethical term in isolation from all the oth~ ers. For the sake of rhetorical symmetry or out of a conviction that the vir~ tues were compatible, or for both reasons, the historiographers for the most part include speeches in which two or more terms work together. In the most impressive speeches, the speaker musters a grand set of virtues for a highly patterned analysis of a single event. When Duke Xiang of Shan pre~ diets greatness for Sun Zhou of Jin, he organizes his speech around eleven 142 terms, including most of the terms listed above. Few speeches are as long or as. intricate as his, but even speakers who use only two or three of the terms tend to make them the basis of patterned constructions. Although each single virtue matters for its content and for the specific injunctions it conveys, each also functions as part of a manifold. As it is used in historiog~ raphy, this set of virtues has less to do with private behavior and personal cultivation-key concerns in the Lunyu and other collections of philosophi~ cal anecdotes-than with the guidance of social and political behavior. Ul~ timately, all the terms are subordinated to one term, the highly reified ver~ sion of ritual propriety that governs most narration and interpretation in the Zuozhuan and Guoyu. Other than the words li and de, discussed below, the most frequently used of the ethical terms is yi, "rightness."143 Historiographical speeches generally support A. C. Graham's definition of yi as "the conduct fitting to one's role or status.''144 More specifically, yi in the speeches is the attitude of devotion that binds a person to his or her assigned place in the ritual~governed hierar~ chy. By extension, it is the aggregate of all individual attitudes of devotion, a putatively objective standard of "rightness" against which deeds can be judged. 145 As an evaluative standard, yi allowed the historiographers to es~ tablish continuities between their own activities and those of the characters whose deeds they remembered. Like their predecessors, they appealed to yi as the most overtly juridical of the ethical terms. Characters in historiogra~ phy use yi when they justifY penalties and when they decry attempts to de~ 46 pict crimes as acts of rightnessl the historiographers imply that their own

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investigations were motivated in part by the need to discern the yi in past 147 events. Like the other virtues, yi is appropriate to discussions of interactions within the royal court, between states, within states, and within homes; the historiographers presume that a single set of moral standards unites all spheres of experience. Speakers refer to the yi that binds states, rulers, min~ isters, commoners, fathers, husbands, mothers, and wives to their roles; yi pertains mainly, but not exclusively, to people's relations with their superi~ ors. 148 Like all moral standards, yi implies a tension between untrained incli~ nations and moral standards and is normally achieved through renunciation of the former. 149 This renunciation is often justified as a way of securing ul~ timate gains, partly because the proper functioning of the hierarchy facili~ tates the flow of goods within and among states; speeches in historiography . b etween y1. an d 1·1, "benefi t" or "profi t."150 Th e reguIarIy d raw connect10ns connection with material gain and the support of family or state in no way contradicts the subordination of yi to the ritual system, toward which all the individual virtues are oriented. 151 As a component of the inherited system, yi is rooted both in inherited texts and in the structure of the extra~human 152 world. Like yi, xin (good faith) is at bottom an aspect of any moral agent's com~ mitment to the inherited order and its preservation. Whereas yi designates the subordination of individuals to their superiors and to the hierarchy itsel£ xin governs the use of language in accordance with the requirements of the system. Guided by patterns of usage in the Lunyu, discussions of xin as a Confucian virtue have generally focused on the problem of trustworthiness. What the historiographical speeches reveal is the larger discursive context behind the Lunyu's discussions of xin. In keeping with the hermeneutic ori~ entations of historiography and with the assumption that all words and acts must eventually become public, xin promotes the subordination of actions to the words of promise, command, and covenant that precede them. 153 Rulers who can keep their own promises and follow their own commands win the trust of the people they govern; ministers earn the trust of their rulers by 154 following orders and making good on their verbal commitments. Xin binds states with their allies, both through normal relations and through the . . . d to secure xm, . t h e covenant.155 rel1g10us proced ure d es1gne Underlying this quotidian matching of deeds and words-but neglected in many later considerations of xin-is the prominence of the term in dis~

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cussions of mimetic continuity. To be xin is to be true to the past, both in giving accounts of it and in acting according to its prescriptions. As a tool of critique, xin designates the truth of certain types of historical lore; on a few occasions, characters wonder if a particular anecdote they have heard is "true."156 I n a 1arger sense, h owever, xm . rs . a correct onentat1on . . to m . hente . d principles. Individual promises and commands are local versions of the much larger verbal legacy that, in the historiographers' view, rulers and min157 isters have a duty to uphold. Closely linked to xin in the vocabulary of historiography is the term zhong, "loyalty." The two words frequently appear in the same speeches, often in the compound zhongxin. Speakers in the Zuozhuan tend to differentiate the terms clearly when using them together; one owes xin to the spirits or 158 to the ruler above and zhongto the people below. These distinctions rarely attend zhongxin in the Guoyu, where the compound is something of a cli, 159 As t he uozhuan,s d"LL • • • 1"1es, zhong 1s. an unspoken comche. urerentlatlon rmp mitment that complements the verbal statements made in the presence of the ruler or the spirits. This may be a commitment to upholding the interests of the people one rules; it may also be a commitment to the interests of the ruler one serves or, more generally, of the other individuals and states 16 with which one is related in the ritual and political structure. For the historiographers zhong was not simply loyalty to one's superior, but the most 161 strenuous aspects of renouncing private good in favor of public duty. Even yi is not so markedly a term for self-sacrificing moral behavior. The historiographers regularly demonstrate, however, that renunciations bring rewards. Like yi, zhong frequently figures in deliberations about punishments, but it tends to be implicated in lessons of reciprocity: remembered loyalty is a reason for pardoning an offender.162 Renunciation, and the reasonable expectation of recognition and reward, are indispensable elements in the ritual sys163 tern. Ren, the ethical term that has most consistently eluded definition, resembles zhong in that it, too, designates a willingness to give of oneself for the benefit of another person or group. What is emphasized in the term ren, however, is neither the difficulty of sacrifice nor the necessity of submitting to some superior entity (whether spirits, ruler, or people). Instead, individuals are typically called ren when voluntarily, and outside the constraints of any stated commitment, they act generously; that is, to draw on parallels in the etymologies of ren and of "generous," they give in a way that bespeaks

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noble birth.164 This formulation resolves certain apparent contradictions in the use of the word. On some occasions to be ren is to remember and act on 165 the interests of one's own group, whether family or state. In many more cases, to be ren is to set aside such interests for the good of some other per~ son or group. 166 What unites the two sorts of acts is the display of generos~ ity; in every case the ren act is the one that requires most of the giver. Thus ren as a political virtue is a ruler's willing mindfulness of the interests of gov~ 167 erned and dependent people and states. It is also forbearance in situations 68 where punishment might be justified or practical/ At the same time, how~ ever, ren rules out inappropriate giving and lax government; only the man 169 characterized by ren knows where giving must end and punishment begin. As an element of the ritual system, ren is the suppression of self-that is, of greed and whim-that allows one to enter into relations with others on the 170 basis of li. Knowledge (zhi) is the faculty that allows rulers and ministers to under~ stand and predict events within the ritual system and at its edges. In this sense zhi designates the hermeneutic skills that the historiographers prize both in their characters and in historical investigation itsel£ Both rulers and ministers are praised for knowing other people, that is, for understanding the characters and motivations of the people they observe. 171 Typically their knowledge is based on a measurement of the observed individual against in~ herited standards, including li, and li itself is often mentioned as the object of 172 laudable knowledge. The wise also know words (yan, ci) and the art of speaking well; they know Heaven (tian) and its ways; they know what is de~ creed (ming) for them by their position and by the mechanics of events; in 173 subtleties (wei) they know how to see the future. Although the term is often used to designate a practical savvy of the sort that preserves its posses~ sor on the battlefield and in court disputes, this savvy derives, at least ideally, from sanctioned knowledge and discernment. 174 As the ~ntellectual capacity by which one comes to comprehend and adopt the other virtues, zhi repre~ sents wit properly subordinated to Confucian values. 175 The historiographers use a number of different words when referring to the virtues in groups or as a complete system. They refer to them as ele~ ments of de-a term that by the early Warring States period had acquired the primary meaning of "virtue" rather than "power" or "gift"-and in so doing imply that the path to political power of the sort the former kings en~ 176 joyed lies in moral behavior. Through terms like dao (the way) and jing

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(the warp-thread), they link the individual virtues to the ancient mimetic vocabulary discussed in Chapter 2. But de, dao, jing, and similar terms are less important in historiography than li, "ritual propriety." Li is the only term that appears in definitions and discussions of all the virtues. To generalize, each of the ethical terms names an orientation that is necessary to maintain the give and take of the li system. Yi determines how much an individual or state must give, and how much it is entitled to receive. Xin describes both the continuity of the system itself and the surety that a particular performance will match the relevant prescriptions. Zhong describes the giving that requires some extraordinary effort on the part of the giver, and ren relates to the noble character ofliberal giving. As scholars since the Han have observed, li is the central philosophical concept in the Zuozhuan and in the large portions of the Guoyu that corre177 spond to the Zuozhuan. In several major speeches and countless shorter remarks, characters develop the notion of li as a system that organizes hu178 man behavior and links it to the natural workings of the cosmos. Taken together, the speeches suggest an extension of li's meaning, a profitable abstraction from the primary meaning-!i as specific rite-to the more famil179 iar Confucian abstraction, li as a commitment to ritual propriety. Once linked to all the particular virtues as a context and justification for them, li is no longer a guide only to ritual performance. It attends all human behavior as a standard both for action and for interpretation. At the edges of the human realm and at its center, and in any part of any hierarchy, the proprieties of exchange that operate within li determine the unfolding of events and open the future to the view of the skilled observer. Li was the one term by which the historiographers could name all the principles of conservatism they advanced in the speeches of their characters. In their prescriptions for sacrifice, for relations with non-Chinese groups, and for royal, hegemonic, and ducal government, they suggested that no human activity and no his180 torical event stood outside the jurisdiction of !i. All of the subjects discussed in this chapter-sacrifice and the realm of the spirits, interactions with cultural others, royal and hegemonic power, relations among and within states, and the language of virtue that speakers employ-play a part in the historiographers' defense of li. Their transformation of li from a strictly defined religious term into one of the master concepts of Confucian thought results from the work accomplished in the hundreds of speeches they record. Remarks on religious practice emphasize

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Order in the Human World

adherence to ritual and the ill consequences of departure from it. Depictions of the barbaric other, whether as depraved or noble, make li the key to any sort of cultural success. Principles guiding the king's relations with the states, and the states' relations among themselves, are at base elaborations of the notion that such relations are based on ritual and should be maintained in accordance with tradition. Ritual has the same weight in relations among individuals, and the ethical terminology that the speeches deploy is united around assumptions intrinsic to li. Even as speakers recognize lias a source of prescriptions in every area of public life, they enlarge it, while making it a principle of ideological consistency. The world created by the narratives and speeches of the Zuozhuan and Guoyu is, above all else, a world informed by devotion to and anxiety about li. The triumph of li in the historiographical representation of the world does not come about solely through the pronouncements of characters. In large part it depends on the techniques of narrative, which are the subject of the next chapters. The exposition of principle that goes on in speeches concerning extra-human and human principles puts historical change in brackets, emphasizing instead a continuity between the principles' orderliness and the patterned connections immanent within language. Narrative, on the other hand, is possible only when language accounts for the passage of time and renders it meaningful. 181 Of all the virtues the historiographers name, li is the only one they assign a central role in their construction and explanation of narratives. None of their other terms has so much to do with time, with the expected and unexpected, and with devotion to the past. As the pinnacle of the system of principles expounded in speeches, li is also the constant that underlies the historiographers' practice of narrative and interpretation of historical events.

PART II

Narrative and Justice

FIVE

The Anecdotal History

Historical knowledge can take many forms, but historical understanding al1 ways requires narration. A text such as the Chunqiu, with its dates and facts, does not so much convey understanding as assume it. The Zuozhuan and the Guoyu, in contrast, explain known or alleged facts of the Spring and Autumn period by recording them in the context of narratives. Although premodern critics of the Zuozhuan as a commentary on the Chunqiu sometimes ranked it behind the Gongyang and Guliang commentaries, with their more direct articulations of the sage's judgments, there have always been readers who recognized that without the narratives of events (shi) that the Zuozhuan pro2 vides, the Chunqiu would yield little in the way of moral significance. In the Zuozhuan and Guoyu, actions have consequences and events have causes; names, dates, and events derive their significance from the rules of narration. Historiography teaches its readers much more than facts: it teaches them how to see beyond facts, to penetrate what is hidden, to observe and predict, and to understand beginnings, consequences, and ends. It teaches them how to read. It does so in the service of a particular ideology, but the pleasure and the intelligibility of its narratives are such that the reader may at times forget the interests they represent. A naturalized consensus on causation and consequence impresses itself. this is how it happened; this is how the world works; about this at least, none of us has cause to disagree, and the one who disagrees will have to learn a new way to recall the past. The historians determined the intelligibility of historical events as they recorded what for

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them were intelligible narratives about these events. To understand how Warring States scholars thought about history, we must understand how 3 they put together their narratives about history. For the narratives of historiography, as for the speeches, there is a long tradition of critical reception and commentary. The aim of much of the work in this tradition has been to explain how the Zuozhuan (and to a lesser extent the Guoyu) writes moral judgments into narratives, putting literary skill in the service of Confucian teaching. After reviewing some of the work in that tradition, I address the basic unit of narrative in the Zuozhuan and Guoyu, the anecdote, by first establishing its formal characteristics and then, in readings of several examples, considering some of the assumptions that inform such narratives. To the extent that the habits of narrative are less visible than the principles defended in speeches, they are subtler-and therefore more powerful-ways of explaining the world.

Readings of Historiographical Narrative The question of moral signification has shadowed readings of narrative in the Zuozhuan and Guoyu since before the time of Sima Qian. The founding myth of Chunqiu exegesis held that Confucius had encoded in the words of the chronicle his judgment of the events recounted there. Perhaps even be~ fore the Western Han, the Zuozhuan was understood as a narrative guide to the decoding of Confucius' judgments; by the Eastern Han, the Guoyu was considered an additional guide. 4 This co~opting of China's earliest large col~ lections of anecdotes in the project of Chunqiu hermeneutics established cer~ rain givens for the reading and writing of narrative, both historical and fictional, in later ages. On the one hand, narrative was secondary and sup~ plementary; in principle, it was read not for its own sake but as part of an approach to principles expressed otherwise (whether indirectly, as in the Chunqiu, or more directly, as in Lunyu). 5 For the Spring and Autumn period, there was a sort of bottleneck in the reading of history and of narrative: a reader must always return from the material of history to judgments of par~ ticular events and, more generally, to the moral philosophy of a single ob~ server. On the other hand, anecdotes about the Spring and Autumn period had thrived before the attachment of the Zuozhuan and Guoyu to Chunqiu studies, and narrative had developed its own topoi, its own techniques, and its own mechanisms of moral signification, some of which are described below. After these texts were put into the service of Confucianism, their

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congruence with the sorts of views expressed in Ruist philosophical texts was forced and incomplete and sometimes even deceptive. This was not without its benefits, however. The pretext that it was substantiating the classic gave historiographical narrative an alibi for incorporating whole ·worlds of oddities and allurements, of perversions and unaccountable motivations.6 Chinese narrative evolved in the space established by the Zuozhuan and Guoyu: secondary and excusable from the perspective of officially held tenets, it developed its own substance and its own principles, not all of which 7 could be dictated from above. Premodern Chinese literary criticism, when it touched on narrative in the Zuozhuan or the Guoyu, tended toward appreciation rather than theorization. Evaluations have taken two forms. The first is a free-standing essay of praise, a cataloguing of the text's virtues presented in an elevated style. Ultimately such essays trace their lineage to the Zuozhuan's own comments on 8 the Chunqiu. Among the more important examples are the remarks of Liu Zhiji, who held that "in the well-crafted narrative, succinctness is of the 9 greatest importance" and praised the Zuozhuan in particular for the skill with which its narrative style mimics the feelings appropriate to the events recorded: "When it recounts the movements of an army, documenting all that fills one's view, it is clangorous and seething. When it discusses measures taken against a fire, dissecting what is before one's eyes, it is carefully cultivated, lofty, and correct. When it speaks of victory and the seizing of captives, the gains are described completely. When it records rout and defeat, disorder lies spread out before one.''10 As is clear from the history of anthologies discussed in Chapter 1, the narratives of the Zuozhuan gradually came to overshadow the speeches as examples ofliterary excellence, especially in the eyes of scholars associated with the T ongcheng school. Of the twenty-eight passages Zeng Guofan selected from the Zuozhuan for his ]ingshi baijia zachao (Various transcriptions from the Classics, the histories, and the Hundred Schools), nineteen were narratives, all of them accounts of battles or civil disorders. A plurality ofLi Shuchang's twenty-two excerpts were battle narratives. Although Fang Bao did not include passages from historiography in his Guwen yuexuan, in his preface to that work and in several other essays he identified the narratives of the Zuozhuan as the purest examples of the Tongcheng schoofs highest literary value, the incorporation of a "system of meaning'' (yifa). 11

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The T ongcheng school also registered its admiration for Zuozhuan nar~ ratives in "evaluated and punctuated" (pingdian) editions. In Ming and Qing pingdian commentaries, the structure, style, and moral meaning of whole works or selected passages were subjected to extensive analysis. The method was the same whether the work under consideration was prose fiction, 12 drama, or one of the Confucian classics. T ongcheng adherents wrote doz~ ens of pingdian works on the Classics, including several on Zuozhuan and Guoyu. 13 The most accessible examples are the Zuozhuan ping (A critique of Zuozhuan) of Wang Yuan (style~named Kunsheng, 1648-1710), the Zuoxiu (The embroidered Zuozhuan, preface 1720) ofFeng Lihua (dates unknown) and Lu Hao (dates unknown), and the Zuozhuan wei (Subtleties of Zuo~ zhuan) ofWu Kaisheng (1877-1949). Wang Yuan was a 1693 provincial graduate who for several years was em~ ployed as an editor of the Ming historyr Fang Bao made his acquaintance in the capital and placed him first in his "Biographies of Four Gentlemen" ("Si junzi zhuan"). 15 In the statement of editorial principles (fanli) for Zuozhuan ping, Wang emphasized that his concern was to show the excellence of the writing (wen). To that end he selected discrete passages (zhang), each of them corresponding to a single incident or event (shi), and, disregarding the moral status of the events described, considered only matters of style. He further adapted the tools ofpingdian criticism to his own purposes. For each of his 144 selections, he offered evaluations both in the midst of the text (in double~ column interlineal comments) and at the end, registered major and minor paragraph breaks, and, by means of various marks placed to the right of the 16 vertical lines of characters, highlighted five types of passages. The author ofa 1910 preface to the Zuozhuan ping noted that of the several pingdian editions of the Zuozhuan that circulated in Wang's time, Fang Bao's Zuoshi pingdian (Cri~ rique and punctuation of the Zuo) was the best. Although Wang's work could not match that of the T ongcheng school's founding ancestor, it would none~ 17 theless contribute to readers' understanding of the Zuozhuan's yifa. Although it was common to excerpt or rearrange the Zuozhuan for the purposes ofliterary commentary, the Zuoxiu ofFeng Lihua and Lu Hao in~ corporates the whole text, in its traditional order, with the standard com~ mentaries of Du Yu and Lu Deming (556-627) and portions of the twelfth~ century Song literatus Lin Yaosou's commentary. The eyebrow section, in this case occupying more than a third of each page, is set aside for remarks

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on the style of narrative and speech; Feng and Li found something remark~ 18 able on almost every page. Like other pingdian commentators, Feng and Lu begin their work with a statement on principles and procedures (liyan), in which they explain why they have chosen to reprint the work with com~ mentaries, how they have marked notable passages, and what other literary commentaries they have consulted. They present their view of the Zuo~ zhuan's unique literary characteristics in several pages of"disjointed remarks" (zhiyan). For them, the Zuozhuan is the perfection of wen. Every choice of diction and taxis is a calculated expression of stylistic wisdom; many choices also express moral judgment. The text supports interpretation at every point and on every level; nowhere is it stylistically neutral. 19 Few readers today would share Feng's and Lu's faith in the comprehen~ sive literary design of the Zuozhuan. But many of their observations are still convincing. The anecdotes are constructed with extraordinary economy and demand of readers that they interpret not only speech and narration but si~ lence itsel£ Parallels and contrasts on the level of plot and character, which establish the conditions for coherence in many anecdotes, are never pointed out by the narrators. Like the best tropes, they work on readers even when 20 they pass unnoticed and are most artful where they seem most natural. The Zuoxiu proposes to make every trope, deliberate or not, fully visible. Wu Kaisheng, like his father, Wu Rulun, is listed among the adherents 21 of the T ongcheng school. His marking system is less elaborate than that of Wang Yuan, and he organizes his text somewhat differently. In a letter printed with the front matter of the Zuozhuan wei, he writes of having come across an edition of the Zuozhuan in which anecdotes had been removed from their separate years (where they had been placed early in the text's history in the interest of Chunqiu exegesis) and reassembled as consecutive narratives. This edition-which may well have been Ma Su's (1621-73) Zuozhuan shiwei (Zuozhuan rearranged by event) or Gao Shiqi's (1645-1704) Zuozhuan jishi benmo (Zuozhuan accounts of events, arranged as discrete nar~ 22 ratives) -disappointed Wu by the shallowness of its literary analysis but inspired him to produce his own commentaries on 107 reintegrated narra~ rives. For each of these, W u identifies the main subject and then gives an interlinear appreciation of the writer's craft, noting such effects as foreshad~ owing, irony, effective changes in diction and narrative pacing, surprises, and implicit praise and blame.

r68

The Anecdotal History

In a long letter concerning his work, W u emphasizes the subtlety with which the Zuozhuan encodes its moral judgments and finds fault with Fang Bao's and Yao Nai's efforts to explain its "system of meaning." He identifies four techniques of narrative indirection: foreshadowing (nishe), in which "the auspicious or inauspicious result has not yet arrived, yet the signs of failure are revealed in advance"; interruption and linking (hengjie), in which "given an unchangeable tendency of affairs, with unavoidable consequences, the meaning of what is said never departs from the path," even in describing apparently unrelated matters; seeping at the edges (pangyi), in which minor details help to reveal aspects of character and event; and contrastive reflection (janshe), in which the admirable behavior of one character serves as a foil for the failures of another. 23 For Wu, reading the Zuozhuan is a matter of identifying these and other tropes, in which the author of the work, like the editor of the Chunqiu, has hidden connections and judgments that could not be proclaimed openly. Twentieth-century literary analyses of the Zuozhuan and Guoyu have for the most part continued the work of the pingdian commentators. Zhang Gaoping, who has published more than any other scholar on the literary characteristics and value of the Zuozhuan, takes the T ongcheng view of the work as his starting point and organizes some of his discussions around a 24 vocabulary of tropes borrowed largely from traditional criticism. Other readers have refined the view, already commonplace for Tongcheng readers, that Zuozhuan narratives convey, sometimes very subtly, moral judgments of the men and women who act in them, and that the task of the reader is to learn to read these judgments. Burton Warson, for instance, describes the Zuozhuan as "a handbook of moral cause and effect, a system of divination based not upon numbers or omens, but upon the more complex, but infinitely more trustworthy, moral patterns discernible in actual human history.''25 He further recognizes that the mainspring of narrative in the work is ritual propriety, which is made the basis both of characters' fortunes and of observers' prophecies. The contribution of John C. Y. Wang, who sets out to understand Zuozhuan narrative through the basic terms of structuralist narratology-namely plot, character, point of view, and meaning-is perhaps to defamiliarize and foreground certain quasi-natural characteristics of historiographical narrative. His observations hold not only for the Zuozhuan but for most works of early Chinese historical and anecdotal writing. As he

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points out, it is for the most part true that characters are stable and rarely change in response to circumstances and that the narratorial point of view, normally objective, has little access to characters' interior lives. 26 Ronald Egan, who eschews the more mechanical categorizations of classic structuralist narratology, builds a clear and convincing account of the form and meaning of Zuozhuan narratives around examples from the great battle scenes and other episodes. His epitome of the meaning of the narratives is more specific than Watson's or Wang's: "The abiding lesson ... is that rul~ ers who are wise and who are dedicated to their people's welfare prosper, while those who are evil or foolish come to a bad end."27 Given the anonym~ ity and reticence of its narrator, Egan argues, the Zuozhuan most often es~ tablishes the meaning of the events it describes through the speeches char~ acters are made to deliver. With little explicit help from the narrator, readers must sometimes judge from the outcome of events which speech was most laudable. The need to substantiate expressions of moral meaning (which I will term 'judgments") explains the proliferation of predictions and other morally charged speeches in the anecdotes immediately preceding a battle. Incidents that are narrated without speech, or with shorter passages of dia~ logue, also point to the moral meaning of events, although these typically demand interpretation on the part of the reader. Although discrete passages of narrative are for the most part organized into larger groupings like the battle narratives, these larger units admit of interruptions from various kinds of heterogeneous materials: flashbacks, moralizing summaries, and self~ contained episodes that contribute little to the meaning of the whole. Fi~ nally, Egan sees in the anecdotal form of Zuozhuan narrative, and in its simi~ larities to the Guoyu, evidence that these works derived from "a tradition of 28 didactic historical anecdote." The formal difference that makes Zuozhuan narrative so singularly effective is the combination of discrete anecdotes into continuous narratives, a literary and intellectual task that the authors or compilers of the Guoyu did not undertake. The books of Sun Liiyi and Zhang Suqing stand out among the most re~ cent work on Zuozhuan narrative. Sun Liiyi, whose goal is to establish the importance of the Zuozhuan in the history of Chinese fiction (xiaoshuo ), be~ gins by reviewing the characteristics of its narratives: the objectivity of the narratorial voice, the use of folkloric and supernatural details, the revelation of character through action, and the care devoted to representing both dia~

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logues and extended speeches. In Sun's view the Zuozhuan's influence on later Chinese narrative is apparent in the ubiquity of these and other shared 29 characteristics in both classical and vernacular fiction. Zhang, in her Xushi yu jieshi (Narrative and exegesis), addresses the old charge that the Zuozhuan is not a commentary on the Chunqiu, a claim advanced by Han critics who saw the form of exegesis found in the Gongyang and Guliang commen~ taries a better guide to Confucius' practice of historical judgment. For Zhang, narrative itself is a form of commentary on the Classic, and the an~ ecdotes of the Zuozhuan are best read for the way they illuminate the moral meaning of Chunqiu entries; the Zuozhuan is, as stated in the "Jingjie" chapter of the Liji, a work that "matches words to events" (zhuci bishi) in order to ex~ plain the classic.30 This argument ignores the view, now accepted by most scholars, that much of what became the Zuozhuan was not originally linked with the Chunqiu and joined the latter as commentary only after a long pro~ cess of compilation and editing. Yet it is useful to be reminded that for many readers of the Zuozhuan, decoding the narratives was a matter of discerning a moral meaning consonant with the judgments encoded by Confucius in his editing of the Chunqiu. As I will argue below, moral judgment, although it does not necessarily lie behind the writing of the Chunqiu, does provide the motive energy both for Zuozhuan narratives and for traditional ways of reading them. In the narratives that are most characteristic of the Zuozhuan and Guoyu, form is the best evidence for function. Both the basic narrative unit, the an~ ecdote, and larger series of anecdotes put narrative in the service of judg~ ments about historical events, which may be expressed or left implicit. Both texts enshrine a principle of recompense (bao) that is continuous with, but more encompassing than, the ideology of ritual propriety. Reward, revenge, recognition, and payback of all kinds supply these narratives with their en~ ergy and explanatory power. The exchanges that take place within the single anecdote account for many of the other features of historiographical narra~ tive discussed in the following chapters. Recompense governs the collection of anecdotes into complete, unified series with recognizable ends. Issues of prerogative, possession, and reward bring aesthetic questions to the fore, and narratives of excess and error train readers in a form of judgment that en~ compasses both aesthetics and morality. Even the historiographers' relation with their subject is, as I will show in the final chapter, conceptualized as a matter of compensatory judgment. The morphology and dynamics of the

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anecdote inform historiographical narrative in all of its uses and all of its self~justifications.

Form and Judgment Scholars have traditionally drawn a sharp formal distinction between the Zuozhuan's accounts and the Guoyu's. As Wei Zhao (d. 273) put it in the preface to his commentary on the Guoyu, the work is devoted to "fine phrases and good speeches" (jiayan shanyu). 31 Cui Shu (1740-1816), denying that the two works could have come from a single author, wrote that in contrast to the Zuozhuan, "the Guoyu is by some later person who took the incidents of the ancients and imitated them in his writing; that is why its in~ cidents are few and its speeches many. What the Zuozhuan can encompass in a single phrase, the Guoyu has not finished with after heaping up paragraphs. Therefore its name is 'The Words of the States'; the genre of 'words' (yu) differs from the recording of incidents in that it is devoted to speaking.''32 It is true that the Guoyu devotes more space to speeches and only occa~ sionally gives long passages of third~person narrative like those found in the Zuozhuan. But the works have in common a treatment of speech and narra~ tive as interdependent in the production of meaning. No speech in the Guoyu is presented without a narrative frame, and the Zuozhuan, like the Guoyu, tends to allow the terms of interpretation advanced in speeches to find vindication in narrated events. In the Guoyu, consequences are often narrated directly after the speech, whereas the arrangement of material in the Zuozhuan means that there is a delay, sometimes of many years and many pages of text, between enunciation of a moral judgment and narration of the events that realize it. In either case, moral interpretation originates with the speaker. Received classifications exaggerate the differences between the two works and obscure their affinities with other early writings. The model presented here, although it is designed primarily to account for the workings of the Zuozhuan and the Guoyu, would with minor changes apply to much of the rest of early Chinese narrative, including the anecdotal illus~ trations adduced by Warring States and Han philosophers and the mated~ als collected by Sima Qian. To characterize the narrative techniques of his~ toriography is to epitomize a pervasive and durable way of making meaning. In the Zuozhuan and the Guoyu, as in much of subsequent philosophical and historical discourse, the basic unit of narrative is one best described as the anecdote. In the history of literary forms and in the classifications of nar~

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The Anecdotal History

ratologists, the anecdote is closely associated with the exemplum and differ33 entiated from other short narrative forms like the joke. Monika Fludernik defers any attempt to distinguish anecdote from exemplum or parable. Her outline of the structure of the anecdote is nonetheless useful for the analysis of early Chinese anecdotes. Following Joel Fineman, she argues that the anecdote is a primary means of projecting the illusion of the real and the particular within the historical text. She goes beyond Fineman to suggest that the anecdote owes its status as token of the real to its fundamentally oral character; it projects "the illusion of unfeigned, spontaneous storytelling, an illusion of historical immediacy." It therefore stands at the threshold of oral. an d wntmg. . . 34 Ity Fineman's article reminds readers of Chinese historiography of a startling and fundamental difference between his material and ours. Whereas the anecdote in Fineman's examples from Thucydides is a brie£ discrete narrative contained within a larger scientific or teleological exposition of the lawfulness of history's grand recit, in the Zuozhuan and the Guoyu, the anecdote dominates, displacing or obviating almost all non-anecdotal material, in35 cluding any overarching authorial explanation of history's unfolding. More than Western historical texts, these works engage the reader in the production of meanings, constantly modeling correct terms of judgment and en36 couraging the reader to adopt these for himself or hersel£ In their original milieu, the anecdotes may often have been transmitted by teachers who carefully guided their students' readings or may have been presented as part of persuasions that used the anecdote for didactic purposes. Nonetheless, the playful use of Spring and Autumn period anecdotes by philosophers of all orientations suggests that no scholastic orthodoxy succeeded in controlling interpretation. Only with the Shiji of Sima Qian would Chinese historiography have a major work in which the authoritative voice of a historian combined generalizing narratives of history's progress with substantiating anecdotes. The anecdote in the Zuozhuan and Guoyu is a brief narration (typically no longer than a few hundred characters) of interactions among historical agents that substantiates a particular judgment, expressed or implied, about the characters or about the event itsel£ Although any anecdote can stand alone as a complete narrative, many anecdotes in the Zuozhuan and in certain sections of the Guoyu are best read in the context of larger series of anecdotes, which bring together several events involving the same individual or

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state, often over a period of years, again to substantiate a judgment. Both the anecdote and the anecdote series have consistent morphological features that offer clues to the meaning of historical narration itsel£ Anecdotes normally begin by introducing a new time, place, and set of actors. The arrangement of the Guoyu foregrounds this habit. The three fas~ cicles concerning the royal domain of Zhou, for instance, recount incidents from the time of King Mu through the tenth year ofKingJing (510 B.c.E.). Each discrete entry begins with the posthumous name of a king and the year in which the incident occurred. Redundant information is omitted when the incidents of subsequent entries occur under the same king or in the same year. Thus the beginnings of three successive entries are: first, "In the twenry~first year of King Jiing"; next, "In the twenty~third year"; and finally simply "The king.'137 Throughout the Guoyu, the date marks the beginning of a section of narration and allows an initial dissection of the text. Because of the annalistic organization of the Zuozhuan, reference to the year is necessary only at the beginning of each year's material. Still, anecdotes have the same characteristic opening reference to place, time, and event as in the Guoyu; 38 quite frequently this statement corresponds to a notation in the Chunqiu. Even the battle scenes, which Egan and many others have seen as China's earliest and best long narratives, are made up of anecdotes, as is evident from the introductory sentences that shift the scene from place to place on the battlefield in the course of the larger account. The typical Guoyu anecdote also has the basic elements of narrative form as found throughout both works. It defines a time and a place, introduces a small group of actors, establishes a pretext for speaking, records the words of one or more speeches, sometimes with shorter passages of dialogue, and nar~ rates the effect (sometimes none at all) of these speeches, which permits an 39 evaluation of their importance. In the Guoyu's first anecdote, for instance, the time is the reign of King Mu; the place is, implicitly, the Zhou court; the actors are King Mu and the Zhai Duke Moufu; and the pretext for speaking is the king's planned attack on the Quan Rong tribe, a measure against which Moufu feels called to remonstrate. Moufu's remonstrance is the only speech, and the conclusion of the entry tells how the king, failing to heed Moufu's advice, brought upon himself exactly the sorts of trouble his minis~ ter predicted: "The king did not listen and attacked them. Having obtained four white wolves and four white deer, he returned. From this time forward, the furthest frontier reaches did not come to bring tribute.'Ao Judgment and

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closure are implied in the final sentence: the kings ilkonsidered deed has alienated former allies and contributed to the breakdown of the ideal early Zhou order. The words that follow introduce the time and place of the next anecdote: "When King Gong traveled by the Jing river.'A1 Of course, not everything in the Zuozhuan and the Guoyu can be classed as anecdote, but everything contributes to narratives, which are at base anec~ dotal. The closest thing to an exception is the comments on the wording of the Chunqiu, some examples of which are given below. These passages, which are probably not part of the original anecdotal materials of the Zuozhuan, ex~ plain how judgments of events have been written into the Chunqiu's choice of words, and closely resemble passages of Chunqiu exegesis in the Gongyang and Guliang commentaries.42 In the Zuozhuan, they appear side by side with nar~ ratives and contribute an additional level ofjudgment that guides the reading of narratives, especially when the anonymous Chunqiu exegete seems to have forced an interpretation that runs contrary to the implications of an anec~ dote.43 On the other hand, Chunqiu exegesis is largely dependent on narra~ tives of the sort collected in the Zuozhuan; without these we would know neither the names of actors nor the events that reveal their moral status. Although Chunqiu exegesis is itself non~narrative, it is parasitic on narrative. Marked judgments, also discussed below, lie at the margins of anecdotes without themselves constituting anecdotes. They are distinguished from the latter by their lack of a temporal setting and named actors. As I will argue, the anonymity and indefinite time of the "gentleman" (junzi) who judges events afford him and the views he represents an unusual mastery over his~ tory's meaning. Yet his authority is ultimately dependent on the narratives that support his judgments. There is in the Zuozhuan, below the level of the anecdote with its organi~ zing judgment, a smaller, dependent unit, a simple entry of details with only the barest indication of their importance. "In the spring of the ninth year [of Duke Zhao ofLu], Shu Gong [ofLu], Hua Hai of Song, YouJi ofZheng, and Zhao Yan ofWey met with the ruler ofChu in Chen.'A4 These details bear a special relation to the Chunqiu, in which uninterpreted entries are the rule. The note just translated, for example, corresponds to a Chunqiu entry that says, "In the spring of the ninth year, Shu Gong met with the ruler of Chu in Chen.'A5 Throughout the Zuozhuan are notes that are little more than expansions of sentences given in the Chunqiu. Like most of the material in the Guliang and Gongyang commentaries on the Chunqiu, these notes are

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designed to show how the detail recorded in the chronicle is significant. But the Zuozhuan's interest in the Chunqiu is not focused solely on authorial in~ tent or the editor's hidden judgment; by adding clarifying details to Chunqiu notations, the Zuozhuan accommodates them to larger series of anecdotes. Even when they do not explain a Chunqiu entry, Zuozhuan entries do sometimes remain at the level of details and, by giving neither judgment nor basis for judgment, amount to less than full~scale anecdotes. But in such cases the entries are followed rather closely by longer passages that incorpo~ rate them into complete anecdotes. The entry of mere details is most com~ mon at the end of a year, when events in the final months begin a process that gets full treatment in the next year. 46 These splits most likely result from Du Yu's editorial work on the Zuozhuan. 47 Because he was concerned to match the chronicle and the commentary year by year and to ftle narrative details in their proper temporal spot, he divided some anecdotes, producing the odd~looking truncated entries that come near the end of so many years. In the tenth month of Zhao 3 (539 B.c.E.), Zichan accompanies his lord to Chu. They are feasted by the king, who recites the hunting song "Auspicious Day" ("Jiri," Mao 180 ). Zichan prepares the hunting equipment, and the king 48 hunts. The only pretext for judgment here is Zichan's correct interpreta~ tion of the kings recitation as a sign that he is going to hunt. But even this reading is hardly remarkable, given the words of the poem, and does little to relieve the flat quality of the details recounted. Only when the hunting scene continues in the next year does that earlier entry take its place in a well~ formed anecdote. From his hunting grounds, the king sends an envoy to Jin to ask for permission to host a meeting of the allies, that is, to demonstrate Chu's precedence among the states. While Jin deliberates and finally decides to permit the move (more on this decision below), King Ling discusses his prospects with Zichan and is warned that he will succeed only as long as he strives for the same things that others want.49 The previous year's entry serves largely to set the stage for the king's conversation with Zichan. Occasionally an anecdote is split within a year, as happens when the Chu king arranges to take a bride from Jin. The first half recounts the king's deci~ sion and the progress of the Chu and Zheng bridal escort; the second half follows the bride and her two noble Jin escorts as far as the Chu court.50 There, in a passage discussed in Chapter 4 (p. 144), the king contemplates maiming the ambassadors to shame Jin but is finally persuaded that ritual propriety can be violated only if one is prepared to face the violence that will

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result. This scene and its fine speech are what give the anecdote its signifi~ cance; the earlier passage, separated from this one by an anecdote about the Lu duke's petty knowledge of ritual, is only a prelude. Generally speaking, formally isolated (non~narrative) entries in the text can always be associated with a nearby full~fledged anecdote and with the point that anecdote makes. The annalistic form, tending toward the chronological ordering of incidents, is in tension with the organic form of the anecdote, which draws details and 1 incidents together and avoids the bare recording of facts. 5 Narratology's structural analyses are indispensable for the comparative study of narrative in different times and cultures, but they tell us little about the meaning of a single type of narrative in a particular historical and intel~ lectual context. Standard works like Seymour Chatman's Story and Discourse and Gerard Genette's Narrative Discourse aim mainly to present exhaustive descriptions of the paradigms (of tempo in narration, of relation of narrator to narrated material, of emplotment, to name only a few) that make any particular narrative possible. They leave it to others to consider what mean~ ing the production and reception of a particular narrative or type of narrative might have in a given historical context. To catalogue the basic units of Chi~ nese historiographical narrative, then, is only to mark the place of this genre within a grand typology of the world's narratives. What is needed, however, is not a demonstration that the Zuozhuan and Guoyu contain narratives of a particular type and that narratology can de~ scribe them-both are truisms-but an interrogation of the values these facts imply. Given the innumerable permutations of narrative possibility suggested by narratological models, what explains the particular practice elected by our historiographical narrators? How was their commitment to certain forms related to their reasons for telling historical stories? If narra~ tology has succeeded in rendering a more or less complete account of the conditions of narration, then one might ask of any narrative how it came to choose particular strategies from among the paradigmatic options and how narrative form and its various functions evolved together under particular historical circumstances. In the famous Zuozhuan story of a fateful turtle soup, the available com~ ponents of the anecdote form are put to exemplary use. It is the fourth year of Duke Xuan ofLu (605 B.c.E.). According to the third entry for this year in the Chunqiu, "In summer, in the sixth month, on the day yiyou, the Ducal Son Guisheng of Zheng murdered his ruler Yi.''52 The opening sentence of

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the Zuozhuan account introduces the doomed man and the gift that will bring his death: 53

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The people of Chu presented Duke Ling of Zheng with a turtle. The Ducal Son Song (Zigong] and Zijia [the Ducal Son Guisheng] were about to have an audience, when Zigong's eating-finger moved. He showed it to Zijia and said, "On other days when I have been like this, I always got to taste some exotic flavor." When they went in, the chef was about to butcher the turtle. The two men looked at each other and smiled. The duke asked about it, and Zijia told him. When it came time to treat the ministers to the turtle, (the duke) called Zigong forward but did not give him any of it. Angry, Zigong dipped his finger in the cauldron, tasted it, and exited. Enraged, the duke wanted to kill Zigong. Zigong and Zijia plotted to take action first. Zijia said, "Even when a domestic beast is aged, one is afraid to kill it. How much more in the case of one's ruler?" [Zigong] responded by [threatening to] incriminate Zijia. Afraid, Zijia went along with him. In the summer, they killed Duke . 54 L mg. The gift of the turtle announces a new narrative, distinguishing what follows from preceding material concerning the state ofLu. At the same time it sets the scene in the Zheng court and initiates the course of events that will lead to the duke's assassination. As in the great majority of narratives in the Zuozhuan, the Guoyu, and much oflater historiography, the setting for this incident is the court, which, as I have already suggested, is always represented as a sort of theater. An audience of ministers surrounds every ruler, and a vaster audience of ancestors, spirits, commoners, and peers surrounds every court. On occasions of ritual diplomacy and war the audience is even larger. Everyone watches what happens in court; whatever one does there, the narrative implies, is ultimately public and subject to interpretation, judgment, and reaction. Here the event in court inspires a sort of clairvoyance, and although news of the gift has not yet been announced, the tremor in Zigong's index finger hints at something good to come. As it happens, it is an index of a butchery more exotic than that of the turtle. The plot of the anecdote, the event it recounts, grows out of the little fragment of separate knowledge Zigong has gained. Perhaps for reasons

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having to do with the dynamics of the gift, the duke does not like the smile Zigong and Zijia share; out of caprice or jealousy, he frustrates expecta~ tions. 55 Instead of extending the expected generosity and confirming Zigong's premonition, he attempts to deny him his share of the gift. In stealing it instead, Zigong fulfills his own prediction and makes an open dis~ play of insubordination in court. Everything that follows is murderous plot~ ring, a contest that the duke loses. In a beautiful touch, Zijia's last remark reinvokes the image of the slaughtered animal, now not the Chu turtle but the duke himsel£ whose sacrifice returns the Zheng court to stability. The beginning of the anecdote establishes the place, the actors, and a phenomenon requiring response, in this case the gift. In the middle of the anecdote, appearances-the omen of the trembling finger-undergo inter~ pretation, which is recorded in the words of the interpreter, Zigong. Inter~ pretations imply expectations and actions. Zigong's prediction leads to his own expectations, to the duke's rejection, and, at the end of the anecdote, to the murder. In this way the incident of the stewed turtle, for all its strange~ ness, represents a general truth of anecdotes in the Zuozhuan and the Guoyu. An event as recorded in these works is a phenomenon in the radical sense of the word: it comes into view, presents itself as an appearance, and prompts interpretation.56 The latter usually takes place within the plot. As I will ar~ gue below, the anecdote is complete when a sort of physics of reaction has run its course, and when all the implications of appearance and interpreta~ tion have been worked out. For the duke of Zheng and his enemies, the valuable gift is the source of energy in the anecdote. Its appearance in court, followed by the appearance of the trembling finger and the two nobles' knowing smile, leads to the interpretations and reactions that bring the duke's death. Since nothing else has been opened to interpretation, the original energy is exhausted, and the anecdote is over. The final component of the anecdote, and the end toward which the nar~ rative is directed, is the judgment. At its most explicit, as in our example, the judgment is given full expression after the conclusion of the narrative: ~ 8 ~ 0 -T ~~ ~ f.il: ;it tl ~ • tl /f\ ;E. -tiL • tl -T 8 -t!L·~f.il:tt·Mtl·ti~m-t!L·M~·~~W-t!L·

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It is written that "the Zheng Ducal Son Guisheng murdered his ruler Yi" because his [Guisheng's] strength was insufficient. The gentleman says, "Humane but not martial, he could not succeed." Whenever a ruler is murdered, if the ruler [alone] is

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referred to by name, then the ruler was without the Way; if the subjects are referred to by name, then it was the subjects' offense. 57

In this most formal type ofjudgment, the Zuozhuan authors, like their counterparts in the Gongyang and Guliang commentaries, justifY the wording of the Chunqiu notation, reading it as a condemnation of Guisheng for his weakness in colluding with Zigong. The closing lines of the passage enunciate a principle of composition (introduced by Jan, "in all cases"), according to which the Chunqiu allegedly follows consistent practice in representing blame. Much of the scholarship on the Chunqiu in imperial China would be devoted to attempts to determine and refine such principles of composition (li) and, by so doing, to comprehend the sage-editor's standards ofjudgment.58 The Janli remarks were likely fairly late additions to the Zuozhuan composite.59 Of greater significance for the reading of Zuozhuan narratives is the marked judgment, which introduces into the narrative a named or unnamed 60 character who comments on events without participating in them. As in the remarks on Zheng's troubles, the judging figure is usually referred to as the junzi, "gentleman," especially in the earlier years of the Zuozhuan, where anecdotes often end with a remark from him praising or excoriating a char61 acter or evaluating an incident. In the second half of the work, in the material recorded for the years of Dukes Xiang, Zhao, Ding, and Ai, the judging figure is quite frequently named; when he is named, he is almost always 62 Confucius, called either Zhongni or Kongzi. The role of the sage in this narrative is a subject for a later chapter, but it should be noted here that he, more than any other named individual, is a model of correct historical judgment in the Zuozhuan as in the larger ideology of Chunqiu hermeneutics.63 Moreover, even though Confucius lives through many of the events of this part of the work, dying shortly before the narratives of the text end, in his comments he is normally as uninvolved in the events in question as the anonymous junzi. Marked judgment always has about it a temporal ambiguity. One does not know if the speaker was a contemporary of the judged events or lived in some later time. His authority may derive from autopsy or from the high ground of retrospection. 64 The same problems attach to the narrative voice itsel£ which speaks from some unspecified moment later than the time of the narrated events. The historiographers of the Zuozhuan abstain almost completely from commenting on material in their own voices. They narrate

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events and record statements about those events uttered by historical participants and observers, but they rarely claim to offer their own explanations. When they speak through the sage or the junzi, the judgments, like this one, 65 normally explain the event in terms favored by the Confucians. In anecdotes that do not include a comment from the gentleman or from Confucius, the way to judgment is often shown by a speaker, who has at his or her disposal all the rhetorical techniques and ways of knowledge discussed in the preceding chapters. I£ for example, a minister remonstrates against a particular course of action, as Moufu did, the speech itself establishes the relevant terms of judgment. As King Mu prepares his attack against the Quan Rong, Moufu explains that the plan is ill-advised because the Quan Rong have fulfilled all their duties under the governmental system of the ancients; they will have the military preparedness of virtue, and the kings campaign will only demonstrate his carelessness about virtuous government. As we saw above, the few sentences of narrative that follow Moufu's remonstrance do nothing more than confirm that his predictions were fulfilled. His speech determines the reader's interpretation of the narrative, even as the narrative and its ending tend to prove the validity of his interpretive scheme. When no gentleman or speaker comes forward to specify the terms of a judgment, the task of interpreting the anecdote is left to the reader. This interpretive imperative is partly a matter of style and has to do with a preference for concision. Narrative prose in the Zuozhuan differs quite markedly from the rhetorical technique employed in speeches. As is clear from examples discussed in the previous chapters, speakers (or the historiographers who scripted their words) strive for, and often achieve, effects of symmetry, parallelism, and balance. Between speeches, however, the narrators generally avoid all effects of balance, favoring a succinct, lapidary style that has ap66 pealed to some readers more than the marked patterns of the speeches. Under these stylistic conditions, even a literal understanding of the text requires real interpretive talent on the part of the reader and of the annotator, whose services are indispensable. Not only individual passages but whole anecdotes tax the reader's learning and hermeneutic skill. Some anecdotes are so compressed and so bare of clues to judgment that they remain enigmatic for commentators and readers. 67 Because judgment is an articulation of the principle thought to underlie both events and the narration of those events, obstacles to judgment are obstacles to readability; the reader who cannot

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make a judgment cannot tell what holds a series of events together as a narrative. Reading comes to resemble listening to a joke and not getting it. Zuozhuan narratives train readers by teaching interpretive skills.68 Many readers, including the critics discussed above, have expressed admiration for 69 the reticence of the Zuozhuan's style; its economies and silences exercise the reader's ability to draw connections, putting him or her in the position of a contemporary of the events narrated. Anecdotes model interpretive talent by making heroes of good observers and by recording their correct judgments beside the matters they judge. Even without openly performed acts of judgment, the narratives constitute a training in the reading both of historical texts-the Zuozhuan itself and the Chunqiu-and of the interpretable, textlike phenomena on which the plots of so many anecdotes turn. Not every fact yields immediate judgment. There is a surplus of detail and incident quirkily selected and deployed; there is a subtle narrative memory at work, a voice fond of understatement, and an eye for every surface peculiarity that conceals a dangerous truth. But the ubiquitous pattern of explicit judgment and narrative vindication establishes an atmosphere of such hermeneutic intensity that any narrative detail seems capable of rising into significance. A gesture, an expression, or a piece of clothing may set a scene or determine the course of events. Mere facts, the material of objective historiography as we know it, are absent. The judgment, even when it is left implicit, is the anecdote's raison d'etre. As Hayden White has argued, "the demand for closure in the historical story is a demand • . . for moral meaning, a demand that sequences of real events be assessed as to their significance as elements of a moral drama." It is 70 impossible, he suggests, to make narratives without moralizing. As the term itself implies, the judgment in a historiographical anecdote is fundamentally moralizing. Its function is to integrate the narrative of the anecdote, drawing together the smallest originating causes and the public, memorable events that result. 71 It puts into words the principles underlying events. When it is not stated, the habits of reading prompt readers to enunciate the judgment for themselves. An aura of certainty accompanies explicit judgments as expressed in speeches, especially predictions and remonstrances, although the speakers are of course represented as speaking before the events they foresee. Speakers have been given surreptitious access to the ends of their stories; in this way they become proxies for the authors, who, in White's view, would be

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the source of moral authority in the narrative. The sense of inevitability speakers convey originates in the narrators' assumption that phenomena in the world do indeed harbor interpretable meaning and that the good observer should be able to see it even before it has been declared outright in actions and events. As if against the view advanced by Wilhelm Dilthey and others, who held that historical understanding differs fundamentally from scientific knowledge, inasmuch as historical events are not repeatable and thus not subject to experimentation, early Chinese historiography im~ plies a continuity between the theoretical interpretation discussed in Chap~ ter 3 and the regular observation and judgment practiced in the daily course of court life. This continuity is far deeper than that envisioned by "scientific" histori~ ans in the tradition ofThucydides and Polybius. Events are not simply likely to recur at some time in human history. 72 They are repeatable: under given circumstances, a given sign reveals something specific about hidden inten~ tions or consequences, and such sequences of signification and fulfillment can be expected to repeat themselves. What prepares an observer to see his~ tory's repeatability is a knowledge both of past events and of various systems of knowledge. Most prominent among these systems is ritual propriety. The single most relevant code in a historiography overwhelmingly concerned with political life, ritual propriety is also intrinsically a system of public sig~ nification and thus lends itself well to the repeated dynamic of observation and interpretation. The historiographers have created a fictional class of historical scientists who, through their knowledge of history and ritual pro~ priety, understand the laws of signification, interpretation, and event so well that they can see the furure. 73 It is an index of the historiographers' prefer~ ences as compilers and authors that when these scientist~speakers judge what they observe, and when they explain the events that are about to occur, they express their laws in Confucian terms. To summarize, the anecdote, the basic unit of all narrative in the Zuo~ zhuan and Guoyu, always includes three readily identifiable formal features. The introductory sentence or sentences establish a new temporal and spatial setting and name individuals whose actions will make the plot of the anec~ dote. This opening passage may also introduce an event (in our examples, a king's plan and a gift) that has consequences. The middle of the anecdote is devoted to those consequences and often incorporates dialogue (such as Zi~ jia's and Zigong's conversation) or long speeches (like Moufu's remon~

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183

strance) that are meant to influence the course of events. The anecdote ends with an invitation to judgment, which may take any of several forms. The narrators may dictate this judgment by recounting the remarks of the gentleman or Confucius, they may narrate events that confirm a judgment presented in a character's speech, or they may leave the problem of judgment to the well-trained reader.

Experiments in Vision The most familiar narratives of the Zuozhuan and Guoyu suggest how consistently the intent to judge determines the selection and presentation of material. The introductory sentences set the stage for interpretable events; the middle of the anecdote recounts actions and reactions, some of them interpretive; and the ending upholds one interpretation. Coherence in the anecdote derives ultimately from the judgment, but it is typically introduced into the texture of the anecdote itself by being attributed to a perceptive character, an individual who both participates in the events of the narrative and embodies the historiographers' ideological sympathies. In this respect, anecdotes are experiments in vision: every event allows a new testing of Confucian values against the particularities of historical experience. Predictably, certain difficulties attend the experiments. The first complete narrative in the Zuozhuan, the famous tale of Duke Zhuang of Zheng, is known to the anthologizing tradition under the tide (taken from the Chunqiu notation for this event) "The Earl of Zheng defeated Duan at Yan."74 The narrative in fact consists of two separate anecdotes, the first concerning the duke's conflict with his brother and the second his reconciliation with his mother. An introductory passage of orientation (opening with chu, "in the beginning, formerly") gives the context for the brothers' conflict: their mother, who has hated the duke since his difficult birth, has plotted to depose him in favor of his brother Duan. In the middle of the anecdote, as Duan's power grows, the duke repeatedly rejects a minister's advice to forestall the coming conflict. Instead, the duke attacks his brother only when the latter has planned an invasion of the capital. In the end, the duke prevails and forces his brother into exile. Judgment follows, as the habits of anecdotal form indicate it should. According to the Zuozhuan's exegesis of the Chunqiu entry, the phrasing of the notation represents a condemnation both of Duan for his insubordination and of the duke for his failure to teach his brother well. Later readers, connecting this pas-

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The Anecdotal History

sage with the comment from the junzi given at the end of the second anec~ dote, have read his refusal to act early against a brother as evidence of his 75 moral failings, including unfiliality (bu xiao ). But judgment here is complicated as nowhere else in the Zuozhuan. De~ spite the patent excellence of the minister's warnings, well furnished with allusions to the old ways of government, the narrative experience readers ac~ quire in the course of the Zuozhuan and the Guoyu points to the duke as the moral and hermeneutic hero of this episode. He is the one who is patient enough to wait and who trusts that his brother will be brought down by his 76 own unprincipled acts. By issuing the order to attack only when Duan is preparing an armed campaign, the duke signals his own resistance to vio~ lence and his willingness to give his brother the benefit of the doubt. To the minister who urges him to take early action, he responds in terms that, un~ less they are more cynical than anything else in this historiography, are un~ exceptionable: a mother cannot lightly be opposed, and the rebel will bring himself down by his unrighteous deeds. The explicit judgment found in the passage of Chunqiu exegesis runs against the grain of readerly training, which 77 would recognize in the duke a blameless savvy. The possibility that the an~ ecdote is narrated for the sake of one judgment (in favor of the duke) and followed by a contesting judgment, perhaps from a different source, points to the heterogeneities in the text and to a struggle over its meaning, but it ultimately confirms the importance ofjudgment as the telos of narration.78 The anecdote that makes up the second half of Duke Zhuang's narrative begins when the duke punishes his mother by vowing never to see her again during their lifetimes: "As long as we have not come to the Yellow Springs [the underworld], I will not see her" 71' 7Jz 7~ • ~ f§ Jf! t!t,. He immedi~ ately regrets the vow. But there is recourse, and recourse that depends for its effectiveness on the interplay of private knowledge and public display.

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Kaoshu of Ying was a border warden at Yinggu. He heard of [the affair] and came to pay tribute to the duke. The duke invited him to dine.

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185

As he ate, he put aside the meat, and the duke asked about it. He replied, "My mother is still alive, and she gets a taste of everything I eat. She has never tasted the lord's stew: I would like to give some to her." The duke said, "You have a mother to give it to, and I do not!" Kaoshu ofYing said, "May I ask what you meant The duke explained the matter and even told him that he regretted it. He replied, "Why worry about this? If you dig down in the earth until you reach water, then make a tunnel and meet her there, who will be able to claim that you have not done what you said?" The duke followed his advice. Entering the tunnel, the duke chanted, "Inside the great tunnel: Joy is concentrated." Exiting the tunnel, Lady Jiang chanted, "Outside the great tunnel: Joy is spread abroad." 9 Then they were mother and son, as at the beginning?

To hear, to see, to know: these are the important verbs in this narrative. Everyone in the state has heard the exact terms of the duke's vow; Kaoshu has heard of his regret. The duke builds seeing into the terms of the vow: he will not see his mother again until both of them have reached the Yellow Springs. Coming to court with his plan ready, Kaoshu uses the business of the meat to get the duke to tell his story and in this way repairs the discrepancy between private knowledge and the semi-public knowledge of gossip. Knowing the story, he shows that he also knows (and has known all along) the solution, which lies in a new interpretation of the words of the vow. As often, the force of the anecdote derives from an act of rereading. Finally, acting out the audience (the "seeing," jian) that was supposed to take place after death, the duke and his mother adhere rigorously to the let· ter of the vow. The structure of the tunnel permits both of them to reach the groundwaters without so much as catching a glimpse of each other. There in the tunnel the duke speaks of their joy of reunion as an emotion contained and concentrated by the walls around them (rongrong). As mother and son emerge from the tunnel, their restored affection now visible to the observers of the state, Lady Jiang speaks of the same joy as a thing to be broadcast (xiexie). Perception itself is linked to the general presumptive unity of the state as audience. By playing on polysemous terms like jian, "to see," and wen, "to hear," by making problems and solutions dependent on these terms, the narrative puts the truth of the world's order beyond question. Kaoshu's plot shows the power of the observer, who reflects on events and words and masters their significations.

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The Anecdotal History

An explicit judgment follows:

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The gentleman says, "Kaoshu of Ying was filial in the purest way. Loving his mother, he imparted [this love] to Duke Zhuang. When the Shi says, The filial son shall not lack; forever shall gifts be bestowed upon your kind,' it is surely referring to this [filial behavior]."

Although the duke, like other rulers who condescend to accept advice from the humble, earns the implicit praise of the narrators, the judgment that ties the anecdote together has more to do with Kaoshu. Playing the familiar role of the indirect remonstrator, a literary type found in Zuozhuan and numerous other early works, he uses a right-minded cunning to restore the duke to proper intimacy with his mother. If there is any tension between the explicit judgment and the judgment implied by the narration itsel£ it lies in the emphasis on xiao, a virtue less central in Zuozhuan and Guoyu than in writings of the later Warring States and Han. 80 Without the gentleman's remark, the judgment suggested by the anecdote might state, a little less specifically, that Kaoshu is to be lauded for his ingenuity in negotiating a way between the. highly public vow and the duke's regret. A smart minister, if heeded, can . ng . ht. 81 m akethmgs An example of morphology and function can be found in another famous anecdote, also from near the beginning of the Zuozhuan. Cao Gui was a commoner who lived in Lu during the reign of Duke Zhuang:82 +~W··fi~ft·0~··WMR~·~BAI3·~*~•z·XW rJJ ~ · ~J 13 · ~ *~~ · *~g~• · J1J J....~ • r..~ fill t.J•. 013 ·1X*?JT '-tt • !it i& W-tf!, • 16, t.J 5t A · W13 · 1]\;!; * llN • .§;; !It ff:£ -tf!, • 013 · ~ tt 3!. ff!, • !It i& 1JO -tl!, • 16, t) fE! • W13 · ;j\ fE! * $ · t$ !It t~ -t1!, • 0 13 · ;J\ Z

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In the (duke's] tenth year (684 B.c.E.], Qi attacked us. The duke was going to do battle. Cao Gui asked for an audience. The people of his village said, "When the meat-eaters are planning about it, how are you going to get involved in itt Gui said, "The meat-eaters are uncouth and cannot plan things far ahead."

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187

He went for his audience and asked what wherewithal [the duke) had for doing battle. The duke said, "I do not dare hoard the food and clothes that give me ease but always share them with others." He replied, "Such a small favor does not reach everyone. The people will not follow you." The duke said, "I do not dare increase my sacrificial animals, jades, and brocades but always maintain them faithfully." He replied, "Such a small faith is not inclusive. The spirits will not bless you." The duke said, "In litigations small and great, although I be unable to determine the details, I always rule according to the circumstances." He replied, "That is a sort ofloyalty. With it you can fight one battle. Permit me to accompany you in battle." The duke had him ride along with him. The battle took place at Changshao. The duke was ready to drum for an advance. Gui said, "Not yet." The Qi army drummed three times. Gui said, "Now." The Qi army was routed. The duke was ready to gallop after them. Gui said, "Not yet." He disembarked, examined the wheel tracks, climbed the chariot rail and looked after them, then said, "Now." Then they pursued the Qi army. After the victory, the duke asked him the reason for his actions. He replied, "Battle is a matter of courageous spirit. With the first drum beats the spirit is aroused, with the second it is on the wane, and with the third it is exhausted. When they were exhausted, we were filled up, so we defeated them. Great states are unpredictable, and you have to worry about ambushes from them. As I examined their wagon tracks, I saw how chaotic they were; as I looked after them, I saw how their 83 flags trailed low. So we pursued them."

Like many of the commoners depicted in these works, Cao Gui is one whose words the ruler would ignore only at his peril. The anecdote begins with an exchange of the epigrammatic sort that serves to mark the difference between Cao Gui's village-based wisdom and the flightiness of the nobles, who 84 are characterized as overfed and dim-witted. Cao Gui's conversations with the duke will overcome the various distances that open up in these remarks. In Wang Yuan's analysis of the anecdote, all of Cao's questions have to do 85 with "planning things far ahead," the nobles' weakness. Cao's farsightedness allows him to plan both for battle and for a principled transformation of the nobles themselves. He collapses social distances by overturning the ascriptive hierarchy and by replacing it-if only temporarily-with a hierarchy of wisdom. The same certainty of vision that first compels him to offer his help also, in the end, allows him to see through the physical distances of the battlefield.

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Under questioning, the duke shows that he understands that battle 1s not a matter of superior forces but of the moral unity ofleader and people. Still, the generosity on which he bases his faith in his army's morale falls far short of the broad diffusion of benefits that Cao Gui has in mind. The duke's ad~ herence to ritual prescriptions is also compromised, and not likely to secure the help of the spirits. Only the duke's attitude toward the resolution oflegal disputes among his people wins Cao Gui's approval. Whether because as judge the duke restores the harmony of his people, or because in hearing evi~ dence and delivering judgments the duke realizes an ideal dialogue between center and periphery, or because (as in Wang Yuan's view) the duke is here most perspicacious in his planning, the legal relation with his people is, in Cao Gui's judgment, the one that will underwrite the duke's campaign. As Qian Zhongshu notes, Cao Gui's actions during and after the battle 86 follow a formulaic sequence. Wordless action-the enemy's drumming, the duke's intent to charge, Cao Gui's inspection-is followed by words"Not yet" (wei ke), 'Now" (ke yi)-and then by further words of interpreta~ tion. In these texts, certain categories of phenomena, including natural oc~ currences and the physical appearance, actions, and utterances of people in the world, are eligible for recounting as long as they carry with them their interpretability. In a case like Cao Gui's, reported speech first results from mute action and is as obscure as that action; one should not know, at the outset, why Gui first forbids and later permits the charge.87 Despite the un~ certainty of their motivation, however, Gui's commands are heeded and thus eliminate the barrier between his exclusive understanding and the actions of the army. Speech, as long as it is guaranteed by the promise of interpretabil~ ity, may carry authority even before it is understood. Finally, obscurity is dispelled and authority justified in an outline of a theory of military action, which Gui presents in response to the duke's question. The formal features of the narratives in the Zuozhuan and Guoyu raise ques~ tions about the uses to which these narratives were put. Narrative itself may be a universal phenomenon, but its particular forms respond to specific needs shared by tellers and audiences. Genres respond to occasions and, when occasions have become extinct, become monuments to them. 88 Who would now doubt that the formulaicism of the Homeric epics has to do with their origins in improvisatory performance or that type~scenes in the He~ brew Bible reflect storytellers' erstwhile possession of sacred historiography,

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or-to consider narratives of a very different sort-that such features as the style indirect libre and experimentations with time in the novel depend in part on literacy and print culture? As the basic unit of early Chinese narrative and the only unit from which longer accounts could be built, the anecdote as form recalls the world of uses and practices in which it flourished. First, the anecdote suggests orality. I have already cited Monica Fludernik's claim that the anecdote is a fundamentally oral form. Several scholars have recognized the importance of orally transmitted sayings and 89 anecdotes in the formation of early Chinese historical writing. The terminology for the passing on of knowledge and for the citation of knowledge in 90 debate bespeaks oral rather than literate avenues of transmission. Second, the anecdote implies a performative context that, when we look for it in the early sources, is to be found everywhere. Genuine references to the composition and use of written historical records are quite rare in historiography. As I showed in Chapter 2, however, the historiographers frequently depict the use of historical knowledge as a rhetorical tool well adapted to the purposes of court deliberation. Speakers who draw on the authority of history do not, for the most part, adduce complete anecdotes, but instead cite fragments of inherited language and details from common knowledge of the past. Passages in which speakers recount events of the Spring and Autumn period make it clear that the anecdote was useful as an interested account of one individual's, family's, or state's relations with others. As such, it functioned within an economy of bao, as a tally of services 91 rendered and debts owed. It is easy to see how the anecdotal genre of the Zuozhuan and the Guoyu would have thrived in the courts, the homes, and even the villages of the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods. The organization of the elements of the anecdote around discovery and justification of a judgment and the thematic preoccupation with visibility and interpretation serve the purposes of public justice both by preserving the memory of specific deeds and by exemplifying a particular way of evaluating those deeds. In one sense, then, the Zuozhuan and Guoyu are compilations of knowledge useful in public debate. Finally, Warring States court deliberations, persuasions, and debates between thinkers of different schools would have been appropriate places for lessons drawn from events of the Spring and Autumn period. As brief as the rhetorical prescriptions of Xunzi and Han Feizi are, they suggest that the 92 ability to use anecdotes well was a prized rhetorical skil1. Certainly Han

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Feizi valued the anecdotal material he accumulated, much of which closely resembles the anecdotes of the Zuozhuan and Guoyu, not for the historical truths it contained but for the arguments it would substantiate. It is con, ceivable, then, that the anecdote was in early China typically adapted to po, lemical uses and that many of the anecdotes that have come down to us were retold for the sake of the arguments they supported and were shaped by their use in these arguments. Attempts to read the Zuozhuan and Guoyu as histories and thus as intrinsically different from anecdote collections made by writers like Han Feizi may require a distinction of categories where there was originally no such distinction. Historiography is philosophical polemic with its overt principles and classifications stripped way, or submerged, or simply left unwritten; left to stand by themselves, the anecdotes came in time to resemble disinterested accounts. The anecdote in the Zuozhuan and Guoyu is narrative specially adapted to substantiate certain kinds ofjudgments. That an aura of interpretability sur, rounds actions and objects in these works is partly the result of their asso, dation with the Chunqiu; praise for the chronicle's subtlety in conveying hid, den meanings tended to affect the reception of the anecdotal works connected with it. In a deeper sense, however, Chunqiu hermeneutics, with its assumption that words mean something other (and something more plainly judgmental) than what they say, is rooted in the habits of the anec, dote. The latter, after all, derives most of its energy from the movement from secrecy to openness and replays the drama of successful interpretation many hundreds of times over. What attracted commentators and antholo, gists to the historiographical works was the play of clarity and obscurity in the narratives and the prospect of a historical writing in which every word embodied moral authority. The morphology and thematics of the anecdote suggest that such concerns were shared by the first users of the form. In re, telling anecdotes that were constructed around opportunities for judgment and in favoring themes of vision, the historiographers made the world and its history a laboratory for their own notions of ritual.

SIX

Narrative and Recompense

The anecdote cannot easily accommodate multiple plot lines. It is well adapted for the narration of events involving a limited cast of characters and a single set of consequences, but when a narrative involves many characters or groups, with varying motivations, acting in different times and places, the anecdote falls short. For more complex chains of events, the historiographers of the Zuozhuan and Guoyu combined anecdotes into series, building largescale narratives that are nonetheless fundamentally anecdotal in character. The anecdote series merits study for its role as a shaper of historical memory: it is the narrative genre in which the most important and memorable events of the Spring and Autumn period are recounted. Anecdote series share certain formal characteristics and themes with the anecdotes from which they are constructed. Judgment, the telos of short and long narratives alike, again accounts for much of the manner and content of narration. Interpretive acumen allows certain adepts to see in other individuals the ambitions and weaknesses that will give rise to events. In the culminating anecdotes of a series, which form the climax of the narrative, the predictions of observing adepts are fulfilled, and the reader (helped along by the narrators and certain commenting characters) is drawn to judge both the actors and the events that have transpired. Underlying the aggregation of events and anecdotes in the series is a principle of recompense, or bao. The anecdote of the Chu turtle exemplified ways of conserving and redirecting energy typical of many narratives in the Zuozhuan and Guoyu. Gifts, services, offenses, and moral successes and failures have consequences, which the

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historiographers trace and record with the care of accountants. The purpose of anecdote series, and one of the primary aims of history writing, is good bookkeeping.

The Anecdote Series The fairly simple principles by which the anecdotes in the Guoyu are organized have already been described. The compilers ordered their material first by the state in which an event occurred or was relevant and then, within each of these sections, by chronology. Since there is no attempt to narrate events for every year or to coordinate the histories of separate states, chronology is more loosely packed than it is in the annalistic arrangement of the Zuozhuan. Nevertheless, this organizational scheme favors the anecdote series, higher-order narratives in which the events narrated in several individual anecdotes (and the force of these anecdotes' judgments) are gathered together in the single outcome that is common to them all. To put it another way, a single event-an important battle, the death of a king, or the like-is related to its causes, and these causes are themselves events that are narrated as anecdotes. Familiar examples of the anecdote series in the Guoyu are the story of events in Jin between the time of Duke Xian and the rise of Duke Wen, and the three accounts ofYue's triumph over Wu. 1 The distribution of material by states in the Guoyu perhaps reflects a desire to preserve the unity of anecdote series, which in many cases have as their characters the nobles of a single state. The Zuozhuan's annalistic organization complicates the treatment of anecdote series. When all material is narrated in the year in which an event occurred or became relevant, and when the unfolding chronology of months and years takes precedence over any other source of unity, anecdote series occur in counterpoint with unattached anecdotes and with other series. Recognition of higher-order unity becomes another test and another source of training for the reader. The brief entries of the Chunqiu provide a sort of framework for the reader, as they perhaps did for the compilers of the Zuozhuan, and anecdote series serve both to flesh out the discrete events noted in 2 the Chunqiu and to bring them into relation with one another. Although the annalistic style regularly forces the reader to draw together the events of different years, it also, and not entirely incidentally, encourages the reader to trace connections among objectively unrelated events taking place in several states in a single year. 3 By distributing anecdotes along a time line, the com-

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pilers of the Zuozhuan established time as a fundamental ordering principle and forced readers to pay constant attention to the unities of subject and meaning that can emerge over several years or within a single year. The Zuozhuan defers meaning more effectively and more stubbornly than the Guoyu does. In the Guoyu, the consequences of an action are quite frequently narrated at the end of the anecdote. In the Zuozhuan, one waits for the fullness of time and then, as often as not, does for oneself the work of drawing 4 together beginning and end. The anecdote series, like the anecdote itsel£ presumes certain conditions that are necessities in any plot: continuity in time and place, intelligible relations among characters, a beginning and an end with some transformation in between. But what makes both narrative forms live, what rules over all their disparate parts, is the judgment, which can be made explicit in the utterance of a character or be left up to the reader. Because characters so consistently model judgment for us and thus demonstrate that making judgments is the justification for observing and retelling details of events, we are trained in our reading to expect judgment, if not from the characters then from ourselves. With this learned habit, we negotiate the complicated texture of the Zuozhuan, registering the rhythm of its judgments as they accumulate in successive anecdotes and in anecdote series. At the same time we learn both to look for unmarked opportunities for judgment and to recognize tensions between the overt claims of speech and the implicit meaning of narrated details. A series of anecdotes recounting the rise and fall of King Ling of Chu during the years corresponding to 547-529 B.c.E. illustrates these propositions and points up some of the most common characteristics of the anecdote series. 5 The series is extraordinary, perhaps, in its length and in the amount of proleptic introductory material it presents, but in form it is entirely typicaL A moment of violence (here the suicide of the king after a mas6 sive rebellion) casts its long shadow back over incidents presented in anecdotes in previous years, gathering them around a single, unifYing judgment, which itself is never fully expressed. Moments of violence within or among states are privileged incidents that inspire predictions and interpretations and transform series of anecdotes into loosely articulated large-scale narratives. More rarely, moments of concord within or among states perform the same function. The confrontation, whether it is a clash or a celebration, is itself accorded significance (of a type examined in the next chapter) and lends significance to all the incidents related to it.

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Narrative and Recompense

Anecdote series incorporate three types of stories. First among them are proleptic anecdotes. A formal feature especially prominent in the series concerning King Ling is a kind of narrative forebalancing, in which the beginning of the tale consists of repeated announcements of its end. This fore balancing is most apparent in the grand arrays of proleptic anecdotes, usually with explicit predictions, that begin King Ling's story and many of the other 7 great anecdote series. Broadly speaking, the more traumatic the event, the further into the past its effect has been projected and the more predictions it 8 has accrued. Vast numbers of anecdotes in the Zuozhuan are purely proleptic and serve to announce well in advance the coming of a great disaster. This narrative habit has several implications. First, the longer narratives take on their characteristic balance. Predictions gather around a person or a state in a long series and are redeemed together in a great fulfillment that brings the narrative to an end. Much of the drama of the narrative is shifted forward, to the work of observation and interpretation that makes prediction possible; and this drama of foresight matches in intensity the drama of the momentous event itsel£ Second, all observable events are imbued with a quality of foreordination. The retrospective habit that ensures that only true predictions are recounted also imports into the past a sure but coy knowledge of the future. Observable details in general take on an ominous quality, and the keys to interpretation are in the hands of the narrators. Third, forebalancing, by which the one who remembers puts a whole series of anecdotes in order around a single great event, represents a mastery of the past by the present: the present narrator's principles explain what happened then. But since the narrator builds anecdotes as predictions and puts the words of the predictions into the mouths of the ministers of that time, he disguises his 9 own mastery of the past as their mastery of their present. I£ as the evidence indicates, the Zuozhuan originated in a ministerial class, such representations of ministerial wisdom would serve clear interests. As Wu Kaisheng noted, King Ling's story is massively counterbalanced with a series of observation-and-prediction anecdotes. 10 First, before he usurps control over Chu, come eight predictions having largely to do with his coming success. When delegations from other states visit Chu for the funeral of King Kang (r. 559-545), a Zheng diplomat observes Prince Wei (now lingyin, or chief minister) with the new king, Jia'ao, and predicts prosperity for the prince, who cuts the more impressive figure; as the Zheng man puts it, grass does not grow well beneath a pine tree. 11 A Chu envoy to Lu

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to answer a Lu minister's questions about Prince Wei; that minister deduces that the envoy is concealing his intention to join the prince in some 12 "great undertaking" (dashi). The next two predictions look beyond usurpation to final disaster. When Prince Wei kills the Chu master of horse (sima) and confiscates his property, another official foretells ruin in a brief formal speech: the prince will not escape disaster, since instead of fostering good men he is harming them and thus bringing trouble to the state; the master of horse is as vital to the chief minister and king as limbs are to the human body; such destructiveness makes trouble inevitable. 13 Then, in a much longer, brilliantly composed speech already discussed in Chapter I (pp. 30-34), Beigong Wenzi ofWey, accompanying his duke on a visit to Chu, draws conclusions from the prince's behavior. The prince has taken on the "dignity and deportment" (weiyi) appropriate to a lord and will soon wish to be a lord; he will succeed for a time but will finally meet his demise. Questioned, Beigong W enzi supports his case with several citations and finally defines the proper weiyi around the ideal figure of 14 King Wen of Zhou. Prince Wei personifies defiance of the code of King Wen. The predictions continue until the moment of the usurpation itsel£ when the prince finally strangles the king in his sickbed. 15 After the prince has made himself king, the interest of the predictions shifts to his ambition and, more important, to his coming downfall. His main aim, it turns out, is to establish Chu's leading position by calling a meeting of the states, a move that is both foreseen and seen beyond. 16 After the triumphant meeting, observers look forward only to the kings fall. There are at least ten predictions, ranging from the perfectly explicit to the merely suggested.17 The backbone of the unified narrative, in fact, is the series of predictions, which account for most of the textual space occupied by the narrative and largely dictate the selection of incidents and details that are narrated. This special form of historical narration is perhaps predominant in the Zuozhuan: the interest of incident, observation, and recollection derives from the interpretability inherent in all human action. The historiographical imagination frequently engages with the past not for its own sake but for the way it presages some later point in the past. Even if the preserved details have historical value-and we may choose to believe, for instance, that Prince Wei did indeed use the regalia of the king before it was proper for him to do sothey also directly serve the interests of plot making, the joining of anecdotes into balanced series. Relatively few anecdotes in the whole text of the Zuo~·efuses

196

Narrative and Recompense

zhuan stand alone; most look forward to climaxes of some sort, whether violent confrontations or more peaceful forms of success. These culminations themselves look backward, to the long trains of signifying moments that the narrator has gathered behind them. Prediction and fulfillment, along with the regular rhythm ofjudgments recorded or implied, are the aspects ofZuozhuan narrative that make it more than an enumeration of anecdotes. A second type of anecdote found in anecdote series might be termed the "amplifying anecdote." Unlike the proleptic anecdote, it does not look forward explicitly to the coming culmination. Still, the confirmation of the judgment implied in this sort of anecdote is ultimately dependent on the end of the whole course of events recounted in the series. Even without the proleptic anecdote's familiar combination of observation and prediction, the events described in the amplifying anecdote are valued for the way they reveal the hidden meanings of character and event. King Ling's encounter with 18 the Qi rebel Qing Feng is a good example:

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The king paid him no attention, and made [Qing Feng] shoulder a great axe and go around to all the allied forces to say, "Let no man do what Qing Feng of Qi did, killing his ruler and enfeebling the heir to make treaties with the ministers!" But Qing Feng said, "Let no man do what Wei, a lesser son of King Gong of Chu, did, killing his ruler-his elder brother's son Jun-and taking his place to make treaties with the allies." The king hurriedly had him killed.

The anecdote supports some simple judgments about the characters of the men involved: Jiao Ju is wise, the king obstinate, and Qing Feng quite similarly obstinate. The king is overly confident in his ability to impose his will on Qing Feng and force him to confess his crimes before the allies. When Qing Feng instead indicts the king for the same crimes, he unwittingly affirms the value of ministerial advice and with it a certain inevitability in the triumph of ritual propriety over private ambition. The king's offense against his predecessor is still living in public memory, still awaiting the compensation that will come when the king falls. Beyond assessments of individual characters, the judgment implied by the whole anecdote is that the ruler who has sullied himself by public violation of ritual propriety has cut himself off from the very mechanism by which power is exerted; he cannot punish even a man who richly deserves punishment. The failure of the king here represents in miniature the causes and course of his final fall. Distinct anecdote series often become intertwined with one another. When King Ling invites Duke Zhao ofLu to celebrate with him the completion of his extravagant architectural undertaking, the Zhanghua complex, the resulting anecdote contributes as much to the unfolding narrative of the feckless duke's life as it does to the drama of the king' s rise and fall. The king at first gives the duke a famous bow known as the "Daqu," but soon comes to regret the gesture. His minister Wei Qiqiang, hearing of the matter, visits the 20 duke and congratulates him. "Why do you congratulate met asks the duke.

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He replied, "Qi, Jin, and Yue have lusted after this [bow] for a long time. My lord had no one worthy to give it to and thus passed it on to you. You must have defenses so well prepared against your neighbors on three sides that you can protect such a treasure with care: should I presume not to congratulate you?"

The ruse works; the frightened duke returns the bow to the king. The anecdote contributes to the wealth of information surrounding King Ling's reign

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Narrative and Recompense

and, more directly, to the narrative of Duke Zhao's visit to Chu. But those loose links are overshadowed by the central pleasure of the anecdote, which lies in Wei Qiqiang's artful use of ceremony to undo the regrettable effects of ceremony. Duke Zhao perhaps accepted the gift carelessly, but Qiqiang fills the gift and the exchange with a significance that terrifies the duke. Valuable now not as a weapon but as a treasure, the bow resumes, in Qiqiang's words, some of the original meaning that made bows good ceremonial gifts: it turns the recipient into a defender and proxy of the donor. 21 Perhaps the incident illuminates Duke Zhao's shortsightedness and pusillanimity, or King Ling's wavering greed, but the focus, as in a great many other anecdotes, is on one minister's know-how and verbal skill; we will return to this theme of cunning shortly. Here interpretation, which is left up to us, leads not to greater integration with the series of anecdotes, but to the isolated appreciation of a single act. The final type of anecdote found in the anecdote series is the culmination, in which narrative debts are paid off as predictions are fulfilled, wisdom and folly have their consequences, and characters get their just deserts. In the culmination, the reader and selected individuals within the narrative acquire the ability to understand the anecdote series as a whole and to reflect on the relevance of a final judgment to the mass of discrete incidents. Paul Ricoeur, who calls this act of narrative sense-making "grasping together," has analyzed it in Aristotelian terms and relates it finally to Kant's understanding of judgment, including aesthetic judgment. 22 The aesthetic, both as a category of experience and as a special type of judgment, is immensely important to the historiographers of the Zuozhuan and the Guoyu, as I will show in the next chapter; they tend to build both supporting anecdotes and culminations on aesthetic events and continually treat the possessions, gestures, and words of characters as objects of a critical observation that is fundamentally aesthetic. The whole anecdote series can be viewed from the perspective of the culmination, as a matter of extending the reach of the narrative backward into the past to gather together the first interpretable hints of causation. 23 The culmination of King Ling's tale has two parts: the first establishes the moral terms of his fall, and the second completes the narration of the fall. The second, the fall itsel£ is the simpler of the two anecdotes. The king has committed a series of offenses against other nobles of Chu and allied 24 states. A rebellion instigated in the annexed state of Cai by the clever aide of a Cai loyalist comes to involve contenders for the Chu throne, who march

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into the capital of Chu. King Ling, tarrying on the winter hunt at Ganxi, cannot oppose them, and they dissolve his army by proclaiming that any soldier who delays in joining them in the capital will have his nose sliced of£ The king's collapse comes when they kill his sons: 25 £~~0~Z~&·e~f$T·B·AZ~~~&·#~*~·~~

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Narrative and Recompense

kinship with his victims. The epiphany brings a total and, in realistic terms, unlikely transformation of the king, who is no longer willing to take even the 27 most obvious steps to preserve his power. His answers to his ministers resemble nothing more than the voice of tendentious historiographical explanation speaking through him: his ending was inevitable, blessings cannot be repeated, his enemies' opposition is justified and invincible. The king surrenders to the logic of ritual offense and revenge that the historiographers have built into their narration. After his surrender, no one needs to assassinate him; once he has given himself over to the judgment against him, he kills himsel£ Shen Hai's treatment of him and his corpse restores in small measure the ritual honor due, not to the man, but to the king. The ground is prepared for the king' s epiphany in the first culminating anecdote, where a minister's cunning remonstrance-like performance fractures the kings complacency and turns his ambition against him. The king has gone on the winter hunt in the eastern part of his state, using the opportunity to send military forces to harass the state of Xu and its more pow8 erful backer, Chu's rival Wu; he establishes his camp at Ganxi?

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There was a snowstorm, and the king dressed in a leather cap, a feathered coat from Qin, a kingfisher-blue cape, and leopard-skin boots, and went out holding a whip, accompanied by his attendant Xifu. Zige, the Minister of the Right, waited upon the king in the evening. When the king saw him, he removed his cap and cape and put down his whip to chat with him. He said, "In times past our former king Xiong Yi, together with Lii Ji [of Qi], Wangsun Mou (ofWey], Xie Fu [ofJin), and Qin Fu (ofLu], served King Kang (ofZhou). All the other four states got their portions (of reward]; we alone did not. If we now send someone to Zhou to ask for the cauldron that is our portion, will the king give it to us?" (Zige) answered, "He will give it to you, Your Highness! In times past our former king Xiong Yi was off in the wilds of Mount Jin. Riding in a cart of sticks and dressed in humble clothing, he lived in the grasses of the plain. He crossed mountains and rivers to serve the Son of Heaven, and all he had was a bow of peach wood and arrows of thorn to present as tribute to the royal court. 'The Qi [founder] was an uncle to King (Cheng of Zhou); Jin, Lu, and Wey were full brothers of the king. It was thus that Chu was without a portion, whereas the others all had theirs. Now Zhou and those four states all serve you, Your Highness, obeying only your command. How could they begrudge you your cauldron?" The king said, "In times past my ancestral uncle Kunwu dwelt in the old territory ofXuu. Now Zheng greedily exploits his fields and will not give them to us. If I ask for them, will [Zheng] give them to us?" (Zige) said, "They will give them to you, Your Highness! If Zhou will not begrudge a cauldron, how can Zheng begrudge these fields?" The king said, "In times past the allies thought of us as remote, while fearingJin. But now we have built great walls in Chen, Cai, and [the two areas of] Bugeng and gotten a thousand chariots from each-you yourself had a part in this accomplishment. Certainly the allies will fear us now!" (Zige] said, "They will fear you, Your Highness! These four states alone would be formidable. When Chu is added to them, how could they not fear Your Highness?" The Director of Artisans Lu then presented a request, saying, "Your Highness has ordered that a jade tablet be carved for the decoration of an axe handle; I beg permission to seek orders from you." The king went inside to look at it. Xifu said to Zige, "You, sir, are the great hope of the state of Chu. Now that you speak to the king like his own echo, what is the state to do?" Zige said, "I am ground sharp in preparation. When the king emerges, my blade will cut him down." The king emerged, and they conversed again. The Scribe of the Left Yixiang

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hurried across the court, and the king said, "This is a good scribe-look well upon him. He is able to recite the 'Three Barrows,' the 'Five Canons,' the 'Eight Guidelines,' and the 'Nine Mounds."' (Zige] replied, "I once asked him a question. In times past King Mu wanted to give free rein to the desires of his heart and travel everywhere under Heaven, so that every place would show the tracks of his carriages and the hoofprints of his horses. The Zhai Duke Moufu composed the poem 'Qj.zhao' to still the king's heart, and it was thus that the king managed to die in the Zhi Palace. I asked [the Scribe of the Left] about this poem, and he did not know it. If you ask him something at all obscure, how can he possibly know it?" The king said, "Can you recite it?" (Zige] replied, "I can. The poem says: 'Sonorous is the "Qizhao," Showing forth the sound of virtue. Think on our king's good orderLike chimestones, Like bells. He makes the strength of the people his measure And has no heart for drunken satiety."' The king saluted him and went in. He could neither eat nor sleep, and for several days he could not gain mastery of himself. And thus he came to grief. 29 The narrative of King Ling is built around the character's equivocal rela30 tion to ritual propriery. As we will see, a marked judgment from the most authoritative of all historical observers equates his extravagance and acquisitiveness with a departure from li. In this penultimate scene of King Ling's reign, everyone on stage conspires to display the king' s failures in their worst light. At first the reader cannot know what Zige is doing. The unusual extended description of the king's sumptuous clothing is perhaps a veiled dis31 approval of aesthetic excess. Yet when the king begins his questioning, there is little indication of irony in Zige's fawning responses. His intentions are subtle enough to escape the king' s personal attendant, who asks him how he can play along with these delusions. The axe metaphor of Zige's answer resumes the aesthetic theme and adroitly incorporates the happenstance of the moment, the king' s temporary withdrawal from court to view a ceremo32 nial axe that is being made for him. This axe, like the axe with which the king had Qing Feng executed, is now turned against its owner; in the figurative sense opened up by Zige's own trope, the two axes are identical. Haun Saussy has argued that the axe and axe handle in the Shi poem "Chopping

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Trunks" ("Fake," Mao 158) can be read as metaphors for the workings of 33 mimetic reproduction in strong political interpretations of poetry. King Ling's axes are a confirmation. Mimesis functions not only to reproduce the right and the appropriate, as in "Fa ke," but also to subject evildoers to the consequences of their deeds. The blade, both here and in the Shi example, is poetry. When the king returns, we watch to see how Zige will cut him down and find ourselves in the familiar (though here unmarked) territory of the remonstrance. Whether by arrangement with Zige or by the plotting of the narrator, the scribe Yixiang crosses the court, again providing Zige with just the terms he needs. The king will understand that this has not been idle chat, that his minister has been leading him on, and that the recondite bit of lore Zige displays is a precedent against which his own behavior can only be judged negatively. Here the customary indirection of remonstrance accounts for its devastating force. The moment of peripeteia is left unnarrated and falls somewhere between the end of Zige's poem and the king' s withdrawal. In this moment are many revolutions. The kings attention is suddenly forced back from the remote reaches of time and from his own ambition, which extends not only to Zhou bronzes and Zheng lands but even to the possession of arcane texts through the scribes in his employ. The ultimate object of ambition, the poem, is transformed from harmless curiosity into caustic antidote. King Mu, whom King Ling perhaps considered a peer, is revealed as a superior. From the point of view of the end of King Ling's story, even King Mu's death is superior, since the poem has kept him (unlike King Ling) from venturing out to die beyond the frontier. Finally, Zige is no obsequious creature of the king and his ambitions but a voice of critique and advocate of the Zhou standard of right, shared by the members of the king's court and its Zhou predecessors. This standard of right is also shared implicitly by the narrator and reader of the Zuozhuan, who must understand it in order to make sense of this and other narratives. The king is alone. Two more elements of anecdote series, both quite clearly marked by formulaic usage, confirm the importance of balance and judgment in the construction of series and the conclusion of narratives. These features are marked judgment and analepsis. The marked judgment functions in the anecdote series as it does in individual anecdotes, as a non-narrative exposition of meaning, often attributed to an anonymous gentleman or to Confucius,

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attached at the end of a narrative. The only difference is that the stretch of narrative the judgment accounts for is now longer and more complicated. In this series, judgment is pronounced immediately after Zige's recitation and the king's response: #ffiS·~~~~·%amm·t~·MWa·••I~~~~·~~ ey:Jj~ij!Z~ •

Zhongni said, "There is a maxim from times long past: 'To master oneself and to restore ritual propriety is humaneness.' Fine indeed! If King Ling of Chu could have 34 done this, how could he ever have been shamed at Ganxit

As in the anecdote about Duke Zhuang, there is a tension between explicit judgment and the judgment implied by the anecdote itsel£ Although ritual propriety has played a role throughout the anecdote series, justifYing the enmity that the king has aroused, this anecdote includes no direct reference to it. The temporal detachment of the judge from the details of the case, a common feature of the marked judgment, is underlined in this case by an ambiguity of reference. One of the last details narrated was the kings inability to gain mastery of himself ( zike) after hearing Zige's account of the poem "Qizhao." Is this the self-mastery Confucius has in mind? Or is he thinking of the extravagance and avarice the king has demonstrated so abundantly in this anecdote and elsewhere? This last loss of mastery is an odd one: it appears to result from Zige's devastating citation of the poem that stilled King Mu's heart. The kings collapse is an unrestrained aesthetic or moral response, as unrestrained, it is suggested, as any of the kings many other departures from ritual propriety. For the king to return to himself from this distraction would be for him to resume his extravagant, unthinking ways, and would in no way be a restoration of li. Confucius speaks generally, from after the fact and well out of context; that he refers to the king by his full posthumous tide, "King Ling of Chu," also contributes to the somewhat detached tone of the judgment. Like the anonymous gentleman, the sage judges from the position of summation, commenting on the whole career of . . 35 t he fj1gure m questiOn. That does not mean that the terms of his judgment are irrelevant to the anecdote. Confucius' maxim takes it as a given that dissoluteness-a lack of self-mastery-and departures from li are complementary moral failings. The king is similarly dissolute and unrestrained by ritual propriety in his reactions to every object of his desire, whether it is the stolen throne, the hegem-

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ony, or Zige's deadly citation. In the end, however, after acting in wanton contravention of all inherited standards, he is made to see through the illusions of power and to learn how far he is from propriety. Whatever the character does to repress it, ritual propriety always returns. Following the course of the anecdote and looking back over it from the vantage point of Confucius' words, the reader, like the characters in the story, plays an extended hermeneutic game, testing surfaces, looking for categorical connections that belie those surfaces, learning the terms of the anecdote and then making them relevant to the categories learned in other anecdotes. The price for narrative and intellectual pleasure is a complicity, at least for the time of reading, in certain doctrinal presumptions, including the faith in li's fundamental power. Like the marked judgment, analepsis establishes conditions for unity in the plot of an anecdote series. Analepsis is a pluperfect mode of narration: it recounts significant events that precede those of the main plot, in some cases by many years. Appearing in the midst of an an~cdote series, it is normally used to set the scene for another anecdote narrated immediately after. But when an analepsis is inserted after the culmination of the series, it plays an especially important role. As a retrospective operation, it corresponds to the 36 proleptic figures of prediction and foreshadowing. Its function resembles theirs in that it incorporates details observed at some earlier moment into the system of interpreted or revealed significance that surrounds the culminating point of a series of a~ecdotes. But since it is achieved both in complete anecdotes and in shorter non-narrative notes, analepsis differs from prolepsis in the degree of suspense it produces. Predictions announce, long before the fact, the ultimate arrival of some culmination. Although they sometimes immediately precede that culmination, they more often lead to it in long, intermittent stages, and one learns to keep track and to wait for summation. Analepsis, on the other hand, can contribute to the fullness of the culmination itsel£ Closely juxtaposed to the culminating anecdotes, it allows the narrator to show how this end was figured forth in interpretable details of moments long past. Analepsis reinforces the adequacy of that culmination to all its prefatory predictions. Usually, but not always, analepses are marked by the introductory word chu ("at an earlier time" or "in the beginning"), which interrupts the temporal progression of the anecdote series and returns the reader to the first causes of an event. King Ling's story includes two marked analepses of this sort,

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both of them inserted immediately after his suicide and burial. The first tells how the king once (the time is not specified) divined about conquering the 7 world? w-•~~a·*~~~~-~~·~•·~~w~a·~~~~w~ *~·*~g~z·£•~z•e&·~~•~•· Earlier, King Ling divined, saying, "I hope to win all under Heaven!" It was not auspicious. He threw down the turdeshell and cursed Heaven, shouting, "Such a paltry thing and still you won't give it to me! I'll take it myself!" The people fretted over the kings insatiability, and it was thus that they so readily took to rebellion.

That the event is narrated after the king's fall is appropriate; it represents his ambition and his excess in the most general terms. He despises not only the rulers of the other states and the precedents of the Zhou order but even Heaven itsel£ In accordance with the narrative and ideological preferences of the historiographers, the consequences of the king's sacrilege come not from divine retribution, as one might expect, but indirectly, through the effect of his display on the watching populace. The anecdote series, with its characteristic components of prediction, amplification, culmination, marked judgment, and analepsis, is the only means of presenting long and complex narratives in the Zuozhuan and the Guoyu. Every narrative is episodic, and the narrators employ the tools at their disposal to create thematic and intellectual unity among the episodes. By far the most important of these tools is the general emphasis on hermeneutic skill on the part of both characters and readers. The constant rhythm of phenomenon, observation, interpretation, and prediction holds complex plots together and presents the reader with a sort of participative training in meaning making. Linked to the hermeneutic themes of the narratives is the assumption, nowhere challenged, that the world has an intelligible way or ways and that human beings of a certain kind understand this way and can, on the basis of their understanding, divine future consequences of observed events. What the Zuozhuan and Guoyu uphold is not a single model of the world's workings but a large set of related models, which are made explicit in the principles adduced in speeches. Narratives, and anecdote series in particular, take their rules of causation from these models. Finally, the two works employ a few general character types in their representation of human characters. These character types do not precede and determine plot; rather, they arise from plot. Thus in a narrative concerning

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repeated aberration and final retribution, like the story of King Ling, the king himself has the role of a willful violator of norms. Other character types we have encountered include the clever and loyal minister (Kaoshu ofYing), the resistant minister (Zigong of Zheng, Zige of Chu), and the wise commoner (Bo Zong's carter) or barbarian (Ji Zha of Wu). We have yet to meet the virtuous ruler, who will be exemplified in the next section by Duke Wen ofJin. The history of the anecdote and its uses necessarily begins with the Zuozhuan and the Guoyu; there are no earlier instances of anecdotal history on such a grand scale. The formal features of the anecdote and the anecdote series, because they are the means of representation for all events recorded in these two works, necessarily affect the representation of the historical process itsel£ In the next section, we examine a set of themes that relate historical content to anecdotal form and guide the historiographers' reconstruction of the meaning of past events.

Bao and the Economy oJNarrative It is difficult to imagine a narrative that does not involve an exchange of some object of value. Like ordinary currency, the object itself and the nature of its value are open to all the arbitrariness of human determination; although many familiar narratives have to do with money itself or with precious goods, narrative transactions expose all sorts of other concrete and abstract possessions to the logic of exchange. Narrative draws its energy from the value of the objects exchanged. As A. J. Greimas puts it, "The various displacements of objects are alone enough to account for the organization of 38 story [sic], with the subjects being no more than the loci of their transfer." The Zuozhuan and Guoyu, which constitute one historically and culturally grounded type of narrative, show a preference for particular types of exchange. These exchanges, properly called bao, operate even in narratives where they are not explicitly named and provide a single model for events involving gifts, services, offenses, and even judgments and predictions. The place of bao in the economy of historiographical narrative ultimately accounts for the historiographers' habit of explaining historical events by refer39 ence to incidents of public aesthetic judgments. Anecdotes that turn on a gift and its consequences are common enough in the Zuozhuan and Guoyu. We have already seen how Chu's gift of a turtle 40 and a duke's perverse distribution of that gift brought mayhem to Zheng

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and how the cauldron of Gao, accepted as a gift or bribe (lu), prompted a famous remonstrance from the Lu minister Zang Aibo.41 In one of the inci~ dents preceding the great defeat of Qi at An by Jin and its allies, a W ey man rescues a high minister of his state and is offered a city as a reward; when he requests, and is granted, the bell array and caparison frontlets that are the prerogative of feudal lords, the event earns the retrospective disapproval of 42 Confucius. A virtuous minister like Xiang Xu of Song knows to refuse an improper gift; 43 Wei Jiang of Jin knows the same and declines very elo~ quently, but is finally forced to accept his ruler's gift of musicians and bells.44 King Xiang of Zhou bestows gifts on Duke Wen ofJin in recognition of the latter's pre~eminent status after the battle of Chengpu, 45 but a later Zhou ruler, King Jiing, goes so far as to demand bronze vessels as gifts from dig~ 46 nitaries making visits of condolence to the royal court. Gift giving, an im~ portant element of political protocol during the Zhou, is also a major theme in narratives about the Spring and Autumn period. When a Song minister rejects, accepts, and then returns a gift of jade, the value of the original gift undergoes some typical transformations:47 *A~~~·~~r~·r~~~·~~~B·U~~A·~AU~W m·~~~~·r~B·~U~~~~·mU~~-·~UW~·W~ Wm · ~~A~~W · ;fitliffi'f5B · 1J\A'Ift~ · ~OJPJ~~fi~ • %f.JJJtPJ~i!f ~m·r~~~~~·~~A~~*~·@rm~~~~m·

Someone in Song had obtained a jade, which he presented to Zihan. Zihan would not accept it. The one presenting the jade said, "I have shown it to the jade workers, and they believe that it is a treasure. Therefore I presume to present it to you." Zihan said, "I consider not being greedy a treasure; you consider the jade a treasure. If you give it to me, both of us will lose our treasures. It would be better for each of us to keep our treasures." The man bowed his head low and explained, "With this jade in my possession, I cannot cross out of the district. I am submitting this and pleading [to avoid] death." Zihan lodged the man in his village and had the jade workers work [the jade] for him. Once the man had become rich, [Zihan] had him return to his original place.

As in the better~known tale ofBian He, a private citizen seeks to present an uncut jade as a gift to a government official. 48 But unlike Bian He, who wished only to give his king a treasure (and who was punished when the kings men doubted his sincerity), the man of Song has a practical problem and an ulterior motive. Too poor to have the jade worked or unwilling to face the danger of carrying it home with him, he determines instead to use it

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to buy the favor of the minister. The ensuing refusal prompts a very clear valuation of Zihan's uprightness, a treasure that cannot be bought for the price of a jade.49 This moment could bring the end of the anecdote; the reader might be satisfied with this simple demonstration,of the minister's integrity. But the value of the jade carries the narrative forward. Zihan's solution of the traveler's problem turns what could have been a loss for them both (the bribe) or an unsatisfying return (the refusal) into a shared profit. Zihan, repaying the visitor's attempted gift with a liberal gift of service, displays his utter lack of greed even as the jade workers make real and useful wealth of the stone. Real wealth, as opposed to simple possession of a valuable object, includes the means (especially guards and other personnel) to transport goods without fear of theft. The importance of this anecdote and others involving gifts lies in their relatively straightforward illustration of the logic of exchange as it is construed in this type of historiography. The gift, wherever and whenever it is given, threatens to impose obligations and thus to become something other than a gift. Thucydides' Pericles said as much in a passing observation on 50 the Athenian character. In the words of Marcel Mauss, the aim of the gift "is to display generosity, freedom, and autonomous action, as well as greatness. Yet, all in all, it is mechanisms of obligation, and even of obligation through things, that are called into play.''51 For Derrida, the gift is simply impossible: "For there to be a gift, it is necessary [il Jaut] that the donee not give back, amortize, reimburse, acquit himsel£ enter into a contract, and that he never have contracted a debt.... I[t] is thus necessary, at the limit, that 52 he not recognize the gift as gift.'' The gift is perhaps impossible. Or, to put the case more hopefully, the gift is a deliberately isolated gesture of disinteredness that at any moment can open again to the cycles of exchange surrounding it. On the one hand, the central ideal of the gift-that it is "free," made willingly and without expectation of recompense-has in the early Chinese context roughly the same place it has elsewhere. "Giving," whether it is presenting to a superior (xian), bestowing on an inferior (si), or not marked as hierarchical, is different from paying. It does not, at least initially, arise from or establish any obligation; unlike wages, it merits special note in a history. On the other hand, established notions of bao in historiography legitimate the idea of return, at least in some of its forms. The problem under these circumstances is not to preserve the realm of freedom represented by the gift

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but to control the channels by which it is reciprocated and converted into other sorts of wealth. Liberality is perhaps not essential to a system of bao, since what is required is objective performances of return rather than a subjective generosity on the part of participants. Yet a ghost of the freedom of the "free" gift hovers about exchanges as an index of givers' and receivers' commitment to the ideal of giving and to the system of exchange itsel£ Grudging participation or efforts to interfere with the objects and channels of exchange signal a greedy intention that threatens to explode the provisional space of generosity and to expose all exchanges-including those of ritual propriety-as interested transactions. Every gift in the Zuozhuan and Guoyu seems to belong to a larger series of exchanges, and the unconnected act of pure generosity is unknown. The best men and women convert their receipts into virtue. Zihan refuses a gift of jade and wins, in recompense for his refusal, a profit of public incorruptibility, which he then capitalizes on by rewarding the traveler with true wealth. Although direct exchange is obstructed, moral worth and material wealth are here coordinated as measures for each other. The coordination is entirely typical of this historiography. No gift exists without divisions. In order to be "given," an object must cross from possession here to possession there, and the distinction between here and there must be quite clear. Since any act of giving requires this line of demarcation between donor and recipient, patterns of giving are often constitutive of individual and group identity. As the gift makes manifest the precise nature of the differences between guest and host, superior and inferior, center and periphery, or the royal Ji lineage and its marriage partners from the Jiang lineage, it also goes a long way toward defining and displaying the essence of those entities. 53 The machinery of narrative resembles the dynamic of the gift in that both are dependent on divisions. For Greimas, who argues that narratives concern the transference of values, the divisions across which objects are transferred (and without which there can be no transference) are deep-seated and can be summarized in a combinatoire of logical contradictions and contraries, the semiotic square; they are not the divisions between named actors that operate on the surface level of narrative. 54 Divisions on the surface level of preQin historiographical narrative, although they echo deeper levels of cultural semiosis, are a part of the spectrum in which individual moral character, social hierarchy, and regional loyalties dominate. These are the divisions across

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which both interpretation and gift giving take place. In the anecdote of the Chu turtle, for instance, national differences play a small role, in that the gift must come from somewhere outside the court. More important, however, is the political hierarchy, which determines the ministers' ignorance of the gift, allows them to be disgraced, and forces them to their final act of murder. As with Zihan's jade, narrative originates with the gift and continues until the gift's value has undergone a series of transformations. One might conceive of a gift as the addition of energy to a given situation; narratives trace the course of changes produced by this energy. As Greimas's work suggests, gifts are not the only transfers of value in narratives. Material exchanges are a model for acquisitions, dispossessions, and trades of a more abstract sort. Although the story of King Ling's epiphany involves no gift in the proper sense of the word, the more general form of exchange it embodies does closely resemble the dynamics of the gift. The king prides himself on his possessions and is brought down by his intemperate lust for one further possession, the poisoned gift of King Mu's poem. The divisions that function here include the usual distinction between ruler and subject, as well as the distinctions between obscurity and openness, ignorance and knowledge, known present and unknown future. The ambitious king stands in opposition both to the traditional order and to those among his ministers who uphold that order. Zige, with his hidden scheme and his hidden knowledge of the poem, stands in opposition to the king. Crossings among the opposed camps produce the narrative: the king submits to the traditional order as Zige's song and scheme are revealed. Without divisions of some sort, there is no narrative; nothing can happen when all of the dramatis personae are the same in every way. Just as a valuable object that changes hands introduces transformative energy into a previously static situation, a gift in the more general form of service is in these narratives often understood to initiate a series of exchanges that constitutes a plot. An offense, which is a disservice, entails different actions and reactions, but also brings them about as a series of exchanges. Service and disservice alike become meaningful only when they take place across divisions. In the following scene, King Gong ofChu (r. 590-560) converses with a noble Jin prisoner who is about to be sent home: 55

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Zhao Jianzi asked Zhuang Chici, "Who is most worthy among the scholar~retainers of the eastt Zhuang Chici bowed and said, "I presume to congratulate you!" Jianzi said, "You haven't answered my question. Why are you congratulating

me.~" He replied, "I have heard that when a state is about to rise, the gentleman will consider himself deficient; and when it is about to fall, there will be some semblance of surplus. Now you, Master, are in charge of the administration of the state of Jin and yet you inquire even with lowly men (like myself], seeking worthies. That is why I congratulate you."

The anecdote is especially telling in that it makes Jianzi's humble interest in scholar~retainers-the group in which the historiographers might have

classed themselves-the sign of his line's rise. According to the historiographers and according to the body oflore from which they culled their anecdotes, the ancestors of the most powerful noble lines of their day revealed in their appearances and gestures the signs of fu~ ture greatness. In such passages the historiographers extend their control over the material of history by implying that their own preferred form of interpretation afforded contemporary observers a glimpse of the future. Mu Shu's scholarly definition of the undecaying cannot entirely displace Fan Xuanzi's aristocratic definition: the historiographers apparently cannot de~ termine ex cathedra what is memorable and what is not. But in the predic~

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tions they remember, each of which depends on the observer's ability to apply ritual and classical learning to the interpretation of real phenomena, the historiographers accomplish a figurative subordination of one sort of power-the ruling lines' reproduction of themselves over generations-to the very different intellectual power of vision. The futures of Lu, Qi, and Jin mattered more to the historiographers than the futures of other states. Nevertheless, for all the major states they recount at least one prediction. Certain ministers' lines will last long in Zheng, but the state itself will perish relatively early. Three predictions are made on the basis of poetry recitations, and others have to do with ritual c . . are rememperrormances an d Improper extravagance. 100 s·1m1'1 ar prophec1es 101 bered for Qin, Chu, Song, Cai, Wey, Cao, and Wu. As for Zhou, in the speech on the nine cauldrons, discussed in Chapter 2 (pp. 60-61), Wangsun Man ties his prophecy (that the dynasty would last for seven hundred years and thirty generations) to the most prestigious aesthetic objects in the 102 realm. The Zuozhuan for the most part avoids explicit reference to the dynasty's end, but the Guoyu quite freely entertains ideas about Zhou's successor, naming Chu as an especially likely candidate. In the most extended passage of this sort, a Zhou official discusses with Scribe Bo the collapse of dynastic authority and the rise of regional power in the states of Chu and 103 Jin; the official goes on to become the founder ofZheng, Duke Huan. At some point the fact ofZhou's decline was so commonly accepted that it could be depicted as the subject of a popular saying, as is shown during a · · firom Zheng an dJ'm:104 . between mm1sters conversation ~{B~D ~

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When the lord of Zheng went to ]in, Zitaishu assisted; there he visited Fan Xianzi. Xianzi said, "What should be done about the royal house?" Zitaishu replied, "As aged as I am, I cannot take care even of my own state: do I dare consider the royal house? Moreover, people have a saying: 'When the widow takes no thought of her weaving threads, but worries over the fall of the Ancestral Zhou, [troubles] are going to come to her.' "Now the royal house is roiling with turmoil, and we small states are afraid. But 105 it is the worry of the great states; what do people like us know about it:'"

In passages like this one, the theme of fear is expressed in the stylized impotence of small states against disorders and decadence in the royal house.

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Every rank has its proper concerns; even if small states are fearful, responsi~ bility for re~establishing order belongs to the great state, Jin. Interesting here is the suggestion of widely recognized Zhou decline and the combination of such recognition with a defense of a ritually sanctioned hierarchical distri~ bution of duties. Like Zitaishu, the Confucian thinkers of the early Warring States period could take refuge when necessary in the notion of restricted duties and prerogatives; like Yanzi, they might diagnose the illness and pre~ scribe ritual as a cure. But ritual could also justify a substitution of under~ standing for action. Holding to li in an individual life might mean watching the competent authorities allow it to disappear from political life. Again, as in Nietzsche's view, ressentiment could adduce impotence as proof of an ex~ elusive sort of power.

The Rise of the South As the old ducal families in the central states decline, the influence of peripheral states grows. In other hands, the rise of Chu, Wu, and Yue as powers capable of influencing events throughout the Zhou realm might have served as evidence of the unworkability of ritual propriety as a principle of social and political organization. But the historiographers of the Zuozhuan and the Guoyu did not retreat, and in the marked failure of the central states to defend themselves against southern and southeastern forces, they recognized further vindication of their model ofbao and their reification

ofli. The triumph of Chu at Bi and the fall of King Ling at Ganxi are told as Confucian parables: Chu flourished when its kings adhered to li and failed 106 when they did not. In narrating the events of treaty meetings during the period of Chu hegemony under King Ling, the historiographers wrote a subtler history, simultaneously admitting and denying the impotence of the central states. The Chunqiu entries for the great treaty at Song in 546 B.C.B. . no h'mt of]'m weakn ess: 107 g1ve

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In the summer, Shusun Bao (of Lu] met with Zhao Wu of Jin, Qu Jian of Chu, Gongsun Guisheng ofCai, Shi Wu ofWey, Kong Huan of Chen, Liang Xiao of Zheng, and men from Xuu and Cao at Song.

Writing and the Ends ofHistory

285

The placement of Jin before Chu would ordinarily indicate that Jin enjoyed · customary pnonty · · m · t h e covenant ceremony. 108 The second entry on t h e 1ts event does nothing to disturb this impression:

In the autumn, on the xinsi day of the seventh month, [Shusun] Bao made a covenant with the ministers from the allied states at Song.

But in this case, as in some others, the chronicle is flatly contradicted by the anecdotes that accompanied it. According to the Zuozhuan, it was at this meeting that Chu first took precedence over Jin in the ceremonial order of the covenant. What accounts for the contradiction? When semi-civilized upstarts have their way with the allied states of China, including Jin, the upholders of the central states' culture have cause for fear. But the tale is told in such a way as to assuage this fear. The proposal for the great treaty at Song, according to the narrator, comes neither from Chu nor from Jin, but from Xiang Xu of Song, who hopes to become 109 famous by bringing an end to wars among the states. When the participants come together, Zhao Wu (Zhao Wenzi, here referred to as Zhao Meng) is disturbed to discover that the Chu representatives are wearing breastplates under their ceremonial clothing. A Chu minister, Bozhou Li, has already remonstrated with his commander, Qu Jian (Zimu), about the importance of good faith (xin) and advised that the armed men be removed. Qu Jian has rejected this counsel on the grounds that Chu and Jin come together not for trust but for profit. Bozhou Li duly predicts disaster for the • 110 cyme. With these anecdotes in the background, Chu motivations are already compromised when the narrative returns to the Jin side:

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476

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478

Chinese Character List

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Ousted Duke ofWey f$j tl:l1}

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Marquis Wen ofJin 'g )( 1*

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Priest T uo :j:Jlft Prince Chao .:E. -=f ijiJ.l

Chinese Character List

x

Prince Dai -T 1M Prince Qiji 0-f- ~ ~ Prince Wei of Chu ~ 0 -TIll Prince Xian of Hejian ?i'iJ FJJ ~ Prince Yingqi 0 -T ~ 7ftf Prince Zha ofWu ~0 -TtL Prince Zhen 0 -T ~ Pu~

"Puqu zhi fa" {~ ~ L 1$;

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Qi (person)@: Qi (state) 7ftf qi tong -1:; IRJ qi wang hu ~ L:: -Sf "Qi yu" 7ftf ~Pi Qianrz "Qianzhi" 00 ;::5;

sangjian zhi yue * FJJ L ~ Sanglin*1* "Sangrou" ~ * Scribe An )t: l!l~ Scribe Bo 5I:: fEI Scribe Mo 5I:: ~ Scribe Yi 5I:: 15)( Scribe Zhao 5I:: /tl!l

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Shalu¥9>~

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