Ideology of Power and Power of Ideology in Early China 9004299335, 9789004299337

Citation preview

i



Ideology of Power and Power of Ideology in Early China

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004299337_001 Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

ii

Sinica Leidensia



Edited by Barend J. ter Haar Maghiel van Crevel In co-operation with P.K. Bol, D.R. Knechtges, E.S. Rawski, W.L. Idema, H.T. Zurndorfer

VOLUME 124

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/sinl

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)



Ideology of Power and Power of Ideology in Early China

iii

Edited by

Yuri Pines Paul R. Goldin Martin Kern

LEIDEN | BOSTON

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

iv



Cover illustration: Tripod cooking vessel with lid (ding), late 6th century bc, (Eastern Zhou dynasty, Spring and Autumn period, 770–ca. 470 bc) Bronze, h. 23.0 cm., w. 27.0 cm., d. 21.0 cm. (9 1/16 × 10 5/8 × 8 1/4 in.). Museum purchase from the C.D. Carter Collection, by subscription. y1965-24 a-b. Photo: © Princeton University Art Museum, Image courtesy of Princeton University Art Museum. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Ideology of power and power of ideology in early China / edited by Yuri Pines, Paul R. Goldin, Martin Kern. pages cm. -- (Sinica Leidensia, ISSN 0169-9563 ; volume 124) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-90-04-29929-0 (hardback : acid-free paper) -- ISBN 978-90-04-29933-7 (e-book) 1. Political science--China--History--To 1500. 2. Power (Social sciences)--China--History-To 1500. 3. Ideology--Political aspects--China--History--To 1500. 4. Political culture--China-History--To 1500. 5. China--Politics and government--To 221 B.C. 6. China--Politics and government--221 B.C.-960 A.D. I. Pines, Yuri. II. Goldin, Paul Rakita, 1972- III. Kern, Martin. JQ1510.I34 2015 320.50931--dc23 2015018511

This publication has been typeset in the multilingual “Brill” typeface. With over 5,100 characters covering Latin, ipa, Greek, and Cyrillic, this typeface is especially suitable for use in the humanities. For more information, please see www.brill.com/brill-typeface. issn 0169-9563 isbn 978-90-04-29929-0 (hardback) isbn 978-90-04-29933-7 (e-book) Copyright 2015 by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi and Hotei Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill nv provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, ma 01923, usa. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

Contents Contents

v

Contents Contents v Acknowledgments vii List of Contributors viii Introduction Ideology and Power in Early China 1 Yuri Pines

Part One The Foundations: Unity, Heaven, and Ancestral Models 1 Representations of Regional Diversity during the Eastern Zhou Dynasty  31 Paul R. Goldin 2 Omens and Politics: The Zhou Concept of the Mandate of Heaven as Seen in the Chengwu 程寤 Manuscript  49 Luo Xinhui 羅新慧 3 Long Live The King! The Ideology of Power between Ritual and Morality in the Gongyang zhuan 公羊傳  69 Joachim Gentz 4 Language and the Ideology of Kingship in the “Canon of Yao”  118 Martin Kern

Part Two Textual Battles: Rulers, Ministers, and the People 5 Monarch and Minister: The Problematic Partnership in the Building of Absolute Monarchy in the Han Feizi 韓非子  155 Romain Graziani 6 The Changing Role of the Minister in the Warring States: Evidence from the Yanzi chunqiu 晏子春秋  181 Scott Cook 7 Ideologies of the Peasant and Merchant in Warring States China  211 Roel Sterckx 8 Population Records from Liye: Ideology in Practice  249 Charles Sanft

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

vi

Contents

Epilogue Ideological Authority in China: Past and Present 9 Political and Intellectual Authority: The Concept of the “Sage-Monarch” and Its Modern Fate  273 Liu Zehua 劉澤華 Bibliography  301 Index  337

Contents Contents v Acknowledgments vii List of Contributors viii Introduction: Ideology and Power in Early China 1 Part 1 29 The Foundations: Unity, Heaven, and Ancestral Models 29 Chapter 1 31 Representations of Regional Diversity during the Eastern Zhou Dynasty 31 Chapter 2 49 Omens and Politics: The Zhou Concept of the Mandate of Heaven as Seen in the Chengwu 程寤Manuscript Chapter 3 69 Long Live the King! The Ideology of Power between Ritual and Morality in the Gongyang zhuan ­ 公羊傳 69 Chapter 4 118 Language and the Ideology of Kingship in the “Canon of Yao” 118 Part 2 153 Textual Battles: Rulers, Ministers, and the People 153 Chapter 5 155 Monarch and Minister: The Problematic Partnership in the Building of Absolute Monarchy in the Han Feizi 韓非子 Chapter 6 181 The Changing Role of the Minister in the Warring States: Evidence from the Yanzi chunqiu 晏子春秋 Chapter 7 211 Ideologies of the Peasant and Merchant in Warring States China 211 Chapter 8 249 Population Records from Liye: Ideology in Practice 249 Epilogue 271 Ideological Authority in China: Past and Present 271 Chapter 9 273 Political and Intellectual Authority: The Concept of the “Sage-Monarch” and Its Modern Fate Bibliography 301 Index 337

49

155 181

273

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

Acknowledgments Acknowledgments

vii

Acknowledgments This volume is the fruit of an international workshop with the same title in May 2012 at the Institute for Advanced Study, Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The workshop was supported by Grant 1714/11 from the Israeli Science Foundation and the Institute for Advanced Study. We are delighted to acknowledge their generosity. Naturally, not all the papers presented at the workshop could be assembled in this volume; but each of the participants whose paper was not included contributed greatly toward the volume’s formation, and we are grateful to all of them: Wolfgang Behr, Carine Defoort, Michael Puett, Matthias Richter, Masayuki Sato, Ori Sela, Ben-Ami Shillony, and Alexander Yakobson. We also thank Matthew Mosca from University of Washington, Seattle for helping us with bibliographic information and the Brill reviewers for their helpful comments. For the three editors, coediting the volume was an inspiring and intellectually engaging exercise. Amid intense exchanges both online and off, we learned a lot from one another and from the contributors; and we are grateful for the latter’s patience with our manifold demands. In working on this volume we were supported by the Israel Science Foundation (Grant 511/11) and by the Michael William Lipson Chair in Chinese Studies (Yuri Pines).

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

viii

Acknowledgments

List of Contributors Scott Cook Professor, Yale-NUS College Joachim Gentz Professor, University of Edinburgh Paul R. Goldin Professor, University of Pennsylvania Romain Graziani Professor, Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon;  senior lecturer, University of ­Geneva Martin Kern Greg (‘84) and Joanna (P13) Zeluck, Professor in Asian Studies; Professor and Chair, Department of East Asian Studies, Princeton University Liu Zehua 劉澤華 Professor (Emeritus), Nankai University, Tianjin Luo Xinhui 羅新慧 Professor, Department of History, Beijing Normal University Yuri Pines Michael W. Lipson Professor of Chinese Studies, Hebrew University of Jerusalem Charles Sanft Professor, University of Tennessee, Knoxville Roel Sterckx Joseph Needham Professor of Chinese History, Science and Civilisation, University of Cambridge, and Fellow of Clare College

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

Introduction: Ideology and Power in Early China

1

Introduction: Ideology and Power in Early China Yuri Pines The three centuries that preceded the establishment of the Chinese empire in 221 bce were an age of exceptional intellectual flourishing. No other period in the history of Chinese thought can rival these centuries in creativity, boldness, ideological diversity, and long-term impact. Values, perceptions, and ideals shaped amid intense intellectual debates before the imperial unification contributed decisively to the formation of the political, social, and ethical orientations that we identify today with traditional Chinese culture. More broadly, the ideas of rival thinkers formed an ideological framework within which the Chinese empire functioned from its inception until its very last decades. It is not surprising, then, that the lion’s share of studies of early Chinese history focus on the intellectual activities of what is often dubbed—somewhat misleadingly—the age of the Hundred Schools of Thought. Several other major Eurasian civilizations witnessed similar periods of vibrant intellectual activity, the impact of which remained perceptible for centuries or millennia to come: Jewish prophets, Indian religious teachers, and Greek philosophers come immediately to mind. Some scholars, beginning with Karl Jaspers (1883–1969), have tried to explore commonalities among these intellectual breakthroughs of ca. 800–200 bce, which Jaspers named the Axial Age (Achsenzeit).1 Regardless of whether this comparative perspective is valid, it is worth noting that among the major intellectual traditions that took shape during that age, the Chinese one appears as the most politically oriented. Of course, political texts were produced in any major civilization—for example, pronouncements of Jewish prophets, Plato’s Politeia, Aristotle’s Politika, and the Arthashastra, attributed to Kautilya.2 Conversely, a variety of nonpolitical texts were produced in China. The overall difference is easily observable, nonetheless. In China, one will have a hard time finding either a “Classic” (jing 經) or a “Masters” (zi 子) text from the pre-imperial or early imperial period that does not discuss such issues as the nature of rulership, ruler-minister relations, an intellectual’s political involvement, ways of controlling “the people” (min 民), and the like. These topoi are repeatedly addressed not just in purely political treatises but also in a variety of texts that focus on ethical, religious, 1 See Jaspers 1965. For follow-up and development of Jaspers’s ideas, see Eisenstadt 1986; Arnason, Eisenstadt, and Wittrock 2005. 2 For the complexity of the Arthashastra and debates over its dating, see Olivelle 2012.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004299337_002 Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

2

Pines

and even metaphysical issues, not to mention contemporaneous historical writings. It would not be an exaggeration to say that questions of power, authority, and proper methods of maintaining sociopolitical relations—what can be broadly defined as political thought—dominate the texts that survived the vicissitudes of history. The preponderance of political discussions in pre-imperial texts is not surprising, given their historical context. The outburst of intellectual activity from the age of Confucius 孔子 (551–479 bce) and his disciples onward took place against the backdrop of a severe systemic crisis. The end of the Springs-andAutumns period (Chunqiu 春秋, 770–453 bce) was marked by the progressive disintegration of political structures in the Zhou 周 realm. First, the Zhou dynasty’s (ca. 1046–256 bce) kings, the proud “Sons of Heaven” (tianzi 天子), lost their power to their nominal subordinates, the regional lords (zhuhou 諸侯); then the latter were eclipsed by powerful ministerial lineages within their domains; soon enough the Zhou world became entangled in a web of debilitating struggles among rival polities, between powerful nobles and the lords, and among aristocratic lineages within each polity. By the fourth century bce, a degree of recentralization in individual polities was achieved, but interstate warfare further intensified, giving, in retrospect, the new era an ominous name: the age of the Warring States (Zhanguo 戰國, 453–221 bce). As wars became ever bloodier and more devastating, and with no adequate diplomatic means to settle the conflicts in sight, most thinkers and statesmen came to believe that unity of “All-under-Heaven” (tianxia 天下) was the only means to attain peace and stability (Pines 2000a). How to bring this unity about and how to “stabilize All-under-Heaven” 定天下 became central topics addressed by competing thinkers. Crises and bloodshed aside, the Warring States period was also an age rife with opportunities for intellectually active individuals. It was an exceptionally dynamic period, marked by novel departures and profound changes in all walks of life. Politically, the loose aristocratic entities of the Springs-and-Autumns period were replaced by centralized and bureaucratized territorial states. Economically, the introduction of iron tools revolutionized agriculture, allowing higher yields, prompting the development of wastelands, and bringing about demographic growth, as well as accelerating urbanization and a commercialization of the economy. Militarily, new technologies, such as the crossbow, as well as new forms of military organization, brought about the replacement of aristocratic, chariot-led armies by mass infantry armies staffed by peasant conscripts, resulting in a radical increase in warfare’s scale and complexity. And socially, the hereditary aristocracy that dominated the Zhou world during much of the Bronze Age (ca. 1500–400 bce) was eclipsed by a

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

Introduction: Ideology and Power in Early China

3

much broader stratum of shi 士 (sometimes translated as “men of service”), the men who owed their positions primarily to their abilities rather than their pedigree.3 These profound changes required new approaches to a variety of administrative, economic, military, social, and ethical issues: old truths had to be reconsidered or reinterpreted. For intellectuals eager to tackle a variety of new questions, this was the golden age. Of the above developments, the rise of the shi appears as singularly consequential. Originally, shi were the lowest segment of the hereditary aristocracy, mostly minor siblings of powerful lineages, who made their living primarily as the aristocrats’ retainers. Yet by the fifth century bce, as many aristocratic lineages were destroyed in bloody internecine struggles, the shi moved to fill the void at the top of the ruling apparatus. Many rulers found it expedient to promote shi, who lacked independent military and economic power and were not in a position to threaten their lords directly, and whose administrative and military skills often were higher than those of hereditary nobles. The stratum of shi duly expanded to comprise both former nobles who had lost their positions and ambitious commoners; active and aspiring officeholders. Not all the shi were intellectually active, but many of them were. Among these, one segment was particularly important: the so-called Masters (zi 子). These Masters were the intellectual leaders of the shi; and they, together with disciples and followers, were the producers of the vast majority of the texts with which we associate the intellectual flowering of the Warring States period. The shi in general, and Masters in particular, were both the major beneficiaries of the administrative overhaul of the Warring States period and its driving force. The replacement of hereditary officeholding with a flexible pattern of employing people according to their abilities opened multiple avenues of advancement to ambitious and talented individuals. Facing numerous challenges, rulers of the age were in need of skilled employees with a variety of expertise: military officers able to lead huge armies; civilian administrators able to increase the state’s control over its human and natural resources; economic specia­lists able to boost agricultural production; and many more. Yet spe­cific issues aside, fundamental questions remained about the functioning of this newly formed bureaucratic state that had to be addressed. How to restore the monarch’s authority, which had reached its nadir by the end of the Springs3 The best introduction in English to the transformation that took place in the Warring States period is Lewis 1999a, except that Lewis ignores the iron revolution (for which, see, e.g., Wagner 1993). For a comprehensive discussion in Chinese, see Yang Kuan 1998. For a focused discussion of the manifold transformations that took place in the most powerful Warring States period polity, Qin 秦, see Pines et al. 2014: 18–32.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

4

Pines

and-Autumns period? How to ensure smooth relations at the top of the government apparatus? How to prevent officials in the center and in local administration from abusing their ever-increasing power? How to retain the loyalty and obedience of generals without curbing their initiative and autonomy of command? How to make the people fight for their ruler? How to continue to extract resources from the populace without overburdening it and without causing emigration or, worse, rebellion? How to train devoted, loyal, and skilled officials? How to identify individuals who deserve to enter government service, and what skills should they possess? These questions could not be addressed by narrow specialists alone; rather, they required broad generalists who would be able to put forward their vision of the proper functioning of the society and the state. They required political thinkers. In the interstate market of talent of the Warring States period, the rulers represented the demand side; on the supply side were intellectually active members of the shi stratum, especially the Masters and their disciples. In general, the shi lacked independent sources of stable and sizable income, and for most of them, government service—either as regular officeholders or as the ruler’s personal advisers—was the best means of bolstering their economic position and social prestige. Their activities were normally not confined to a single state; rather, they traveled freely throughout the Zhou realm, seeking employment at one of the competing courts or, at least, patronage by one of the courtiers. Their attitudes toward political involvement differed: some, like Confucius and his followers, considered service a means of moral self-realization; others (e.g., the authors of the Zhuangzi 莊子) vehemently opposed serving the government, viewing such work as filthy, dangerous, and ultimately futile. Yet, differences aside, it may be safely assumed that most Masters—like the majority of shi—were either directly engaged in serving the rulers or at least aspired to do so. This close relation to the government provides yet another explanation for the predominance of political topics in their writings.4 That most intellectually active shi sought government employment does not mean, however, that they—or at least their leaders, the Masters—were satisfied with the position of the ruler’s obedient servitors. Rather, they sought employment on their own terms, as the moral and spiritual guides of society, of rulers and commoners alike. Emboldened by the high demand for their services and inspired by the overall dynamism of their age, the competing Masters aimed at directing the state and, ultimately, All-under-Heaven, toward 4 For the rise of the shi and their attitudes to political service, see Pines 2009: 115–162. For a different view, see Lewis 1999b: 53–97; cf. also Liu Zehua 2004: 22–39, 113–119; Yu Yingshi 1987: 26–33.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

Introduction: Ideology and Power in Early China

5

peace, tranquility, and orderly rule. Paraphrasing Karl Marx, we may assert that, in distinction to Western philosophers, the Masters’ goal was not just to explain the world but to change it.5 This combination of society’s—and especially the rulers’—urgent need for political advice and the resultant employment opportunities for and high social prestige of intellectually active individuals explains the extraordinary richness and sophistication of political thought in the Warring States period. One cannot but be impressed by the broad range of questions discussed: for example, the nature of the ruler’s authority, of social hierarchy, and of the commoners’ political role; proper ways of distributing material wealth and of waging war; the search for metaphysical, moral, or divine stipulations for the sociopolitical order; elaboration of ethical norms applicable to the elite and those applicable to the population at large; how intellectuals interact with power holders, and to whom they should owe allegiance (to the ruler, the state in its entirety, or their moral principles alone); the limits of obedience and the right to dissent or rebel. The perennial relevance of many of these questions explains the ongoing appeal of pre-imperial thought, or at least some of its strands, not only throughout the imperial millennia but even in contemporary China (see below). The political thought of the Warring States period was not only immensely rich but also remarkably diverse. In this fragmented world, no government could impose effective political orthodoxy; nor was there any institution on a par with religious establishments elsewhere able to impose—or even just to define—orthodoxy in the intellectual realm. Even upon a cursory reading of the texts by different thinkers, the sheer variety of approaches and the evident absence of politically “forbidden zones” are striking. Some ascertained the divinity of Heaven and deities, while others rejected it; some advocated the political involvement of the intellectuals, while others ridiculed it; blatant militarists debated with staunch pacifists; supporters of state activism rivaled advocates of laissez-faire policy. Even when the overwhelming majority of the thinkers agreed on certain principles—such as the monarchic form of rule— this did not diminish radical divergences among them. Thus, Mengzi 孟子 (ca. 380–304 bce), a staunch monarchist in theory, asserted that the ruler who malfunctions may be replaced and that an immoral sovereign deserves to be overthrown, while Han Fei 韓非 (d. 233 bce), in contrast, demanded outlawing even the discussion of past nonhereditary power transfers as intrinsically subversive. On the other end of the spectrum, the authors of the Zhuangzi, one 5 “Philosophers were only explaining the world in various ways, but the task is to change it” (Karl Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach” [1845], cited from Marx and Engels 1976: 5, italics in original).

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

6

Pines

of the few texts that express direct opposition to any organized state, compared the rulers—even the best of them—to criminals who deserve neither respect nor allegiance.6 Ideological pluralism of the Warring States period reflected the rulers’ remarkable tolerance of unconventional ideas. When the rulers did persecute offenders, they seem to have targeted primarily offensive action or, less frequently, offensive speech, but never offensive ideas. Judging from our sources, the worst punishment for controversial views was only termination of the thinker’s employment. Whenever a Master (such as Han Fei) was executed, this was invariably due to his political involvement and not because of an unacceptable ideological stance. It was only after the imperial unification that these tolerant attitudes were reduced, and the atmosphere for dissenters became much chillier. Throughout the Warring States period intellectual openness seems to have been the rule.7 The richness of early Chinese political thought; its sophistication, breadth, and diversity; its ongoing relevance; and the considerable impact of at least some of the thinkers on the actual functioning of their states and on the future trajectory of the Chinese world—all these hallmarks make the study of this topic exceptionally rewarding both for historians of China and for scholars engaged in studies of comparative political thought. Yet, somewhat surprisingly, Chinese political thought remains woefully underresearched. Of the many thousands of publications in China, Japan, and the West that explore pre-imperial Chinese philosophy, only a small fraction focuses on the political content of the Masters’ texts. In the West, in particular, studies of early Chinese political thought remain relatively underdeveloped both within the narrowly defined field of early China studies and in broader, comparative studies. It is against this background that we launched the conference which yielded this volume.8

6 See Pines 2009: 34–36 and 71–72 (for Mengzi), 97–100 (for Han Feizi), 79–80 and 157–158 (for Zhuangzi). 7 It is worth noticing that voices against excessive pluralism were raised from among the late Warring States intellectuals, most notably Xunzi 荀子 (d. after 238 bce) and Han Fei; their views might have contributed directly to the assault on private learning soon after the imperial unification of 221 bce. See more in Pines 2009: 172–184. 8 This conference, “Ideology of Power and Power of Ideology in Early China,” was held in May 2012 at the Institute for Advanced Study, Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

Introduction: Ideology and Power in Early China



7

Between Endorsement and Indifference: Ebbs and Flows in Studies of Early Chinese Political Thought

Interest in political aspects of early Chinese thought has waxed and waned during the last century or so. In China, since the late nineteenth century, ideas of pre-imperial and early imperial thinkers were often employed as foils in debates over the country’s paths to modernity. This “resort to the past to serve the present” peaked in the early 1970s during the “Anti-Confucian Campaign” launched by Mao Zedong’s wife, Jiang Qing 江青 (1914–1991), and her henchmen. At the apex of this campaign, the struggle between the so-called Legalists (fa jia 法家) and Confucians (ru jia 儒家) was imagined as a perennial conflict between progressives and reactionaries that permeated Chinese history from its earliest days well into the current struggle of supporters of Mao Zedong 毛 澤東 (1893–1976) against various “deviationists” (normally against the “rightists” 右傾分子). With hundreds of thousands of students, workers, and peasants involved in writing collective essays that extolled the “progressive” Shang Yang 商鞅 (d. 338 bce) and denounced Confucius as the “servitor of slaveowners,” who was “like the rat who crosses the street and everybody shouts ‘Hit him!’” (人人喊打的過街老鼠), the politicization of studies of early Chinese thought attained very grotesque forms.9 Coincidentally, the 1970s also witnessed an early peak of interest in early Chinese political thought in the West. It was then that Frederick W. Mote translated the first volume of Hsiao Kung-chuan’s 蕭公權 comprehensive History of Chinese Political Thought (Hsiao 1979), while Sebastian de Grazia called his collection of translations from early Chinese texts Masters of Chinese Political Thought (1973). Perhaps the most blatant example of the political reading of early Chinese texts is by a Soviet dissident, Vitaly Rubin, whose Individual and State in Ancient China (1976) can be read as an inversion of the Maoist antiConfucian campaign: here Shang Yang is treated as a fascist totalitarian, Mozi 墨子 (ca. 460–390 bce) as a communist totalitarian, Zhuangzi as a dangerous anarchist, while Confucius stands for humanism and the right of an individual to fight against the oppressive state.10 Yet Rubin’s book remained an exception: 9

10

For the Anti-Confucian Campaign (more precisely, “criticize Lin [Biao 林彪, 1907–1971], criticize Confucius” [pi Lin pi Kong 批林批孔] campaign), see Louie 1980: 97–136; Perelomov 1993: 372–386. For an eyewitness account, see Liu Zehua 2012. For a general background for the campaign, see MacFarquhar and Schoenhals 2006: 366–373. For a sample of its production, see Xiao Gan 1974; cf. pieces collected in Li Yu-ning 1977. Rubin’s study was published (under the title Ideology and Culture of Ancient China) in the Soviet Union in 1970 but was banned immediately thereafter due to the author’s application to emigrate to Israel. It was republished in Russian in Rubin 1999: 8–76.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

8

Pines

never again were ancient Chinese thinkers mobilized to fight ideological battles of the West. The excessively political reading of the Masters’ texts in the 1970s gave way to a lack of interest in their political messages after the early 1980s. In China, as ideological fervor receded, studies of the Masters were largely dissociated from the realm of politics. There, this depoliticization of studies of China’s intellectual history was to a certain extent counterbalanced by the emergence of focused examinations of early Chinese political thought and political culture11 and later by reemergent interest in the relevance of the past to the country’s present (see below). In the West, the change was much more radical. To be sure, the political preoccupation of early Chinese thinkers is normally acknowledged in major studies, but it is also strongly de-emphasized, as is evident, for instance, in Benjamin I. Schwartz’s seminal The World of Thought in Early China (1985). Another major introductory study of early Chinese thought, A.C. Graham’s Disputers of the Tao (1989), postulates the primacy of the search for the “way to order the state and conduct personal life” in the Masters’ literature and contains many insightful observations about their concrete political views; but Graham’s declared focus is on “how the thinkers think,” not the content of their proposals.12 Many other scholars tend to disregard the political ideas of early thinkers altogether: hence, although studies of Chinese political thought continued to be published in the 1980s, 1990s, and beyond, their proportion within the growing corpus of studies of the Masters’ texts has become ever more minuscule. The shift away from the political aspects of the Masters’ literature may to a certain extent reflect scholars’ uneasiness with the vulgar politicization of these texts in the past; but it is more fundamentally related to what may be called a “philosophical bias” of Western research. The recognition of early Chinese thought as “philosophy” has been a lengthy (and still ongoing) process, in which the definition of the philosophical discipline remains firmly in the hands of scholars of Occidental philosophy, while Sinologists in the field often have to adapt themselves to disciplinary parameters established by their colleagues (cp. Van Norden 1996; Defoort 2001). It seems that Hegel’s derisive 11

12

This renewed interest in the concepts of “political thought” and “political culture” may be related to the resurrection of political sciences departments in Chinese universities in the 1980s, after these were closed during much of Mao’s era. See Graham 1989: 3 and 8, respectively. Graham appears to be more at ease with the political content of Chinese thinkers’ ideas than Schwartz, who eschews all mention of political ideas in his introduction and appears very much on the defensive when acknowledging the political content of, for example, Confucius’s thought (Schwartz 1985: 102–117).

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

Introduction: Ideology and Power in Early China

9

judgment of Confucius as “only a man who has a certain amount of practical and worldly wisdom—one with whom there is no speculative philosophy” (Hegel 2009: 107) still haunts many Sinologists with a philosophical background. As a result, they tend to prefer discussions of abstract and “speculative” matters in early Chinese thought at the expense of practical and this-worldly issues, of which political thought is most prominent. To demonstrate this tendency to shift away from political issues, suffice it to review the manifold studies on such an eminent thinker as Xunzi 荀子 (d. after 238 bce). The vast majority of these focus on Xunzi’s views on human nature, mind, Heaven, and epistemology, with incomparably less discussion dedicated to his views on rulership, ruler-minister relations, or the proper distribution of material resources, even though these themes occupy a significant part of the eponymous text.13 Other thinkers who are considered “too practical,” such as Shang Yang, are sometimes simply glossed over. For instance, David S. Nivison’s chapter, “The Classical Philosophical Writings,” in the Cambridge History of Ancient China (Nivison 1999) dedicates only a few words to Shang Yang, whose ideas are covered more thickly in Mark E. Lewis’s chapter, “Warring States: Political History,” in the same book (Lewis 1999a). This choice is not a matter of Nivison’s individual preferences: rather, it reflects a widespread lack of interest in Shang Yang and other “Legalists” among scholars of early Chinese philosophy. Only very recently can we see the seeds of change (see more below).14 Given the lackluster interest in early Chinese political thought among Sinologists, its neglect among the comparatists is not surprising. Four decades ago, 13

14

For such treatment of Xunzi in general studies of early Chinese thought, see Nivison 1999: 790–799; cf. Graham 1989: 235–267. For a similar trend in Xunzi-related monographs and collected volumes, see, e.g., Machle 1993; Kline and Ivanhoe 2000; Cua 2005. For major exceptions, see Goldin 1999; and esp. Sato 2003. As I noticed a few years ago (Pines 2009: 225n18), the number of works published in English since the 1980s on the subject of the so-called nominalist (ming jia 名家) Gongsun Long 公孫龍 was four or five times larger than that of studies that deal with the Shang jun shu 商君書 (Book of Lord Shang), attributed to Shang Yang, although the latter is much more influential, better preserved, and much longer and allows for significantly more research than the remains of Gongsun Long’s text. Notably, while the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy contains a lengthy discussion of the “school of names,” neither Shang Yang nor even such a brilliant political thinker as Han Fei is included (as of 2013; in 2014 an entry entitled “Legalism in Chinese Philosophy” was added; Pines 2014). A rare exception in the field is a recent (2011) volume of the Journal of Chinese Philosophy dedicated to the “Legalists”; in this issue, see esp. Goldin 2011a, which explains the inadequacy of the term “Legalism.”

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

10

Pines

John Schrecker (1974: 462) lamented that “political theorists in the contem­ porary West have virtually ignored the Chinese tradition.” He attributed this neglect to “a parochialism in space and time which deeply infects Western intellectual life.” Sadly, little has changed since then. For the majority of scholars of political thought (or “political philosophy”) worldwide, the Chinese case remains terra incognita. Early Chinese political thought is not mentioned at all in the six volumes of the Cambridge History of Political Thought, nor is it discussed in the journal History of Political Thought; it is absent from the “political philosophy” sections in the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy and the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy,15 is ignored by The Blackwell Dictionary of Political Science (Bealey 2003), and is only cursorily mentioned in The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Political Thought (1986) and Mark Bevir’s Encyclopedia of Political Theory (2010). Surely, there are laudable exceptions (see, e.g., Anthony Black’s A World History of Ancient Political Thought [2009]), but overall, the Western-centric bias in studies of political thought remains strongly visible. Insofar as we speak of Sinology proper, one does not need much effort to prove that the shift away from the political thought of early thinkers is counterproductive. But what would comparatists gain from incorporating Chinese ideas? It is not my intention to debate here whether the study of early Chinese thought would be—to paraphrase Van Norden (1996: 226)—of purely “notional” interest (i.e., serve only to expand one’s horizon) or a “real” option (i.e., would it be possible for a Western audience to learn something useful from ancient Chinese ideas?).16 What is important for me is to notice at least several aspects of early Chinese political thought that make it particularly worthwhile for comparative analysis. First, early Chinese political thought is notable for its intrinsic connection with political practice. As argued above, Chinese thinkers were less engaged in abstract theorizing than in providing concrete recipes on how to direct the realm toward peace and stability. Insofar as this stability was overwhelmingly envisioned as attainable only under a universal empire ruled by an omnipotent monarch, the imperial unification of 221 bce may justifiably be considered as the materialization of the thinkers’ hopes. While the empire deviated in many aspects from its architects’ recommendations, its fundamental functioning mode was undoubtedly shaped by the ideas, ideals, and premises of 15 16

See http://www.rep.routledge.com/article/S099 for Routledge; http://plato.stanford.edu/ for Stanford. Van Norden’s (1996: 226) analysis of a “real” option (in which case “going over” new ideas is recommendable) and a “notional” one (which can maximally provide “some inspiration for thoughts about elements missing from modern life”) is borrowed from Williams 1985.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

Introduction: Ideology and Power in Early China

11

the thinkers of the Warring States period. This provides us with an excellent case study for analyzing the dialectical connection between the political ideas and their actualization. This case study is all the more interesting when we recall that the Chinese empire became—at least on the ideological level—the single most durable polity in human history. The cumulative impact of preimperial thought on this durability makes the study of this thought all the more rewarding.17 Second, the practical orientation of Chinese thought allows reassessment of the nature of political theories in general. For some observers the preoccupation of Chinese thinkers with the practical consequences of their ideas at the expense of theoretical abstractions appears as intellectual weakness; but this should not necessarily be so. It may be argued, conversely, that the insistence by many Chinese thinkers on the need to test theoretical constructs in practice is actually the major strength of their approaches. Xunzi stated with utmost clarity: “it is better to implement rather than just understand: learning should culminate in implementation.”18 That this statement comes from one of the most sophisticated philosophers is revealing. It may be tempting to think of Xunzi’s view as representing what should be a norm rather than an aberration in the history of political thought: the idea’s validity should be tested against the possibility of its actualization. In Chinese political thought this prioritization of praxis over pure theorizing remained the hallmark of eminent thinkers for centuries. It may be of some interest to recall that it was also prominently advocated by the single most influential—even if hugely controversial—modern Chinese political thinker: Mao Zedong.19 The emphasis on the implementability of one’s ideas shaped not just the content of Chinese thinkers’ proposals but even their ways of argumentation. 17

18 19

There was considerable disagreement among the editors of this volume as to what exactly constitutes the empire’s “durability.” It should be clarified that speaking of durability does not mean glossing over ruptures, discontinuities, and periods of severe malfunctioning that plagued the Chinese empire. What is important for me are significant continuities, primarily on the ideological level but also in terms of manifold political practices. See more in Pines 2009, 2012. 知之不若行之。學至於行之而止矣。Xunzi IV.8: 142 (“Ru xiao”). For Mao’s discussion of the relation between theory and practice, see his 1937 essay “On Practice” 實踐論 (Mao Zedong 1975: vol. 1, 295–309). In the course of his long career, Mao forsook his erstwhile pragmatism, allowing himself to be misled by empty ideological chimeras; but his dictum of integrating theory with practice was resurrected after his death by Deng Xiaoping 鄧小平 (1904–1997) and Deng’s allies, eager to dismantle the disastrous legacy of Mao’s last years. For Mao’s thought, see Schram 1989. For Deng’s appeal to “practice,” see MacFarquhar 1993: 317–321.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

12

Pines

Thus, the Masters often built their arguments not around carefully constructed syllogisms but around historical analogies, most often through historical anecdotes, which allowed the audience to analyze advantages or disadvantages of certain types of political action in concrete situations (Goldin 2013b). This style of argumentation, in turn, was conducive to intellectual flexibility: the very fact that historical narratives could normally be interpreted in more than one way cautioned a reader against excessive ideological rigidity and encouraged him to adjust ideas to ever-changing circumstances.20 The resultant flexibility and adjustability of political ideas may be one of the major sources of the remarkable vitality of Chinese political culture. Closer integration with the historical dimension may also benefit political thought elsewhere. Last, but not least, engagement with Chinese political thought may be a rewarding experience for comparatists because that thought is rich with ideas that were not strongly articulated elsewhere. Some of these ideas—such as the quest for a universal empire ruled by an omnipotent monarch—may have only a “notional” interest for modern political philosophers in the West, but others may well belong to Van Norden’s “real” option. For instance, the concept of meritocracy and the idea that intellectuals have a political commitment may be of some practical value in our time, even though it would be foolhardy to see them squarely as adequate remedies to the maladies of Occidental political culture.21 More controversially, even the elitist view of the sociopolitical hierarchy as reflective of a moral and intellectual division between the “superior men” (junzi 君子) and the “petty men” (xiao ren 小人)—challenging as it is to the normative understanding of political equality in the West—may deserve attention from those who are not happy with the current form of political democracy. At a minimum, the very possibility of pondering the relevance of early Chinese ideas to modern political challenges is indicative of the future perspectives that the systematic study of Chinese political thought can open to the general field.

20

21

For the use of historical narratives (especially anecdotes) to convey ideologically important information, see Schaberg 2001, 2011. For the inherent multiplicity of the messages conveyed by historical narratives, see the excellent study by Li Wai-yee (2007). For the close relation between historical anecdotes and the concept of “expediency” (quan 權), which allowed the flexible implementation of guiding moral and political principles, see Gentz’s chapter (chap. 3) in the present volume. On “expediency” or “Primacy of the Situation,” see also Goldin 2005b; cf. Vankeerberghen 2005–2006. For engaging attempts to consider the relevance of Chinese meritocratic ideas to current political practices, see, e.g., Bell and Li 2013; Bell 2015.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

Introduction: Ideology and Power in Early China



13

Reengaging Early Chinese Political Thought: Modernizers versus Historians

In recent years, interest in early Chinese political thought is again reemerging both in China and in the West. Among many reasons for this phenomenon, one should be singled out as particularly interesting: a renewed search for the relevance of traditional Chinese thought to China’s future. Decades of remarkable economic growth and the resultant social transformation have hollowed out much of China’s Marxist ideology, creating a void of cultural and political orientations. Among intellectuals who search for the country’s path toward renewed cultural and ideological prowess, the voices of those who draw inspiration from the country’s rich past are becoming ever stronger, and their impact is palpable even within the top echelons of the Communist Party of China (CPC).22 This, in addition to a parallel increase in the appeal of Chinese traditional culture, primarily Confucianism, to members of the sizable Chinese diaspora worldwide, has helped to fuel interest in China’s traditional ideologies among political scientists and political philosophers in China and—increasingly—the West. This revival of interest in Chinese traditional culture—or, for short, “Confucian revival”—is a heterogeneous phenomenon, whose participants differ markedly in terms of their ideological and political agendas, as well as their disciplinary affiliations. The movement is by no means confined to academic circles but is much broader: its adherents come from different social strata and have highly distinctive perceptions of what constitutes Confucianism (Billioud 2010). Even among academic participants the differences are huge. Some are members and supporters of the CPC, and some are its bitter foes; some want to reconcile Confucianism with Western democratic ideas, while others hope that it provides an alternative to Western liberal democracy; some look at Confucianism as a possible repository of universal values, while others are primarily interested in filling the cultural void in China itself; some turn to the past only as a source of general inspiration, while others search there for viable political models with which to mend or replace the current sociopolitical system.23 Revivalists come from many disciplinary affiliations, but overall within 22

23

In October 2014, the all-powerful Politburo of the CPC conducted a special study session dedicated to the relevance of the past to the country’s present (http://news.xinhuanet. com/politics/2014-10/13/c_1112807191.htm, accessed November 18, 2014). See also Buckley 2014. Among Western political scientists, the most active promoter of interest in traditional Chinese thought is Daniel Bell (see, e.g., Bell 2008). Among the most prolific expatriate

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

14

Pines

the academy their voices are clearly dominated by political scientists and philosophers. Parallel to the flood of Confucian revivalism, there is a palpable increase in scholarly interest in early Chinese political thought within the narrowly defined field of early China studies. Even a brief search through such an essential tool as Paul R. Goldin’s Ancient Chinese Civilization: Bibliography of Materials in Western Languages (2014) will show that more articles and monographs on this topic have been published in the West during the last five years (2009–2013) than during the preceding four decades. While some of these publications are clearly related to the Confucian revival, many more diverge—quite considerably—from this trend. Actually, the gap between studies of early Chinese political thought generated by historians and by, for example, political scientists appears at times to be so huge that one wonders whether or not a dialogue between these two avenues of investigation is possible at all. The reasons for methodological distinctions between scholars who analyze early Chinese political thought through the prism of its modern applicability and those who investigate it in the context of early Chinese history are obvious and do not require further discussion. Yet we should not dismiss a possibility of establishing a creative dialogue and mutual fertilization. For political scientists it would require more attentiveness to the historical context of early Chinese ideas and to their actualization before and after the imperial unification; for historians it would require paying more attention to broader implications of our topics of study beyond the specific period under discussion. Speaking from a historian’s point of view, I believe that broad and engaging topics can be addressed without sacrificing methodological rigor. It is with this in mind that we organized the conference that called upon scholars of early Chinese history, literature, paleography, and philosophy to tackle broad issues in early Chinese political thought. The results of this conference—attended by twenty researchers from East Asia, Europe, Israel, and the United States—are presented in this volume. Our conference pursued two goals. First, we aimed at discussing broad topics, such as the nature of rulership, ruler-minister relations, and the legitimating devices employed by Chinese rulers to sustain their power and maintain Chinese promoters of the Confucian revival, one must mention Tu Wei-ming (Du Weiming 杜維明) and Yü Ying-shih (Yu Yingshi 余英時); cf. Tu Wei-ming 2010 and Yu Yingshi 2005. For views of current promoters of the Confucian revival in China, see, e.g., Yan Xuetong 2011; Bai Tongdong 2012; Jiang Qing 2013. Several volumes of Contemporary Chinese Thought and other journals have explored the phenomenon of the Confucian revival in China.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

Introduction: Ideology and Power in Early China

15

control over the population. Second, in doing so, we did not dispense with our methodological tools, such as careful contextualization, philological research, and in-depth textual analysis, but rather tried to demonstrate that these tools are essential for the proper analysis of the political thought of the Warring States period. We believe that addressing problems of the texts’ dating, of inter­textuality, of their rhetorical devices, of historical and archeological context, and the like is crucial if we want to make a meaningful statement about ideas concerning power and authority in pre-imperial and early imperial ­China. There is one other common point of our articles: all of us are firmly grounded in the temporal and geographical setting in which the ancient texts were produced. Some scholars nowadays argue that “Confucianism transcends time” and that “Confucianism transcends culture” (Tu Wei-ming 2010: 249– 251). The contributors to this volume do not have a uniform view of this issue. Yet whatever our attitudes to the potentially universal and modern validity of Confucianism or of any other strand of early Chinese thought, we all share a common belief that this thought should first of all be introduced within its own context and on its own terms (cf. Skinner 1992: ix–xv). Only then can we start a meaningful discussion about the relevance of China’s past to its present.

The Structure of This Volume

This volume is divided into two parts. The first explores some of the foundational ideas and concepts that were formed during the pre-imperial age and later contributed toward shaping the Chinese imperial system and, in particular, toward dynastic legitimation. By speaking of “legitimation” we do not refer to specific legitimation devices as applied by different dynasties or different rulers (for these, see, e.g., Chan 1984; Wechsler 1985) but to what may be called the fundamental legitimacy of any ruling dynasty: the requirement to ensure political unity of All-under-Heaven; the concept of Heaven’s Mandate (tian ming 天命); and adherence to political models associated with the paragons of the past. Each of the chapters discusses one of these ideas and notions, and each problematizes it. The first chapter is by Paul R. Goldin, “Representations of Regional Diversity during the Eastern Zhou Dynasty.” Goldin explores one of the major riddles of early China: the increasing regional diversity on the eve of the imperial unification of 221 bce. As has been shown in previous research, it was during the Warring States period that the quest for political unification of “All-under-Heaven” (tianxia 天下) became exceptionally powerful, eventually becoming the center­piece of Chinese political culture and the cornerstone of dynastic

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

16

Pines

legitimacy for millennia to come (Pines 2000a; 2012: 11–43). This quest for political unity shaped the philosophical and even spatial perceptions of the thinkers of the Warring States period, who postulated, for instance, the absolute priority of the whole (e.g., “All-under-Heaven”) over its parts (e.g., the regions) (Lewis 2006). Intuitively, one would expect that the evolution of the idea of unity should come in tandem with increasing cultural homogenization of the Zhou realm; but as Goldin shows, this was not the case. Actually, the Eastern Zhou 東周 period (770–256 bce) witnessed an increasingly pronounced regional diversity, reflected through distinctively regional artistic expression, variations in burial practices, the appearance of local history-writing in regional polities, or accentuation of regional differences in military and economic texts. And yet this recognition of regional diversity did not generate an ideology of political regionalism, as it did, for instance, in modern Europe. Goldin emphasizes that, at the very least, on the textual level, it was clear that “the regions of China are diverse, but together they constitute a complete and closed system.” Even geographic and astrological constructs emphasized the “conception of China as a great whole containing a number of discrete subdivisions.” How and why did the idea of a unified “China”—referring here to the Warring States world (i.e., territory that is roughly associated with what we call today “China proper” except for its southernmost parts)—evolve before the real imperial unification? Why did it develop during a period of increasing regional diversification? Why did the processes of increased territorial integration in each of the component states, outlined by Goldin, not give place to local separatism? How—and to what extent—was the “China” that was unified in 221 bce related to the loose entity of the Western Zhou 西周 period (ca. 1046–771 bce)? Full answers to these questions will require further research. The political unification of the subcelestial realm was one of the cornerstones of dynastic legitimacy in China; the notion of Heaven’s Mandate was another. This notion appeared as early as the Western Zhou period (although debates on the precise dating of its emergence continue: cf. Kern 2009; Luo Xinhui 2012), and after a relative lull during the Eastern Zhou, it was resurrected as the fundamental legitimation device in the Han period, most notably after Wang Mang’s 王莽 (r. 9–23 ce) interregnum. Normally, the idea that the dynasty’s rule is mandated by the supreme deity, Heaven, should be considered a classical instance of religious legitimation, which was common worldwide (e.g., in the ancient Near East). And yet, Heaven was a peculiar supreme deity. In marked distinction to, for example, Near Eastern gods, Heaven of the Zhou age was not only highly depersonalized but also lacked a direct means of

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

Introduction: Ideology and Power in Early China

17

communicating its will to the populace. No prophet spoke on its behalf, no sacred scriptures explicated its will, and aside from occasionally sending down portents and omens (the meaning of which was highly contestable), Heaven remained separated from the people.24 The primary religious means of ascertaining Heaven’s will was divination, but it is difficult to assess how much the results of divination influenced policymakers (cf. Kern, forthcoming-a). Early sections of the Shijing 詩經 (Classic of Poems) and the Shujing 書經 (Classic of Documents) do refer, albeit infrequently, to divination, but almost never to omens. These texts emphasize that Heaven’s will can be inferred primarily from the analysis of human affairs (especially, but not exclusively, ex post facto from the success or failure of a dynastic contester); and it is through proper maintenance of human affairs that one should attain Heaven’s Mandate. This emphasis on human, rather than divine, matters is so strong that a leading scholar of early Chinese religion, Poo Mu-chou, averred that “the religion of the [Z]hou court was more akin to a type of political philosophy” (1993: 30). Even if somewhat overstated, this view reflects a substantial difference between the conceptualization of the supreme deity in China and elsewhere. Yet while it is common among scholars in China and elsewhere to reduce the Heaven-centered religion to “a type of political philosophy,” there are also indications that the real picture was by far more complex. In her chapter “Omens and Politics: The Zhou Concept of the Mandate of Heaven as Seen in the Chengwu 程寤 Manuscript,” Luo Xinhui 羅新慧 analyzes a short manuscript from the collection of bamboo texts that were apparently looted from a Warring States period tomb from the state of Chu and then acquired by Tsinghua (Qinghua 清華) University on the Hong Kong antiquities market. The manuscript, named Chengwu by its editors, appears to be an early variant of a long-lost chapter from the Yi Zhou shu 逸周書 (Lost Documents of Zhou) collection. Luo demonstrates that the manuscript comprises two sections, of which the first is earlier, datable possibly to the Springs-and-Autumns or early Warring States period; while the second part is probably from the middle Warring States period. The two sections represent highly distinct views of the 24

The “Tian zhi” 天志 (“Heaven’s Intent”) triplet of the Mozi remains an exceptional text in the pre-imperial corpus insofar as it speaks confidently on Heaven’s behalf. Even these chapters, though, treat Heaven much less as a revelational deity and more as an abstract symbol of justice. For a later development of the Mozi doctrine of Heaven, as exemplified in the “Fa yi” 法儀 chapter, see Standaert 2013. In the imperial period, by contrast, attempts were made—usually but not exclusively by various religious movements, especially those associated with religious Daoism—to establish direct links with Heaven (for a curious relation between Mozi and later Daoism, see Goldin 2011b).

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

18

Pines

transfer of the Mandate to the Zhou people. The first section narrates a prophetic dream of the future King Wu of Zhou 周武王 (d. ca. 1043 bce); the dream promises the Zhou overthrow of the Shang. This indirect revelation of Heaven’s will is followed by elaborate sacrifices, after which the Mandate is unequivocally granted to the Zhou. The second section of the manuscript presents an entirely different way of attaining the Mandate. The importance of the dream and of sacrifices is downplayed, while the importance of King Wu’s proper political behavior is emphasized. Luo suggests that this short text reflects tensions around conceptualizations of Heaven’s Mandate and of Heaven’s interaction with humans. It seems that, at least among some segments of the educated elite, Heaven was conceptualized as a revelational deity, while for other thinkers this idea was potentially damaging to the dominant interpretation of Heaven’s Mandate as something that was bestowed in recognition of human actions alone. The implicit tension between the two parts of Chengwu may reflect, then, a broader tension between different views of Heaven’s interaction with humans. It may be interesting to notice in this regard that the resurrection of the idea of Heaven’s Mandate under the Han 漢 dynasty (206/202 bce–220 ce) brought about a rise of interest in omens and portents to a degree unheard of in the Warring States period texts (see, e.g., Loewe 1996; Kern 2000b). The topic of distinct conceptualizations of Heaven and the manifestations of its will certainly requires further research. The third major leg of dynastic legitimacy during the imperial period was the adoption of a ritual, political, and intellectual framework associated with the paragon rulers of the past. The dictum to emulate the former wise kings or meritorious ancestors is strongly pronounced as early as the Western Zhou chapters of the Shujing and many contemporaneous bronze inscriptions; evidently, the idea of learning from the past belongs to the earliest layers of Chinese political thought. Yet during the Warring States period this idea was no longer taken for granted. In an age of rapid changes, the past was no longer uniformly revered; and not a few thinkers questioned its authority altogether. Facing the need to reconcile the legacy of the past with the rapidly changing world, some thinkers became engaged in either reinterpreting old traditions or inventing new ones; it was during that age that new paragons were invented or old ones were imagined in a new way, and texts attributed to them or associated with them were created. This process of reshaping the tradition ended, inconclusively, only in the Han dynasty, when certain interpretations of the past were canonized, while others were abandoned altogether. These efforts of imperial court Erudites and exegetes did not bring about a uniform understanding of the venerated tradition, but they did create a certain common

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

Introduction: Ideology and Power in Early China

19

framework within which the debates over the proper interpretation of the past were henceforth conducted.25 Two chapters in this volume deal with the texts that were formed during the late pre-imperial or early imperial period and that presented their distinct visions of the past as guidelines for the present and for the future. One of these texts is the Gongyang zhuan 公羊傳 (Gongyang Commentary) to the Chunqiu 春秋 (Springs-and-Autumns Annals). The Chunqiu is the historical chronicle of the state of Lu 魯, the compilation (or editing) of which is traditionally attributed to Confucius. The Gongyang zhuan teaches the reader to discern the “great meaning” 大義 of the Chunqiu supposedly encoded there by Confucius through “subtle words” 微言. During the reign of Emperor Wu of the Han dynasty 漢武帝 (r. 141–87 bce), the Chunqiu, in its Gongyang interpretation, was elevated to the position of the summa of Confucius’s political wisdom, while the Gongyang zhuan itself became a singularly important text and a focus of intensive exegetical efforts. Although from the Latter Han on, the importance of the Gongyang zhuan receded, it was occasionally “rediscovered” and repromoted by various statesmen and political thinkers, most notably by the famous late imperial reformer Kang Youwei 康有爲 (1858–1927) and, most recently, by the current Chinese political thinker Jiang Qing 蔣慶 (b. 1952).26 What is common to Kang, Jiang, and many other adherents of the Gongyang zhuan is their reading of its message through the prism of the Han and Qing 清 (1644–1912) exegesis. The result is odd: the constructs that are based on the Gongyang zhuan often depart considerably from the original content of the text. Against these trends, Joachim Gentz, in his “Long Live the King! The Ideology of Power between Ritual and Morality in the Gongyang zhuan 公羊傳,” 25

26

For the invention and reinvention of the legendary and semilegendary past, see Gu Jiegang (1926) 1988, a somewhat-outdated but still insightful study; for the process of formation of the uniform vision of the past and of canonical tradition, see, e.g., Lewis 1999b. In the post-Han era, there was a sharp decline in exegetical works on the Gongyang zhuan and even in references to its exegesis during court discussions. The Gongyang zhuan was invoked at times as a foil to the “too historical” Zuo zhuan, which was derided by some classicists for missing “the great meaning” 大義 of the Chunqiu. Yet even these scholars (such as Lu Chun 陸淳 [d. 806] and his eighth-century predecessors or, much later, Zhu Xi 朱熹 [1130–1200]) do not appear to be particularly inspired by or interested in the Gongyang zhuan as such. The same holds for the scholars, such as Sun Fu 孫復 (992– 1057), who adopted the basic ideas of the Gongyang exegesis but preferred to claim direct inspiration from the Chunqiu rather than from its commentary (Li Jianjun 2008: 89–119). See more in Huang Kaiguo 2013: 424–447. For Kang Youwei’s resurrection of the Gongyang zhuan, see Huang Kaiguo 2013: 651–730. For a broader context of Chunqiu studies, see Zhao Boxiong 2004. For Jiang Qing’s views, see Jiang Qing 2013.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

20

Pines

sets out to restore the original outlook of the Gongyang zhuan and its major ideological premises. Gentz’s study is based on his earlier explorations of the nature and exegetical strategies of the Gongyang zhuan (Gentz 2001, 2005) but goes further toward demonstrating the complexity of Gongyang exegesis and the intrinsic link between its form and its content. Gentz analyzes the peculiarity of the text by highlighting not just its explicit ideas but also its “meaningful silences that have to be interpreted as specific statements of a particular ideological position” (p. 101). These silences are revealing: for instance, crucial ethical terms that permeate Zhou literature, such as “virtue” (de 德) and “filial piety” (xiao 孝), are absent from the Gongyang zhuan, markedly distinguishing this text from those of Confucian lore. Gentz furthermore explores internal tensions in the Gongyang zhuan between rigid and supposedly unshakable ritual rules, on the one hand, and the importance of expediency, or “weighing” (quan 權), which should guide moral action outside the ritual framework, on the other. In Gentz’s analysis, the Gongyang zhuan is far more sophisticated than most readers would admit; and it is also a highly distinctive work whose ideological stance has no clear parallels among pre-imperial texts. Gentz places its stance “somewhere between a traditional person-centered monarchy, in which the concepts of virtue (de), loyalty, and filial piety are central, and a new, impersonal system operating on the basis of an abstract set of highly efficient ruling techniques and bureaucratic rules” (p. 105). The text furthermore defines “an ideal realm of royal authority and power independent from the actual existence of an adequate ruler” (p. 116). As Gentz shows, the sublime message of the Gongyang zhuan was flexible enough to be endorsed by both Emperor Wu and his critics. Martin Kern, in his “Language and the Ideology of Kingship in the ‘Canon of Yao,’” tackles another major canonical text: “Yao dian” 堯典 (“Canon of Yao”), the first chapter of the Shangshu 尚書 (aka Shujing, Classic of Documents). “Yao dian” narrates the rule of two major paragon sovereigns of antiquity: Yao 堯 and Shun 舜. In most historical accounts, the most famous act of each was to abdicate in favor of a worthier candidate: according to Warring States period legend, Yao yielded the throne to his worthy minister, Shun, who later similarly abdicated in favor of another worthy minister, Yu 禹 (Allan 1981; Pines 2005a). However, the “Yao dian” story is not about abdication (Yao’s abdication to Shun is mentioned only briefly, while Shun’s is not mentioned at all). Rather, it presents Yao and Shun as two models of rulership, embedding in a single text the full range of implicit tensions between different concepts of monarchy. “Yao dian” is a notoriously difficult text, in part because of its archaizing language, which bewildered commentators from the Han period on. Kern ­departs from the traditional reading of the text and presents a novel

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

Introduction: Ideology and Power in Early China

21

interpre­tation of the “Yao dian” as a work of political rhetoric that presents two distinct models of kingship. Yao is treated in the text as an archaic charismatic ruler who acts idiosyncratically and whose personal voice is fully heard, especially when he contradicts his officials. Shun, on the other hand, is portrayed as an impersonal ruler, who presides over a well-functioning bureaucracy and performs a series of highly ritualized acts, which do not require any display of the ruler’s individuality. It is not difficult to infer that for most imperial court officials (and in all likelihood for the text’s compilers), it was Shun, rather than Yao, who was a real model for the emperor to emulate. These courtiers’ ideal would be a compliant and depersonalized ruler who performs his tasks meticulously but who does not overrule his officials and whose activism does not depart from the ritually prescribed framework. Why then does the text present two distinct models? Were these considered complementary, reminiscent of Kantorowicz’s (1957) idea of the “king’s two bodies,” or was Shun presented as a proper response to Yao’s individualistic mode of rule? If, as many scholars (Kern included) suggest, the Shun section of the “Yao dian” was edited by the court Erudites of the First Emperor of Qin 秦始皇 (emp. 221–210 bce), then it may be surmised that they tried thereby to direct this activist and individualist ruler toward a more ritualistically regulated mode of rule, which would make the emperor more compliant with his bureaucrats. Taken more broadly, the distinct modes of rule of Yao and Shun embed the perennial tension between individualist and depersonalized monarchs throughout Chinese history.27 The articles in the first part of this volume differ in their content, angle of analysis, and even methodology. Yet there is one common point that recurs in each of the analyses: the intrinsic presence of multiple tensions in Chinese political thought. Tensions existed between unity and diversity; between the emphasis on human affairs when dealing with Heaven and the omenological approach; between inviolable ritual norms and the dictates of political expedience; between a charismatic and a depersonalized mode of rule; and so on. These tensions, which permeate most Chinese political texts and, mutatis mutandis, Chinese political culture in general, are not incidental. Rather, as argued by Liu Zehua 劉澤華 (2006), they reflect what he dubs the yin-yang 陰 陽 structure of Chinese political culture: the coexistence of ostensibly contradictory statements and premises, which complement rather than negate each other.28 This multiplicity of messages and meanings explains in particular why canonical texts, such as those analyzed by Gentz and Kern, could be used to 27 28

For this tension, see Pines 2012: 44–75. It should be clarified that Liu Zehua uses the yin-yang pair purely in a metaphorical sense; he does not refer to actual yin-yang philosophy.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

22

Pines

both bolster the ruler’s power and constrain it, to quell the opposition and to empower it. This understanding should be kept in mind when we discuss modern usages of Confucianism. The same ideology can contribute toward strengthening the Party’s power and toward its curtailment; it can be utilized by the regime’s guardians and by its critics. On a more general level, the persistent tensions in Chinese political thought and political culture imbue these with considerable adjustability to ever-changing circumstances and, as noted above, may explain their ongoing vitality. In the second part of our volume we go down the sociopolitical ladder to explore relations between the ruler and his ministers and between the state and its subjects, the commoners. These relations were also characterized by multiple contradictions. In particular, the ministers had to navigate carefully between their commitment to monarchic order, in which all the imaginable power was supposed to be granted to the supreme sovereign (Liu Zehua 2000; Pines 2009: 25–53), and their sense of self-esteem as intelligent and responsible political actors. Immense tensions characterized ruler-minister relations throughout the imperial millennia, but they were even more acute in the preimperial period, when the coexistence of multiple loci of power weakened the rulers vis-à-vis their aides. Not surprisingly, many ministers of that age adopted a haughty attitude that would not be tolerated under the unified empire. For instance, proud hereditary ministers of the aristocratic Springs-and-Autumns period viewed themselves as sharing the ruler’s responsibility for the altars of soil and grain (sheji 社稷)—that is, for the state—and treated the lord as mere primus inter pares. By the Warring States period, ministers’ relative standing vis-à-vis the sovereign declined; but their pride did not. Actually, in the new meritocratic age, many ministers felt that insofar as they owed their position to superior skills, while the ruler owed his primarily to pedigree, they should be treated as the ruler’s equals or even as his guides and not as mere servitors (Pines 2009: 115–180). How to maintain this proud stance without jeopardizing the monarchic principle of rule became a source of concern for many political thinkers of the age. One of the most interesting examples of the immense tensions generated by the ministers’ simultaneous commitment to the overarching principle of monarchism and to their own sense of self-esteem is the case of Han Fei, explored by Romain Graziani in his chapter “Monarch and Minister: The Problematic Partnership in the Building of Absolute Monarchy in the Han Feizi 韓非子.” Han Fei is arguably the most authoritarian-minded of early Chinese thinkers; nobody can match the harshness of his pronouncements against scheming ministers; nobody else displays such a resolute commitment to safeguarding the ruler’s authority. Han Fei is deeply pessimistic about the possibility of

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

Introduction: Ideology and Power in Early China

23

maintaining amicable relations between the ruler and his ministers. Having postulated the rule of self-interest as the supreme principle of political life (Goldin 2005a: 58–65; 2013a), he dismisses the idea of ruler-minister friendship, entertained by many of his contemporaries, as a daydream: rather, as he says, their coexistence is based on “a hundred battles that are fought daily” 上 下一日百戰.29 So, did Han Fei support limitless autocracy? Not necessarily. First, as a potential minister himself, he was aware that total alienation between the ruler and the ministers would be detrimental to his own position; hence, pace his own antiministerial philippics, he introduces the figure of a reliable and fully committed adviser, whom the ruler should heed. And second, more substantially, Han Fei was also painfully aware of the monarch’s potential inadequacy. Repeatedly, he speaks of stupid monarchs who gravely damaged their state by disregarding good advice. Graziani concludes that “the monarch is both metaphysical fantasy and recurring nightmare to the author(s) of the Han Feizi” (p. 177). How to resolve this nightmare? The text fluctuates between the advocacy of an omnipresent and omniscient sovereign who controls every imaginable aspect of life in his state and the recommendation to the ruler to nullify himself, to refrain from activism and let the officials act in his stead and on his behalf (the latter alternative would curiously resemble the Shun model depicted in the “Yao dian”). Neither alternative is good, though: ultimately, as ­Graziani shows, Han Fei fails to provide a viable solution for the proper ruler-minister partnership or devise an ideological construct that “allowed room for a minister of his kind” (p. 180). Han Fei’s achievement lies elsewhere, though. An astute analyst, Han Fei diagnosed multiple maladies of the monarchic system, from which it continued to suffer for the next two millennia. Ironically, the thinker most committed to the perfection of the ruler-centered political order was the one most aware of the problems of individual rule. The Han Feizi is renowned for its antiministerial views, but its approach is a distinct minority in the corpus of received political writings from the Warring States period. One of its marked antipodes is the Yanzi chunqiu 晏子春秋 (Annals of Master Yan), discussed by Scott Cook in his chapter “The Changing Role of the Minister in the Warring States: Evidence from the Yanzi chunqiu 晏子春 秋.” The Yanzi chunqiu is a collection of anecdotes about the exemplary minister from the late Springs-and-Autumns period state of Qi 齊, Yan Ying 晏嬰 (aka Yanzi, ca. 580–500 bce). Yan Ying figures prominently in the major history of the Springs-and-Autumns period, the Zuo zhuan 左傳 (Zuo Commentary), which records a series of his speeches that are singularly bold in their 29

Han Feizi II.8: 51 (“Yang quan”); see also Pines 2013a: 73–77.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

24

Pines

denigration of rulers’ incompetence and assertion of the minister’s position as the ruler’s equal (Pines 2013c: 70–80).30 In particular, he insists that a minister should owe exclusive loyalty to the altars of soil and grain rather than to an individual ruler. This view is largely echoed in the Yanzi chunqiu. There Yan Ying appears even more audacious, arrogating to himself the right to intervene in any imaginable sphere of his lord’s activities: from appointments and dismissals of officials to policymaking to mere entertainment. The lord is depicted as even more deferential to criticism than he is in the Zuo zhuan. Cook attempts to locate the Yanzi chunqiu anecdotes within a broader lore of pre-imperial and early imperial discussions of ministerial loyalty. His conclusion—which will surprise the readers accustomed to dismissing the Yanzi chunqiu as a late Warring States or Han period text—is that most of its component anecdotes reflect the intellectual milieu of the early Warring States period, if not the Springs-and-Autumns period itself. This tentative conclusion will certainly require corroboration in further research; but it suffices to show the importance of the too-often-ignored Yanzi chunqiu as a source for analyzing ministerial ethics of the pre-imperial age. As noted above, historical anecdotes were a peculiar genre that enjoyed high popularity from the Warring States to the early Han period (cf. Schaberg 2011); and some of the reasons can be inferred from Cook’s analysis. It seems that anecdotes allowed the authors to convey their message on politically sensitive topics with much greater security than could be done through direct theorizing. Thus, the concept of ministerial loyalty as reflected in Yan Ying–related anecdotes poses a minister as a highly intelligent and autonomous political player, whose loyalty is owed to the state rather than to the ruler personally, and who has the right and the duty to disobey the ruler on matters of importance. Moreover, as one of the anecdotes related by Cook suggests, the ruler was not even supposed to exercise his will on matters of rewards and punishments unless his decision was approved by his ministers. It is significant that such subversive ideas were almost never aired directly but remained hidden among historical narratives. This demonstrates that the genre of anecdote is essential for a full understanding of the complexity of political ideas of the Warring States period. The two final chapters of the second part of this volume focus on the interaction of the state with the lower strata. This topic is rarely raised in studies of early Chinese political thought, and when it is discussed, the discus­sion 30

For the debates about the dating and nature of the Zuo zhuan and its reliability as the source for the intellectual history of the Springs-and-Autumns period, see Schaberg 2001; Pines 2002a; Li Wai-yee 2007.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

Introduction: Ideology and Power in Early China

25

normally focuses on what is called min ben 民本 (people as a root) thought— that is, views of the “people” (normally referring to the lower strata) as the raison d’ȇtre of the polity, whose well-being should be of primary concern to the rulers and the ultimate goal of political action.31 In our volume we do not focus on min ben thought but rather on ideas and practices aimed at achieving the state’s control over the populace. After all, a common concern of the Warring States polities and of the subsequent empire was to fully utilize the state’s material and human resources, to keep the population compliant, and to ensure a decent livelihood for the inhabitants so as to prevent dissent. How this control was conceptualized and maintained is the focus of chapters 7 and 8. In his chapter, “Ideologies of the Peasant and Merchant in Warring States China,” Roel Sterckx probes one of the central topics in pre-imperial and early imperial thought: what he calls the ideology of “agriculturalism”—namely, the prioritization of agriculture over commerce. Quite often, “agriculturalist” ideas in early China are read through the prism of the Han dynasty discourse that designated the peasants as superior to the merchants and emphasized the absolute importance of agriculture for the state’s economic prowess. Yet Sterckx shows that a systematic reading of major pre-imperial texts alters this picture. First, the peasant was lauded not so much because of his economic contribution to society but because he was more governable and stable, since his mental simplicity or even stupidity made him more amenable to the ruler’s control. Second, merchants were only rarely and exceptionally singled out in Warring States period texts as unwelcome parasites; actually, aside from the Shang jun shu 商君書 (Book of Lord Shang), contemporaneous writings refrain from overall assaults on merchants. This suggests in turn that the antimercantile shift, which placed farmers at the top and relegated merchants to the bottom of society, was largely a Han intellectual product. The reasons for this shift of priorities since the early Han period require further discussion. Charles Sanft’s chapter, “Population Records from Liye: Ideology in Practice,” focuses on a topic that has never been discussed in the context of early Chinese political thought: population registration and documents concerning the government’s reach into the lower strata. The discovery of an imperial Qin county archive from Qianling County 遷陵縣, near the modern town of Liye 里耶 (Hunan), is one of the most fascinating archeological finds of recent decades, as it grants our first opportunity to understand the functioning of early 31

Not a few scholars have tried to find in the min ben the seeds of China’s supposedly indigenous democratic thought; see, e.g., Tan 2003: 132–156; Nuyen 2000; cf. Zhou Guitian 2001. For a radically different interpretation of min ben ideology as paternalistic rather than democratic, see, e.g., Zhang Fentian 2009. See more in Pines 2009: 187–218; Sabattini 2012.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

26

Pines

imperial bureaucracy at the lowest levels of society. Sanft’s analysis of the unearthed documents reveals an immensely efficient state apparatus, able to register the population in a remote corner of the newly conquered realm immediately after its military occupation and even able to trace fugitive debtors when they left the county. This tight control over human resources immediately invokes the image of Qin as a paradigmatic case of “agro-managerial despotism” akin to the model depicted by Karl A. Wittfogel in his seminal Oriental Despotism (1957). Yet Sanft views the matters differently. For him, “Qin systems for registering and monitoring the populace” “supported the creation and exercise of political power” that functioned not necessarily through coercion but “through monitoring and managing” (pp. 268–269). Qin institutions “functioned as tools more sophisticated than mere enablers of brute force. They were media by which the Qin promulgated their ideology” (p. 269). Sanft’s study reminds us that treating an early Chinese state as a purely coercive institution is a gross simplification. This volume ends with an epilogue by Liu Zehua, “Political and Intellectual Authority: The Concept of the ‘Sage-Monarch’ and Its Modern Fate,” which differs substantially from the other contributions. First, in terms of period covered, Liu’s article is not confined to early Chinese thought but rather presents a panoptic view of Chinese traditional political culture and its impact that extends to Mao Zedong and beyond. Second, the article is polemical. Liu criticizes some of the current proponents of China’s re-Confucianization. This is done not only for political reasons, although it is clear that Liu Zehua dislikes the potential negative impact of the resurrection of China’s traditional values, particularly Confucian ones, on the possibility of political liberalization. Rather, Liu also opposes China’s turn backward to its tradition, not as a political activist (he is not), but as a historian and particularly as a scholar of traditional Chinese political thought and political culture. The source of Liu Zehua’s dissatisfaction with the so-called New Confucians (xin rujia 新儒家) is related less to Confucianism per se and more to the proliferation of uncritical views about the past in the Chinese intellectual community and among the general public. According to the new “patriotic” fashion, the past is presented in an increasingly affirmative way as the source of the nation’s “five-millennia-old” glory; the unpleasant pages of China’s history are glossed over; and critical approaches toward the intellectual legacy of both the imperial and the pre-imperial age are visibly receding. Embellishment of the past is evident not just on a quasi-official level (e.g., in museums) and on a popular level (movies, TV serials, etc.) but also on the academic level, as an increasing number of incomprehensibly laudatory accounts of China’s past in general and its traditional political culture in particular are being published

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

Introduction: Ideology and Power in Early China

27

annually.32 For a critical historian such as Liu, these accounts are no less disturbing than the vehement attacks on traditional values during the Cultural Revolution. They flatten Chinese history, distort the past, and are detrimental to the historical discipline in general. Against these trends, Liu Zehua reminds us of some unpleasant and frequently toned-down aspects of traditional Chinese political culture, such as the nature of intellectual authority. While it is too often taken for granted that this authority rested firmly with the literati, Liu argues that this was not the case. Ever since the First Emperor of Qin appropriated the posture of a sage (shengren 聖人), this most respectable intellectual designation became an attribute of the imperial office. Although most emperors neither took their sagacity literally nor tried to impose their will on the intellectual realm, there were no legal or institutional means to prevent them from doing so. The exaltedness of the imperial position was sufficient in itself to overawe most literati; and when the emperor’s ex officio position as a sage was added to his enormous power of coercion, it created a combination of political and spiritual authority that could be utilized to curtail any intellectual activities. It should be recalled here that, in the long term, the emperor’s power over the realm of thought was rarely effective; but, in the short term, it could gravely affect the lives of men of letters. At least in principle, it was within the emperor’s prerogative to outlaw (or promote) any doctrine, any cult, any commentary on a classical book, or any literary work. Traditional China was not totalitarian; but, as Liu Zehua implies, the roots of Mao Zedong’s totalitarian rule during the last decade of his life are easily identifiable within the country’s past. Promoters of the restoration of China’s glorious traditional culture should pay attention to

32

See, e.g., the “Jiashen 甲申Culture Manifesto” published by a group of leading Chinese intellectuals in 2004. The manifesto argues, among other things: “We truly believe that Chinese culture has the Oriental qualities of emphasis on personality, on ethical norms, on altruism, and on harmony; it possesses a humanistic spirit of liberating, peaceful communication. It will provide a great intellectual enlightenment to those who consider how to reduce the problems in the current world, the problems of supreme individualism, supreme materialism, vicious competition, predatory exploitation, and all kinds of alarming and disturbing phenomena. It will illuminate those who seek peace and happiness for humankind” (http://paper.wenweipo.com/2006/10/19/xw0610190007.htm, accessed No­vember 18, 2014). This simplification of traditional Chinese culture to an “all-positive” image (for which, see also, e.g., Cao Deben 2006; Jiang Qing 2013) deeply annoys Liu Zehua and like-minded critical scholars.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

28

Pines

this unpleasant feature of the country’s history and face the past in its full complexity: not only as a source of inspiration but also as a warning.33 The First Emperor’s acquisition of the status of a sage in the aftermath of the imperial unification of 221 bce sets the temporal limit of this volume. Unification did not bring about the cessation of intellectual life, to be sure, but it reshaped its dynamics. Henceforth, the power of the throne over the members of the educated elite increased tremendously. Having monopolized the avenues of power and prestige, the imperial court could opt either to suppress men of letters (as, e.g., by the First Emperor himself during the infamous biblioclasm of 213 bce)34 or just to determine which sorts of intellectual expertise would open the routes of employment and which would close them (as was done by Emperor Wu of Han a century thereafter).35 In any case, it may be said with much confidence that political unification—which realized the hopes of the great majority of Warring States period intellectuals—also brought about a considerable reduction in the intellectuals’ autonomy (Ge Quan 2003). Under the imperial monopoly, intellectuals had to learn to avoid potentially dangerous topics or, at the very least, to adopt new forms of argumentation; and also the focus of their discourse shifted to a certain extent from the realm of politics to a variety of other matters. In retrospect, the imperial unification appears as a watershed in China’s intellectual history. Here we focus on the ideas and ideals that preceded it. How the establishment of the empire influenced political discourse is a topic for future studies. 33

34 35

It is worth noticing that during the study session of the CPC Politburo, the current (2015) General Secretary of the CPC, Xi Jinping 習近平, cautioned against blind adoration of the past. Rather, “the good aspects [of the past legacy] should be selected and adopted; the bad ones should be discarded” (see Xinhua report, n. 22 above). For various views of the Qin biblioclasm, see Petersen 1995; Kern 2000a: 183–196; Pines 2009: 180–183. It is noteworthy that Emperor Wu was as intolerant toward intellectual pluralism as the First Emperor. So close are the parallels between the two that Hans van Ess (2014) even opines that the negative portrait of the First Emperor in the Shiji might have been constructed primarily as a means to criticize Emperor Wu.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

Introduction: Ideology and Power in Early China

29

Part 1 The Foundations: Unity, Heaven, and Ancestral Models

∵

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

30

Pines

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

Regional Diversity during the Eastern Zhou Dynasty

31

Chapter 1

Representations of Regional Diversity during the Eastern Zhou Dynasty Paul R. Goldin If there is one word that art historians love to use in connection with the art of the great southern state of Chu 楚, it is “flamboyant” (e.g., Eugene Yuejin Wang 1994: 522; So 1983: 67; Lawton 1982: 24).1 “Exotic” is a favorite as well (Willetts 1958: vol. 1, 254). But the issue is not the fulsomeness of such adjectives (no item of culture is “exotic” to those who grew up with it), for even soberly worded accounts must still come to grips with the fact that Chu art displays certain styles and motifs not found anywhere else in the ancient Chinese world (e.g., Flad and Chen 2013: 133; Sickman and Soper 1971: 40). For instance, an observer with any knowledge of Chinese art will be able to tell that a certain type of drum stand with addorsed birds, often treading on tigers or snakes, comes from Chu (Furniss 2008: 39). The same goes for the tomb objects known in Chinese as “grave-securing beasts” (zhenmu shou 鎮墓獸), which are usually made of wood—sometimes joined with real antlers—and can have conspicuous features such as lolling tongues (Chaffin 2007). There are all sorts of apotropaic images and figurines in Chinese funerary art, but this type is peculiar to Chu. Thus, it may come as a surprise that, as several scholars have recently stressed (Li Ling 2004: 271–333; also Falkenhausen 2006: 264–265; Xu Shaohua 1999: 21–32), the further back one goes in time, the more Chu art resembles that of the Zhou 周 court and the Central Plain. This seems not only counterintuitive but also contrary to depictions of Chu, commonplace even in antiquity, as a polity straddling the border between Chinese civilization and alien barbarism. In one memorable passage in Speeches of the States (Guoyu 國語), the men of Chu are portrayed as “savages from Jing” 荊蠻 (Jing being another name for Chu: see Li Yujie 2001: 10–11) who do not know how to conduct themselves at ritual gatherings; elsewhere in the same text, they are called “savage * Many thanks to Matthew Anderson, Cortney E. Chaffin, Annie Chan, Lothar von Falken­ hausen, Martin Kern, Yuri Pines, and Ori Sela for helpful comments while I was drafting this essay. 1 “Flamboyant” is much abused in other contexts as well. See, e.g., Valenstein 2007, which, perhaps not coincidentally, makes a case for Chu influence (62).

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004299337_003 Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

32

Goldin

barbarians” 蠻夷 (Guoyu 14.12: 429–431 [“Jinyu ba” 晉語八]; 18.7: 527 [“Chuyu xia” 楚語下]). The Zuo Commentary (Zuo zhuan 左傳) is less overtly condescending (Pines 2002a: 42–43) but still reflects ambivalence (Wai-yee Li 2007: 298ff.; Schaberg 2001: 133ff.). Thus, if Chu art was originally comparable to that of any other regional power in the Zhou cultural sphere, within a few centuries Chu’s neighbors had forgotten this fact; responding, perhaps, to the same artistic styles that have struck modern critics as “flamboyant” and “exotic,” these ancient observers regarded the population of Chu as alien, admissible into the Chinese moral order only after thorough habituation and schooling. This phenomenon demands explanation—and the explanation must also address the apparent paradox that, just as the Chinese world was moving toward political and ideological unification (finally achieved in 221 bce by the First Emperor of Qin 秦始皇帝, after decades of preparation), regional art in Chu was becoming more, not less, distinctive. The story of early Chinese history has been told by masters such as K.C. Chang2 as a protracted transition from a system with a large number of small and culturally diverse polities (as in the Stone Age) to a system with a small number of large and culturally homogeneous ones (as in the Warring States period, on the eve of unification). While this schema is no doubt correct in its essentials, it is in need of refinement. In the area of bronze-casting, the origins of Chu art as an unmistakable subtype of Zhou culture are paralleled, mutatis mutandis, in most other states on the ancient periphery (Rawson 1999: 365–366).3 In Yan 燕, in the northeast, the recently excavated Ke lei 克罍, which might have been produced as early as the eleventh century bce and records the establishment of a gentleman named Ke as Lord of Yan 燕侯,4 is so similar to Zhou analogues that no one can be sure of where it was produced: either in the king’s workshops (whence it would have been packed and transported to Yan) or in a Yan workshop that imitated royal standards. Like early bronzes from Chu and other peripheral regions, early Yan bronzes can be virtually indistinguishable from royal products. 2 E.g., Chang 1983: 32: “the political landscape of ancient China was dotted with hundreds of thousands of towns inhabited by members of discrete clans and lineages.” For a shorter version of the argument, see Chang 2005. Chang blunted his analysis by insisting on referring to the period as “the Three Dynasties” (i.e., Xia 夏, Shang 商, and Zhou), even though his own work went a long way toward overturning this mythic conception of ancient China. Thus, he is not without his critics (e.g., Bagley 1999: 135n17). 3 For early Qin bronzes, which could scarcely be identified were it not for their inscriptions, see esp. Han Wei 2001: 10–16; also Teng Mingyu 2003: 65–68. 4 This piece, incidentally, invalidates the older theory that the appointment of the Lord of Yan under Zhou auspices is but a myth (e.g., Qi Sihe 1940).

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

Regional Diversity during the Eastern Zhou Dynasty

33

Indeed, they are most distinctive when they fail to live up to royal models because of craftsmen’s incompetence—as in the case of the Ke he 克盉, a later vessel with an inscription identical to that of the Ke lei but noteworthy for its gross inferiority (Li Feng 1997). The inscription is difficult, but herewith a tentative translation: 王曰: 太保，唯乃明乃鬯，享余乃辟。余大對乃享，令克侯于 燕。事*? 羌* 、馬、虘* 、于* 、馭、長。克來燕，入土及厥 司。用作寳尊彝。(Zhou Baohong 2005: 1–104)5 The King said: “Grand Protector, you have brightened your fragrant wine, offering it to me, your ruler. I greatly respond to your offering and command Ke to be the Lord of Yan, to govern the Qiang, Ma, Zha [?], Yu, Yu, and Chang.” Ke came to Yan and accepted the land and its officials, wherefore he made this treasured sacrificial vessel. (Cf. the translation in Li Feng 2008: 241–242.) Inasmuch as Ke’s legitimacy derived directly from his appointment by the sovereign, it is plausible that he wanted the inscription authorizing his governance of Yan to be cast in a bronze vessel as similar as possible to those enjoyed by the King of Zhou himself. The very act of displaying his legitimacy in writing—for these might have been the first written words that had ever been seen in Yan—was also part of Ke’s effort to associate himself with the literate culture of the heartland.6 Such motives would have suppressed any nascent tendency toward regional distinctiveness. This is not to say that there was no regional variation during the Bronze Age. On the contrary, there was variation of multiple kinds. First, it is a near certainty that not everyone spoke the same language, even if the full range of linguistic diversity can never be ascertained through archeology. (Language and culture, as is especially well illustrated in New Guinea, the most linguistically diverse region on earth, are by no means coterminous.)7 For reasons that are 5 Asterisks in my transcription indicate graphs that cannot be reproduced in the standard kaishu 楷書 font. 6 On the spread of writing from the center to the periphery, see, e.g., Li Feng 2011: 271–272. 7 The classic study is Welsch 1992, with numerous responses, rebuttals, re-rebuttals, etc. For a synthesis, see Terrell 2001. These findings vitiate theories attempting to match material cultures inferred from archeology with discrete linguistic groups: e.g., Laurent Sagart’s (2011) equation of Proto-Sino-Tibetan-Austronesian with the Yangshao Culture 仰韶文化. For all we know, Yangshao might have encompassed multiple unrelated (and possibly extinct) language families.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

34

Goldin

still not completely understood, Chinese was the only written language, but, with an elite education, someone with a foreign mother tongue could read and recite Chinese like any other aristocrat. This is, at any rate, the situation depicted in historical sources (Zuo zhuan, Xi 14.1: 1005–1007; cf. Pines 2005b: 70), and there must have been at least as much linguistic variety in prehistoric times. Second, literally tens of thousands of bronze vessels from the Shang and Zhou periods have been documented,8 and certain regional tendencies are undeniable.9 Vessels depicting human faces, for example, are relatively rare in the north10 and thus suggestive of southern manufacture. Sadly, the hypothesis cannot be tested by some of the most famous examples, such as the “HumanFaced Square Cauldron” 人面方鼎, currently in the Hunan Provincial Museum,11 or “The Tigress,” a you 卣 depicting a creature holding a human head near its maw,12 because they are unprovenanced. But both of these are thought to come from Hunan.

8

9

10

11

12

Here I do not consider the bronze cultures of Sanxingdui 三星堆 and Jinsha 金沙, autochthonous yet interconnected with the civilizations of the Chinese heartland, because there is no reason to suppose that they participated in the same political system. The most recent discussion in English is Flad and Chen 2013: 89–100. Chinese scholarship usually identifies Sanxingdui as the forerunner of the later nation called Shu 蜀 (e.g., Li Xueqin 1997: 204–214). The lack of any writing from Sanxingdui or Jinsha obviates definite conclusions, but Shang and Zhou documents do not convey that these cultures (whatever they were called in their day) were part of the same oikumene. The relevant bibliography is too large to cite in a single footnote. For representative studies, see Li Xueqin 1997: 190–273; Zhu Fenghan 1995: 647–681, 782–858; and Kane 1974– 1975. Bagley (2004: 241n29) goes too far when he claims that Anyang never produced “representational art,” let alone depictions of human beings, except in its writing system: “Only in the sixth century bc do pictorial designs appear on a few bronze vessels.” There are many noteworthy counterexamples. For example, Allan (2010) discusses two unmistakable pictorial motifs (from Anyang as well as other regions). Bagley himself discussed several jade figurines in Bagley 1980, entries 34–40. Also sometimes called Dahe 大禾 Square Cauldron, after the two graphs inscribed inside it. Much Chinese scholarship has been wasted on the intractable question of the identity of the face. See, e.g., Xiong Jianhua 2007; and Sun Zuoyun 2007. Two nearly identical copies are known: one in the Musée Cernuschi (Paris) and one in the Sumitomo Collection (Sen’oku Museum 泉屋博古館, Kyoto and Tokyo). See Chen Peifen 2007.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

Regional Diversity during the Eastern Zhou Dynasty

35

Third, burial practices vary as well. The great western state of Qin probably displays the most variation of all.13 In the words of Lothar von Falkenhausen, “Qin tombs differ in two respects from Eastern Zhou–period tombs elsewhere in the Zhou culture sphere: they are overwhelmingly oriented east–west rather than north–south, and they feature flexed rather than extended burial” (2006: 215). Falkenhausen goes on to analyze Qin burials at Yimencun 益門村 and Maojiaping 毛家坪 that indicate the presence of multiple ethnic groups (Falkenhausen 2006: 224–239; Teng Mingyu 2003: 93–94). Similarly, the inscription on the aforementioned Ke lei seems to enumerate diverse ethnic groups living in the territory of Yan, where Ke is about to assume command.14 But sources such as these emphasize cultural conformity over heterogeneity for ideological reasons. By grounding Ke’s franchise in the words spoken by the King of Zhou, the same inscription deploys the standard political discourse of the time: presenting the Zhou confederation as a great family—modeled, no doubt, on the structure of Bronze Age lineages—of fellows in a shared enterprise, united by familial rhetoric (Li Feng 2008: 294–299; He Ziquan 2001: 95– 96; Hsu and Linduff 1988: 163–171) regardless of whether they were, in fact, related by blood. (Some were; some were not.) Like the patriarch (gong 公) of a lineage presiding over far-flung and potentially factious branches, the King of Zhou served as the lodestar whose legitimacy, itself conferred by Heaven,15 was eagerly borrowed by lesser lords. Overt submission to the King would be requited by whatever offices or domains he thought fit to dispense. And the coin of the realm was ritual. There was no surer indication of the King’s favor than a bronze vessel duly inscribed with a record of his dispensation, often recounting the many precious ritual gifts that accompanied the commission (Vogt 2012: 63–67; Li Feng 2008: 109–110; Musha 1980). Armed with such tokens, the lesser lord would play out his role as the King’s representative by erecting, in his appointed lands, a smaller ritual center imitating that of his overlord. This would be his own lineage seat (Falkenhausen 2008: 218ff.), centered on the precinct of his ancestral cult. Li Feng (2003; 2008: 288–290) has rightly criticized the characterization of this system as feudalistic, which was all too common in both Chinese and 13 14 15

Yin Qun (2012) interprets one Qin burial as evidence of a close connection between the cultures of Shang and early Qin. See also Thote 2004: 84. Compare also the ode “Hanyi” 韓奕 (Mao 261), where the Lord of Han is charged with overseeing the “hundred groups of savages” 百蠻 in his domain. On the Mandate of Heaven, see, e.g., Luo Xinhui 2012; Deng Peiling 2011: 30–48; Shaugh­ nessy 1999: 313–317; and Kominami 1992. The discussion in Creel 1970: 93–100 is marred by his conception of the political system as feudalistic (see below).

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

36

Goldin

Western scholarship of the twentieth century (e.g., Granet 1952; Fan Wenlan 1956, 1: 133–138). The throng of nobles beholden to the Zhou ruler—bearing titles conventionally translated as “duke” (gong 公), “marquis” (hou 侯),16 “earl” (bo 伯), “viscount” (zi 子), “baron” (nan 男), and so on—were conceived as vicegerents charged with establishing ritual colonies and serving the king’s interests away from the royal center, in the midst of alien populations. As Li Feng explains: Beyond the territorial core, the royal domain in Shaanxi, there was probably no “territory” that we can call Zhou, but there were thousands of settlements that were linked by roads to the many regional centers that formed the Zhou state. In between and beyond these settlements, there were forests, virgin lands, and probably also settlements, especially in the east and north, inhabited by some non-Zhou communities. (2008: 288) For all their impressive bronzes, the power of regional lords to impose their will on those non-Zhou communities was by no means guaranteed, and in some cases may have been nil. A text as late as the Zuo Commentary depicts non-Chinese groups living uneventfully in the proximity of major Chinese settlements (e.g., Zuo zhuan, Ai 4.2: 1627; cf., generally, Creel 1970: 199–200). Thus, it makes more sense to imagine the Western Zhou kingdom not as a continuous territory with fixed borders but as a royal ritual center surrounded by satellite ritual centers in all directions. Over time, however, the establishment of so many regional lords led to the diminution of the king’s power. Partly because he seems to have conceded the right to intervene in the various lords’ territorial affairs, they and their descendants were able to harness the resources of their domains, so that within a few centuries, their collective strength outstripped that of their king (Wang Jian 2004: 146–151; Li Feng 2006: 110–121). A milestone in this transition came in 771 bce, when the Lord of Shen 申侯, the king’s father-in-law, joined forces with an alien group known as the Canine Warriors (quanrong 犬戎)17 to depose King You 幽王 (r. 781–771) and sack his capital, ushering in the period that we now call Eastern Zhou 東周 (770–256 bce). If the sources are to be believed, 16

17

Strictly speaking, if the English translation of bo 伯 is to be “earl,” then the translation of hou ought to be “marquess,” not “marquis.” (“Earl” and “marquess” are English titles, “count” and “marquis” their French equivalents.) I have never understood this quirk of Sinology. Virtually all Chinese scholars make the mistake of assuming that rong 戎 refers to an ethnic group (see Goldin 2011c: 221, 235n5).

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

Regional Diversity during the Eastern Zhou Dynasty

37

the impetus was a succession dispute: the Lord of Shen wanted the Crown Prince to be his own grandson, but King You wished to designate a son by a concubine, the bewitching Si of Bao 褒姒 (which might mean no more than “The Woman from Bao”). The legend of Si of Bao, which I have discussed elsewhere (Goldin 2002: 49–50), is not entirely believable, but it encapsulates the crucial political dynamic of the day: territorial lords were now strong enough to dictate who should be the next king. The Son of Heaven no longer had the power to choose his own successor. Bronze inscriptions reflected this political sea change: once it was no longer obligatory to fawn upon the King of Zhou and laud his munificence, lords would more typically commemorate their own achievements undertaken on their own authority (Mattos 1997: 86). And this is precisely when the expression of regional identity began to take shape (Thote 2004: 86). One important development is that the regional franchises, which were now acting more and more like autonomous states, began to compile their own historical annals, often called “scribal records” (shiji 史記; Pines 2002a: 14–26). The most famous is the text known as Springs-and-Autumns (Chunqiu 春秋), or the annals of the state of Lu 魯 for the period 722–481 bce. The Bamboo Annals (Zhushu jinian 竹書紀年), which has a complicated textual history, probably constitutes an analogue for the state of Wei 魏 (and previously Jin 晉) (Shaughnessy 2006: 186–256; Nivison 2009). Mengzi (8.21: 192), finally, mentions two other chronicles, of which no traces remain: The Conveyance (Sheng 乘) of Jin and The Fiend (Taowu 檮杌) of Chu. There are no examples of such texts before the Eastern Zhou.18 These developments in the political sphere led to fundamental changes in the significance of war and the manner in which it was waged. As Mark Edward Lewis has explained, in the early Eastern Zhou, battle was primarily a ritual affair: there was little reason to fight to the death when the combatants were gentlemen of the same elite class and often interrelated by marriage— hence the frequent literary tropes of refusing to press a strategic advantage because it would be considered undignified, of dismounting to aid one’s foe when his chariot was stuck in the mud, and so on. (Bronze Age chariots were rickety little cars that must have been in constant danger of tipping over.) In the Warring States, by contrast, with states fighting for their very survival, punctiliousness in matters of ritual would have been an unaffordable luxury. Now battles were large-scale confrontations involving masses of unskilled 18

Sima Qian 司馬遷 (ca. 145–ca. 85 bce) famously complained that he had to rely exclusively on the annals of Qin, because that state had destroyed all the others: Shiji 史記 15: 686, “Liuguo nianbiao” 六國年表.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

38

Goldin

troops—most were probably peasants who were handed a crossbow in the seasons when their labor was not needed in the fields—with incomparably higher numbers of casualties (Lewis 1990: 15–96).19 Thus, it stands to reason that some of the earliest Chinese texts highlighting regional variation were military manuals. A commander marching into foreign lands needed to know as much as possible about its terrain and customs.20 Wuzi 吳子—which, despite the attribution to Wu Qi 吳起 (d. 381 bce), cannot be dated precisely—offers a vade-mecum through the regions of China: 夫齊性剛，其國富。君臣驕奢而 𥳑 於細民。其政寬而祿不均。 一陳兩心，前重後輕，故重而不堅。擊此之道，必三分之，獵 其左右。脅而從之，其陳可壞。   秦性強，其地險，其政嚴，其賞罰信，其人不讓；皆有鬭 心，故散而自戰。擊此之道，必先示之以利而引去之；士貪於 得而離其將。乘乖獵散，設伏投機，其將可取。   楚性弱，其地廣，其政騷，其民疲。故整而不久。擊此之 道，襲亂其屯，先奪其氣。輕進速退，弊而勞之。勿與戰爭， 其軍可敗。   燕性慤，其民慎。好勇義，寡詐謀；故守而不走。擊此之 道，觸而迫之，陵 [= 凌] 而遠之，馳而後之，則上疑而下懼。 謹我車騎必避之路，其將可虜。   三晉者，中國也；其性和，其政平，其民疲於戰。習於兵， 輕其將，薄其祿。士無死志，故治而不用。擊此之道，阻陳而 壓之，眾來則拒之，去則追之，以倦其師。 此其勢也。(Wuzi 2: 3–4 [“Liaodi” 料敵])

19

20

If I have one misgiving about Lewis’s brilliant account, it is that, for the Springs and Autumns period (Chunqiu 春秋, 770–453 bce), he relies too heavily on romanticized tales in documents such as the Zuo Commentary. Incidentally, Lewis’s conception of military history seems to be influenced by Turney-High 1971: 30, where the rise of the state is also associated with the emergence of “true war.” “Maps” (“Ditu” 地圖), Guanzi 管子 X.27: 529, states this explicitly: the commander “must be thoroughly familiar with the location of winding gorges, waterways that might flood his chariots, famous mountains, passable valleys, navigable rivers, hills, and mounds; the places where grasses, trees, and reeds flourish; the lengths of roads; the sizes of fortifications; famous towns; ruined towns; harsh and arable land” (cf. the translation in Rickett 2001: 391–392) 轘轅之險，濫車之水，名山、通谷、經川、陵陸、丘阜之所在， 苴草、林木、蒲葦之所茂，道里之遠近，城郭之大小，名邑、廢邑、困殖之 地，必盡知之.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

Regional Diversity during the Eastern Zhou Dynasty

39

Qi’s nature is hard, its state rich. Lords and ministers are arrogant and extravagant, and strict with the destitute populace. Its government is generous, but salaries are uneven. A single formation will be of two minds, the front heavily armed and the rear lightly; thus, they are heavily armed but not solid. The way to attack them is to divide them into three and chase down their left and right. Outflank and pursue them, and their formations can be broken.   Qin’s nature is strong, its terrain hazardous, its government severe, its rewards and punishments reliable. Its people do not defer: they all have a pugnacious heart; thus, they scatter and fight for themselves. The way to attack them is first to display something profitable before them, inducing them to leave [their positions]. Their men-at-arms are greedy for gain and will abandon their commander. Take advantage of their recklessness and chase them down when they are scattered. Set up ambushes and exploit the opportunity enthusiastically, and their commanders can be seized.   Chu’s nature is weak, its terrain broad, its government troublesome, its people exhausted. Thus, they may line up in order but do not remain so for long. The way to attack them is to assault and wreak havoc in their encampments, thereby robbing them first of their fighting spirit. Advance with lightly armed troops and retreat quickly, enervating and overworking them. Do not engage in battle with them, and their troops can be defeated.   Yan’s nature is cautious, its people careful. They are fond of bravery and righteousness but rarely scheme or conspire; thus, they defend and do not decamp. The way to attack them is to coerce them by jabbing them; provoke them but keep them at a distance, and charge to their rear. Their superiors will be uncertain, inferiors fearful. Use chariots and cavalry conscientiously; secure the roads whereby they might escape; and their commanders can be captured.   The Three Jin [i.e., Zhao 趙, Han 韓, and Wei 魏] are states in the center. Their nature is harmonious, their government evenhanded, but their people are exhausted from warfare. They are practiced in combat but make light of their commanders and consider their salaries meager. Their men-at-arms have no will to die; thus, they are orderly but useless. The way to attack them is to isolate their formations and harry them. When their whole host comes [to the rescue], resist them; when they turn back, hunt them down, debilitating their army.   Such is the situation [in these states]. (Cf. the translations in Sawyer 1993: 210–211; and Lewis 2006: 202.)

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

40

Goldin

The final line places this passage in the military tradition of inferring the best strategy from a thorough evaluation of “the situation” (shi 勢). For example, Sunzi 孫子, by every indication an older text, advises the commander to collect as much information as possible about the enemy—his position, the status of his camps, the attitude of his soldiers, etc.—and then devise the right response to smash him (Goldin 2005b: 15ff.). In Wuzi, the habits of the fighting men in each of the Warring States are presented as another “situation” that a prudent commander must assess before acting. Moreover, the passage is significant for tracing soldiers’ attributes to two major factors: the terrain of their homeland and the state of its government. Both tropes are amply attested in the contemporary literature. “Water and Earth” (“Shuidi” 水地), a chapter in the received Guanzi 管子, contains a section attributing the characteristics of people from Qi, Chu, Qin, Jin, Yan, and Song 宋 to the nature of their water. For example: “The water of Qi flows restively and churns; thus, its people are greedy, crude, and enamored of bravery” (夫齊之水道躁而復 [= 澓],21 故其民貪麤而好勇 Guanzi XIV.39: 831; cf. the translation in Rickett 1998: 106). Appealing to ineluctable geographical circumstances was one of many strategies to account for (perceived) regional variations in human behavior.22 By contrast, most judgments of fighting spirit in texts such as the Zuo Commentary are based on the status of the combatants’ government rather than their geography. Consider, for example, the Battle of the Plain of Han 韓原之 戰 (Wai-yee Li 2007: 160–171). The casus belli is that Qin had succored Yiwu 夷 吾, the Lord of Jin, before he came to the throne and supported him afterward by sending grain in the midst of a famine, but Yiwu, far from expressing gratitude, went so far as to provoke a war by reneging on promises of land and refusing to send grain when Qin suffered a famine of its own. Just before the commencement of hostilities, Yiwu sends a scout named Han Jian 韓簡 to gauge the enemy: 復曰：「師少於我，鬥士倍我。」 公曰：「何故？」 對曰：「出因其資，入用其寵，饑食其粟。三施而無報，是以 來也，今又擊之。我怠秦奮，倍猶未也。」(Zuo zhuan, Xi 15.4: 355) 21 22

For the emendation fù 復 = fú 澓, I follow the commentary of Ren Linpu 任林圃. Compare Liji 禮記, “Wangzhi” 王制: “Wherever people dwell, their character will certainly accord with Heaven, Earth, and the cold, warmth, aridity, or humidity [of their environment]” 凡居民材，必因天地寒暖燥濕 (Liji zhengyi 12: 1338b).

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

Regional Diversity during the Eastern Zhou Dynasty

41

When [Han Jian] returned, he said: “Their army is smaller than ours, but they have twice as many men-at-arms ready to fight.”  The Lord [of Jin] said: “Why is that?”  He replied: “When you departed [from Jin], you relied on their [Qin’s] assistance; when you reentered [Jin], you made use of their patronage; and when you were starving, you ate their grain. They did these three things without recompense; this is why they have come, and now you have gone so far as to attack them. Our [forces] are listless, while those of Qin are vigorous. They might have even more than twice [our number of men ready to fight].” (Cf. the translations in Watson 1989: 32; and Legge 1893–1895: vol. 5, 168.) The soldiers from Jin are “listless” (dai 怠) because of the boorishness of their lord, not because of their inherent constitution. The episode reveals nothing in particular about either Jin or Qin; the point is that any army, regardless of its origin, would be listless if placed in the position of fighting for a morally or ritually deficient ruler—just as any army enraged by prior offenses will have a disproportionate number of ferocious warriors. Elsewhere, when Jin is in the right and Qin has behaved improperly, Jin’s troops are invincible and Qin is routed (Goldin 2010: 77).23 On the unforgiving battlefield, however, moral superiority is no guarantee of victory. In literature, a small band of inspired warriors might win against all odds, but a pragmatic commander would still prefer to have numbers and matériel on his side. This brings us to another relevant observation by Lewis: logistical problems associated with raising, training, and supplying huge armies induced rulers to rethink their approach to governing their territories: those who could exploit their resources most efficiently gained a sizable advantage in the theater of war. Thus, the demands of battle led to the restructuring of the state as a vast production ground of people and munitions, maintained by an organized administration and serving a single king, to whom the entire population owed unquestioning allegiance. Kinship ties, ritual obligations, and traditional practice, which had been significant considerations guiding human 23

The most famous analysis of regional diversity in the Zuo Commentary—namely, the concert performed for Prince Zha of Wu 吳公子札 (576–484 bce)—has a very different setting but is based on the same logic. Hearing the music of each region in turn, Zha infers the character of its people and the status of its government: regional differences apparent through music merely supervene on varying states of moral and political rectitude. The passage has been discussed insightfully by Wai-yee Li (2007: 136ff.) and David Schaberg (2001: 86–95) and thus need not be treated in extenso here. For some doubts as to its authenticity, see Zhao Zhiyang 1985.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

42

Goldin

action in earlier times, were now subordinated to the material requirements of the warring state (Lewis 1990: 53–67; 1999a: 597–619). Dismantling the hereditary aristocracy, a prime impediment to the centralization of power and “the major source of cultural homogeneity in the Zhou world” (Shelach and Pines 2006: 219), was a political goal of the first order. Whereas the ritual centers of the Bronze Age had been enclaves among lands and tribes whom the local lords probably never surveyed systematically, now it was of vital importance to take stock of natural resources that could be utilized to support the war effort, including soil, plants, game and livestock, mineral deposits, timber, and fruits of the sea such as fish and salt—not to mention the most important resource of all, namely, the populace.24 People had to be registered for tax and service,25 lands charted and apportioned,26 and stockpiles vigilantly tallied and secured. This process must have led to an unprecedented appreciation of China’s economic diversity (Chao Fulin 2003: 527–650). Different regions had always produced different goods, but again, the dominant political discourse did not formerly emphasize differentiation. In the Warring States, by contrast, a prudent ruler had the keenest incentive to acquaint himself not only with his own stores but also with those of his rivals. (Know thine enemy and know thyself 知彼知己; Sunzi 1: 62 [“Mougong” 謀 攻].)27 This is the most plausible background for the undatable text known as “The Levies of Yu” (“Yugong” 禹貢), now transmitted as a chapter of the Classic of Documents (Shujing 書經).28 In its opening section, the text retraces the journeys of Sage-King Yu throughout the realm—surveying land and taming rivers 24 25 26

27

28

Cf. Guanzi IX.22: 453: “The Hundred Clans of Qi are your foundation, my Lord” 齊國百 姓，公之本也 (“Baxing” 霸形). The recently discovered population records from Liye 里耶, discussed in this volume by Charles Sanft, have enormously improved our understanding of this process. Cf. Guanzi XXII.74: 1282: “There is soil for rushes, soil for bamboo [with which to make] arrows, for sandalwood and zhe-trees, soil of low-lying riverbanks and moist marshes, and soil that is inundated by water [and produces] fish and turtles” 有莞蒲之壤，有竹前 [= 箭] 、檀柘之壤，有汜下漸澤之壤，有水潦魚鼈之壤 (“Shan guogui” 山國軌). Another chapter (“Chengma” 乘馬) recognizes that different plots have different levels of productivity and speaks of “equalizing lands in accordance with the statistics of their produce” 地均以實數 (Guanzi I.5: 89). Cf. Shang jun shu 商君書 III.10: 69 (“Zhanfa” 戰法): “If one analyzes the enemy and inspects one’s multitudes, victory or defeat can be known beforehand” 論敵察眾，則勝 負可先知也. There is a similar text called “The King’s Gathering” (“Wanghui jie” 王會解, Yi Zhou shu VII.59: 850–983), which also lists tribute items from all parts of the realm but does not refer to the Nine Provinces.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

Regional Diversity during the Eastern Zhou Dynasty

43

wherever he went—and outlines the products and indigenous peoples of each of the legendary Nine Provinces: Jizhou 冀州, Yanzhou 兗州, Qingzhou 青州, Xuzhou 徐州, Yangzhou 揚州, Jingzhou 荊州, Yuzhou 豫州, Liangzhou 梁州, and Yongzhou 雍州.29 The description of Qingzhou (corresponding roughly to modern northeastern Shandong 山東) is typical: 海岱惟青州。嵎夷既略；濰淄其道。厥土白墳，海濱廣斥。厥 田惟上下；厥賦中上；厥貢鹽、絺，海物惟錯，岱畎絲、枲、 鈆、松、怪石。萊夷作牧，厥篚檿絲。浮于汶，達于 濟。(Shangshu 6: 147c–148a) The sea and Mount Dai make up [the boundaries] of Qingzhou, where the region of Yuyi was mapped, the Wei and Zi Rivers given their courses. Its soil is white and loamy; by the seacoast there are broad salterns. Its fields are of the lowest of the highest rank, its revenue of the highest of the middle rank. Its tribute items are salt and fine linen; creatures from the sea are sundry; the valleys of Mount Dai [produce] silk, hemp, lead, pine timber, and marvelous stones. The barbarians of Lai are engaged in pasturage; their baskets [contain] silk from the yan-mulberry. [Yu’s party] sailed on the Wen River and arrived at the Ji River. (Cf. the translation in Legge 1893–1895: vol. 3, 102.) The text goes on to divide the entire known world into five concentric rings, ranging from the domain of the Son of Heaven (dianfu 甸服), the beacon of civilization itself, to “the desert” (huangfu 荒服), fit only for savages and exiles (Shangshu 6: 153ab). None of these territories, it should be noted, is identified explicitly with any of the states of the Eastern Zhou (for that would expose the anachronism of the document), but readers would have been able to tell from the geographical references which “province” refers to which area of China. Moreover, in a branch of astrology called “field allocation” (fenye 分野), known from contemporaneous sources such as the Zuo Commentary and Rituals of Zhou (Zhouli 周禮), the Nine Provinces are associated with leading kingdoms. (Qingzhou, as one might expect, is the province where one finds the northeastern state of Qi.) The sky is divided into nine equal partitions, and the trick is to ascertain which region on earth will enjoy a military advantage by observing which of the nine corresponding regions in the sky currently houses the planet Jupiter. As David W. Pankenier (1999) has shown, the technique 29

For other lists of the Nine Provinces besides that of “Yugong” (which DorofeevaLichtmann regards as the oldest set), see Dorofeeva-Lichtmann 2009: 595–644.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

44

Goldin

must really have been practiced, because there is evidence that states timed their campaigns to coincide with such astrologically propitious moments. Crucially, according to these sources, the regions of China are diverse, but together they constitute a complete and closed system. A commander perusing the Wuzi needed to learn the salient features of Qi, Qin, Chu, Yan, and the Three Jin—but only those five. Evidently, he was not expected to encounter other foes. Similarly, because field-allocation astrology relied on the association of the Nine Provinces with its nine celestial divisions, no tenth region could ever have been added. There would simply have been no tenth part of the sky to identify with it. This conception of China as a great whole containing a number of discrete subdivisions went hand in hand with the view that proper networks of trade should bring about economic self-sufficiency. What one region lacks, another is sure to have in plenty; thus, the road to autarky is not to try to produce everything oneself but to locate the natural sources of the products that one needs and acquire them prudently. The philosopher Xunzi (i.e., Xun Kuang 荀況, d. after 238 bce) summarized the attitude of the day: 北海則有走馬吠犬焉，然而中國得而畜使之；南海則有羽翮、 齒革、曾青、丹干焉，然而中國得而財之；東海則有紫、 紶 [= 綌]30 、魚、鹽焉，然而中國得而衣食之；西海則有皮革、 文旄焉，然而中國得而用之。故澤人足乎木；山人足乎魚。農 夫不斲削、不陶冶而足械用；工賈不耕田而足菽粟。(Xunzi V.9: 161–162 [“Wangzhi” 王制]) By the Northern Sea, there are galloping horses and barking dogs, but the Central States obtain them and domesticate and employ them; by the Southern Sea, there are feathers, tusks and hides [of pachyderms],31 azurite, and cinnabar, but the Central States obtain them and prize them; by the Eastern Sea, there are dyed cloth,32 coarse linen, fish, and salt, but the Central States obtain them and wear or consume them; by the Western Sea, there are leather goods and fancy oxtails, but the Central States 30 31 32

For the emendation qǔ 紶 = xì 綌, I follow the commentary of Wang Yinzhi 王引之 (1766–1834). I follow the commentary of Yang Liang 楊倞 (fl. 818 ce). Hides of pachyderms were used for armor, as Xunzi states in Xunzi X.15: 281 (“Yibing” 議兵). See also Shadwick et al. 1992. Yang Liang glosses zi 紫 as zibei 紫貝, or “cowrie,” but this seems to be incorrect, inasmuch as all the items from the Eastern Sea are products that people wear or eat. The basic meaning of zi is “purple.”

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

Regional Diversity during the Eastern Zhou Dynasty

45

obtain them and use them. Thus, people in the marshes have sufficient timber; people in the mountains have sufficient fish. Husbandmen do not have to carve or chisel or make pottery or work iron, yet they have sufficient equipment and utensils; craftsmen and merchants do not have to till the fields, yet they have sufficient legumes and grain. (Cf. the translations in Lewis 2006: 210; and Knoblock 1988–1994: vol. 2, 102) Xunzi lived at a time when the victory of Qin was all but assured, and his surviving works include two separate analyses of its strengths and weaknesses, with moralistic recommendations for improvement (Xunzi X.15: 280–281 [“Yibing” 議兵], XI.16: 303–304 [“Qiangguo” 彊國]; cf. Zhang Wenli and Song Shangwen 2003: 68–89; and Yu Zongfa 1998: 103ff.). These are noteworthy because such extended discussions of the characteristics of a single state are rare; more commonly, as we have seen, Qin was situated within the context of the Chinese world writ large. But presumably it was no longer possible to pretend that Qin was merely another constituent state within the world order. On the contrary, Qin was about to establish a new order of its own. It fell to Xunzi’s student Li Si 李斯 (ca. 280–208 bce) to forge the ideological underpinnings of that order (Goldin 2005a: 69ff.; Meng Xiangcai 2001: 229–238; Bodde 1938: 162–222). Li Si inherited the view that the diverse regions of China are pieces of an overarching whole but added the assertion that the other ­pieces of this whole would have to adapt themselves to the suzerainty of Qin. Before the final conquest, however, it appears that even the King of Qin (the future First Emperor) was unprepared for the conceptual consequences. We get the first glimpse of Li Si’s imperialist vision in his response to an edict that would have debarred immigrants from government service on the grounds that they could not be trusted. In his memorial in his own defense, Li Si, who was born in Chu, explained that a king who cannot accept ministers from another state is a king who is not ready to be the emperor of the world. Ruling the world means ruling every part of the world, taking advantage of all its re­ sources, not merely the resources of one’s native domain (An Zuozhang and Meng Xiangcai 2005: 91–96; Zhang Fentian 2003: 102–107). 今陛下致昆山之玉，有隨、和之寶，垂明月之珠，服太阿之 劍，乘纖離之馬，建翠鳳之旗，樹靈鼉之鼓。此數寶者，秦不 生一焉，而陛下說之，何也？必秦國之所生然後可，則是夜光 之璧不飾朝廷，犀象之器不為玩好，鄭、衞之女不充後宮，而 駿良駃騠不實外廄，江南金錫不為用，西蜀丹青不為采。所以 飾後宮、充下陳、娛心意、說耳目者，必出於秦然後可，則是 宛珠之簪、傅璣之珥、阿縞之衣、錦繡之飾不進於前，而隨俗

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

46

Goldin

雅化佳冶窈窕趙女不立於側也。… 王者不卻眾庶，故能明其 德。是以地無四方，民無異國，四時充美，鬼神降福；此五 帝、三王之所以無敵也。(Shiji 87: 2543 and 2545 [“Li Si liezhuan” 李 斯列傳]) Now, Your Majesty, you acquire jade from the Kun Mountains and possess the treasures of Sui and He. You wear the Moon-Bright Pearl as a pendant and equip yourself with the sword Tai’e; you ride in a carriage drawn by the horse Xianli; you raise a banner of kingfisher and phoenix [feathers]; you set up drums of crocodile skin. Qin did not produce a single one of these several treasures, yet, Your Majesty, you take delight in them. Why is this? If only products of the state of Qin are permissible, then nightgleaming jade rings would not adorn the court, objects of rhinoceros [horn] and ivory would not be your playthings, girls from Zheng and Wey would not fill your privy chambers, fine steeds and jueti-horses would not occupy your outer stables. Bronze and tin from south of the Yangzi would not be used; cinnabar and azurite from Shu in the west could not be [exploited] for their colors. If anything that adorns your privy chambers, fills your seraglio, amuses your heart and mind, or delights your ears and eyes is permissible only if it comes from Qin, then hairpins with pearls from Yuan, earrings with suspended oval pearls, robes of white silk from E, and ornaments of brocade embroidery would not be brought before you, nor would seductive and alluring girls from Zhao, such as accommodate our customs but render them more elegant, stand by your side. …  One who rules as King does not reject the multitude of commoners; thus, he can manifest his power. Therefore, when the earth does not have four quarters and when the people do not have different [native] states, [the realm] is filled with beautiful things throughout the four seasons, and ghosts and spirits send down good fortune. This was how the Five Thearchs and Three Kings were without rival. (Cf. the translations in Nienhauser 1994–: vol. 7, 338–339; Dawson 1994: 28–29; and Watson 1993: 182–183.) If people could be made to return to the prehistoric order, when no one distinguished between this region or that, it would be easier for them to accept a single and all-encompassing ruler who did not necessarily share their particular heritage. This all-encompassing ruler must take in each region, with all its characteristics, assigning each one its proper role. Tin from the south belongs in the metallurgical workshops; elegant ladies from the Central States belong

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

Regional Diversity during the Eastern Zhou Dynasty

47

in the harem; and a cunning minister from Chu has a place in the administration as well. The histories inform us that the First Emperor embraced Li Si’s agenda, but one would reach the same conclusion, even without such assurances, from circumstantial evidence. One telling detail is that whenever the First Emperor destroyed another kingdom, he would have a simulacrum of its palace built in his capital as a menacing exhibition (Shiji 6: 239 [“Qin Shihuang benji” 秦始皇 本紀]; cf. Wang Xueli 1985: 72–74). Moreover, Martin Kern has shown that the First Emperor’s program of inspection tours and sacrifices parallels the activities attributed to Sage-King Shun 舜 in the “Canon of Shun” (“Shun dian” 舜 典)—a text that, as Kern argues in the present volume, the First Emperor might have promulgated as legitimation for his own regime (also Kern 2000a: 110ff.). There could scarcely have been a more suitable model for the sage-ruler who travels to each region of the known world, proclaiming his dominion over all of them. Nevertheless, Li Si and the First Emperor were under no illusions about the centrifugal threat posed by territorial powers, and they instituted historic reforms to standardize weights, measures, currency, orthography, and even axle widths.33 When courtiers proposed reinstituting the Zhou practice of bestowing land on the sons and younger brothers of the sovereign, Li Si denounced the idea as destabilizing; indeed, blaming such misguided proposals on the influence of private teachers, he took the extreme measure of prohibiting the possession of unauthorized books and ushered in the notorious biblioclasm that sullied Qin in the eyes of centuries of Chinese literati (Kern 2000a: 188ff.; Pines 2009: 181ff.).

…

The texts examined in this study do not explain the problem raised at the outset: namely, why Chu art seems to become more and more distinctive over the course of the Eastern Zhou period. But they do at least suggest the scrim behind these developments. The benefits of expressing fealty to the King of Zhou having waned, artists and their patrons found themselves freer to innovate; perhaps they also incorporated motifs familiar to them from less momentous works of art all around them—motifs that would otherwise remain unattested 33

Once again, the relevant bibliography is too huge to cite in a single note. The best discussion in English is now Sanft 2014a: 58–76; for an informative survey from the perspective of metrology, see Qiu Guangming 2008: 77–91. Traditional conceptions of the Qin standardization of orthography have recently been challenged by Galambos (2006).

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

48

Goldin

today because they were never imprinted on media of any permanence. As the elite of all the territories came to regard themselves not as regional outposts of royal Zhou culture but as competitors in a death struggle among a handful of distinct and threatening kingdoms, the impulse to conform would have ceded to the impulse to assert their haecceity. Moreover, conformity and haecceity were both constructed. There were certain objective criteria by which regions could be adjudged similar or different—climate, terrain, language, etc.—but geography alone cannot explain a region’s self-portrayal in art, which was equally informed by political and rhetorical expedience. Indeed, since the art that has survived tends to be laden with political significance, the pieces by which we analyze the ancient Chinese world may represent the height of its artfulness and guile. If we have come to recognize that historical texts are performative utterances—that is, they do at the same time that they say (e.g., Skinner 2002: vol. 1, 107–124)—then we must also recognize a corresponding function for visual art as performative representation.34 A work of art is as much an instrument of persuasion as it is a thing of beauty. 34

Compare Kleingärtner 2014 for the Vikings’ “deliberate reuse or remodelling” of foreign objects “to express an independent Viking-Age identity.”

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

49

Omens and Politics

Chapter 2

Omens and Politics: The Zhou Concept of the Mandate of Heaven as Seen in the Chengwu 程寤 Manuscript Luo Xinhui 羅新慧 The recently published Chu bamboo text Chengwu 程寤, from the Tsinghua (Qinghua 清華) University collection, presents a new version of the story of the attainment of the Mandate of Heaven by King Wen of Zhou 周文王 (d. ca. 1047 bce) and his son, Fa 發, the future King Wu 周武王 (d. ca. 1043 bce). Through the analysis of this document I hope to shed new light on conceptualizations of the Mandate of Heaven during the Zhou period. In addition, I shall also explore different views of the receipt of the Mandate by Kings Wen and Wu, as reflected in bronze inscriptions and in early texts. I hope to show that different conceptualizations of their role in the receipt of the Mandate may assist us in fine-tuning the dating of some of the early Zhou texts.

The Chengwu Manuscript: Introduction

The Chengwu is a short manuscript written on nine bamboo slips, each of which is forty-five centimeters in length. Only one of the slips (no. 6) is broken, but both parts are well preserved and can be easily recombined. Like all the Tsinghua manuscripts, the Chengwu lacks a clear provenance; conventional wisdom considers all these manuscripts as having been looted from a Chu 楚 tomb and smuggled to Hong Kong, where they were purchased by the Tsinghua University sponsors and repatriated to the Mainland. I am not aware of any doubts concerning the authenticity of the Chengwu. The name of the manuscript, Chengwu, does not appear on any of the slips but was suggested by the Tsinghua editors on the basis of clear parallels with surviving fragments of the now-lost “Chengwu” chapter from the Yi Zhou shu * I wish to thank the editors (Yuri Pines, Paul R. Goldin, and Martin Kern) for their careful reading, language corrections, constructive suggestions, and patience. Without their help, I might not have been able to finish the paper.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004299337_004 Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

50

Luo Xinhui

逸周書 (Lost Documents of Zhou) collection (see more below). Notably, all the citations of the “Chengwu” chapter in transmitted texts refer exclusively to the first section of the Chengwu manuscript (what I call Chengwu A); but there is no doubt that the second section (Chengwu B) belongs to the same manuscript. That section starts on slip 4, the opening characters of which (“from the August Supreme Thearch” 于皇上帝) clearly continue the final words of slip 3 (“received the Shang Mandate” 受商命). This, in addition to the fact that the second section clearly refers to the dream told in the first, proves that the editors’ decision to consider both sections as part of the same manuscript is correct. The first section of the Chengwu manuscript narrates a dream that King Wen’s wife, Taisi 太姒, had, in which the attainment of Heaven’s Mandate by King Wen and by his son is predicted. The second section tells of a series of ritual activities conducted in the aftermath of the dream. In the second section the admonition by King Wen to his son Fa presents a different interpretation of the dream. In this admonition, King Wen emphasizes that, despite the auspicious dream and the supposed reception of the Mandate of Heaven, Fa must remain cautious and fearful and concentrate on proper maintenance of political affairs. While the two sections seem to be connected in terms of their content, their emphases clearly differ. The first section focuses on the attainment of the Mandate of Heaven as announced through the dream of Taisi, a story of which we previously knew next to nothing. The second section argues that one’s success depends on taking care of human affairs rather than on Heaven itself, reflecting a familiar Zhou concept that is well known from the Shujing 書經 (Classic of Documents) and many Confucian texts. The fact that the two sections of the same short manuscript, Chengwu, have markedly different emphases allows us to surmise that they reflect distinct ways of conceptualizing Heaven’s Mandate. In what follows, I shall first analyze each of the sections (hereafter named Chengwu A and Chengwu B), then assess the possible dating of the story recorded in Chengwu A, and, finally, provide my analysis of the difference between the two parts. I hope that my comparison will elucidate anew the persistent tension between different views of Heaven and its relations with human beings during the Zhou dynasty.

Chengwu A: An Auspicious Dream

The first section of the Chengwu manuscript reads:

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

Omens and Politics

51

隹王元祀，正月既生魄，太姒夢見商廷惟棘，迺小子發取周廷 梓樹于厥間，化為松柏棫柞。寤驚，告王。王弗敢占，詔太子 發，俾靈名凶，祓。祝忻祓王，巫率祓太姒，宗丁祓太子發。 幣告宗祊社稷，祈于六末山川，攻于商神，望，烝，占于明 堂。王及太子發並拜吉夢，受商命于皇上帝。 In the king’s first year,1 the first month, after the growing brightness, Taisi dreamed that the Shang court was filled with thorns. Thereupon Young Prince Fa took catalpa trees from the Zhou court and planted them amid the thorns, and [the catalpa trees] turned into pine, cedar, scrub oak, and hard oak trees. Startled, [Taisi] awoke and reported the dream to the king. The king did not have the temerity to make a divination about it. He summoned Crown Prince Fa, had a spirit medium name the ominous appearance,2 and performed the exorcism. Invocator Xin performed the exorcism for the king; Shaman Shuai performed the exorcism for Taisi; Ancestral Attendant Ding performed the exorcism for Crown Prince Fa. They presented silk to the ancestral temple and to the altars of soil and grain and prayed to the Mountains and Rivers of the Six Extremities,3 attacking the Shang deities. They performed the sacrifice of gazing afar,4 performed the winter sacrifice, and divined at the Bright Hall. The king and Crown Prince Fa jointly made obeisance on account of the auspicious dream and received the Shang Mandate from the August Supreme Thearch. (Li Xueqin 2010: 135–139) Taisi’s dream brings about a sophisticated reaction. King Wen and his son perform divination, exorcism, and a series of sacrifices and prayers, all of which are aimed at confirming whether the dream is auspicious. It is purely through these activities that they are able to validate the dream as related to the conferment of the Mandate on the Zhou. There are similarities between the account quoted above and the “Chengwu” chapter preserved in the Yi Zhou shu.5 “Chengwu” was originally one of the 1 The “first year” presumably refers to the first year after King Wen proclaimed himself as possessor of the Mandate. 2 Naming of the ominous appearance (ming xiong 名凶) was supposed to grant the participant in a ritual a sort of magical power over the omen. 3 The precise meaning of 六末山川, translated here as “Mountains and Rivers of the Six Extremities,” is unknown. 4 The “gazing afar” (wang 望) sacrifice was a sacrifice to the mountains and rivers under the rule of the regional lord. See, e.g. Zuo zhuan, Ai 6.4: 1636. 5 For a recent English-language study of the Yi Zhou shu, see McNeal 2012: 73–96, esp. 75–82.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

52

Luo Xinhui

chapters in the Yi Zhou shu collection, but it was lost long ago, with only the title preserved. The Qing scholar Lu Wenchao 盧文弨 (1717–1796) reconstructed the text from fragments preserved in the imperial encyclopedias Yiwen leiju 藝 文類聚 (624) and Taiping yulan 太平御覽 (984). The reconstructed “Chengwu” chapter of the Yi Zhou shu reads: 文王去商在程，正月既生魄，大姒夢見商之庭產棘，小子發取周 庭之梓樹于厥間，化為松柏棫柞。寤驚，以告文王。文王乃召太 子發占之于明堂。王及太子發並拜吉夢，受商之大命于皇天上 帝。

King Wen left Shang and stayed at Cheng. In the king’s first month, after the growing brightness, Taisi dreamed that thorns were growing in the Shang court. Young Prince Fa took catalpa trees from the Zhou court and planted them amid the thorns, and [the catalpa trees] turned into pine, cedar, scrub oak, and hard oak trees. Startled, [Taisi] awoke and reported the dream to the king. Thereupon King Wen summoned Crown Prince Fa and divined at the Bright Hall. The king and Crown Prince Fa jointly made obeisance on account of the auspicious dream and received the Shang Mandate from August Heaven and the Supreme Thearch. (Yi Zhou shu II.13: 195) The two versions of the Chengwu account are fundamentally similar; it is just that the Tsinghua bamboo version is more detailed. This suggests that the identification of the manuscript in the Tsinghua collection as one of the early versions of the “Chengwu” chapter is correct. Although the “Chengwu” chapter from the Yi Zhou shu was lost long ago, there is evidence for its circulation at the very least until the Latter Han period (25–220 ce). Thus, the story of Taisi’s dream is mentioned in the Qianfu lun 潛 夫論 (Comments of a Recluse) by Wang Fu 王符 (ca. 85–163). In the chapter “Meng lie zhi” 夢列志 (“Records of Arrayed Dreams”), Wang Fu collected extracts from earlier writings about significant dreams. The chapter says: 太姒有吉夢，文王不敢康吉，祀于羣神，然後占於明堂，並拜吉 夢。修發（省）戒懼，聞喜若憂，故能成吉以有天下.

Taisi had an auspicious dream. King Wen dared not console himself with its auspiciousness. He performed sacrifices to multiple deities and then divined at the Bright Hall; [King Wen and Taisi?] jointly paid obeisance for the auspicious dream. [King Wen] rectified and inspected [himself],

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

53

Omens and Politics

displayed caution and fear, upon hearing joyous [news] [behaved] as if it were worrisome; therefore, he was able to accomplish auspiciousness and possess All-under-Heaven. (Qianfu lun VII.28: 322) The dream account of the Qianfu lun suggests that in Wang Fu’s time, at least part of the “Chengwu” chapter or a related text was still in circulation. In other words, although the “Chengwu” chapter was not preserved in the Yi Zhou shu, different versions of it were transmitted through other channels. The account about Taisi’s dream in the Chengwu manuscript is written in relatively plain prose that does not resemble the style of the Western Zhou 西 周 period (ca. 1046–771 bce). But the story that Taisi had an auspicious dream and that this dream predicted the attainment of Heaven’s Mandate by King Wen and King Wu might have an earlier origin. While the received texts do not contain an explicit account of Taisi’s dream, traces can still be discovered. Some of these are scattered in other Yi Zhou shu chapters. For example, the “Da kai wu” 大開武 chapter records that “Heaven sent down a startling dream in Cheng” (天降寤於程). The Qing scholar Lu Wenchao suggested, “The startling dream in Cheng perhaps refers to Taisi’s dream,”6—namely, that this statement in “Da kai wu” refers to the “Chengwu” chapter. Another Qing scholar, Chen Fengheng 陳逢衡 (1778–1855), put forward a similar explanation.7 The “Da kai wu” chapter is commonly dated to the early or middle Springs-and-Autumns period (Chunqiu 春秋, 770–453 bce).8 Another Yi Zhou shu chapter, “Wen jing” 文儆, has the following record: 維文王告梦，懼後祀之無保。庚辰，詔太子發曰：汝敬之哉！ When the dream was reported to King Wen, he was fearful that his descendant9 would not beware. On the gengchen day, he summoned Crown Prince Fa and told him: “Be reverent!” (Yi Zhou shu III.24: 245) Chen Fengheng pointed out that this dream “should be the dream discussed in the ‘Chengwu’ chapter”; after Kings Wen and Wu jointly made obeisance on account of the auspicious dream, “[King Wen] produced this chapter so as to warn Crown Prince Fa”; “this was because in the aftermath of paying obeisance at the Bright Hall, King Wen was fearful that his heir would be absorbed by 6 7 8 9

See Yi Zhou shu III.27: 277. See Yi Zhou shu II.13: 196. See Luo Jiaxiang 2006: 13–20; Huang Huaixin 2006: 63. I follow Huang Haixin’s reading of 後祀 as identical to 後嗣.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

54

Luo Xinhui

auspiciousness and neglect human affairs.”10 The “Wen jing” chapter is also commonly thought to date to the early to middle Springs-and-Autumns period (Luo Jiaxiang 2006: 13–14; Huang Huaixin 2006: 51). Whether or not the chapters “Da kai wu” and “Wen jing” were compiled during that period is debatable (see below), but there are other indications that the story of Taisi’s auspicious dream might be of fairly early origin. The “Tai shi” 泰誓 (“The Great Oath”) chapter of the Shujing cites King Wu’s declaration on the eve of his assault on the king of Shang: “My dreams concur with my divination, doubling the blessed auspicious portent. The attack on Shang must succeed” (朕夢協朕卜，襲于休祥。戎商必克).11 The current “Tai shi” chapter is in all likelihood a third- to fourth-century ce forgery, but the forger incorporated many citations from the original “Tai shi” scattered throughout pre-imperial (i.e., pre-221 bce) texts. The cited passage appears verbatim in the Guoyu 國語 (Speeches of the States), from which, according to Martin Kern, it could have been taken.12 Since the quotations from the “Tai shi” are scattered across many early texts, including the Zuo zhuan 左傳 (Zuo Commentary), Guoyu, Mengzi 孟子, and others, it is likely that the original “Tai shi” was an early document, quite possibly from the Western Zhou period. If so, we may assume that the story of an auspicious dream preceding the Zhou rise to power was already circulating at such an early time. Even if Chengwu A is not a Western Zhou text, its narration of Taisi’s auspicious dream may well have Western Zhou origins.

Chengwu B: Political Instructions

The second section of the Chengwu manuscript presents King Wen’s instructions to his son Fa. The main topic of this section is that, with due respect to auspicious dreams, one should not rely too much on divine help but rather focus instead on human affairs. The chapter reads: 興，曰：“ 發，汝敬聽吉夢。朋棘 梓，松柏副，棫覆柞，化爲 雘。嗚呼，何驚非朋，何戒非商，何用非樹，樹因欲，不違 材。如天降疾，旨味既用，不可藥，時不遠。惟商慼在周，周 慼在商。欲惟柏夢，徒庶言 ，矧又勿亡秋明武威，如棫柞亡 根。嗚呼，敬哉！朕聞周長不貳(忒) ，務擇用周，果拜不忍， 10 11 12

See Yi Zhou shu III.24: 246. “Taishi” 泰誓 cited from Shisanjing zhushu, 181; translation after Legge 2000a: 291. See Guoyu 3.3: 100 (“Zhou yu xia” 周語下); Kern, forthcoming-a.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

Omens and Politics

55

綏用多福。惟梓敝不義，芃于商，俾行量亡乏。明明在 向（上），惟容納棘，意亡。勿用不惎，思（使）卑柔和順， 眚（生）民不災懷允。嗚呼，何監非時，何務非和，何褢非 文，何保非道，何愛非身，何力非人。人謀强，不可以藏。後 戒後戒，人用汝謀，愛日不足。” When they arose [from joint obeisance], [King Wen] said: “Fa, may you respectfully heed the auspicious dream. The numerous thorny plants had surrounded the catalpa, but pine trees and cedar trees assisted it, and the scrub oak and hard oak trees protected it, so that the catalpa tree transformed into a [useful] ocher. Wuhu! Whom should one respect but his associates? Whom should one be on guard against but the Shang? What should one use but the trees [that are firmly planted]? [When using the tree], follow its desires, and use it in accordance with its quality.13 When Heaven sends down disease but one still consumes fine foods, then it cannot be cured, and one’s time [of demise] is not far off. The worries of Shang lie with Zhou, and those of Zhou lie with Shang. If you want to show forth this dream but just follow the loose talk of the multitudes, you surely will have no way to manifest your martial awesomeness;14 you will be like scrub oaks and hard oaks that have lost their roots.  “Wuhu! Be reverent! I have heard: he who excels everywhere makes no mistakes. Be meticulous in selecting [your aides]!15 Uproot resolutely what is intolerable, so as to peacefully multiply good fortune. As the catalpa defeated the unrighteous [thorny plants], it grew densely in Shang; there was no destitution. The One Above is bright and clear; [when he displayed] the thorns, he showed that [Shang] was doomed.16  “Do not employ [the people] without instructing them first!17 [If you] make them compliant, soft, and harmonious, then the folk will meet with no disaster, and they will embrace trustworthiness. Wuhu! What should one observe if not timeliness, to what should one devote oneself if not harmony, what should one embrace if not refinement, what should one 13

14 15 16 17

According to my understanding, “the trees” here are a metaphor for the worthies. When the ruler wants to use the worthy, he should first satisfy the candidate’s desires, and only then will he be able to employ him. The meaning of this sentence is disputed; I follow Ziju 2011. Reading ze 擇 as “selecting one’s aides.” The meaning of this sentence remains disputed and unclear. I follow Ziju 2011. I follow Ziju 2011.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

56

Luo Xinhui

protect if not the Way, what should one cherish if not one’s own self, for what should one exert oneself if not the people? [If] the aspirations of the people are strong, they cannot be concealed. Be warned, my descendant! Be warned, my descendant! Take heed that time is running out for the people to make use of your plans!” (Li Xueqin 2010: 135–139) Stylistically, the Chengwu B document clearly displays the traits of Warring States period literature, which are not seen in Chengwu A. For instance, rhetorical questions of the type “what 何 … if not 非 …?” recur in many Warring States texts. Compare the “Lü xing” 呂刑 chapter of the Shujing: “Whom to select if not [the proper] people? What to revere but the punishments? … What to observe if not virtue?” (何擇非人？何敬非刑？ … 何監非德？)18 The same “what … if not ...?” formula also appears in two identical passages in the Mengzi: “Whom to serve if not the ruler, whom to employ if not the people?” (何事非君？何使非民？)19 Another contempo­ raneous text, the “Wen Wang guanren” 文王官人chapter of the Da Dai liji 大 戴禮記, asks: “What to be careful about if not the heart? What to be careful about if not the people?” (何慎乎非心？何慎乎非人？ Da Dai liji X.72: 196). Further examples could be adduced. Many sentences in the Chengwu B manuscript have close parallels in other chapters of the received Yi Zhou shu. For instance, the final sentences “[If] the aspirations of the people are strong, they cannot be concealed. Be warned, my descendant! Be warned, my descendant! Take heed that time is running out for the people to make use of your plans!” (人謀强，不可以藏。後戒後戒， 人用女（汝）謀，愛日不足), recur with minor variations in no fewer than five chapters of the received text: “Feng bao” 酆保, “Da kai” 大開, “Xiao kai” 小 開, “Wen jing,” and “Wu jing” 寤儆.20 Similarly, the rhetorical question of the “what … if not …?” type recurs in chapters “Wen jing,” “Xiao kai,” “Da kai wu,” “Bao dian” 寶典, and others. In general, the language and the style of Chengwu B are closely related to those of the “Xiao kai,” “Da kai,” and “Wen jing” chapters of the Yi Zhou shu.21 While “Da kai,” “Xiao kai,” and similar chapters claim to record speeches by King Wen, King Wu, or the Duke of Zhou 周公 (d. ca. 1035 18

19 20 21

“Lü xing” cited from Shisanjing zhushu 249, 251. Most scholars date the chapter to the middle to late Warring States period; see Guo Moruo 1954: 32; Qian Mu’s “Zhouguan zhuzuo shidai kao” 周官著作時代考 in Qian Mu 2001: 378–379; Chao Fulin 2002. Mengzi 3.2: 63 (“Gongsun Chou 公孫丑 shang”); 10.1: 232 (“Wan zhang 萬章 xia”). See, respectively, Yi Zhou shu III.21: 224; III.22: 229; III.23: 243; III.24: 249; III.31: 325. Overall, the recurrence of similar vocabulary, similar stylistic patterns, and even repetition of entire phrases in several chapters is one of the characteristics of the Yi Zhou shu.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

Omens and Politics

57

bce), their language differs markedly from the eight “Declarations” (gao 誥) chapters of the Shujing that are generally assigned to the Western Zhou period.22 This pronounced difference suggests that the aforementioned chapters of the Yi Zhou shu are the product of Warring States period authors pretending to speak in the voices of Kings Wen and Wu. It is highly possible that the Chengwu B manuscript belongs to a similar milieu. Aside from pronounced differences in style and language between Chengwu A and Chengwu B, their distinct origins can be inferred from a closer analysis of their interrelation. Three points are particularly noteworthy. First, the con­ nection between the two sections is very weak. Chengwu A appears as a complete textual unit, which could easily constitute a chapter in its own right. Chengwu B appears to be connected with the first through the mention of a dream as well as of the pine, cedar, scrub oak, and hard oak trees that are also named in the first section. A closer look, however, shows the connection as largely superficial: the trees mentioned in the second section refer primarily to the issue of employing the worthies and are not directly related to the auspi­ cious trees discussed in the first section’s narrative. Second, there is a drastic shift of focus from the first section to the second one. The first section concerns Taisi’s dream; its purpose is to emphasize King Wen’s and King Wu’s receipt of the Mandate of Heaven. The second section turns suddenly to King Wen’s warning to his son; the text diminishes the importance of the dream and even appears as an attempt to correct a wrong impression created in Chengwu A with regard to the dream’s role in the reception of the Mandate. Moreover, the notion of the Mandate of Heaven itself disappears entirely from Chengwu B. In their fundamental message, the two sections are not in line with each other. Third, stylistic observations disclose further differences between the two sections of the Chengwu. As mentioned above, the style of Chengwu B is very close to the “Da kai,” “Xiao kai,” and “Wen jing” chapters, which record admonitions of King Wen and other paragons and have no further narratives attached. In contrast, Chengwu A merely tells the story of Taisi’s dream. In light of these observations, I suspect that Chengwu B was just a record of King Wen’s admonition, similar to those in the “Da kai” and “Wen jing” chapters of the Yi Zhou shu. It was only later, perhaps, that it was merged with the Chengwu A story to form the current Chengwu manuscript (and its parallel, the 22

See Vogelsang 2002 for a dissenting voice about the belatedness of the gao chapters. This study notwithstanding, I prefer to rely on such scholars as Jiang Shanguo (1988), Liu Qiyu (2007: 531–540), and Gu Jiegang and Liu Qiyu (2005) all of whom accept the earliness of the gao.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

58

Luo Xinhui

“Chengwu” chapter of the Yi Zhou shu).23 Alternatively, it is possible that an admonition, patterned after similar speeches in the Yi Zhou shu, was created specifically to moderate the message of the Chengwu A story. I will return to this issue at the end of the present essay.

Kings Wen and Wu and the Zhou Mandate

The Chengwu manuscript records that King Wen and his son Fa (the later King Wu) together received the Mandate from the August Supreme Thearch. The reception of the Mandate by Kings Wen and Wu is discussed in a number of texts from the Western Zhou period. Yet the details of these accounts vary significantly: while some claim that it was King Wen alone who received the Mandate, others suggest that Kings Wen and Wu received it jointly. These differences may reflect ideological changes over the course of the Western Zhou period and may help us to date the Zhou texts—and in particular the first section of Chengwu—with more precision. In bronze inscriptions, the term “Mandate of Heaven” 天命 can also be written as “Great Decree” 大令, “Heaven’s Decree” 天令, and “Great Mandate” 大命; these terms are interchangeable.24 The notion of the “Mandate of Heaven” appears first in the He-zun 何尊 inscription, which is dated to the early Zhou period (the reign of King Cheng 成王, ca. 1042–1021 bce). In this inscription, King Cheng declares: “King Wen received this Great Decree, and it was King Wu who defeated the Great Shang” (肆文王受茲大令, 隹武王既克 23

24

It is impossible to determine here whether or not Chengwu B was also part of the “Chengwu” chapter of the Yi Zhou shu. Since the language of Chengwu B parallels that of some Yi Zhou shu chapters (such as “Wen jing”), this assertion is plausible; but as we lack any citation from Chengwu B in the texts that refer to the “Chengwu” chapter, we should be cautious. At the current stage of our knowledge, we cannot answer with certainty whether or not the bamboo Chengwu is identical in its entirety to the lost “Chengwu” chapter. This interchangeability can be seen, for instance, in the Lai-pan 逨盘 inscription (see Shaanxi Sheng Kaogu yanjiusuo et al. 2003), which notes first that “King Wen and King Wu … received Heaven’s bounteous decree” 文王武王 … 膺受天魯令 and then adds, “Lai, Illustrious Kings Wen and Wu received in response the Great Decree” 逨，丕顯文 武王，應受大令. In two Qin inscriptions from the seventh (and perhaps sixth) centuries bce, another pair is used: the Qin Gong-gui 秦公 says, “received Heaven’s Mandate” 受天命, but the similar Qin Gong-zhong 秦公鐘 states, “received the Great Decree” 受大 令, further showing the interchangeability of the two terms. For these inscriptions, see Kern 2000a: 79–88.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

Omens and Politics

59

大邑商).25 In other words, the achievements of Kings Wen and Wu were intentionally differentiated: after King Wen had received the Mandate, King Wu ended the rule of Shang and established the Zhou supremacy. This differentiation is also reflected in other early Zhou inscriptions, such as the Da Yu-ding 大盂鼎 inscription, which reads: “The great and illustrious King Wen received the Great Decree from Heaven. When King Wu succeeded King Wen, he founded the state, exterminated the evil [i.e., King Zhòu 紂 of Shang], and broadly possessed the four quarters” (丕顯玟王受天有大令，在珷王嗣玟 乍邦，闢厥慝，匍有四方).26 Similar notions of the reception of the Mandate also appear in the inscriptions from the middle of the Western Zhou period. The inscriptions on Xing-zhong 鐘 and Shi Qiang-pan 史牆盤 are two typical examples. They both identify King Wen as the sole recipient of the Mandate of Heaven:27 曰古文王，初盭龢於政，上帝降懿德大甹，匍有四方，匌受萬 邦。 圉 武王，遹征四方 ，達殷畯民 。 It is said that in antiquity, when King Wen first took control and brought harmony to government, the Supreme Thearch sent down fine de 德 [power, virtue] and great security. [King Wen] broadly possessed the four regions and uniformly received [submission from] the myriad countries. Capturing and controlling was King Wu! He proceeded and campaigned through the four quarters, piercing Yin [Shang] and ruling its people.28

25 26 27

28

Yin Zhou jinwen jicheng 2004: 06014. Yin Zhou jinwen jicheng 2004: 02837. The inscriptions on Xing-zhong and Shi Qiang-pan claim that it was the Supreme Thearch 上帝 who granted King Wen the Mandate. The Zhou people did distinguish between Heaven and the Supreme Thearch, but insofar as receipt of the Mandate was concerned, the two were identical. For instance, the “Shao gao” 召誥 chapter of the Shujing says at one point: “The August Heaven, Supreme Thearch, replaced the Mandate of its primary son, this great state of Yin” 皇天上帝改厥元子，茲大國殷之命, and then says: “Heaven abandoned and ended the Mandate of the great country, Yin” 天既遐終大邦殷 之命. In this, as in many similar examples, “Heaven” and “Supreme Thearch” are interchangeable. Yin Zhou jinwen jicheng 2004: 00251 (Xing-zhong), 10175 (Shi Qiang-pan). The translation follows that of the Shi Qiang-pan inscription and is partly borrowed from Shaughnessy 1991: 185.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

60

Luo Xinhui

Although this inscription does not explicitly refer to the reception of the Mandate, its fundamental message is the same as that of the earlier inscriptions mentioned above; the functions of Kings Wen and Wu are clearly differentiated. Yet the situation changes sometime in the middle of the Western Zhou period. Inscriptions still frequently invoke the reception of the Mandate but they present the events differently. As noticed by Martin Kern, it was only by the late Western Zhou period that both kings had firmly attained their position as “primordial double ancestors who through their succession and comple­ mentary virtues had established the dynasty” (2009: 148–150). Indeed, Kings Wen and Wu appear now as a stable pair. For example, the Xun-gui 詢簋 inscription, dated to the late Western Zhou period, states: “The king spoke to this effect: Xun! The great and illustrious Kings Wen and Wu received the Decree. Your ancestors helped them to establish the Zhou state” (王若曰： 詢，丕顯文武受令，則乃祖奠周邦).29 Kings Wen and Wu are similarly conjoined as the recipients of the Mandate in such contemporaneous inscriptions as Shi Xun-gui 師詢簋, Mao Gong-ding 毛公鼎, Shi Ke-xu 師克 盨, Guaibo Guifeng-gui 乖伯歸峰簋,30 and the recently discovered pair of the Lai-ding 逨鼎 and Lai-pan 逨盘.31 Regarding the Mandate, the narration in four of these five inscriptions is almost identical: “the great and illustrious [ancestors] King Wen and King Wu received the Mandate of Heaven.” To quote the Mao Gong-ding inscription: 丕顯文武，皇天引厭氒德，配我有周。膺受大命。 The greatly illustrious Wen and Wu—August Heaven was pleased with their virtue and conjoined with us, the possessors of Zhou; [Kings Wen and Wu] received the Great Mandate.”32 The above inscriptions clearly suggest a change in the Zhou views of the Mandate. Before the middle of the Western Zhou period, the inscriptions refer exclusively to King Wen as the recipient of the Mandate: the possessor of fine virtue endorsed by the Supreme Thearch. King Wu is never directly associated with this achievement, and his merits are clearly differentiated from those of his father. King Wen received the Mandate while King Wu overcame the Shang 29 30 31 32

Yin Zhou jinwen jicheng 2004: 04342. See, respectively, Yin Zhou jinwen jicheng 2004: 04321, 02841, 04468, 04331. Shaanxi Sheng Kaogu yanjiusuo et al. 2003. Yin Zhou jinwen jicheng 2004: 02841.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

Omens and Politics

61

dynasty; King Wen possessed virtue and harmonized the myriad countries (wan bang 萬邦), while King Wu accomplished the great enterprise of annihilating the Shang. In contrast, the late Western Zhou inscriptions identify both kings as the Mandate’s recipients, whose merits are no longer distinguishable. Both possessed fine virtue; both received the Mandate; and there is no real difference in their contribution to the establishment of the Zhou. The attainment of the Mandate of Heaven by Kings Wen and Wu of Zhou is also narrated in numerous transmitted texts, particularly the eight “Decla­ rations” chapters that compose the earliest part of the Shujing. Interestingly, the conceptualization of the receipt of the Mandate there largely parallels the picture we see from the bronze inscriptions. Namely, earlier documents emphasize the singularity of King Wen as the recipient of the Mandate, while later documents refer to the receiving of the Mandate as the joint achievement of both kings. For the earlier layer, we can turn to “Kang gao” 康誥 (“The Announcement to Prince Kang”), which is traditionally dated to the early Zhou period. The document contains the following statement by the Duke of Zhou: 惟乃丕顯考文王，克明德慎罰；不敢侮鰥寡，庸庸，祗祗，威 威，顯民。 用肇造我區夏，越我一、二邦以修我西土。惟時怙 冒，聞于上帝，帝休，天乃大命文王。殪戎殷，誕受厥命越厥 邦厥民，惟時敘，乃寡兄勖。 Our greatly distinguished father, King Wen, was able to manifest his virtue and was careful in the use of punishments. He did not dare to offend widowers and widows; he employed the employable and revered the reverend; he was awesome to those who needed to be awed and clarified [his rule] to the people. Thus, he laid the foundations for our rule in the Xia realm, allying with one or two countries so as to strengthen our rule in the western lands. As these all relied on him and looked up to him, his fame ascended to the Supreme Thearch. The Thearch was pleased, and hence Heaven granted the great Mandate to King Wen. Exterminating the martial Yin, seizing their Mandate, and appropriating their people—these were the achievements of my brother, [King Wu].33

33

“Kang gao” cited from Shang shu zhengyi 14: 203. The translation is modified from Legge 2000a: 383.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

62

Luo Xinhui

“The Announcement to Prince Kang” clearly distinguishes between King Wen’s receipt of the Mandate and King Wu’s overcoming of the Shang. According to the Duke of Zhou, King Wen was the possessor of virtue, cared for the people, and thus developed a power base in the Xia area. His fame was noticed by the Supreme Thearch, who consequently granted him the Mandate. In distinction, King Wu’s tasks were to inherit his father’s Mandate, to attack the Shang, and to lay the foundations for the Zhou dynastic enterprise. A similar view is expressed in the chapter “Jun Shi” 君奭 (“Prince Shi”), which likewise is believed to date to the early Western Zhou period. The essence of the “Prince Shi” narrative is as follows: The Supreme Thearch was inspired by King Wen’s virtue and granted him the Mandate; King Wen was able to pacify his country and employ virtuous advisers, while King Wu excelled in inheriting his father’s good advisers, who joined him in exterminating the Shang.34 Here again, the merits of both kings are clearly differentiated. The picture differs markedly in sections of the Documents that were composed in later periods. For instance, the “Wenhou zhi ming” 文侯之命 (“Command to Lord Wen”) records the investiture of Lord Wen of Jin 晉文侯 (r. 780–746 bce) by King Ping of Zhou 周平王 (r. 770–720 bce) and hence dates from the Springs-and- Autumns period, at the earliest. The chapter states: 丕顯文、武，克慎明德，昭升於上，敷聞在下；惟時上帝，集 厥命于文王。 Great and illustrious were King Wen and King Wu. They were able to carefully illuminate their virtue so that its brilliance ascended upward while their fame spread downward. Therefore, the Supreme Thearch settled his Mandate on King Wen.35 Although the text claims that the Mandate was given to King Wen alone, it does not distinguish between the achievements of Kings Wen and Wu but rather argues that both of them had brilliant virtue. This narrative clearly differs from that in the early Zhou documents surveyed above. If we examine accounts concerning the receipt of the Mandate in the Shijing 詩經 (Classic of Poetry), we again find a similar picture. For instance, the “Da ming” 大明 ode, the “Wu” 武 hymn, and the “Wen Wang you sheng” 文王有 聲 ode all distinguish between the merits of King Wen and King Wu. By 34 35

For the nature of the “Prince Shi” document, see discussion in Shaughnessy 1993a. “Jun shi” cited from Shangshu zhengyi 20: 253. The translation is modified from Legge 2000a: 613.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

Omens and Politics

63

contrast, the “Haotian you chengming” 昊天有成命 hymn says: “Great Heaven has its accomplished Mandate, which the two sovereigns [Kings Wen and Wu] received” (昊天有成命，二后受之).36 Similarly, the ode “Jiang Han” 江漢 says: “When Kings Wen and Wu received the Mandate, the Duke of Shao 召公 acted as their pillar” (文武受命，召公維翰).37 Both later poems aver that Kings Wen and Wu received the Mandate jointly, and they do not distinguish between the kings’ individual achievements. The dating of most of these poems remains disputed; but it may be guessed that insofar as the “Da ming” and “Wen Wang you sheng” focus on the events of the early Zhou period, they might have been composed relatively early. The “Jiang Han” ode records a charge by King Xuan of Zhou 周宣王 (r. 827–782 bce) to Shao Hu 召虎 to start the southward expedition against the Huai Yi 淮夷 and thus could not have been composed before the late Western Zhou period. The dating of “Haotian you chengming” is less clear, but it is unlikely to be very early.38 Summarizing records about Kings Wen and Wu in bronze inscriptions, as well as chapters from the Shujing and odes and hymns from the Shijing, we can see that there was clearly a development in the idea of the reception of the Mandate of Heaven during the Western Zhou period. During the early to middle Western Zhou period, King Wen was considered to be the single recipient of the Mandate and King Wu was the one who ousted the Shang; whereas afterward, the achievements of the two kings were treated as the same—Kings Wen and Wu both jointly received the Mandate. Within this 36 37 38

Mao shi zhengyi 19: 587; translation in Legge 2000b: 575. Mao shi zhengyi 18: 573; modifying the translation in Legge 2000b: 554. The dating of the “Haotian you chengming” hymn is contested. The phrase 成王不敢康 is often understood as referring to King Cheng (i.e., in Legge’s translation, “King Cheng did not dare to rest idly in it”; see Legge 2000b: 575); from this it is inferred that the text was composed during King Cheng’s time (ca. 1042–1021 bce). However, Zheng Xuan 鄭玄 (127–200 ce) reads the word cheng 成 as referring to “accomplishing” and not to King Cheng. He says: “To ‘accomplish’ [cheng 成] the Mandate means that the Zhou possessed the Mandate since the times of [the legendary progenitor] Houji 后稷. Kings Wen and Wu inherited this enterprise, acted according to the Way and virtue, and accomplished the royal merit. They dared not behave indolently; from morning to dusk they were compliant with Heaven’s Mandate, dared not be idle, and implemented kind and peaceful government so as to stabilize All-under-Heaven” (cited from Zheng’s gloss at Mao shi zhengyi, 587). Similarly, Wei Zhao 韋昭 (207–273 ce) says in his gloss on the citation from the “Haotian you chengming” hymn in the Guoyu: “Kings Wen and Wu rectified themselves and were assiduous, thereby accomplishing [cheng 成] the royal merit; the poem does not speak of King Cheng” (Guoyu 3.7: 116 [“Zhou yu xia” 周語下]). From these glosses it is clear that the association of the hymn with King Cheng and its dating to the early Zhou period cannot be taken for granted.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

64

Luo Xinhui

particular historical and literary context, and given that in the Chengwu manuscript, King Wen and his son Fa (i.e., King Wu) jointly received the Mandate, it becomes quite clear that the Chengwu narrative cannot date from early in the Western Zhou period.

Summary: Zhou Debates about Heaven Revisited

We may now summarize our findings. First, while the story of Taisi’s prophetic dream may have a relatively early origin, the Chengwu A narrative is not likely to precede the late Western Zhou period, while the text itself might have been composed even later. Second, the two parts of the Chengwu manuscript seem not to have been composed at the same time: the language of Chengwu B is noticeably later than that of Chengwu A. Third, the two parts differ also in content. The first presents an omen-focused narrative: an auspicious dream by Taisi, followed by a series of exorcist and sacrificial rituals, which result in the attainment of Heaven’s Mandate by Kings Wen and Wu. The second part of the narrative, in contrast, focuses exclusively on human affairs: the major point of King Wen’s admonition is that the importance of the dream is not in the promise of divine support per se but rather in a political lesson that should be learned. To ensure success, one should focus one’s efforts on proper policies: select good aides, care for the people, and be cautious and reverent. The auspiciousness of the dream is downplayed, and curiously, the attainment of the Mandate—the central topic of Chengwu A—is not mentioned at all. Read in this context, the second part of the manuscript can be understood as a correction or even subversion of the message of the first part. From the realm of the omens we are redirected decisively to the realm of ethics and politics. The short manuscript, then, may reveal some of the tensions that accompanied Zhou conceptualizations of Heaven’s Mandate and, more broadly, Heaven’s interaction with the human realm. In a recent study, Martin Kern has analyzed a curious bifurcation between the practice of divination in early China and its very limited presentation in textual sources. Kern states: “as much as the routine practice of divination pervaded early Chinese society on all levels—a fact now proven by a rich record of archeological discoveries—almost nothing of it has remained in the textual heritage from antiquity” (Kern, forthcoming-a). This observation, mutatis mutandis, can be applied to the realm of omens and portents as well. While some of the Zhou textual sources—most notably the Zuo zhuan— contain more than a few references to omens and portents, their importance is

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

Omens and Politics

65

usually downplayed and is subordinate to that of human affairs, as emphasized in the Zuo zhuan’s dictum to “heed the people” rather than “heed the deities.”39 With regard to the major political event in Zhou history—namely, the attainment of the Mandate of Heaven and replacement of the Shang dynasty— the apparent insignificance of omens in the textual record is striking. Insofar as we rely on the relevant chapters of the Shujing, their message is very clear and can be summarized by the extract from “The Announcement to Prince Kang” cited above: the Mandate was obtained due to the superb morality and proper political conduct of King Wen; the person upon whom the Mandate should be conferred was decided exclusively on the basis of affairs in the human realm; Heaven (or the Supreme Thearch) simply responded to the “fine virtue” of King Wen and punished the evildoer, King Zhòu 紂 of Shang. While Western Zhou texts do mention the invariably favorable divination that accompanied the epochal power transfer from the Shang to the Zhou (and some other major events in early Zhou history), omens, if any, are glossed over, except for a very brief reference to a dream (possibly Taisi’s dream) in the “Tai shi” document as mentioned above. Does this mean that portents and omens were indeed minor, next to nonexistent, back in the early Zhou period? Not necessarily. We have ample, if late, evidence of their possible importance. For instance, the “Fei gong xia” 非 攻下 (“Contra Offensive Warfare C”) chapter of the Mozi 墨子 narrates the overthrow of King Jie 桀 of Xia 夏, which was accompanied by manifold portents (e.g., the sun and moon did not come out at the right time, the seasons were disordered, the five kinds of grain seared and died, ghosts wept in the country, cranes kept on calling for ten days and ten nights, and so on). Then the text narrates in even greater detail the overthrow of King Zhòu of the Shang, and this narrative deserves full citation: 遝至乎商王紂，天不序其德，祀用失時，兼夜中十日，雨土于 薄，九鼎遷止，婦妖宵出，有鬼宵吟，有女為男，天雨肉，棘 生乎國道，王兄自縱也。赤鳥銜珪，降周之岐社，曰：「天命 周文王伐殷有國。」泰顛來賓，河出綠圖，地出乘黃。武王踐 39

See, e.g., such statements as “When the state is to prosper, [the ruler] heeds the people; when it is to perish, he heeds the deities” (國將興，聽於民；將亡，聽於神。Zuo zhuan, Zhuang 32.3: 252). This mode of thought is often interpreted as “taking the people as a root” (min ben 民本) or “taking human beings as a root” (ren ben 人本), meaning, in this context, prioritizing human affairs over interaction with the divine. See more in Liu Jiahe 1995. For the interaction with the divine forces in the Zuo zhuan, see Chao Fulin 1995.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

66

Luo Xinhui

功，夢見三神曰：「予既沈漬殷紂于酒德矣，往攻之，予必使 汝大堪之。」武王乃攻狂夫，反商作周. When we come to King Zhòu of the Shang, Heaven did not prolong his virtue; his sacrifices were not in accordance with the seasons. The night lasted for ten consecutive days;40 it rained soil for ten days at [the Shang capital,] Bo; the nine cauldrons moved from their place;41 witches appeared in the dark and ghosts sighed at night. Some women turned into men; flesh came down from Heaven like rain; thorny brambles covered highways in the capital, yet the king became even more dissolute. A red bird holding a gui tablet in its beak descended on the Zhou altar at Mount Qi, proclaiming: “Heaven commands King Wen of Zhou to attack Yin [Shang] and to take possession of its capital.” Tai Dian then came to be minister to [King Wen]. The River generated the Chart; Earth generated chenghuang.42 As King Wu ascended the [Zhou] throne [after King Wen’s death], he dreamt of three deities, saying [on behalf of the Thearch?]: “Now that I have deeply submerged Zhòu of Yin [Shang] in ale-muddled de [power], go and attack him! I shall certainly let you destroy him.” Then King Wu set out and attacked the madman [Zhòu of the Shang], rebelling against the Shang and causing Zhou to arise.43 This narrative differs substantially from the accounts of the fall of the Shang in the Shujing: the story contains more references to omens and portents than all the earlier accounts combined. It is possible that some of these were outright inventions by Mozi (ca. 460–390 bce) so as to warn that only a comparable accumulation of omens and portents would justify war or rebellion in the future,44 but even if this is the case, then at the very least some of these portents 40 41

42

43 44

The sentence is not clear; an alternative translation would be that ten suns appeared simultaneously in the night. The nine cauldrons are the ultimate symbol of royal power. In the Zuo zhuan it is narrated that they were transferred from the Xia to Shang and then to Zhou as the symbol of the dynasty’s legitimate rule (Zuo zhuan, Xuan 3.3: 669–672). The Chart from the Yellow River (He tu 河圖), writings from the river Luo (Luo shu 洛書), and the appearance of the magical animal chenghuang 乘黃 became by the Warring States period attributes of the new Mandate-bearer (see Wu Yujiang’s 吳毓江 glosses in Mozi jiaozhu, 238nn114–115). Mozi jiaozhu V.19: 220–221 (“Fei gong xia”). As suggested in Pines 2008: 10–11, from which the translation of the passage is borrowed, with minor alterations. For an alternative interpretation of this passage, see Van Els 2013: 88–91.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

Omens and Politics

67

and omens must have been known to Mozi’s audience, since otherwise the story would lack any credibility.45 It is possible, then, that there were alternative versions of the overthrow of the Shang and the Zhou attainment of the Mandate and that these versions were much more omen- and portent-oriented and might have circulated either orally or in texts that later did not merit inclusion in the canon. At the very least, the Mozi passage suffices to caution us against uncritical acceptance of the Shujing narrative as the single version of the Mandate transfer.46 It is highly likely that the omen-related stories of Heaven’s intervention in human affairs were disliked by not a few pre-imperial thinkers. In the eyes of some, they might have added unpredictability and even manipulativeness to human interaction with the supreme deity: after all, it was all too easy to fabricate a favorable omen (not to say an auspicious dream!) so as to bolster one’s legitimacy as a potential bearer of the Mandate. This uneasiness is reflected in several texts, most notably Xunzi’s discussion of Heaven, which unequivocally dismisses exceptional celestial and terrestrial events as irrelevant to human affairs.47 Elsewhere, the “Cheng lian” 誠廉 chapter of the Lüshi chunqiu 呂氏春秋 (Springs-and-Autumns of Sire Lü) narrates the indignation of two famous recluses, Boyi 伯夷 and Shuqi 叔齊, with King Wu of Zhou, who “spread a dream in order to convince the populace” (揚夢以說 眾) of the righteousness of his assault on the Shang.48 Clearly, the abuse of dreams and other portents was a distinct possibility (and as we know from historical texts, this possibility frequently materialized).49 Faced with this problem of the omen-oriented view of Heaven, thinkers whose voices we hear most in the Zhou texts—and, therefore, who probably 45

46

47 48

49

At the very least, even if Mozi invented the portents, he might have referred to the religious mind-set of the early Zhou people, which is reflected, for example, in the importance of divinations in the early Zhou. For divinations as essential for early Zhou policymakers, see, e.g., the “Grand Declaration” (“Da gao” 大誥) chapter of the Shujing; see more in Kern, forthcoming-a. Another notable mention of an auspicious omen that preceded the rise of the Zhou is in the “Yingtong” 應同 chapter of the Lüshi chunqiu: “at the time of King Wen, there was fire visible in heaven; the red bird came to the Earth Altar of Zhou with a vermilion book in its beak” 及文王之時，天先見火，赤烏銜丹書集於周社 (Lüshi chunqiu 13.2: 682). Xunzi jijie XI.17: 313–317 (“Tian lun” 天論). Lüshi chunqiu 12.4: 641. The Qing scholar Bi Yuan 畢沅 (1730–1797) pointed out that the dream mentioned in the “Cheng lian” chapter might have been the dream recorded in the “Chengwu” chapter of the Yi Zhou shu (see Chen Qiyou’s gloss on p. 638). For fabrication of a series of favorable omens, see, for instance, Sima Qian’s 司馬遷 (ca. 145–ca. 85 bce) narration of Chen She’s 陳涉 (d. 208 bce) rebellion (Shiji 46: 1950).

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

68

Luo Xinhui

present the mainstream Zhou ideology—preferred to shift their focus from the affairs of Heaven to the affairs of men. Of course, the divine nature of Heaven remained very strongly pronounced: the early Zhou chapters of the Shujing contain several accounts of divinations performed at the beginning of the Zhou dynasty to verify Heaven’s will; the invariably auspicious outcome of these divinations was an important layer in Zhou dynastic propaganda.50 But the overwhelming focus was on neither divinations nor omens but the proper maintenance of human affairs. Narratives that did not fit this focus were either ignored, silenced, criticized (as in the “Cheng lian” chapter of the Lüshi chunqiu), or, at least, reinterpreted. The Chengwu manuscript presents us precisely with this latter option: the second part of the narrative reinterprets the story of an auspicious dream, eviscerates its divine context, and refocuses the reader’s attention on the familiar dictum of being careful and attentive in human affairs. Yet luckily for us, the authors of Chengwu B preserved an earlier (Chengwu A) account of Taisi’s auspicious dream, through which we gain a glimpse at the “omenological” approach to Heaven and to Heaven’s Mandate. The Chengwu in its entirety shows the complexity of Zhou views of Heaven and reminds us that beyond the mainstream view that Heaven assists those who possess brilliant virtue, other—including more omen- and portentoriented—ideas of Heaven’s revelation existed and continued to exercise their influence throughout the Zhou dynasty and beyond.51 50 51

See more in Kern, forthcoming-a. As is well known, omens and portents became increasingly important political weapons during the Han dynasty; see, e.g., Kern 2000b. This topic goes, however, beyond the temporal parameters of my study.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

69

Long Live the King!

Chapter 3

Long Live the King! The Ideology of Power between Ritual and Morality in the Gongyang zhuan ­ 公羊傳1 Joachim Gentz C’est à l’idéologie, à cette ténébreuse métaphysique qui, en recherchant avec subtilité les causes premières, veut sur ces bases fonder la législation des peuples, au lieu d’approprier les lois à la connaissance du cœur humain et aux leçons de l’histoire, qu’il faut attribuer tous les malheurs. Napoléon at the Conseil d’Etat in 1812

⸪

Background: Origins and Early History of the Gongyang zhuan

Along with the Zuo zhuan 左傳 and the Guliang zhuan 穀梁傳, the Gongyang zhuan 公羊傳 is one of the three canonical commentaries to the Chunqiu 春 秋 (Spring and Autumn Annals). The Chunqiu in turn belongs to the wider genre of annalistic chronicles that were kept at the courts of many states during the Zhou 周 period (ca. 1046–256 bce)2 and recorded events that were of significance for the state.3 The Chunqiu, which became one of the five core 1 Parts of this essay draw on my earlier German publication, Gentz 2001. I wish to thank the editors for their careful reading, constructive suggestions, and patience, Yuri Pines especially for his enormous input of expertise and effort (he surely is the god in the details of this essay), Elizabeth Leith for her attentive proofreading, and Pamela J. Burton for her meticulous and intelligent final polish. 2 Hereafter all the dates are bce (before the Common Era) unless indicated otherwise. 3 Mozi jiaozhu VIII.31: 337–339 (“Ming gui xia” 明鬼下); Guoyu jijie 17.1: 485 (“Chuyu 楚語 shang”) and 13.8: 415 (“Jinyu 晉語 7”); Zhuangzi jinzhu 2: 74 (“Qiwu lun” 齊物論); and Mengzi yizhu 8.21: 192 all refer to annalistic chronicles held at the courts of other states such as Zhou 周, Yan 燕, Song 宋, Qi 齊, Chu 楚, and Jin 晉. See Gentz 2001: 25–37. The “wooden planks for the yearly records” 記年之牒 mentioned in Han Feizi jijie VIII.29: 210 (“Dati” 大體) could also refer to similar works.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004299337_005 Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

70

Gentz

Confucian works in the fourth or third century bce, is a chronicle of the state of Lu 魯 covering the period from 722 to 481. In the view of the Gongyang zhuan it was compiled by Confucius4 from earlier versions of one or several unedited Chunqiu chronicle(s)5 (buxiu Chunqiu 不脩春秋),6 the historical substance of which it basically preserved. Yet the Gongyang zhuan believes that Confucius formulated the transmitted historical records in particular ways in order to indicate his judgments on the contents of the records as subtle moral messages to posterity. As these moral judgments made by Confucius seem to combine the deep wisdom of his historical knowledge with his sagelike moral sense, they are regarded as an invaluable resource for study. The Gongyang commentary endeavors to detect the hidden messages by analyzing in particular the wording of the Chunqiu records, especially where it deviates from the normal pattern of the historiographical rules according to which the main parts of the Chunqiu are written.7 This intellectual attempt to explain the text according to reasoned rules had a lasting impact on traditional Chinese historiography and its interpretation.8 Its new exegetical methodology also influenced legal interpretation and contributed to a new style of communication in the political sphere. Dating of the Gongyang zhuan The place of origin of the Gongyang zhuan is unknown, as are the date and the authors and/or transmitters; therefore, highly controversial positions regarding the date and transmission of the Gongyang zhuan exist in the secondary literature.9 The earliest and thus official version of the Gongyang transmission 4 My assertion that this is an assumption of the Gongyang text itself is mainly based on the commentary in Zhao 12.1 where “zi yue” 子曰 clearly refers to Confucius as he refers to himself as “Qiu” 丘 at the end of the quote. In this quote he explicitly states that he is responsible for the wording of the Chunqiu (其詞則丘有罪焉耳) ! For a translation of this passage see n. 90 below. 5 The historical records on which the Chunqiu is allegedly based are often called shiji 史記 in the early literature; see Wang Liqi 1989: 107–109. 6 See Gongyang zhuan (hereafter GYZ), Zhuang 7.2 (Liu Shangci 2011 [hereafter Liu 2011]: 120, Shisanjing zhushu edition [hereafter SSJZS], 6: 2228). 7 For an analysis of the prescriptive rules governing which types of events could be recorded as well as the form of those records, see Van Auken 2007. Van Auken basically confirms the observations of the Chunqiu commentaries. For a much more detailed analysis, see Duan Xizhong 2002: 151–404. 8 Durrant 1995: chap. 1 and pp. 59–68; Watson 1958: 85–100; Lei Jiaji 1990: 30–50. 9 Hama Hisao (1987: 76–78; 1992: first and second part of chap. 1) surveys the Chinese and Japanese positions.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

Long Live the King!

71

line is given by the Later Han 後漢 (25–220 ce) scholar Dai Hong 戴宏 (fl. ca. during the reign of Emperor An 漢安帝, 106–125 ce)10 in the preface to his now-lost Jieyi lun 解疑論 (Essay on the Explanation of Textual Ambiguities).11 According to Dai Hong, the Gongyang zhuan was first transmitted orally (mostly from father to son) in the following order: Confucius’s disciple Zixia 子夏 (b. 507); Gongyang Gao 公羊高; Gongyang Ping 公羊平; Gongyang Di 公羊地; Gongyang Gan 公羊敢; Gongyang Shou 公羊壽. During the time of Emperor Jing 漢景帝 (r. 157–141), it was then written down on bamboo and silk (著於竹 帛) by Shou’s student Huwu Zidu 胡毋子都, who is often referred to as Master Huwu (Huwu sheng 胡毋生). Dong Zhongshu 董仲舒 (ca. 195–115) finally added diagrams and prognostic explanations (tu chen 圖讖).12 This line of transmission is not entirely reliable for several reasons. First, it lists only five transmitters from the Gongyang family in the three-hundred-year period between Zixia’s maturity and Emperor Jing.13 Second, the Gongyang zhuan quotes 10 11

12

13

Ma Guohan 1990: vol 3, 308. More details can be found in Yamada Taku 1957: 172. Some fragments of this work are collected in Ma Guohan 1990: vol. 3, 308–309. See also Xu Fuguan 1982. A special investigation by Yoshikawa Kōjirō (1966) is listed in the bibliography of Arbuckle 1993. The earliest transmission of the relevant passage from the Jieyi lun, however, is in a quotation in Xu Yan’s 徐彦 (Tang dynasty) subcommentary to the preface of He Xiu’s 何休 (129–182 ce) Chunqiu Gongyang jiegu 春秋公羊解詁 (SSJZS 2190). The earliest definitive datable statement concerning the transmission of the Gongyang zhuan is therefore in He Xiu’s commentary on the second year of Lord Yin of the Gongyang zhuan (SSJZS 2: 2203). He proposes the same oral transmission line as Dai Hong does, ascribing the written version of the Gongyang zhuan on bamboo and silk (ji yu zhubo 記 於竹帛) to a certain Mister Gongyang and his students Master Huwu 胡毋生 et al. On the basis of this evidence, there is no reason to doubt the Dai Hong quotation by Xu Yan, and this quotation is even more complete than the passage in He Xiu’s commentary. For a detailed discussion, see Jiang Youyu 2005: 112–118. See Dai Hong’s preface as quoted in Xu Yan’s subcommentary in SSJZS 2190. Nobody knows to what kind of diagrams or prognostic explanations the text refers here, as nothing of this sort has been transmitted. This has also been noticed by Cui Shi 崔適 (1852–1924) in his Chunqiu fushi 春秋復始: “Zixia was 44 years younger than Confucius. Confucius was born in the twenty-first year of the reign of Lord Xiang [552]. Down to the beginning of the reign of Emperor Jing [r. 157–141] there are more than 340 years. Between Zixia and Gongyang Gao there are only five transmissions, so in the Gongyang family the interval from generation to generation must have been more than 60 years. Every father must have enjoyed an old age, and the sons must all have been wise from birth. Is it credible that this can be achieved?” (子夏少 孔子四十四歲。孔子生於襄公二十一年，則子夏生於定公二年。下迄景帝之 初三百四十餘年。自子夏至公羊壽，甫及五傳，則公羊世世相去六十餘年； 又必父享耄年，子皆夙慧，乃能及之，其可信乎？ Cui Shi 1918: vol. 1, 1b). Qian Mu (1985: 86–87) even doubts that a Gongyang family existed at all and argues that the

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

72

Gentz

six Chunqiu masters who do not appear in this line.14 Third, Shiji 史記 and Hanshu 漢書 both report the oral transmission of Chunqiu interpretation by Confucius’s disciples, but neither mentions a written text. Fourth, oral transmission lines reaching back to Confucius were frequently invented during Dai Hong’s time. The Gongyang zhuan is a compilation consisting of clearly distinguishable parts.15 A core exegetical text composed of distinct parts such as glosses, ritual rules, and general exegetical guidelines can be distinguished from historical narratives and later exegetical supplements inserted into the exegetical text. This core piece originated probably in the time span between Mengzi’s 孟子 late years (ca. 320) and the death of Han Fei 韓非 (233), but most probably at the beginning of the third century bce in the state of Qi 齊 during the reign of King Xuan 齊宣王 (r. 320–301) or King Min 齊閔王 (r. 301–284)16 in the intellectual context of Jixia 稷下 scholars.17 It might have started as an oral tradition of Chunqiu interpretations that accumulated layers of interpretation by different exegetical authorities during the third and first half of the second centuries. At a certain point in time the core text of the Gongyang zhuan was

14

15 16

17

Gongyang line is the product of wrongly transmitted references to Zengzi’s 曾子 disciples Gongming Gao 公明高 and Gongming Yi 公明儀. The masters are Luzi 魯子, Zi Shenzi 子沉子, Zi Simazi 子司馬子, Zi Beigongzi 子北宮 子, Zi Nüzi 子女子, and Gaozi 高子. Nothing is known about them. According to the “Gujin renbiao” 古今人表 of the Hanshu (20: 947–948), they all were active in the twenty years between 300 and 280, during the reigns of Lord Min/Wen of Lu 魯愍/ 文公 (r. ca. 302–280) and King Min of Qi 齊愍王 (r. 301–284). A number of studies discuss these historiographers; e.g., Qian Mu 1985: 272–274; Sagawa 1960: 48–50; Yamada 1957: 157–164. See my analysis in Gentz 2001: 372–377. See also the analyses in Yamada 1957: 164–172; Hihara 1976: 42–43; Noma 1996: 105–108; Sekiguchi 1976: 16–21. The optimistic Gongyang vision of an ideal system based on transmitted Zhou rules was probably conceptualized in the time of Qi’s relative strength between 334, when Lord Wei of Qi assumed the title of king, and before 284, when Qi was defeated by the unified armies of the states Yan 燕, Qin 秦, Han 韓, Zhao 趙, and Wei 魏, a defeat from which it never recovered (Yang Kuan 1998: 381–385; Shiji 46: 1900). It appeared most probably during the reign of King Xuan, who demanded and promoted the creation of such unitary visions, or during the reign of his successor, King Min. Little is known about how scholarship was organized during the Warring States period. All we know about scholars in Qi in the third century bce is that some of the most brilliant minds were sponsored by the ruling Tian family and that their center, located by the capital’s Jixia gate, was important and influential. See Liu Weihua and Miao Runtian 1992; Zhang Bingnan 1991. Sivin (1995) and Lloyd and Sivin (2002: 29–30) have criticized the term “Jixia Academy” as inappropriate because the scholars were dependent guests and did not conduct independent scientific study.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

Long Live the King!

73

fixed, orally or in written form. Its exegesis of the Chunqiu makes partially use of written material such as glossary lists, ritual-administrative rules, and historical narratives.18 The literarization of the exegetical tradition was probably finalized during the reign of Emperor Jing (r. 157–141). This finalization should probably be understood as purely a work of compilation, a last unification accomplished by selection and cutting of older materials without otherwise changing their contents or adding anything substantial to them: the last record might have been modified to serve as a kind of postface. The Chunqiu exegesis that appears in the first five chapters of the Chunqiu fanlu 春秋繁露 (probably authored by Dong Zhongshu or Huwu Zidu) is based on this last compilation. Missing Han Themes in the Gongyang zhuan This last compilation of this Chunqiu exegetical tradition, which was called Gongyang zhuan only much later,19 provided one of the most powerful ideological instruments of Former Han 前漢 (206/202 bce–9 ce) Confucianism. The Gongyang zhuan does not, however, reflect an ideology that is particular to the Former Han. A number of missing central themes and terms prompt this conclusion. Also, the Gongyang zhuan’s emphasis on political unity is often cited as major evidence for a Former Han date, but it seems to be derived from pre-Han discourse. The themes discussed in the Gongyang zhuan nowhere reflect the concrete situation of the early Han. None of the Gongyang’s rules regarding succession to the throne, for example, match the problems that were so prominent in the Former Han after the death of the first emperor, Emperor Gao 高帝 (r. 206/202– 195). Immediately after Emperor Gao’s death, Empress Lü 呂后 dominated the palace and government for about fifteen years (195–180), trying to manipulate the succession in favor of her natal family and to oust the Liu family. Although this nearly brought the dynasty to an end, there is no reflection of any analogous problem in the Gongyang zhuan. After the expulsion of the Lü family, the imperial succession was again uncertain, as three possible candidates existed whose respective claims to succession could not be decided on the grounds of consensual succession rules.20 Again, the Gongyang zhuan does not address 18

19 20

For glossary lists, see, e.g., Erya 爾雅 for Shijing 詩經 and Shangshu 尚書 exegesis, and the “Shuo gua” 說卦 and “Za gua” 雜卦 chapters for Yijing 易經 exegesis. For ritualadministrative rules, see, e.g., the “Quli xia” 曲禮下 and “Wang zhi” 王制 chapters of the Liji 禮記, sections of the eponymous chapter in Xunzi 荀子, and the surviving fragments of the lost Wangdu ji 王度記. For historical narratives, see, e.g., Zuo zhuan and Guoyu. Cui Shi (1918: vol. 1, 1b) argues that it was first called Gongyang zhuan by Liu Xin 劉歆 (ca. 50 bce–23 ce) in his Qi lüe 七略. Hanshu 4: 105ff. and 38: 1987ff.; Loewe 1986: 130–137.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

74

Gentz

this problem in any way. Neither does the Gongyang zhuan provide any rules regulating other pressing issues of the Former Han such as obligations of the regional lords (zhuhou 諸侯) to attend the Son of Heaven’s court, taxation,21 or the increasing bureaucratization of the state, all of which became major problems under Emperors Wen 漢文帝 (r. 180–157) and Jing (Loewe 1986: 140). Moreover, there is no reflection of what the Shiji presents as two different styles of government: namely, the laissez-faire policy of the so-called HuangLao 黃老 party, which opposed an expansionist policy against the Xiongnu and supported the rights of the enfeoffed kings, versus a faction of Ru 儒 (“Confucians”) and reformists who supported the fight against the Xiongnu and curtailment of the kings’ power (Van Ess 1993: 16–17). While the Gong­yang zhuan was endorsed by the faction of the Ru, it contains neither polemic against Huang-Lao policy nor any advocacy of an aggressive fight against Yi-Di 夷狄 “barbarians” or of the regulation of enfeoffed kings, nor any sympathy for reformist politics whatsoever. There is no hidden polemic against the Qin or any discussion of harsh punishments, topics that circulated in most prominent ideological discourses from late Warring States (Zhanguo 戰國, 453–221) times until the beginning of the Former Han. Magnification of Unified Rule The ideology of the Gongyang zhuan has often been identified with Former Han ideology because of its famous notion of the “magnification of the unified rule” (da yitong 大一統) in the very first record.22 Chunqiu (hereafter CQ): 元年， 春，王正月。 First year, spring, the king’s first month. Gongyang zhuan (hereafter GYZ): 元年者何？君之始年也。春者 何？歲之始也。王者孰謂？謂文王也。曷為先言王而後言正 月？王正月也。何言乎王正月？大一統也。 What is the first year? It is the year in which the reign of the ruler [of Lu] begins. What is spring? It is the beginning of the year. King refers to whom? It refers to King Wen. Why does it first say “king” and then say “first month”? It is the first month of the [Zhou] royal calendar. Why does 21

22

The one passage on taxation, in Xuan 15.8, is reminiscent of a parallel passage in Mengzi 12.10. Both passages seem to echo the same discourse, which in its simplicity clearly does not reflect the complexity of early Han discourses on taxation. Liu 2011: 1; SSJZS 1: 2196–2197.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

75

Long Live the King!

it say the “first month” of the [Zhou] royal calendar? To magnify the unified rule. This unified rule is taken by later commentators to refer to the unity achieved after the unification of the Qin and Han empires. Yet, as Yuri Pines (2000a) has shown, the paradigm of political unity emerged long before actual unity was realized in 221 bce, and this “quest for unity was almost unanimously endorsed by Zhanguo thinkers” (2000a: 311). Pines (2000a: 304, 311) enumerates various strands of argumentation in the Warring States period ideology, which supported political unification of “All-under-Heaven” (tianxia 天下). The Gongyang zhuan differs from these strands, yet it has certain parallels in Warring States literature in texts such as the Zhou shi tian fa 周食田法 (Regulations for Zhou Food Fields),23 a work predating 295 bce (Yang Bojun 1979: 68), and the Wangdu ji 王度記 (Records of the Monarch’s Measurements). The Wangdu ji was probably compiled during the reign of King Xuan of Qi (r. 320– 301) in the context of Jixia scholarship24 and was incorporated later as a chapter in the Da Dai liji 大戴禮記. Today only nine quotations from the Wangdu ji survive. They can be found in the Baihu tong 白虎通 (Comprehensive Discussions at the White Tiger Hall) and in commentaries on the classics and dynastic histories (Gu Jiegang 1979: 7; He Xichun 1966: 4–6). These fragmentary pieces indicate that the Wangdu ji must have been a work consisting, like the later “Wang zhi” 王制 chapters, of ritual and administrative gradations of official ranks, endowments, and salaries and an overall order of institutional posts. One of its nine quotations corresponds rather closely to a rule from the Gongyang zhuan: Wangdu ji 王度記:25 23

24

25

天子一娶九女

This text was looted in ca. 279 ce from the tomb of King Xiang of Wei 魏襄王 (r. 318–296) at Ji 汲 Commandery, Henan, (together with the Zhushu jinian 竹書紀年 [Bamboo Annals] and many other texts). See Jinshu 36: 1061 and 51: 1433. For a critical introduction to the so-called Jizhong 汲冢 discovery, see Shaughnessy 2006: 131–184. Shaughnessy notes that there is “no subsequent record of the Zhou shi tian fa” (178). See Liu Xiang 劉向, Bielu 別錄, quoted in the subcommentary of Kong Yingda 孔穎達 (574–648 ce) to the Liji (SSJZS 43: 1566). Liu Xiang ascribes the work to the intellectual circle around the Jixia scholar Chunyu Kun 淳于髡. Chunyu’s Shiji biography, however, does not contain any reference to such a work (Shiji 74: 2347). Chunyu Kun is sometimes listed with a number of other Jixia scholars in the Shiji (46: 1894, 74: 2346, etc.), in the context of which Liu Xiang wants to place the Wangdu ji. Quoted in Baihu tong 10:469 (“Jia qu” 嫁娶).

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

76

Gentz

GYZ, Zhuang 19.3:26

The Son of Heaven takes nine women as wives all at once. 諸侯壹聘九女 The regional lords take nine women as wives all at once.

According to Gu Jie­gang (1979), the Wangdu ji is one of many programmatic conceptions of a unified empire, which comprised elaborations of concrete details for a bureaucratic hierarchical order. In an article on the genesis of the Zhouli 周禮, Gu points out a number of such early conceptions of political orders in the books Mengzi, Xunzi 荀子, and particularly Guanzi 管子. According to Gu, these conceptions may count as precursors of the order of offices in the Zhouli. These concepts, which, according to Gu, were mainly developed in the Jixia context of Qi, expressed the aspirations of Qi rulers for a unified rule over the Chinese territories in the pragmatic form of administrative regulations. Gu interprets them as the earliest concrete designs of a centrally administered unified empire in Chinese history. We thus find in pre-Han texts from Qi—which closely resemble the Gongyang zhuan in content, style, and attitude—an early vision of a unified central state that is based on ritual and administrative rules.27 A new wave of texts focusing on a ritual-based political unity emerged at the beginning of the Han. Texts like the “Wang zhi” chapter of the Liji 禮記 (as well as a section of an eponymous chapter in the Xunzi)28 reflect a similar scholarly effort to create appropriate delineations of a unified central state based on transmitted Zhou dynasty ritual and administrative rules that are partly copied, partly emulated, partly extended, and partly amended to match Former Han political needs (Wang Baoxuan 1994). These early Han texts, however, differ from the Warring States period works in several respects. First, the Han 26 27

28

Liu 2011: 144; SSJZS 8: 2236. The excavated text Tianzi jian zhou 天子建州 from the Shanghai Museum collection includes similar passages in which the different ritual prerogatives of the Son of Heaven 天子, the rulers of the states 邦君, the noble officers 大夫, and the shi officers 士 are clearly distinguished. The “Wang zhi” chapters consist mainly of administrative and ritual rules and regulations concerning institutional structures, offices and their obligations, tasks, and emoluments, official titles and designations, units of measurement, clothing, ritual procedures, hunting, sacrifices and music, social organization and care, legal instructions (punishments), geography, distribution of land and property, and education. They claim to provide details of the Zhou state that should serve the ruler as a basis from which to govern a unified state.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

Long Live the King!

77

texts are given different titles. Early works designate their political systems as fa 法 (regulations, schemes),29 such as the Zhou shi tian fa 周食田法, or as du 度 (measures), as in Wangdu ji 王度記. Early Han texts use the term zhi 制 (institutions), as in the “Wang zhi” chapters (in the Xunzi and Liji) and texts commissioned under Emperor Wen (r. 180–157): “Ben zhi” 本制, “Bing zhi” 兵 制, “Fu zhi” 服制,30 and the Liji “Sangfu sizhi” 喪服四制 chapter. Second, as Legge (1976: 19) and Gu (1979: 25) have pointed out, in Han times the emperor’s position could not be listed in a sequence together with subordinate positions. He had to be listed outside the hierarchical sequence in order to mark his extraordinary position. The Gongyang zhuan’s vision of a ritually unified realm clearly belongs to the first of these strands. It relates its many ritual rules to early visions of unification, which it refers to as “King Wen’s regulations and measures” (Wen wang zhi fadu 文王之法度).31 Both fa and du appear here as terms denoting a royal system; the term zhi 制, which is so prominent in Han texts, is used only once in the Gongyang zhuan, as a verb in the last record referring to the gentleman’s compilation of the Chunqiu (zhi Chunqiu 制春秋). This evidence might suffice to refute the argument that the emphasis on political unity in the Gongyang zhuan reflects Former Han political ideology. It appears much more plausible to regard the Gongyang zhuan itself as a variant of these early visions of a rule-based unity in the intellectual context of the Qi court. Referring to the old Zhou ritual and administrative system, the Gongyang zhuan envisions a continuation of the cultural unity of the Zhou, when the Son of Heaven ruled over his œcumene (tianxia 天下), with no place lying outwith his dominion (the formulation wangzhe wuwai 王者無外—“nothing is external to the [true] King”—is used four times in the Gongyang zhuan),32 and it takes a strongly relativist attitude toward notions of interior (nei 內) and

29

30 31 32

“Administrative regulations are extremely important in our contemporary bureaucracies. Such rules, handed down by a multitude of regulatory agencies, probably have a greater impact on the lives of most of us than does what we call ‘law.’ In China, however, these have been included in what is cal­led ‘law’” (Creel 1974: 143). For a detailed discussion of the term fa in Zhanguo times, see Goldin 2011a. See Liu Xiang’s Bielu and the expanded version of this bibliographical record, the Qi lüe 七 略 by his son Liu Xin 劉歆, in Ma Guohan 1990: vol. 6, 158. Wen 9.1 (Liu 2011: 301; SSJZS 13: 2269). Yin 1.6 (Liu 2011: 10; SSJZS 1: 2200); Huan 8.6 (Liu 2011: 76; SSJZS 5: 2219); Xi 24.4 (Liu 2011: 249; SSJZS 12: 2259); Cheng 12.1 (Liu 2011: 410; SSJZS 18: 2295).

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

78

Gentz

exterior (wai 外) or to differences between Central States (Zhongguo 中國) and Yi-Di 夷狄 “barbarians.”33 Interior and Exterior Realms The envisioned unity is not the unity of the Han state, which defends and expands its borders against non-Han people. It is rather the vision of an empire without political borders that is defined on cultural grounds. The borders that have to be drawn and defended are cultural borders, and the belonging to interior or exterior realms is gradual and depends on the perspective of the historiographer, as pointed out in Cheng 15.12,34 in a passage that indicates that the Gongyang zhuan is aware of the contradiction between the vision of a unified realm and the separation into interior and exterior realms: CQ: 冬十有一月，叔孫僑如會晉士燮、齊高無咎、宋華元、衛孫 林父、鄭公子鰌、邾婁人，會吳于鐘離。 Winter, eleventh month. Shusun Qiaoru joined Shi Xie of Jin, Gao Wujiu of Qi, Hua Yuan of Song, Sun Linfu of Wei, Gongzi Qiu of Zheng, and an officer of Zhulou in meeting with Wu at Zhongli. GYZ: 曷為殊會吳？外吳也。曷為外也？《春秋》內其國而外諸 夏，內諸夏而外夷狄。王者欲一乎天下。曷為以外內之辭言 之。言自近者始也。 Why is “meeting Wu” set apart [from the sequence of the other participants]? To present Wu as exterior. Why is it presented as exterior? The Chunqiu, when presenting its own state as interior, presents other Central States as exterior. When it presents the Central States as interior, it presents the Yi-Di as exterior. Now, if the true king desires unity in All-underHeaven, why does it then talk [about All-under-Heaven] by employing the terms “interior” and “exterior”? When it talks [about All-underHeaven,] it starts from the perspective of what is near. There are numerous examples where the Gongyang zhuan draws a clear line between the Central States and excludes the Yi-Di from the community of states belonging to the Zhou ritual realm. The Yi-Di are not permitted to act 33 34

For a discussion on “how to distinguish between civilized states and barbarians” in the Gongyang zhuan, see Yu 2010, 105–107. Liu 2011: 417; SSJZS 18: 2297.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

79

Long Live the King!

within the ritual code of the Zhou, in which they have neither place nor position, nor are they allowed to disturb the ritual order at all: CQ: 邾婁人、牟人、葛人來朝。 Men from Zhulou, from Mu, and from Ge came for an audience. GYZ: 皆何以稱人？夷狄之也。 Why are they all called “men”? To mark them as Yi-Di.35 CQ: 秋。宋公、楚子、陳侯、蔡侯、鄭伯、許男、曹伯會于霍。 執宋公以伐宋。 In autumn, the Duke of Song, the Viscount of Chu, the Marquis of Chen, the Marquis of Cai, the Earl of Zheng, the Baron of Xu, and the Earl of Cao had a meeting in Huo. The Duke of Song was seized and thereupon they invaded Song. GYZ: 孰執之。楚子執之。曷為不言楚子執之。不與夷狄之執中 國也。 Who seized him? The Viscount of Chu seized him. Why does it not say that the Viscount of Chu seized him? It is not permissible for Yi-Di to seize [members of] the Central States.36 Nevertheless, the Gongyang zhuan recognizes that the status of a Yi-Di state can change, albeit gradually, over time: CQ: 冬，楚子使椒來聘。 Winter, the Viscount of Chu sent Jiao to come for a visit. GYZ: 椒者何﹖楚大夫也。楚無大夫，此何以書﹖始有大夫也。 始有大夫，則何以不氏﹖許夷狄者不一而足也。 35

36

Huan 15.8 (Liu 2011: 93; SSJZS 5: 2221). The passage implies inferiority of the visiting leaders, who are not referred to according to their official titles. For the complexity in the use of the designation “men” 人 in the Chunqiu records, see Van Auken 2011. Xi 21.4 (Liu 2011: 241; SSJZS 11: 2256).

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

80

Gentz

Who is Jiao? A noble officer from Chu. Chu has no ranks of noble officers,37 so why is it here recorded? Because here it started to have ranks of noble officers. If it started here to have ranks of noble officers, then why is the surname [of the noble officer] not recorded? One occurrence is not enough to allow Yi-Di [to be treated like a Zhou polity].38 And, conversely, the Central States can change their status into “new Yi-Di”: CQ: 戊辰，吳敗頓、胡、沈、蔡、陳、許之師于雞父。 On the day wuchen, Wu defeated the armies of Dun, Hu, Shen, Cai, Chen, and Xu at Jifu. GYZ: 此偏戰也，曷為以詐戰之辭言之？不與夷狄之主中國也。 然則曷為不使中國主之？中國亦新夷狄也。 This was a positional war [as indicated through giving the date and place of the battle]. Why does it then talk about it in terms of a surprise attack [using the term “defeat” 敗 instead of the term “conducting war against” 戰]? It does not grant the Yi-Di [states such as Wu, which did not belong to the Central States] precedence over the Central States [such as Dun, Hu, Shen, Cai, Chen, and Xu]. Why then are not the Central States made the leaders? Because the Central States were also like new Yi-Di.39 37

38 39

Yuri Pines pointed out (in personal communication) that “the Gongyang zhuan’s insistence that Chu and Qin have no noble officers 大夫 is counterfactual (both Zuo zhuan and archeological data indicate the belonging of both states to the Zhou cultural sphere); it may reflect a late Warring States period process of cultural estrangement between the peripheral and the Central States, which caused Qin and Chu to be reimagined as cultural others.” Wen 9.12 (Liu 2011: 303; SSJZS 13: 2270). Normally, a visiting noble had to be recorded with his surname. Zhao 23.7 (Liu 2011: 554; SSJZS 24: 2327). The Central States are considered as new Yi-Di here because after the death of the Son of Heaven (King Jing 景 of Zhou) in the previous year (Zhao 22, 520 bce), the Chunqiu reported turmoil in the royal house 王室亂, succession struggles resulting in the death of the royal successor, Prince Meng 猛, and an eclipse of the sun. In the twenty-third year, calamitous events continued to occur: Jin attacked a city in the royal domain to quell Prince Zhao’s 朝 rebellion, but the rebellion continued, the incumbent king (King Jing 敬) was driven from the capital, Prince Zhao was set up in his place, and there was an earthquake. In the view of the Gongyang zhuan, the “barbarian” state of Wu 吳 (for the history and status of the state of Wu, see Wagner 1993: 96ff.) taking precedence over the Central States is justified because the Zhou ritual order was

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

81

Long Live the King!

We do see “barbarian” states accepted as partly belonging to the ritual realm of the Zhou and behaving like or even better than members of the Central States. Yet they are never fully admitted as equal members of the Central States in formal terms and are always somehow marked as belonging to the Yi-Di (yidi zhi 夷狄之) in the records.40 The decisive criterion used to differentiate the Central States from the Yi-Di is the ritual code of the Zhou. Therefore, Confucius, according to the Gongyang zhuan, got into trouble with his recording when Yi-Di acted ritually more accurately than members of the Central States: CQ: 晉荀林父帥師及楚子戰于邲，晉師敗績。 Xun Linfu from Jin led an army and fought with the Viscount of Chu at Bi. The army of Jin was utterly defeated. GYZ: 大夫不敵君，此其稱名氏以敵楚子何？不與晉而與楚子為 禮也。 A noble officer does not equal a ruler. Why is he here then called by his personal name and surname to equal the Viscount of Chu? Because it is not appropriate that it was not Jin but the Viscount of Chu who acted according to ritual.41 The distinction between interior and exterior realms follows the logic of the ritual system, which is basically a system of distinctions. Distinguishing between interior and exterior realms is an expansion of the aim to rigidly define ritual competences and authority also beyond the system itself. It determines not only the powers and limitations of social positions within the Zhou ritual system but also the borders of the system itself. Like the other ritual dis­tinc­ tions, this is conditional to keep the system intact and to avoid any inter-

40

41

not preserved by anyone at that time. As none could justifiably claim to follow the ritual system of the Zhou, none could be made the legitimate leader in the ritual order of the historical records of the Chunqiu. The expression that they are marked as belonging to the Central States (Zhongguo zhi 中 國之) does not occur, to my knowledge, until Han Yu 韓愈 (768–824 ce) uses it in his “Yuan Dao” 原道 (“Tracing the Way to Its Origins”) when referring to the Chunqiu: “Producing the Chunqiu, Confucius presented the regional lords as belonging to the Yi when they employed the ritual code of the Yi, and when they moved close to the [ritual code of the] Central States he presented them as belonging to the Central States” (孔子 之作春秋也，諸侯用夷禮則夷之，進於中國則中國之。 Han Changli 1: 17). Xuan 12.3 (Liu 2011: 362; SSJZS 16: 2284–2285).

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

82

Gentz

ference with other (cultural) powers that could question it or claim dominance over it. The distinctions serve to define a fixed order. Nowhere does the Gongyang zhuan use the distinction between interior and exterior to stir or justify expansion. This is yet another point that differentiates it from Han texts.

The Ideology and Literary Form of the Gongyang zhuan

The Ideology of Ritual and Morality The ritual code—according to which the Viscount of Chu acted—refers to a set of rules allegedly created by King Wen. It is regarded as timelessly valid in providing guidelines for appropriate action. Catalogs of such ritual rules can be found in ritual chapters such as the “Quli” 曲禮 chapter of the Liji as well as in the abovementioned Wangdu ji and “Wang zhi” chapters. The Gongyang zhuan’s ideology of ritual rules envisions a closed system of an ideal order that not only is grounded in the aim of exerting power but also reflects a philosophical, religious, or moral order. Yet there is a clear awareness in the Gongyang zhuan that the power of this ideology of ritual rules (that are restricted in number) lies in its applicability to a variety of real-life situations that vastly outnumber these rules. Taking the Chunqiu as a collection of representative precedent cases, the Gongyang zhuan is also aware that these are likewise limited in number and not sufficient to provide enough models to map the complexity of reality in a framework of casuistic deduction.42 There are two possible ways to deal with this limitation of the given ritual rules with regard to the infinity of real-life situations. First, new ritual rules can be created as supplements to existing rules, either by analogy with the existing rules or on the basis of shared basic principles. This exegetical strategy is used, for example, in the commentaries to the Yili 儀禮 and in many Liji chapters that relate to earlier sets of ritual rules (such as those in the Yili).43 This first strategy still operates within the assumptions of a closed and all-encompassing ritual system that can be expanded to include all kinds of new situations. The second strategy applies in situations where ritual rules conflict with one another. In these cases, the rules and the values behind these rules have to be weighed and evaluated according to morality. The recognition that this may be necessary concedes that the ritual system is imperfect. In order to operate 42 43

The successful tradition of the Yijing 易經 proves that, in contrast, sixty-four situations are sufficient in the realm of divinatory deduction. For an analysis of the Sangfu zhuan 喪服傳 and Liji complements to the “Sangfu” 喪服 chapter of the Yili, see Gentz 2010.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

Long Live the King!

83

properly and remain authoritative, the ritual system needs a further means of regulating affairs that is not linked to ritual rules. This further means of regulation is moral weighing (quan 權) (for which see also Vankeerberghen 2005– 2006). To maintain the authority and operability of the ritual ideology, morality is introduced as a methodological solution to the limitations of ritual. Morality is developed neither as a countermodel to replace ritual nor as an identical alternative that can be adopted in cases where applicable ritual rules are lacking. It is, rather, a fundamentally different way of realizing intuitions grounded in the human heart and enacted in virtuous acts of benevolence, righteousness, and other virtues. These are also formalized in rituals that, for systematic reasons (and not just the lack of casuistic rules), cannot always be applied. Hence, to put it very briefly, the ideology of the ritual system envisions an ideal order that is based on authoritative rules and is valid beyond particular circumstantial situations. The power of morality, in contrast, is a function and an effect of this ideal order in the particularities of the real world. It is the result and effect of appropriate applications of the ideal order in situations in which the ritual rules fail to operate. Morality, therefore, ensures the continuous power of the prevailing ideology by, first, conceding that this ideology as represented in the system of ritual rules is imperfect and fails in certain situations and, second, offering an alternative way of dealing with these situations in the spirit of the existent ideology and thus offering an alternative way of enacting the power of this ideology. These different facets of the ideology are also reflected in the literary form of the Gongyang zhuan, which in turn responds to the literary form of the Chunqiu as interpreted by the Gongyang zhuan. The Literary Form of the Chunqiu In early Chinese texts, ideology and literary form are inseparable. There are many examples of early Chinese texts in which the literary form reflects the contents of the text (see Gentz and Meyer, forthcoming; Behr and Gentz 2005). The interlocking parallels in the Laozi 老子 (Wagner 2000: 53–113) reflect the interrelationship of, for example, being and nonbeing, named and unnamed, shaped and unshaped; the use of metaphor in dialogues in the Mengzi expresses the belief in the potential of human intuition to grasp basic shared values and virtues; the strict argumentative essayistic constructions in parts of some Xunzi chapters44 and in the Han Feizi 韓非子 are demonstrations of 44

See the analysis of chapter 1 of the Xunzi by Kern (forthcoming-b) and of chapter 23 by Gentz (forthcoming).

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

84

Gentz

meticulously constructed artifacts that are considered intellectual tools, superior to human intuition, for the betterment of human beings. The Gongyang zhuan is no exception in this respect. It is, in fact, the earliest text that explicitly interprets the literary form of a text (the Chunqiu) as an expression of its ideology and develops a corresponding methodology of interpretation. Furthermore, it creates its own literary form accordingly. The Gongyang zhuan identifies three different formal modes of expression in the Chunqiu: 1. Regular records. These records are written according to a fixed pattern of historiographical rules that delineate specific types of records and every detail of the record, including standardized forms of elements such as dating, placenames, or titles for each specific type of record, clearly defined sequential orders of certain elements of a record, appropriate terminology for titles and technical terms, and the like.45 Such records indicate regular historical events, and the Gongyang zhuan does not comment upon them. CQ: 夏，四月，丁未，公及鄭伯盟于越。 Summer, fourth month, day dingwei, the duke [of Lu] made a covenant with the Earl of Zheng in Yue.46 2. Deviating records. These records display formal deviations from the historiographical standard and indicate irregular (exceedingly good or bad) historical events. The formal deviations are not mistakes but meaningful expressions, and they call for an interpretation. Formally, the deviations can be either additional elements that do not belong in the type of record in which they occur or different terms (titles, technical terms), different sequential orders, absent elements that normally would be part of a certain type of record, or records of topoi that are normally not recorded.47 The Gongyang zhuan often explicitly formulates rules for such deviations, as in Wen 9.3: CQ: 二月，辛丑，葬襄王。 Second month, day xinchou, burial of King Xiang. 45 46 47

For a study of these patterns in the Chunqiu, see Gentz 2001: appendix; Duan Xizhong 2002: 151–405; Van Auken 2007. Huan 1.3 (Liu 2011: 53; SSJZS 4: 2213). See Duan Xizhong 2002: 151–223. Van Auken (2007) gives a description of these records, which she calls “marked.”

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

85

Long Live the King!

GYZ: 王者不書葬，此何以書﹖不及時書，過時書，我有往者則 書。 Burials of kings are normally not recorded; why is it recorded here? They are recorded when they are carried out too early, when they are carried out too late, or when our [i.e., Lu] representative participates.48 3. Absent records. This third mode is the absence of a record that, according to the historiographical pattern, is expected to appear. The reason for this absence and its significance must be explained, as in Yin 11.4: CQ: 冬，十有一月，壬辰，公薨。 Winter, eleventh month, day renchen, the duke [of Lu] deceased. GYZ: 何以不書葬﹖隱之也。何隱爾﹖弒也。弒則何以不書葬﹖ 春秋君弒，賊不討，不書葬 ，以為無臣子也。子沈子曰：「君 弒，臣不討賊，非臣也。不復讎，非子也。葬，生者之事也。 春秋君弒，賊不討，不書葬，以為不繫乎臣子也。」 Why is the burial not recorded? To conceal it. Why was it concealed? He was assassinated. Since he was assassinated, why is the burial then not recorded? In the Chunqiu, when a ruler is assassinated and the murder is not punished, then the burial is not recorded. That the burial is not recorded is because it takes this as an indication that there are no ministers and sons. Zi Shenzi said: When a ruler is assassinated and the minister does not punish the murder, then he is not a minister. If [the son] does not take revenge, he is not a son. The burial is a matter of the living. In the Chunqiu, when a ruler is assassinated and the murder is not punished, it does not record the burial because it cannot connect it to ministers or sons.49 The Gongyang zhuan marks these records by using the formulaic question “Why did the Chunqiu not write x?” (heyi bu shu 何以不書 x?).

48 49

Liu 2011: 302; SSJZS 13: 2269. Liu 2011: 50; SSJZS 3: 2210.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

86

Gentz

The Literary Form of the Gongyang zhuan In keeping with this threefold model of expression, the Gongyang zhuan also conveys its own messages in a threefold way. The ideology of the Gongyang zhuan therefore has to be reconstructed from these three modes of expression, which take the following forms: 1. Ritual rules that the Gongyang zhuan cites in order to prove deviation from the ritual code in the Chunqiu. These rules are an expression of the ritual system of King Wen (or, more precisely, “methods and measures of King Wen” 文王之法度), which is taken as an authoritative guideline for proper action and sociopolitical order and can thus be regarded as the normative basis of the Gongyang zhuan’s ideology. 2. Historical narratives transmitted by the Gongyang zhuan in order to explain the background of certain records. As this background explains Confucius’s judgments inserted in these records, the narratives operate as empirical evidence of Confucius’s normative judgments. They also explain judgments of situations for which no matching ritual rule can be found or created. 3. The absence either of a commentary on Chunqiu records that are obviously irregular or of particular terms and concepts in the commentary that are normatively expected to be employed in any contemporary discussion of certain topics. The use of these three modes of expression is not haphazard but is carefully employed to convey different meanings that, beyond the overt messages of the records, lie solely in their form. In the following I will first analyze the forms one by one as literary modes displaying ideological contents. I will then discuss how the particular combination of different forms and ideologies enables the Gongyang zhuan to give expression to a further dimension of meaning through the integration of different aspects into a more complex whole, like the depth perception afforded by binocular vision or stereophonic sound by binaural hearing. Ritual Rules The ritual rules in the Gongyang zhuan refer to a series of concrete prescriptions that regulate the entire spectrum of a noble person’s activities—from titles to garments to proper positioning—according to his rank within the Zhou aristocratic hierarchy. These are the basic means of upholding the sociopolitical hierarchy headed by the king. The Gongyang zhuan quotes these to define the norms of the Zhou ritual system (against which deviations from these

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

87

Long Live the King!

norms can be made obvious). Some examples will illustrate the different kinds of ritual rules propounded by the Gongzang zhuan.50 CQ: 三月，庚戌，天王崩。　　 Third month, gengxu day, the Heavenly King passed away. GYZ: 何以不書葬﹖天子記崩不記葬，必其時也。諸侯記卒記 葬，有天子存，不得必其時也。曷為或言崩或言薨﹖天子曰 崩，諸侯曰薨，大夫曰卒，士曰不祿。 Why is his burial not recorded? In the case of a Son of Heaven, his passing away is recorded but not his burial because this always takes place at a certain time [seven months after his death]. In the case of regional lords, the death as well as the burial is recorded because under the rule of a Son of Heaven, their burial does not necessarily take place at a certain time. Why does it sometimes say “passed away” and sometimes “deceased”? In the case of a Son of Heaven, to die is called “to pass away”; in the case of regional lords, it is called “to be deceased”; in the case of noble officers, it is called “to die”; in the case of shi-officers, it is called “ceasing to receive a salary.”51 This passage, which is paralleled in the Liji and other early texts,52 explicates the proper burial times and mortuary terminology applicable to each grade in the aristocratic hierarchy. Elsewhere other sumptuary laws are explained: CQ: 初獻六羽。　　 The six [lines] feather [dance] was performed for the first time. GYZ: 初者何﹖始也。六羽者何﹖舞也。初獻六羽何以書﹖譏。 何譏爾﹖譏始僭諸公也。六羽之為僭奈何﹖天子八佾，諸公 六，諸侯四。諸公者何﹖諸侯者何﹖天子三公稱公，王者之後 50 51 52

For a full list of all Gongyang ritual rules classified according to themes and annotated with all parallels in the transmitted early Chinese literature, see Gentz 2001: 575–595. Yin 3.2 (Liu 2011: 19; SSJZS 2: 2203). “Wang zhi,” “Li qi” 禮器, “Zaji xia” 雜記下, and “Quli xia” chapters of the Liji; “Si dai” 四代 chapter of the Da Dai Liji; Erya, “Shi gu” 釋詁; Zuo zhuan; Yuejue shu 越絕書; Shuoyuan 說苑, etc.; Gentz 2001: 590.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

88

Gentz

稱公，其餘大國稱侯，小國稱伯、子、男。天子三公者何﹖天 子之相也。天子之相則何以三﹖自陝而東者，周公主之，自陝 而西者召公主之，一相處乎內。始僭諸公昉於此乎﹖前此矣。 前此則曷為始乎﹖此僭諸公猶可言也，僭天子不可言也。 What is the “first time”? It is the beginning. What is “six feathers”? It is a dance. Why is it recorded that the six [lines] feather [dance] was performed for the first time? To criticize. What was criticized? The beginning of the usurpation of [a ritual pertaining to the] dukes.53 In what respect is the six [lines] feather [dance] a usurpation? The Son of Heaven has eight lines [of eight dancers], the dukes have six, the marquises have four. Who are dukes and who are marquises? The Three Dukes of the Son of Heaven are called dukes, and the descendants of the kings [of the preceding dynasties Xia and Shang, the rulers of the states Qi 杞and Song 宋] are called dukes. The [rulers of] the rest of the great states are called marquises; those of the small states are called earls, viscounts, and barons. Who are the Three Dukes of the Son of Heaven? They are the Son of Heaven’s [highest] ministers.54 Why are the Son of Heaven’s highest ministers three in number? [During the perfect rule of the early Zhou kings, which set the standards for all later times,] the territory east of Shan was controlled by the Duke of Zhou, the territory west of Shan was controlled by the Duke of Shao, and one high minister attended inside [at the royal court]. Did the beginning of the usurpation of the dukes’ [ritual prerogatives] start with this [six lines feather dance]? [It started] before this. If [it started] before this, why is it then [presented as] the beginning? This usurpation of the dukes’ [ritual prerogatives] can still be mentioned; the usurpation of the Son of Heaven’s [ritual prerogatives] cannot.55 Another important category of ritual rules relates to sacrificial procedures: CQ: 夏，四月，四卜郊不從，乃免牲，猶三望。

53 54

55

See Lunyu 3.1 for the same critique. Zuo zhuan gives different rules. For the Grand Tutor 太師, Grand Assistant 太傅, and Grand Protector 太保 as defined in the “Zhouguan” 周官 (“The Officers of Zhou”) chapter of the Shangshu 尚書, see Legge 1976: 527. Yin 5.5 (Liu 2011: 33–34; SSJZS 3: 2207). The last lines imply that territorial lords were responsible for their eventual loss of ritual superiority vis-à-vis their ministers: they were the first to usurp ritual prerogatives of the Sons of Heaven.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

Long Live the King!

89

Summer, fourth month, four divinations regarding the great jiao sacrifice to Heaven were not auspicious. Thereupon the sacrificial ox was released. The threefold “gazing afar” [sacrifice to Mount Tai, Yellow River, and Eastern Sea] was still carried out. GYZ: 曷為或言三卜﹖或言四卜﹖三卜，禮也；四卜，非禮也。 三卜何以禮﹖四卜何以非禮﹖求吉之道三。禘嘗不卜，郊何以 卜﹖卜郊，非禮也。卜郊何以非禮﹖魯郊，非禮也。魯郊何以 非禮﹖天子祭天，諸侯祭土。天子有方望之事無所不通。諸侯 山川有不在其封內者，則不祭也。曷為或言免牲﹖或言免牛﹖ 免牲，禮也；免牛，非禮也。免牛何以非禮﹖傷者曰牛。三望 者何﹖望祭也。然則曷祭﹖祭泰山河海﹖曷為祭泰山河海﹖山 川有能潤于百里者，天子秩而祭之。觸石而出，膚寸而合，不 崇朝而徧雨乎天下者，唯泰山爾。河海潤于千里。猶者何﹖通 可以已也。何以書﹖譏不郊而望祭也。 Why is there sometimes talk of three divinations and sometimes talk of four divinations?56 Three divinations are in accord with ritual. Four divinations are not in accord with ritual. Why are three divinations in accord with ritual and four divinations not in accord with ritual? The correct method of seeking auspicious signs is threefold [divination]. There is no divination for the [auspiciousness of the] summer di sacrifice and the autumn chang sacrifice. Why is there divination for the great jiao sacrifice to Heaven? To divine for the great jiao sacrifice to Heaven is not in accord with ritual. Why is it not in accord with ritual to divine for the great jiao sacrifice to Heaven? That the state of Lu conducts the great jiao sacrifice to Heaven is not in accord with ritual. Why is Lu’s conducting the great jiao sacrifice to Heaven not in accord with ritual? The Son of Heaven sacrifices to Heaven and the regional lords sacrifice to Earth. In “gazing afar” sacrificial offerings [to the universal terrestrial powers Mount Tai, Yellow River, and Eastern Sea], the Son of Heaven pervades everywhere. [In their “gazing afar” sacrifices to their local] mountains and rivers, regional lords do not sacrifice to what does not lie within their fiefdom. Why is there sometimes talk of “releasing the sacrificial ox”57

56

57

Compare Xiang 7.2 (Liu 2011: 447; SSJZS 19: 2302), with three divinations, and Xiang 11.2 (Liu 2011: 456; SSJZS 19: 2304), with four. In Cheng 10.2 (Liu 2011: 407; SSJZS 17: 2293–2294) even five divinations are recorded. See Xiang 7.2 (Liu 2011: 447; SSJZS 19: 2302).

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

90

Gentz

and sometimes of “releasing the ox”?58 “Releasing the sacrificial ox” is in accord with ritual; “releasing the ox” is not in accord with ritual. Why is “releasing the ox” not in accord with ritual? If it is harmed, it is called “ox.”59 What is meant by “threefold gazing afar”? It is a “gazing afar” sacrifice. So to whom is a sacrifice made? A sacrifice is made to Mount Tai, [Yellow] River, and [Eastern] Sea. Why is a sacrifice made to Mount Tai, [Yellow] River, and [Eastern] Sea? To those mountains and rivers that can give water to an area of up to one hundred li the Son of Heaven makes sacrifices according to their range. When [the moisture] touches upon stones, it exits [as condensation] and amalgamates as slight vapor. However, that it brings rain all over the world even before the next morning, this is only at Mount Tai. And the [Yellow] River and [Eastern] Sea give water to areas of up to one thousand li. [Therefore, the Son of Heaven makes special sacrifices to these three.] What does “still” mean [in the last sentence]? It means that [the sacrifices] should have been canceled throughout. Why was it recorded? To criticize that there was a “gazing afar” sacrifice when there was no great jiao sacrifice to Heaven.60 In contrast to most sumptuary laws, most rules pertaining to sacrificial details have very few parallels in the early literature (apart from Zuo zhuan and Guliang zhuan). Only those sacrificial rules that emphasize the strong distinctions between the sacrificial rights of the Son of Heaven and those of the regional lords and that buttress hierarchical relations between them can be found in other early texts.61 These relations are also emphasized in other rules: CQ: 九月，齊侯送姜氏于讙。 Ninth month, the Marquis of Qi escorted Miss Jiang as a bride to the city of Huan [in the state of Lu]. GYZ: 何以書﹖譏。何譏爾﹖諸侯越竟送女，非禮也。

58 59 60 61

See Cheng 7.1 (Liu 2011: 398; SSJZS 17: 2292). In Cheng 7.1, for example, a mouse had repeatedly gnawed at the sacrificial oxen’s horns so that they had to be released. Xi 31.3 (Liu 2011: 270; SSJZS 12: 2263). The “Wang zhi,” “Li yun” 禮運, and “Quli xia” chapters of the Liji were also echoed in Shuoyuan and other texts (see Gentz 2001: 593).

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

91

Long Live the King!

Why was this recorded? To criticize. What is criticized? That regional lords cross the border to escort brides is not according to ritual.62 CQ: 莒慶來逆叔姬。 Qing from Ju came to meet his bride Shu Ji. GYZ: 莒慶者何﹖莒大夫也。莒無大夫，此何以書﹖譏。何譏 爾﹖大夫越竟逆女，非禮也。 Who is Qing from Ju? He is a noble officer from Ju. Ju has no noble officers, so why is this recorded [in a manner as if he would be a noble officer: by recording his name]? To criticize. What is criticized? That noble officers cross the border to meet their brides is not according to ritual.63 The whole system of ritual rules reflected in these translated passages aims at strengthening the authority of the ruler, particularly through a set of very concrete legal and ritual definitions. These rules aim to perpetuate an imagined ideal Zhou order and demand subordination of the interests of aristocratic lineages (jiashi 家事) to the state authority (wangshi 王事). The central passage in the Gongyang zhuan that discusses this relationship runs as follows: CQ: 三年春，齊國夏、衛石曼姑帥師圍戚。 Third year, spring, Guo Xia from Qi 齊 and Shi Mangu from Wei led an army and surrounded [the city of] Qi 戚. GYZ: 齊國夏曷為與衛石曼姑帥師圍戚？伯討也。此其為伯討奈 何？曼姑受命乎靈公而立輒，以曼姑之義，為固可以距之也。 輒者曷為者也？蒯聵之子也。然則曷為不立蒯聵而立輒？蒯聵 62 63

Huan 3.6 (Liu 2011: 62; SSJZS 4: 2214–2215). Zhuang 27.5 (Liu 2011: 165; SSJZS 8: 2239). Ju was a non-Xia 夏 polity, hence the Gongyang’s assertion that Ju had no noble officers (in the ideal ritual reality of the Gongyang zhuan). Yet the Gongyang zhuan seems to accept the historical reality of noble officers in Ju by claiming that what the record criticizes is that noble officers crossed the border to meet their brides. The reader thus does not know whether Ju’s ritual claim to have noble officers is criticized in the first place or whether it is the fact that noble officers crossed the border to meet their brides. The critique is probably directed against someone claiming (against the Zhou ritual order) to be a noble officer and then (transgressing the Zhou ritual propriety of his own claim) crossing the border to meet his bride.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

92

Gentz

為無道，靈公逐蒯聵而立輒。然則輒之義可以立乎？曰：可。 其可奈何？不以父命辭王父命，以王父命辭父命，是父之行乎 子也；不以家事辭王事，以王事辭家事，是上之行乎下也。 Why did Guo Xia from Qi together with Shi Mangu from Wei lead an army and surround the city of Qi? This was a case of a [justified] punishment by the hegemon. In which regard was this a case of a [justified] punishment by the hegemon? Mangu received an order from Lord Ling [of Wei] and thereupon established Zhe [as the ruler of Wei]. Based on Mangu’s righteous position [in this affair], it was clearly permissible to repel [Zhe’s father, Kuaikui, in the city of Qi]. Who was this Zhe? Zhe was the son of Kuaikui. Then why was Kuaikui not established rather than Zhe? Kuaikui acted without moral principles. Lord Ling therefore expelled Kuaikui and established Zhe. But was Zhe’s [position] sufficiently righteous to allow his establishment? The answer is: it was. How could this be? A son’s proper action toward his fatherly line should be like that: do not reject the grandfather’s order for the sake of the father’s order; do reject the father’s order for the sake of the grandfather’s order. The inferior’s proper action toward his superiors should be like that: do not reject royal affairs for the sake of family affairs; do reject family affairs for the sake of royal affairs.64 The potential contradiction between family and political obligations was one of the touchiest issues for the followers of Confucius, including the Master himself. The Gongyang zhuan’s assertion that the ruler’s authority should be prioritized over that of the father places this text squarely at the extreme rulerfocused edge of Confucian thought.65 The Gongyang zhuan asserts its ritual system with reference to three different kinds of authorities: a number of authoritative personalities in the past,66 64 65

66

Ai 3.1 (Liu 2011: 625–626; SSJZS 27: 2346). Both the Lunyu (13.18: 139) and Mengzi (13.35: 317) stipulate the priority of family ties over political obligations. Similar views are expressed in even more radical ways in some of the Guodian documents, such as Liu de 六德, which stipulates priority of mourning (and, mutatis mutandis, social) obligations to the father over those due to the ruler. See Pines 2009: 240n7, q.v. for further references. These authorities are, most importantly, King Wen, who is regarded as the creator of the ritual system; the first hegemon, Lord Huan of Qi 齊桓公 (r. 686–643), who is said, in Xi 3.5 (Liu 2011: 200; SSJZS 10: 2248), to have formulated a number of important rules; the six historiographers who established rules of recording and are mentioned in n. 14 above, plus a seventh, Zi Gongyangzi 子公羊子); the ways of old; and Confucius.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

Long Live the King!

93

the human heart (xin 心),67 and righteousness (yi 義). The latter two (xin and yi) both appear in the commentary to Wen 9.1, which is exceptional in many respects: CQ: 九年春，毛伯來求金。 Ninth year, spring, the Earl of Mao came [to Lu] to ask for [a contribution of] metal [for the king’s burial]. GYZ: 毛伯者何？天子之大夫也。何以不稱使？當喪未君也。逾 年矣，何以謂之未君？即位矣，而未稱王也。未稱王，何以知 其即位？以諸侯之逾年即位，亦知天子之逾年即位也。以天子 三年然後稱王，亦知諸侯於其封內三年稱子也。逾年稱公矣， 則曷為於其封內三年稱子？緣民臣之心，不可一日無君；緣終 始之義，一年不二君，不可曠年無君；緣孝子之心，則三年不 忍當也。毛伯來求金，何以書？譏。何譏爾？王者無求，求金 非禮也。然則是王者與？曰：非也。非王者則曷為謂之王者， 「王者無求」？曰：是子也。繼文王之體，守文王之法度，文 王之法無求而求，故譏之也。 Who is the Earl of Mao? He was a noble officer of the Son of Heaven. Why does it then not say that he was “dispatched” [by the Son of Heaven]? During the mourning period there was not yet an [officially enthroned] ruler. The new calendric year had already started, so how could one say that there was not yet an [officially enthroned] ruler? [The Zhou ruler] had already been enthroned but was not yet titled “king.” If he was not yet titled “king,” how does one know that he had been enthroned? From the fact that regional lords are enthroned after the beginning of a new calendric year, one also knows that the Son of Heaven is enthroned after the beginning of a new calendric year. From the fact that the Son of Heaven is titled “king” only after three years [of mourning], one also knows that regional lords within their fiefs are titled “son” during the three years [of mourning].68 If after the start of the new calendric year they are titled “duke,” why are they then within their regions titled “son” during the 67 68

The heart refers to something like the moral sense of filial sons, of upright ministers, or of the people in general. The Zuo zhuan confirms this rule in Xi 9.1 in one of its so-called fan rules: “It is a general rule that while they are mourning, kings are called ‘little child’ and regional lords are called ‘son’” (凡在丧，王曰小童，公侯曰子).

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

94

Gentz

three years [of mourning]? In compliance with the heart of the people and officials, it is impossible to have one day without a ruler; in accord with the righteousness of calendric beginning and end, there are not two rulers within one calendric year, yet it is also impossible to have a whole calendric year without a ruler. In compliance with the heart of a filial son, he cannot bear to take his official position for three years [after the death of one of his parents]. Why is it recorded that the Earl of Mao came to ask for metal? To criticize. What is criticized? A true king does not ask for anything; to ask for metal is not according to the ritual rules. But then was there actually a king? The answer is: there was not. If there was no king, then why was there reference to a king when stating that “a true king does not ask for anything”? The answer is: he was in fact only a “son.” Yet he continues the [institutional] body of King Wen and observes the regulations and measures of King Wen. According to the regulations of King Wen, he must not ask for anything, yet he asked for something. Therefore, he is criticized.69 This commentary illustrates how difficult the interplay of different authoritative instances could be in a concrete case. The ritual rules display the imagined ideal order of the political ideology of the Zhou, which should follow both the heart (of the people, officials, and filial sons) and the righteousness of beginning and end (of the calendric year). The ideal patterns of the historiographical text (wen 文) normally follow the formal principle of calendric beginning and end. Yet the historical reality (shi 實) recorded at the same time as an important matter of the heart that does not match the formal principle of calendric beginning and end requires some compromise in the form of the record. This conflict is solved mainly through the insertion of historical narratives by which the formal deviations in the record can be explained as appropriate formal expressions that satisfy the incompatible requirements of both the heart and righteousness. Historical Narratives Looking at the second form of literary expression, we see that these narrative passages do not define ideal rules but serve to explain the more complex and problematic cases of rule application in reality (shi 實, as opposed to the ideal, rule-based pattern of the text, wen 文).70 The historical stories in the Gongyang 69 70

Liu 2011: 301; SSJZS 13: 2269. Xi 1.2 (Liu 2011: 188; SSJZS 10: 2246), Xi 2.1 (Liu 2011: 194–195; SSJZS 10: 2247), Xi 14.1 (Liu 2011: 225; SSJZS 11: 2253), Wen 14.6 (Liu 2011: 318; SSJZS 14: 2273), Xuan 11.5 (Liu 2011: 360; SSJZS 16: 2284), and Ding 1.2 (Liu 2011: 580; SSJZS 25: 2334). Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

95

Long Live the King!

zhuan display an additional focus on situations where the ideology of the fixed, defined ritual rules does not easily apply to the historical reality. This ideology does not permit the representation of the complex reality of these empirical cases in the ideal patterns of the historiographical records.71 The situations in these cases are complex and ambivalent, and most importantly, they are often situations that are defined as “no [true] Son of Heaven above and no regional hegemon below” (上無天子，下無方伯), which indicates that the overall political context is out of order and therefore requires compromises.72 It is therefore impossible to make a general, rule-based decision regarding which action is appropriate in the given specific context. Instead of giving new rules for such situations outside the ritual framework, the narrative passages emphasize the ability to weigh one’s behavior according to the circumstances (quan 權) in order to make it expedient and powerful (Goldin 2005b: 19–21; Vankeerberghen 2005–2006). Guiding principles such as indulgence, pity, and humanity are provided for orientation. There are never any references in these stories to ritual rules or historical authorities apart from King Wen and Confucius. Instead, we find a number of general moral guidelines put into the mouths of historical actors who conduct the dialogues in the stories (Queen 2013b). One central passage in the Gongyang zhuan in particular discusses the concept of weighing (quan 權) as follows: CQ: 九月，宋人執鄭祭仲。 Ninth month. Men from Song seized Zhai Zhong from Zheng. GYZ: 祭仲者何？鄭相也。何以不名？賢也。何賢乎祭仲？以為 知權也。其為知權奈何？古者鄭國處于留。先鄭伯有善于鄶公 者，通乎夫人，以取其國，而遷鄭焉，而野留。莊公死已葬， 祭仲將往省于留，塗出于宋，宋人執之。謂之曰：「為我出忽 而立突。」祭仲不從其言，則君必死、國必亡；從其言，則君 可以生易死，國可以存易亡。少遼緩之，則突可故出，而忽可 故反，是不可得則病，然後有鄭國。古人之有權者，祭仲之權 是也。權者何？權者反於經，然後有善者也。權之所設，舍死 亡無所設。行權有道，自貶損以行權，不害人以行權。殺人以 自生，亡人以自存，君子不為也。 71 72

The Gongyang zhuan uses the formulation “it is granted in reality but not in the patterned text [of the historical records]” 實與而文不與 several times to make this argument. Zhuang 4.4 (Liu 2011: 112; SSJZS 6: 2226), Xi 1.2 (Liu 2011: 188; SSJZS 10: 2246), Xi 2.1 (Liu 2011: 194–195; SSJZS 10: 2247), Xi 14.1 (Liu 2011: 225; SSJZS 11: 2253), Xuan 11.5 (Liu 2011: 360; SSJZS 16: 2284). Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

96

Gentz

Who is Zhai Zhong? He is a minister from Zheng. Why is his name not given?73 To present him as worthy. What [did the Chunqiu consider] worthy about Zhai Zhong? It considered him to know how to weigh [matters according to circumstance]. In what regard did he know how to weigh [matters according to circumstance]? In ancient times, the capital of the state of Zheng was located at Liu. Among the earlier rulers of Zheng there was one [Lord Wu 鄭武公, r. 770–744] who was on good terms with the Lord of Kuai. He had illicit relations with the Lord of Kuai’s wife, thereupon seized Kuai’s capital, and moved Zheng’s capital there, thus making Liu a peripheral town. After the death of Lord Zhuang of Zheng [r. 743– 701], and when his burial was over, Zhai Zhong planned to go to Liu to carry out investigations. He passed through Song and the men of Song captured him and said to him: “For our sake expel [Zheng’s heir apparent] Hu and establish [the son of a concubine from Song] Tu [as successor of the deceased Lord Zhuang of Zheng].” Zhai Zhong [was aware that] if he did not accede to this demand, then the [new] ruler would inevitably be killed and the state would inevitably be extinguished. If he acceded to this demand, then the ruler could exchange death for life and the state could exchange extinction for existence. After a little while they could then be interchanged: Tu could for some reason be expelled and Hu could for some reason return. If this could not be achieved, then this would be vicious. But after all there would still be the state of Zheng. Among the weighing [of matters] of the people of old, Zhai Zhong’s weighing is a valid one. What is weighing [of matters according to circumstances]? Weighing is when one turns against the ruling norms and achieves something good afterward. As to the implementation of weighing, unless death [of people] and extinction [of states] are at stake it must never be implemented. Exercising weighing follows [two] basic principles: oneself might suffer derogation by exercising weighing, but no harm might be done to anyone else. To kill others for the sake of one’s own life, to extinguish others [states] for the sake of one’s own existence, this is something noble persons do not do.74 In this commentary, the Gongyang zhuan provides a clear definition of weighing and further defines conditions in which weighing is appropriate. Accordingly, violating the ruling norms by weighing to achieve something good should 73 74

Zhong was Zhai’s appellation that indicated his sequence of birth (行辭), meaning “the second brother.” His personal name (名) was Zu 足. Huan 11.4 (Liu 2011: 81; SSJZS 5: 2219–2220).

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

Long Live the King!

97

be implemented only in situations of existential adversity and then only if it does not harm others. The two different types of content (ideal, patterned, model, standard situations vs. real-life, complicated and deviating situations) in the Gongyang zhuan basically adhere to the same ideology of strengthening the ruler’s power, but they emphasize different points. The ritual rules provide a fixed set of moral and ritual values that can be applied to most of the historical situations recorded in the Chunqiu. These rules belong to what the Gongyang zhuan terms jing 經 (in contrast to quan 權)75 or wen 文 (as opposed to shi 實)76 and reflect the ideal regular order. The narrative passages dealing with “weighing,” however, are set up to describe real situations that are either so ambivalent and complex or so far out of the orthodox ritual reference frame that it is not possible to apply ideal rules to them. Instead, they show how such situations have to be dealt with, how the specific circumstances have to be weighed up, and how a morally correct decision about one’s action can be achieved in irregular contexts in order to accord with the ideal to which the ritual rules apply. The narrative passages thus aim at the same ideal and supplement the ritual rules that apply only to common and normal situations.77 These two modes of ritual rules and historical narratives correspond to the two modes of presenting historical events—a patterned form of annalistic records and its deviations—that the Gongyang zhuan claims for the Chunqiu. The ritual rules apply to what we might call the regular form of situations; the narrative passages cover situations that deviate from this regularity. This point 75 76

77

See Huan 11.2 above. Similar distinctions between the normative (zheng 正) and the extraordinary (qi 奇) are also made in military texts (Lewis 1990: 122–127) and also in ritual texts such as the Liji, where the “Liqi” 禮器 chapter distinguishes normative rites (jingli 經禮) from specific rites (quli 曲禮) for extraordinary circumstances (“Hence, there are three hundred normative rites and three thousand specific rites, but their bottom line is the same” [ 故經禮 三百，曲禮三千，其致一也]; Liji XXIV.10: 651). The Chunqiu fanlu uses the terms jingli 經禮 and bianli 變禮 (variable rites) to analyze this difference, e.g.: “The Chunqiu has normative rites and variable rites. … He who clearly grasps the matter of normative versus variable will then understand the divisions between the important and the minor: with him one can approach [the matter of] weighing according to the circumstances” (《春 秋》有經禮 , 有變禮 … 明乎經變之事 , 然後知輕重之分 , 可與適權矣。Chunqiu fanlu III.4: 74 [“Yuying” 玉英]). Queen (2013b) makes a similar observation in her analysis of Gongyang narratives when she writes: “They [i.e., the narratives] appear when the predominant praise and blame mode of explication tied exclusively to the wording of a given entry cannot fully disclose the ethical nuances of the judgment at hand.”

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

98

Gentz

is important, because this distinction shows that the Gongyang zhuan recognizes the occurrence of situations that cannot be classified within the defined rules and therefore cannot be dealt with by means of these rules. The belief that every action could be regulated and controlled by an all-embracing set of casuistic ritual rules (that do not provide general guidelines but regulate singular cases one by one) is abandoned. There is no perfect ritual system of the Zhou, especially in times when “there is no [true] Son of Heaven above and no regional hegemon below” (上無天子，下無方伯).78 The Gongyang zhuan attempts to establish a more flexible system that also allows different situations to be judged according to specific circumstances on the basis of general moral guiding principles. The Gongyang zhuan might thus be taken as a counterproject to the vision of a rigid ritual system, as an attempt to revive and to actualize the ideal of Zhou ritual in a new historical setting, thereby reempowering the traditional ideology of the Zhou. Although the concern to stabilize the old aristocratic hierarchy and its values by defining exactly the frame of power and the duties of each position and of their mutual relations is a conservative one, the methodology of the Gongyang zhuan is innovative. The new flexibility of this style of judgment of right and wrong in the Gongyang zhuan was of central interest to Han readers in the juridical sphere as well. Meaningful Absences Unlike the first two modes of ideological expressions in the Gongyang zhuan, the third mode is not a method of expressing ideology but a method of exclusion that clearly demarcates the border between concepts and notions that are acceptable within the ideological discourse and those that are not. This method operates like a taboo, disallowing the existence of ideas that undermine the ideological discourse. This method of exclusion is one of the well-known ways of exerting power by means of discourse (Foucault 1981b). Assuming that the Gongyang zhuan in its own text applied the same methodology that it reads in the Chunqiu text,79 we have to apply the question heyi bu shu 何以不書 …? (Why did the Chunqiu not record …?) also to the Gongyang zhuan and interpret absences accordingly. Yet these exclusions in turn allow us to understand much more clearly what is included in the ideology of the Gongyang zhuan and to identify the countertext against which it is set. I will briefly list the seven most important notions that are conspicuously and significantly absent in the Gongyang zhuan.

78 79

See n. 72. For this technique in the Jewish tradition, see Strauss 1952.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

Long Live the King!

99

1. Since ritual (li 禮) is such an important concept in the Gongyang zhuan, we are prompted to ask which concept of ritual is employed in the text. It appears as a very plain concept, without any elaboration or theory of ritual. Ritual is not connected to emotions (qing 情) or to the structure of heaven and earth. There is no doubt or questioning of ritual, nor any critical reasoning about it, as in, for example, the Zuo zhuan, the Xunzi, and many Liji chapters (Pines 2000b). Central terms of Warring States ritual theory like emotions (qing), intention (zhi 志), and reverence (jing 敬) are absent in the Gongyang zhuan. 2. The word “virtue” (de 德) is absent in the Gongyang zhuan.80 This is striking since it appears in nearly every early Confucian text. 3. The terms “loyalty” (zhong 忠) and “filial piety” (xiao 孝) are missing, too. Xiao is found only once as part of the compound xiao zi (filial son). 4. The very common topos of the necessity of “selecting worthy ministers” (qiu xian 求賢) is absent as well. 5. The whole sphere of techniques (shu 術 or shu 數) (e.g., yin-yang 陰陽, qi 氣, self-cultivation, and Huang-Lao 黃老), the sphere of military theory (bingfa 兵法), and all administrative and legalist terminology are absent in the Gongyang zhuan, nor is there any criticism of these concepts. The topoi of penalties (xing 刑) and punishments (fa 罰) or rewards (shang 賞) are absent. The term fa 法 appears in only two passages in the Gongyang zhuan: once in the context of applying penal law81 and once in the formulation “King Wen’s regulations and measures” (Wen wang zhi fadu 文王之法度), which designates the system of ritual rules as discussed above.82 6. Any consideration about the people (using the concept of min 民) is absent. Certainly, the Chunqiu also makes no mention of anyone below the level of noble officers (dafu 大夫). But we might expect positive judgments of persons who are in touch with, and friendly to, the people and critiques regarding poverty or a lack of welfare, as we find in the Guliang zhuan.83 7. Finally, the Gongyang zhuan doesn’t talk about Heaven. It accepts records of calamities and anomalies (zaiyi 災異) as regular historiographical categories in the Chunqiu. However, it tries not to further elaborate on these Heavenly signs but keeps silent about these matters. Among the approximately 140 80 81 82 83

The character de 得 is not used as a substitute for de 德. Cheng 2.4 (Liu 2011: 383; SSJZS 17: 2290): “How should they be treated according to penal law?” 其法奈何﹖ Wen 9.1 (Liu 2011: 301; SSJZS 13: 2269). Pu Weizhong devotes a whole chapter of his doctoral thesis to this theme: Pu 1992: 150–152.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

100

Gentz

entries concerning calamities or anomalies, only two are related to a cause by the Gongyang zhuan.84 In both cases, Heaven is said to respond to certain human actions or to send a warning. These two statements show that a relationship between natural deviations and human conduct is assumed in the Gongyang zhuan. Despite this assumption, however, there is no attempt to use these records to support historical judgments. Instead, most of the entries about natural calamities or anomalies are not commented on at all. At most, the Gongyang zhuan explains that this is an entry concerning a natural calamity or an anomaly. How meaningful are these absences? A comparison of the different versions of a set of orders supposedly dictated to the regional lords by the hegemon Lord Huan of Qi 齊桓公 (r. 686–643) and narrated in the Mengzi, the Guanzi (“Da kuang” 大匡 and “Ba xing” 霸形 chapters), the Guliang zhuan (Xi 9.4), and the Gongyang zhuan (Xi 3.5) reveals that precisely those orders in the Mencian version that concern the topics of filial piety (誅不孝), the selection of worthies (尊賢育才, 取士必得), virtue (彰有德), and welfare (敬老慈幼) are not present in the parallel passage in the Gongyang zhuan. Here is the Mengzi’s version: 初命曰：『誅不孝，無易樹子，無以妾為妻。』再命曰：『尊 賢育才，以彰有德。』三命曰：『敬老慈幼，無忘賓旅。』四 命曰：『士無世官，官事無攝，取士必得，無專殺大夫。』五 命曰：『無曲防，無遏糴，無有封而不告。』 The first order was “Punish unfilial sons; do not replace rightful heirs; do not make concubines into wives.” The second was “Honor the worthy and train the talented to give distinction to the virtuous.” The third was “Respect the aged and be kind to the young; do not neglect visitors and travelers.” The fourth was “Shi should not hold hereditary offices; two different offices should not be held concurrently by the same official; the selection of shi officials must be successful; a regional lord should not by his own authority execute a great officer.” The fifth was “Dikes should not be crooked; the sale of grain should not be prohibited; any enfeoffment should be reported.” (Mengzi 12.7: 287–288) The Gongyang zhuan (Xi 3.5) has only parts 2 and 3 of the first order and parts 1 and 2 of the fifth order: 84

Xi 15.11 (Liu 2011: 229; SSJZS 11: 2254), Xuan 15.9 (Liu 2011: 373; SSJZS 16: 2287), and probably also the last record, Ai 14.1.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

101

Long Live the King!

桓公曰：「無障谷，無貯粟，無易樹子，無以妾為妻。」 Lord Huan said: “Valleys should not be obstructed; grain should not be hoarded; rightful heirs should not be replaced; concubines should not be taken as wives.”85 Most of the topics mentioned only in the Mengzi version are exactly those that are conspicuously absent in the Gongyang zhuan. Although the Mengzi passage appears to be spurious for several reasons,86 it allows us, even if it is an invented speech, to draw the following conclusions. The Gongyang passage, like the similar Guanzi “Ba xing” passage, might be an earlier, and perhaps more authentic, version of Duke Huan’s orders. In this case, the absence of the topics could be explained historically: the topics were not yet relevant at the time this passage was written, and therefore, the passage reflects an earlier ideological position that is not concerned with these topics. Alternatively, the Gongyang passage could be a reduced form of a longer speech that we find in more complete versions in the Guliang zhuan and the Mengzi. Then the absences of those topics are meaningful silences that have to be interpreted as specific statements of a particular ideological position which is very much

85 86

Liu 2011: 200; SSJZS 10: 2248. 無障谷 accords to 無曲防 and 無貯粟 accords to 無遏糴. First, the Zuo zhuan does not quote any element of it and instead adduces another quotation from Lord Huan at the Kuiqiu 葵丘 meeting in Xi 3.5. Second, Yuri Pines (2005c: 215–217) has pointed out that most ideas proposed in the Mengzi version are incompatible with Springs-and-Autumns period practices but are likely to have been invented in Warring States times. However, the Gongyang and Guanzi “Ba xing” versions contain none of the topics that Pines finds doubtful. These versions might therefore represent the earliest, and perhaps authentic, core of the speech, which was then expanded in different stages as reflected in the Guliang and Mengzi versions. Third, the speech is connected to different historical contexts. Whereas Mengzi and Guliang relate it to the covenant meeting at Kuiqiu in 651, Gongyang (which, like Zuo zhuan, is highly critical of Lord Huan’s attitude at the Kuiqiu meeting yet praises his concern for the Central States at earlier meetings in its commentary to Xi 9.4) prefers to link these orders (which it endorses) to one of these earlier meetings, the meeting at Yanggu 陽榖 in 657. In Guanzi “Ba xing” Lord Huan declares these orders to the King of Chu when he meets him at Shaoling 召陵 in 656 (Guanzi IX.22: 460), and Guanzi “Da kuang” does not connect it to any concrete historical event but just writes that “the ruler thereupon spread them [the orders] among the regional lords” (君乃布之於諸侯 Guanzi VII.18: 365). The speech thus serves to demonstrate Lord Huan’s commitment and/or strength, but it is not coherently linked to a concrete historical moment.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

102

Gentz

concerned with these topics.87 In both cases, however, the topics are not an articulate part of the ideology of the Gongyang zhuan. The Ideology Expressed through the Absences The missing critical reflection on ritual might reveal a position that takes ritual to be a transmitted set of fixed rules that have to be followed unquestioningly. The focus on the meaning of ritual does not lie in the personal realm of emotions (qing 情) or intentions (zhi 志) but rather in the realm of the sociopolitical hierarchy of aristocratic positions. The term “virtue” (de 徳) is not found in the Gongyang zhuan probably because the commentary espouses a political system that is not founded on personal qualities like virtue (de) but rather on general rules of power and duty, a system in which there is no space for the unfolding of someone’s individual de. The absence of the words “loyalty” (zhong 忠) and “filial piety” (xiao 孝) seems to point in the same direction. We do find expressions like “the Way of the son” (zi dao 子道) and “the righteousness of ruler and minister” (jun chen zhi yi 君臣之義). However, these expressions (as well as the expression xiao zi 孝子 in Wen 9.1) define the relationships as part of a greater system of ritual behavior and not as personal relationships. Any loyal action toward the ruler is correct not on grounds of a personal relationship but as a duty within a system of ritual rules. In the view of the Gongyang zhuan, loyalty is owed to the system, not to an individual.88 Therefore, terms like the “Way” (dao 道) and “righteousness” (yi 義) (which are also used in the Gongyang zhuan for typical normative institutions of the ritual system such as “the Way of old” 古之道, “the Way of Yao and Shun” 堯舜之道, “the Way of yin” 陰之道, “the righteousness of calendric beginning and end” 終始之義, “the righteousness of noble officers” 大夫之義, “the righteousness of regional lords” 諸侯之義, or, indeed, “the righteousness of the Chunqiu” 春秋之義) are used to describe the kind of 87

88

In the last part of the excavated text San de 三德 from the Shanghai Museum collection there is a list of twenty-five prohibitions among which we find the following four: “Do not dam the rivers, do not cut off the ponds, do not annihilate the clans, do not deplete the granaries” (毋壅川，毋斷洿。毋滅宗，毋虛牀[ 藏] 。Slip 10). This long list proves that a great variety of such prohibitions circulated during the late Warring States period. The occurrence of a set of verbatim identical prohibitions is therefore particularly meaningful. This attitude is similar to what Pines (2002b: 70) finds in the Xunzi: “Xunzi advocated institutional, rather than personal loyalty to the sovereign; the ruler had to be served and protected because he was a ruler, the pinnacle of political and social order, and not because of his personal features. This depersonalization of loyalty side-stepped the concept of ruler-minister friendship, so highly praised by Zhanguo shi.”

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

Long Live the King!

103

loyalty devoted to the ritual system as a whole and thus an intrinsic part of it. Although the term xin 信 is used in the Gongyang zhuan, it never refers to a concept of loyalty that implies “unconditional obedience” or “personal fidelity directed to the ruler,” unlike in the Springs-and-Autumns period (Chunqiu 春 秋, 770–453).89 In the Gongyang zhuan, xin 信 always denotes trustworthiness and reliability in being true to one’s word. It is mainly used in the context of covenants (meng 盟) and promises (yue 約) in contrast to cheating (qi 欺) and in one instance even refers to the Chunqiu as a trustworthy historical record (xinshi 信史).90 The topos of the necessity of “selecting worthy ministers” (qiu xian 求賢) suggests that a good government depends on individual qualities of officials, which again presupposes a personal system, which the Gongyang zhuan wants to avoid. If a minister is praised by the Gongyang zhuan, it is only because he did his duty in accordance with the ritual rules. Although Lord Huan of Qi is evaluated very positively, his meritorious minister Guan Zhong 管仲 (d. 645 bce) plays no role in the Gongyang zhuan. Merits that are ascribed to Guan Zhong in texts like the Guoyu 國語 and the Guanzi are ascribed to Lord Huan of Qi in the Gongyang zhuan. Thus, the absence of the topic of worthies is due to the emphasis on the role of the ruler and the rejection of a political system that depends on, and praises, the quality of single individuals.91

89

90

91

Pines 2002b: 45, 52. “Two different concepts of loyalty coexisted in the Chunqiu period: the intelligent and selfless loyalty of the ministers, directed to the state, and the personal fidelity of the retainers, directed to the master” (52). “The trustworthiness of the recorders/records of the Chunqiu lies exactly in the fact that the sequence [of the historical actors] is determined by [the hegemons,] Lord Huan [of Qi] and Lord Wen [of Jin], and the meetings [recorded] are those arranged by the leaders of the meetings. My own, Qiu’s [i.e., Confucius’s], guilt lies only in the wording (《春 秋》之信史也，其序則齊桓、晉文，其會則主會者為之，其詞則丘有罪焉爾 。GYZ, Zhao 12.1; Liu 2011: 531; SSJZS 22: 2320). This saying implies that Confucius in his compilation of the historical records did not alter the sequence of participants in alliances and meetings, which was determined by contemporaneous leaders; his alterations of the texts concern only minor details, the “wording.” The historical content of the records is therefore “trustworthy.” For identifying “wording” as Confucius’s possible “guilt,” see Mengzi 6.9: 155. Queen (2013b) writes accordingly: “The Gongyang narratives deem most praiseworthy ministers who subjugate their personal desires and concerns, demonstrating loyalty to their lords and service to their states above all other concerns. The independent and confident voice of the ministerial class, which is such a prominent feature of the Zuo, is strikingly absent in the Gongyang Commentary, where instead we find a more compliant and subservient vision of service.”

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

104

Gentz

The focus on ritual and moral virtues seems to exclude the discursive field of penalties and punishments as well as political techniques on the basis of a conceptual opposition that is often drawn between these fields as, for example, in the Lunyu 論語: 道之以政, 齊之以刑, 民免而無恥; 道之以德, 齊之以禮, 有恥且格. Guide them by means of governmental regulations and keep them in order by means of punishments and the people will evade those but lack shame. Guide them by means of virtue and keep them in order by means of ritual and they will have a sense of shame and also keep to the rules. (Lunyu 2.3: 12) A government that is ordered by a perfect set of ritual rules does not need to emphasize punishments or any other religious, military, or political techniques. Violence, including punishments, executions (zhu 誅), and various forms of justified battles (for which, see Yu 2010), is sanctioned as a crucial means to protect, enact, and even enforce the ritual system. But it is not part of the ideological discourse. There is also no necessity for considerations of welfare or poverty, since the people will be well only if the rules are applied correctly and everyone fulfills his duties in accordance with his specific social position. Hence, welfare is not a central concern in the Gongyang zhuan. Finally, the Gongyang zhuan bases its ideology of a perfect order on the system of rules authorized by King Wen and on the virtues deriving from the morality of the human heart. Heaven is recognized as an agent that has to be respected, but it does not provide a model for human action. The practice of not talking about supernatural phenomena reflects an attitude ascribed to Confucius in the Lunyu (Gentz 2012). Sima Qian 司馬遷 (ca. 145–ca. 85) writes in his “Tian guan” 天官 chapter: “Confucius expounded upon the Six Classics, he recorded anomalies but did not write down any interpretations” (孔子論六 經，紀異而說不書 Shiji 27: 1343). Throughout the two most often quoted texts in early Confucian literature, the Shujing 書經 (Classic of Documents) and the Shijing 詩經 (Classic of Poems), we likewise find almost no theoretical explanations of supernatural events.92 The Gongyang zhuan seems to uphold the same basic attitude of keeping silent about things unknown. 92

The calamities sent down by Heaven that are reported in the Shangshu are always manmade: invasions, rebellions, usurpations, etc. We never find any natural calamity or anomaly described as being sent down by Heaven as a response to human conduct, in order to punish or to warn, such as we often find in later texts (the violent storm in the “Jin teng”

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

Long Live the King!

105

Considering all these absent topoi—and there are more—as part of a distinct ideological stance, the Gongyang zhuan reveals a very particular view that does not reflect any of the traditionally defined school positions of Warring States or Han China. It certainly is a Ru (Confucian) position, but it can neither be placed in the bipolar tension between Mengzi and Xunzi nor be affiliated with any of the approaches ascribed to Confucius’s students such as Zengzi 曾子, Zisi 子思, and so forth. The abundant quotation of ritual rules shows that the Gongyang zhuan has to be positioned in a sphere of ritual expertise. The Gongyang zhuan seems to represent a position that had no strong representation in the Warring States period. Moreover, since the Gongyang zhuan in the Former Han was read through the interpretation of Huwu Zidu and Dong Zhongshu, who read it in their own ways, and since all later readings, even until today, base themselves on the interpretation of the Late Han commentary of He Xiu 何休 (129–182 ce) (see below), the original position has never been recognized as a distinct and independent one. Defining its ideological stance, we have to place it somewhere between a traditional person-centered monarchy, in which the concepts of virtue (de), loyalty, and filial piety are central, and a new, impersonal system operating on the basis of an abstract set of highly efficient ruling techniques and bureaucratic rules. Taking an intermediate approach, it maintains and redefines the traditional hierarchy of aristocratic positions. It defines these positions on the basis of a system of abstract ritual rules to which everyone has to submit without exception. However, for certain special situations, special solutions have to be found by means of moral discretion. Moral decisions are expedient either because they serve pragmatic solutions or because they accord with human qualities such as indulgence, pity, benevolence, and righteousness. By these means, the fixed ritual system loses its rigidity and attains a flexibility that opens up space for a human and pragmatic perspective that is needed in particular situations to make the ritual system work. Besides these special cases, humanity and righteousness are fully embodied within the system of ritual rules, which, in normal cases, correspond to the human heart (xin 心). With an emphasis on ritual, which accords with the human heart and attaches little value to efficiency and success in terms of quantity, the Gongyang zhuan formulates a counterposition to a system of techniques (shu 術) of rulership and thereby clearly opposes what is usually identified as a “Legalist” approach. This 金縢 chapter might be the only exception; see also Luo Xinhui’s chapter in the present volume). In the Shijing there is one eclipse of the sun, which results from bad human conduct (Shijing, “Shi yue zhi jiao” 十月之交, Mao 193). Apart from this instance, we only find good harvests as an unspecific indicator of good government and regular sacrifice.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

106

Gentz

does not mean that the Gongyang zhuan is hostile toward technique, but technique is clearly subordinated to ritual and has to serve it. The Gongyang zhuan’s emphasis on ritual rules as the guiding sociopolitical force does resemble the Legalist emphasis on impersonal means of regulating the political sphere; but the text’s simultaneous emphasis on moral sense as a counterbalance distinguishes it critically from Legalism. It refutes a technical approach to rituality that regards ritual as an efficient tool that can be applied in any circumstances.93 Indeed, it insists on grounding the ritual system in human values that cannot be dealt with technically. Ritual and morality both have their origin in the human heart and are not created as an artificial instrument of regulation. In this respect the Gongyang zhuan seems to be closer to Mengzi than to Xunzi. It is only through the interpretation of the obvious absences in the Gongyang zhuan that we are able to define its position more clearly.

Early Han Gongyang Interpretation

We don’t know exactly why the Gongyang zhuan rose to the position of the single most influential ideological text during the reign of Emperor Wu. It seems that both ideological and personal reasons played important roles in this process. Three Gongyang exegetes seem to have developed a level of intellectual discourse from their Gongyang studies that secured them high positions under the emperors Jing and Wu and attracted numerous students, many of whom in turn gained high posts. Huwu Zidu, who is credited by Dai Hong with creating a written version of the Gongyang (see above), is probably the 93

Ironically, the only position that is identified with a pure ritualist approach among the “Disputers of the Tao” (to borrow the apt title of A.C. Graham’s 1989 book) is the Confucian position as defined by its opponents. See, for example, the chapter “Against the Ru” 非儒 in the Mozi (IX.39: 437) and the “Discussion on the Ru” 論儒 in the Yantie lun 鹽鐵論 (II.11: 150), where the critic says that “Confucius was able to be square but unable to be round [i.e., flexible]” (孔子能方不能圓). However, extant Confucian texts show a different approach. For instance, the exegetical effort to keep the ritual rules flexible in works like the Yili is obvious in the related chapters of the Liji (Gentz 2010). The fact that Confucius dissociates himself explicitly from such a rigid approach in a statement like “The Master said: ‘“Ritual,” they say. “Ritual,” they say. But do they just talk about jade and silk? “Music,” they say. “Music,” they say. But do they just talk about bells and drums?’” (子 曰: 「禮云禮云! 玉帛云乎哉! 樂云樂云! 鍾鼓云乎哉! 」Lunyu 17.11: 185). This saying indicates that pure ritualist approaches existed among certain ritual experts and were of immediate concern for Confucians.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

107

Long Live the King!

first Gongyang scholar to receive an official post as an Erudite at court during the reign of Emperor Jing (Shiji 121: 3118). Among his many disciples, Gongsun Hong 公孫弘 (200–121) was the most famous. Rising to the position of imperial chancellor in 124 under Emperor Wu, Gongsun Hong was probably the first Confucian scholar ever to be elevated to the top of the Han government apparatus in recognition of his mastery of a canonical text. Gongsun Hong reportedly came from a poor background and made a living by tending pigs. Having studied the Gongyang zhuan in his forties he was able to submit a response to Emperor Wu’s call for advice from “men of proficiency and fine quality” (xianliang 賢良) and “men of learning” (wenxue 文學) in 141 or 134, which led to his appointment as Academician (boshi 博士) and to further senior posts (Loewe 2011: 55; Vankeerberghen 2001: 19–20). Gongsun Hong’s elevation was therefore taken as a sign by his contemporaries that Confucian education had become an attractive career option for everyone during Emperor Wu’s reign. Sima Qian (who despised Gongsun Hong as a sycophant) notes sarcastically that “when Gongsun Hong, because of his Chunqiu learning, rose from a commoner to one of the three highest officers of the Son of Heaven and was enfeoffed as Marquis of Pingjin, the scholars of the world all followed as blown by this wind” (公孫弘以《春秋》白衣為天子 三公，封以平津侯。天下之學士靡然鄉風矣 。Shiji 121: 3118). Yet, if we read Gongsun Hong’s petitions and responses, we find no reference to the Chunqiu or the Gongyang zhuan. His elevation to one of the highest official posts might be interpreted as an expression of Emperor Wu’s openness to and respect for some Confucian scholars, but in no way does it indicate the status or official usage of the Gongyang zhuan during Emperor Wu’s reign. Matters are slightly different with the third of the important early Gongyang scholars, Dong Zhongshu, who was a contemporary of both Huwu Zidu and Gongsun Hong and of whom Sima Qian writes that “in the whole period from the foundation of Han until the fifth of its emperors it was only Dong Zhongshu who gained a reputation for exposition of the Spring and Autumn Annals. It was he who transmitted the explanations of Mr. Gongyang.”94 Like Huwu Zidu, Dong was appointed as Academician under Emperor Jing. Under Emperor Wu he was selected as a “man of proficiency and fine quality” (xianliang zhi shi 賢 良之士) and then sent as counselor (xiang 相) to the two kingdoms of Jiangdu 江都 and Jiaoxi 膠西. He never held a senior position at the center, was sentenced to death and then pardoned, and only slowly won the sympathy of the emperor. One of his greatest achievements is described by Ban Gu in the following terms: 94

Shiji 121: 3128; translation mainly following Loewe 2011: 47.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

108

Gentz

瑕丘江公受穀梁春秋及詩於魯申公，傳子至孫為博士。武帝 時，江公與董仲舒並。仲舒通五經，能持論，善屬文。江公吶 於口，上使與仲舒議，不如仲舒。而丞相公孫弘本為公羊學， 比輯其議，卒用董生。於是上因尊公羊家，詔太子受公羊春 秋，由是公羊大興。 Eminency Jiang of Xiaqiu received instruction in the Guliang Chunqiu and the Poems from Sire Shen of Lu, transmitting this to his sons and grandsons and becoming an Academician. In the time of Emperor Wu, Eminency Jiang was in a position that was on a par with Dong Zhongshu’s. Zhongshu was conversant with the Five Classics, capable of sustaining an argument and accomplished at written composition; Eminency Jiang suffered from stuttering. The emperor ordered him to engage in discussion with Zhongshu, whom he did not match.  Gongsun Hong the chancellor was basically a student of Gongyang and compared and collected his interpretations; in the end those of Scholar Dong were adopted. Thereupon the emperor respected the Gongyang specialists and decreed that his heir apparent should be instructed in Gongyang Chunqiu. From this point onward the Gongyang was promoted on a large scale.95 If we believe Ban Gu’s report, then the promotion of the Gongyang zhuan to the leading classic of the Former Han (Hiraoka 1983: 23) must have happened gradually as Han Gongyang exegetes convinced Emperor Wu of the value of their teachings by proving themselves superior to other scholars. Yet the persuasion could be successful only if the ideology of the Gongyang zhuan was able to serve the emperor’s political goals. We do not have enough evidence to know which part of the Gongyang ideology was most attractive to Emperor Wu. We can only speculate that the Gongyang zhuan’s strong emphasis on the exclusivity and universality of the authority of the Son of Heaven fitted Emperor Wu’s program of renewed centralization; the distinction between interior (nei 內) and exterior (wai 外), between the Central States and the barbarians (Yi-Di), could be used to support territorial expansion;96 and the prohibition against aristocrats and noble officers acting on their own authority (zhuan 專) perfectly responded to the 95 96

Hanshu 88: 3617; translation mainly following Loewe 2011: 151. As explained above, this goes against the original aim of the Gongyang zhuan, and Dong Zhongshu therefore was able to use the same Gongyang zhuan to heavily criticize Emperor Wu’s expansionist policy.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

Long Live the King!

109

Former Han tension between the emperors and the territorial kings. And insofar as this ideological support was couched in the language of emulating the revered Zhou past and invoked Confucius’s wisdom, it made the emperor’s policy much more acceptable to the members of the educated elite than was the case during the Qin dynasty. However, the sources do not indicate that anyone interpreted the Gongyang zhuan in this way. Neither Huwu Zidu nor Dong Zhongshu held positions that would have allowed them to put their ideas into practice. Moreover, Dong Zhongshu did not provide Gongyang material to support Emperor Wu’s politics but mainly used its humanitarian values to protest against Emperor Wu’s political moves. He opposed the aggressive expansionist policy, took exception to the oppressive methods of taxation, and criticized rigid laws and the imbalance of wealth. “That he aroused animosities and anger, followed by indictment and effective banishment need hardly surprise us,” writes Loewe (2011: 75). Gongsun Hong, in contrast, held a position in which he could implement his own ideas. However, when he disapproved of Emperor Wu’s politics against the Xiongnu, he resigned his office (to be appointed again several years later). In his political performance we can hardly detect any Gongyang ideology. One area, however, in which we do see an application of Gongyang ideology is the legal realm. The Gongyang reading of the Chunqiu opened up the possibility of a legal interpretation of historical precedents. The Chunqiu could thus serve as a potential replacement of the Qin legal code in certain respects, and it is probably not a coincidence that the case of Liu An 劉安, the last of the powerful territorial kings, who sponsored the production of the famous text Huainanzi 淮南子, was supported by a Gongyang interpretation of an analogous Chunqiu case (Shiji 118: 3094; Vankeerberghen 2001: 31). In the course of the Han, the jurisdiction based on the “righteousness of the Chunqiu” (Chunqiu zhi yi 春秋之義) became widely applied to legal cases (Tanaka 1994; Wallacker 1985; Arbuckle 1987; Queen 1996). The transformation of the Chunqiu into a lawbook became possible through the further development of Gongyang exegesis into a Chunqiu handbook of legal cases ascribed to Dong Zhongshu, the Chunqiu jueyu 春秋訣獄 (Deciding Cases by the Chunqiu).97 The Chunqiu jueyu 97

The book is referred to by different titles. In Ruan Xiaoxu’s 阮孝緖 (479–536 ce) Qi lu 七 錄, it is called Chunqiu duanyu 春秋斷獄; in the bibliographic chapter (“Yiwenzhi” 藝文 志) of the Hanshu (30: 1714) and in Taiping yulan 太平御覽 (984 ce; juan 640, vol. 3: 2868), it is called Gongyang Dong Zhongshu zhiyu 公羊董仲舒治獄. In the bibliographic (“Jingjizhi” 經籍志) chapter of the Suishu 隨書 (32: 930), it is called Chunqiu jueshi 春秋 決事, also in Ma Guohan’s 馬國翰 (1794–1857), Yuhan shanfang jiyi shu 玉函山房輯佚 書 (Ma Guohan 1990: vol. 3, 246–247) and, in the most detailed edition, in Cheng Shude’s 程樹德 (1877–1944), Hanlü kao (Cheng Shude 1988: chap. 6). In the Chongwen zongmu 崇

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

110

Gentz

is a handbook of lawsuits of which only fragments have survived. Using the technical terminology of the Qin and early Han legal and administrative rules (such as those found on excavated manuscripts from Tomb 11, Shuihudi 睡虎 地; from Tomb 247, Zhangjiashan 张家山; and from the collection of the Yuelu 岳麓 Academy), legal cases are formulated in an abstract and generalized way in order to function as general precedents. Principles of the Chunqiu are then referred to as basic guidelines for the judgment of a case. This book reflects an important stage in the process of what has been called “the Confucianization of the Law.”98 We should be careful not to overestimate the authority of the Chunqiu in legal decisions, however. Sima Qian tells us that the commandant of justice Zhang Tang 張湯, who was involved in the trial of Liu An, employed students and court Erudites familiar with the Chunqiu to help in deciding on doubtful points of the law. Yet Sima Qian, who presents Zhang Tang as an example of a “harsh official” 酷吏 in chapter 122 of the Shiji, leaves no doubt that Zhang did so only because the emperor at this time showed great fondness for literature and learning and Zhang thought it opportune to “back up his decision with references of the classics” 欲傅古義 (Shiji 122: 3139). In other words, Sima Qian believed that the classics were often used as mere ornamental backups. Dong Zhongshu is also the alleged author of another work, the Chunqiu fanlu 春秋繁露. In the first seventeen chapters of this book, which contain material authored by Huwu Zidu, Dong Zhongshu, or the latter’s immediate disciples,99 the Gongyang exegesis is further developed to adapt it to Former Han needs. These chapters formulate a new Former Han Gongyang ideology. One of the main innovative features of these chapters is that political topics absent from the Gongyang zhuan discourse are introduced into Chunqiu exegesis. Among these are moral instruction and moral transformation (jiao/hua 教/ 化), change of institutions (gaizhi 改制), the opposition of “refined” (wen 文) and “substantial” (zhi 質), “the people” (min 民), punishments (xing 刑), worthies (xian 賢), virtue (de 德), and, especially in chapter 6, new religious concepts such as Heaven (tian 天) as the utmost authority and model

98 99

文總目 (1041 ce), it is called Chunqiu jueshi bibing 春秋決事比并. Translations may be found in Wallacker 1985; Arbuckle 1987; and Queen 1996. See Goldin 2012 for a critical review. For the history of the debate about the authenticity of the Chunqiu fanlu, see Arbuckle 1993: 316ff. Arbuckle (1993: 457–459) speculates that the material might come from the school of Huwu Zidu. See also Arbuckle 2004; Queen 1996: 45–49; and Gentz 2001: 406– 408. Queen and Major will argue in their forthcoming translation of the Chunqiu fanlu that the material from the first five chapters comes from the hand of Dong Zhongshu and that the material from chapters 6–17 comes from Dong or his disciples.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

Long Live the King!

111

of orientation. Original qi (yuanqi 元氣), as well as cosmological theories of correspondence (all of which are conspicuously absent in the Gongyang zhuan, as we have seen above), are now introduced as well. The new exegetical language used in these chapters differs strongly from the language of the Gongyang zhuan. A theoretical language is being developed in which new technical concepts of exegesis are formulated that stem from the context of speculative-logical discourse such as inference (tui 推), induction of general models or standards (fa 法), distinction of identical kinds (yi tong lei 異同類), discrimination of categories (bie lei 別纇), differentiation of names and reality (ming shi 名實), distinction of right and wrong (shi fei 是非), connection of parallel cases (guan bi 貫比), estimation of intention (gui zhi 貴 志), and so forth.100 Abstract principles of exegesis are formulated on an exegetical metalevel that is based more on an interest in analytical topics than on a specific exegetical interest in single passages. On this abstract basis, legal and omenological exegesis is then also applied to the Gongyang reading of the Chunqiu. The secular juridical appropriation of the Chunqiu in the legal realm is not very different from its political appropriation in the alleged religious realm of cosmological laws. Both applications are accomplished in contexts in which experts in textual interpretation, employing a specific technical language, use all their highly trained skill to base far-reaching decisions on the text of the Chunqiu. In contrast to earlier Chunqiu readings, however, they have recourse to clearly defined sets of rules, which are based not on personal wisdom or power but on transparent and explicit laws that gain their authority through their argumentative force in public debate.101 This new methodological approach reflects an ideology that contradicts the ideology of the monarch’s absolute power as it appears in the Gongyang zhuan. A further stage of Former Han Gongyang exegesis is the attempt to create lists of the essential principles of the Chunqiu as reflected in chapters 10–12 of the Chunqiu fanlu. Thus, “Ten Guiding Points” (shi zhi 十指) are presented in chapter 12 of the Chunqiu fanlu as essentials of the Chunqiu.102 Chapter 23, “The Three Dynasties’ Alternating Regulations of Substance and Refinement” 100 101

102

For a further analysis of this point, see Gentz 2009b. For more-detailed analyses of the changes in how the Gongyang zhuan was perceived during Han times following the work of Dong Zhongshu, see Gentz 2009a: 823–838; Cheng 1985; and esp. Huang Kaiguo 2013. For a fully annotated translation and analysis in the light of chapters 10 and 11, see Gentz 2001: 469–497. See also my English translation in Gentz 2009b: 69. For other English translations, see Feng 1952: vol. 2, 76; and Elman 1990: 174.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

112

Gentz

(Sandai gaizhi zhiwen 三代改制質文), one of the late chapters of the Chunqiu fanlu,103 grounds Chunqiu principles in cosmological correlations and classifies the ritual rules in a scheme of monthly ordinances. It further develops the important notion that the Chunqiu deals with matters of a new (true) king, regards the Zhou as an antecedent dynasty to that new king, and treats both the Shang and the Zhou as descendants of former (true) kings.104 In the Eastern Han, He Xiu builds upon this idea of chapter 23105 to formulate the first of his famous “Three Themes, Nine Aspects” (sanke jiuzhi 三科九旨) (Ojima 1990): 三科九旨者，新周﹑故宋，以《春秋》當新王，此一科三旨 也。又云: 所見異辭，所聞異辭，所傳聞異辭，二科六旨也。又 內其國而外諸夏，內諸夏而外夷狄，是三科九旨也。 As to the three themes and nine aspects, to consider [the ritual status of] the Zhou as new [antecedent dynasty]106 and the [ritual status of] Song as remote [pre-antecedent dynasty], to take the Chunqiu as representing the new royal authority, this is one theme and three aspects. It further says: to use different wordings for what [Confucius] witnessed with his own eyes, what he heard about, and what he knew by traditional accounts, 103 104

105

106

Loewe dates chapter 23 to the first or second century ce. See Loewe 2011: 295, 309, with a full, annotated translation on 317–334; Queen 1996: 81. “The Chunqiu formulates matters of a New King, changes the Zhou institutions, adopts the Dispensation of Black [as the ruling color in a correlative cycle of governance] as orthodox, and regards the dynasties Yin [Shang] and Zhou as descendants of former [true] kings” 《春秋》作新王之事，變周之製，當正黑統。而殷周為王者之後 (Chunqiu fanlu VII.23: 187, 199). As he mentions in his preface (SSJZS: 2191), He Xiu bases his commentary on Huwu Zidu’s Tiaoli 條例, not on Dong Zhongshu’s work (for further, detailed argumentation, see Duan Xizhong 2002: 12–23). This might indicate that chapter 23 of the Chunqiu fanlu comes from Huwu Zidu’s school. Another possibility is that chapter 23 is so late that it in turn builds on He Xiu. The expression xin Zhou 新周 is taken from the Gongyang commentary to Xuan 16.2. He Xiu explains it in his subcommentary as referring to the new status of Zhou as the antecedent of what the Chunqiu regards as new royal authority (the authority expressed by the rules in the Chunqiu and soon to be realized by the Han). The Chunqiu fanlu parallel in chapter 23 (Chunqiu fanlu VII.23: 189) uses qin 親 (being proximate) rather than xin 新 (new) as a qualifier for Zhou in the phrase 親周﹑故宋 (and the combination of 親 and 故 recurs also in a number of other cases in the same chapter). He Xiu also uses the formulation 新周﹑故宋 in his commentary to Zhuang 27.6 (SSJZS 8: 2239.3). See the detailed discussions in Duan Xizhong 2002: 467–480; and Huang Kaiguo 2013: 104–108.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

Long Live the King!

113

this is two themes and six aspects. Further, to regard one’s own state as interior and all the Xia as exterior, to regard all the Xia as interior and the Yi-Di as exterior, this is three themes and nine aspects.107 The topic of revenge (fuchou 復讎), which appears in three passages of the Gongyang zhuan as a subtopos in discussions on the relationship between duties to the ruler and to the father, is not yet regarded as important in all these early lists. It becomes prominent as a theme of the Gongyang zhuan probably in Tang 唐 (618–907 ce) or Song 宋 (960–1279 ce) times (Chen Dengwu 2003; Li Longxian 2012, chap. 3) and is still regarded as one of the central Gongyang topics in the Qing, along with the topic of dealing with the “barbarians” and magnifying unified rule, which are still considered relevant today.108 He Xiu’s commentary forms the endpoint of Han Gongyang studies. In contrast to the enthusiastic vision of the Han starting at the beginning of a new dynastic cycle, which finds expression in Former Han writings by Dong Zhongshu and some chapters of the Chunqiu fanlu, He Xiu, looking at a declining dynasty at the end of the Later Han, develops a messianic vision that, probably influenced by early Daoist ideas, is linear and more teleological than cyclical.109 In his subcommentary to Yin 1.7, He interprets the Three Ages of Chunqiu transmission (sanshi 三世)110 as the early ages of “Decline and Disorder” (shuailuan 衰亂) where in the Chunqiu Confucius focuses only on the state of Lu, of “Approaching Peace” (shengping 昇平) where Confucius distinguishes the inner Central States from the barbarian exterior, and of the most recent ages of “Great Peace” (da/taiping 大平) where Confucius (who witnessed this age with his own eyes) envisions “the barbarian tribes becoming promoted to [Zhou] aristocratic ranks, and All-under-Heaven, far and near, large and small, being like one” (夷狄進至於爵，天下遠近小大若一。 107

108 109 110

See Xu Yan’s subcommentarial preface to the Gongyang zhuan (SSJZS: 2195.3), where he quotes this text from He Xiu’s Wenshili 文謚例 (now lost). The last two themes are verbatim quotations from the Gongyang zhuan. The second theme can be found in Yin 1.7 (Liu 2011: 10; SSJZS 1: 2200), Huan 2.4 (Liu 2011: 56; SSJZS 4: 2213), and Ai 14.1 (Liu 2011: 650; SSJZS 28: 2353). The third theme is quoted from Cheng 15.12 (Liu 2011: 417; SSJZS 18: 2297). For a discussion of the Qing and contemporary Gongyang reception, see Gentz 2001: 241– 248; Sun 1985; Chen Qitai 1997; Ding Ya 2002; Huang Kaiguo 2013: 250–407. Cheng 1985: 207–223, esp. 215, 221–223. See the second theme above: “what [Confucius] witnessed with his own eyes [events during the reigns of Lords Zhao, Ding, and Ai], what he heard about [events during the reigns of Lords Wen, Xuan, Cheng, and Xiang], and what he knew by traditional accounts [events during the reigns of Lords Yin, Huan, Zhuang, Min, and Xi]” 所見異辭，所聞異辭，所 傳聞異辭.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

114

Gentz

SSJZS 1: 2200).111 Derk Bodde (1981: 250) holds this theory to be “the first in Chinese thought which explicitly recognizes the possibility of positive human progress according to a fixed pattern of historical evolution.” He Xiu’s subcommentary terminates, fixes, and preserves the Han Gongyang tradition and forms, as Anne Cheng (1985: 15, 269) asserts, a kind of “summa” of the New Text school without which the great interest in this school by Qing scholars would never had been aroused. Prior to the Qing resurrection, there was a long age of gradual decline of New Text studies in general and of Gongyang studies in particular. The latter remained fully dominated by a single exegetical tradition, that of He Xiu.112 Han Yu, who, as mentioned above (n. 39), was aware of the Gongyang zhuan exegesis, writes in a letter: 近世公羊學幾絕。何氏注外不見他書。 In recent times, Gongyang studies have almost ceased. Besides Mr. He’s commentary there are no other writings in view. (Quoted in Chen Qitai 1997: 57)

Conclusion

The Gongyang zhuan is one of the great founding texts of the Han Empire. It emphasizes political unity (da yitong 大一統) and affirms the power of the ruler’s position by identifying him squarely with the state as sharing “the same body” (guo jun yiti 國君一體).113 Looking at the overall ideology of the Gongyang zhuan as an ideology of power, I have attempted to present a more differentiated picture in which the ideal of a true king exists only as a model within a highly formalized ritual scheme of power stratifications. Historical reality is set up as a systematic corrective to this ritual ideal. The Gongyang zhuan constructs a conceptual tension between the ideal ruler (whose position is defined within a model scheme of rules allegedly reflecting the Zhou ritual order) and actual historical rulers (as they appear in the Chunqiu records). This tension is paralleled in an exegetical technique that constructs a similar relationship between an ideal pattern of the canonical text of the Chunqiu (that is based on a set of historiographical principles allegedly 111 112 113

For a full translation of He’s commentary, see Cheng 1985: 209–212. For a short history of the decline of Gongyang studies between the Late Han and the early Qing, see Huang Kaiguo 2013: 237–249. GYZ, Zhuang 4.4 (Liu 2011: 112; SSJZS 6: 2226).

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

Long Live the King!

115

reflecting the Zhou ritual order) and its actual records (reflecting Zhou historical reality). We find the same tension in the criteria for meting out praise and blame to the historical protagonists’ behavior: to explain a judgment, the Gongyang zhuan refers either to an ideal system of ritual rules (allegedly reflecting the Zhou ritual order) or to historical moral narratives (allegedly reflecting Confucius’s moral sense in cases where no ritual rules apply). The Gongyang zhuan thereby offers a way of dealing with the schematized model of an ideal past in the concrete reality of the present. It is the conscious methodological construction and the reconciliatory handling of these tensions in a political program targeting a strong central royal power that secured the power and influence of the Gongyang zhuan’s ideology throughout Former Han times. To analyze the tension between the ideal of a true king and historical reality in the Gongyang zhuan I have identified in the Gongyang zhuan the twofold modes of, on the one hand, an ideal ritual order represented by a set of rules that describe and prescribe this ideal order and, on the other hand, a real situation that deviates in many respects from this ideal one. The Gongyang zhuan recognizes that the ideal order, which is identified with the ritual order of the Zhou, can neither be implemented technically as a rigidly closed system that responds to each situation nor be operated on a personal basis whereby success depends on the individual personality or qualification of the ruler (actually, the text repeatedly laments the absence of a [true] ruler during the age depicted by the Chunqiu). It therefore presents the ideal order of the ritual rules as the basic and primary pattern and guideline that should be followed as far as possible within the limits of historical reality since the Springs-and-Autumns period. The Gongyang zhuan therefore offers an alternative means of determining the right or wrong of non-standard situations in cases where the ritual rules do not apply. A moral weighing that is based on the same values as the ritual rules will lead to the same judgments of right and wrong as the ritual rules do. This moral weighing as corrective for an inappropriate system of rules is in most cases associated with the person of the true minister (or historiographer). Relating the ritual system of King Wen to the morality of the human heart, the Gongyang zhuan offers a system of governance that, despite its emphasis on the role of the ruler, separates royal authority from the person of the ruler. Concepts that derive from a personified mode of rule, such as “virtue,” “loyalty,” “filial piety,” “selecting worthy ministers,” or, alternatively, any references to the authority of Heaven are therefore absent from the Gongyang zhuan. The ritual system, not the personality of King Wen, is important. Designed for situations where “there was no [true] Son of Heaven above,” the Chunqiu, according to

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

116

Gentz

the Gongyang zhuan, defines an ideal realm of royal authority and power independent from the actual existence of an adequate ruler. In contrast to Han Fei’s Legalist model, which also postulates an “opposition … between the human factor and the objective functioning of the system” and similarly tries to “protect the idea of monarchy from the monarch,”114 this ideal realm is based not on newly established laws (fa 法) and techniques (shu 術) but on old “regulations and measures” (fadu 法度) and on moral sense. Confucius, who demonstrates the application of these “regulations and measures” to the “reality” of historical materials in his editing of the Chunqiu, therefore, complements and accomplishes the work of King Wen, who purportedly established the ritual rules for the same purpose and in the same spirit. Moreover, by connecting historical narratives to ritual rules, Confucius creates a further discursive domain whereby he is able to discuss, include, and reconcile deviations in the ritual system. Through this innovation he ensures the continuation of the power of the Zhou ideology in the same way as a true minister should ensure the power of his king. The ritual system of the Zhou cannot survive on its own. Neither can the Son of Heaven. Yet this system is the foundational framework within which morality moves. The integration of both is the vision of the Gongyang zhuan. Both approaches support and illuminate each other and generate a further dimension of the meaning of the Zhou ­ideology. This further dimension of meaning is gained through the blending of slightly different aspects of the same ideology that, taken together, produce a depth that is cognitively not achievable by only one form of display. We may compare this with the difference between monaural and binaural hearing or between monocular and binocular vision: in both cases a further spatial dimension and depth of perception is gained when two sense organs blend their perceptions. Andreas Wagner (2007) has interpreted the function of parallelisms as lying in their creation of multiple perspectives that can be added paratactically and that through convergence open a space of cognition in which understanding can move in different directions and achieve a greater complexity of insight. The two eyes of the Chunqiu—King Wen’s ritual rules and Confucius’s morality—should, in the view of the Gongyang zhuan, enable the reader to see the ideology of the Zhou as a three-dimensional one that can “disperse the times of disorder and effect the return to the correct order,” as “nothing comes closer to this than the Chunqiu” (撥亂世，反諸正，莫近諸《春秋》).115

114 115

See Romain Graziani’s chapter in the present volume, p. 157. GYZ, Ai 14.1 (Liu 2011: 650; SSJZS 28: 2352–2354).

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

Long Live the King!

117

The extant sources do not provide enough information as to exactly how and why this understanding of the Chunqiu developed, but the ideology of the Gongyang zhuan must have been so appealing to scholars and emperors during the Former Han that the Chunqiu—reportedly mainly mediated through the exegesis of Huwu Zidu and Dong Zhongshu—was elevated to be the leading classic of the dynasty. Paradoxically, the same Gongyang zhuan that supported Han rule was also used by Gongyang scholars like Dong Zhongshu to criticize the ruler.116 This sheds new light on the kind of means on which rulers like Emperor Wu based their authority. Like many other canonical texts, the Gongyang zhuan could serve simultaneously to bolster the ruler’s legitimacy but also to guide, moderate, and ultimately to restrict the ruler. This double function reflects well the perennial tension between the throne and the scholars who promulgated this text. Limitations of space do not allow me to follow the fluctuations in the status of the Gongyang zhuan after the Han dynasty, including its resurrection to the position of a foundational ideological text in the late nineteenth century, especially in the writings of Kang Youwei 康有爲 (1858–1927).117 Although the importance of this text—and Chunqiu studies in general—declined in the twentieth century, it was still taught as one of the most profound of all Confucian classics by scholars like Aisin-Gioro Yuyun 愛新覺羅毓鋆 (1908–2011) in Taiwan until the 1980s and is propagated as the most authoritative Confucian source for the conception of a New Confucian state by at least one PRC scholar (Jiang Qing 2013) even today. 116 117

See on this point Huang Kaiguo 2013: 76–78, 136–139. At least three monographs were written on Gongyang studies in the Qing: Sun Chunzai 1985; Chen Qitai 1997; and Ding Ya 2002. For further reference, see also Elman 1990; and Huang Kaiguo 2013: 250–407.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

118

Kern

Chapter 4

Language and the Ideology of Kingship in the “Canon of Yao” Martin Kern

Introduction

The “Yao dian” 堯典 (“Canon of Yao”) is the first chapter of the Shangshu 尚書 (aka Shujing 書經), or Classic of Documents. The “Yao dian” of the so-called “modern-text” Shangshu 今文尚書 includes both the “Yao dian” chapter and the following “Shun dian” 舜典 (“Canon of Shun”) chapter of the “ancient-text” Shangshu 古文尚書 that first surfaced in 317 ce and is considered an un­ reliable forgery.1 It is the longer, modern-text version of “Yao dian” that is the subject of the present essay. In my analysis, I will suggest, however, that the two narratives of Yao and Shun reflect different ideological takes on archaic kingship, and that they employ rather different rhetorical means to stake out their respective positions regarding the ideal of government. From this perspective, the accounts of Yao and Shun are far less integrated than might appear from their “modern-text” versions and should be considered two separate texts. What is the “Yao dian”? Traditional scholarship has read this chapter as an idealized account of the ancient rulers of high antiquity, Yao and Shun, who * I thank the students in my Princeton graduate seminar on the Shangshu (Spring 2012), where we developed in detail many of the ideas and readings offered in the present essay. For substantial further suggestions I am grateful to the participants at the conference held at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in May 2012 and to John S. Major, Gopal Sukhu, Michael Loewe, Constance A. Cook, Michael Hunter, Michael T. Davis, Sarah Allan, David W. Pankenier, and Kai Vogelsang. 1 Without trying to rehabilitate the ancient-text version, I do not subscribe to the common notion of “forgery” in this context for two reasons: it fails to recognize that at least parts of the ancient-text Shangshu are based on earlier sources that only in part are still known to us, and it wrongly elevates the modern-text Shangshu to some sort of original and trustworthy record of antiquity. Yet while the received ancient-text version may postdate the Han dynasty modern-text version by several centuries, the latter postdates the events recorded in the Shangshu by an even much longer span of time. Neither version can be understood as historically reliable; both present foundational narratives of cultural memory, shaped according to the ideological needs of their own time.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004299337_006 Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

Language and the Ideology of Kingship in the “Canon of Yao”

119

are valorized in a wide range of Warring States and early imperial sources. Guided by the common view of the Shangshu as a set of (however idealized or retrospectively composed) historical “documents,” we are used to taking the “Yao dian” as a narrative of history or political mythology, “euhemerized” or “reversely euhemerized.”2 Meanwhile, modern scholarship has dated the composition—or at least the substantial rewriting—of the received “Yao dian” to late Warring States or imperial Qin/early Han times.3 However, it should be noted that all the rather extensive evidence adduced for a Qin or Han dynasty writing or rewriting of the text comes only from the second half of the chapter—that is, the part that corresponds to the “Shun dian” in the ancient-text Shangshu. Thus, how do the two parts of the “Yao dian” fit with late Warring States and early imperial intellectual and political history? What do they contribute to the political thought of their time? And what are the rhetorical means by which they advance their ideological goals? In the following, I wish to suggest that we should read the two parts of “Yao dian” neither as a unified whole nor as mere historical or mythological narratives, but instead as works of political rhetoric representing particular ideologies and showing distinctly performative features.

Performative Speech and the Construction of Yao: The Opening Passage of the “Yao dian”

Consider the opening passage of the text, which—we should not forget—is the opening passage of the entire Shangshu. In Sun Xingyan’s 孫星衍 (1753– 1818) standard edition, collated by Chen Kang 陳抗 and Sheng Dongling 盛冬 鈴, it is punctuated as follows: 曰若稽古帝堯，曰放勳。欽明文思安安，允恭克讓，光被四 表，格于上下。克明俊德，以親九族，九族既睦。平章百姓， 百姓昭明。協和萬邦，黎民於變時雍。(Sun Xingyan 1986: vol. 1, 2–10) With minor modifications, the same punctuation is also found in Pi Xirui 皮錫 瑞 2004, Gu Jiegang 顧頡剛 and Liu Qiyu 劉起釪 2005, Qu Wanli 屈萬里 2 See Allan 1981; Boltz 1981: 141–153; Maspero 1924. 3 Chen Mengjia 1985: 135–146; Jiang Shanguo 1988: 140–168; Liu Qiyu 2007: 156–173. Gu Jiegang (1932: vol. 1, 1–45) dates the “Yao dian” to the time of Emperor Wu of the Han 漢武帝 (r. 141–87 bce).

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

120

Kern

1977, James Legge 1991, and Bernhard Karlgren (1950), with the only difference being in the first two phrases, which Legge and Karlgren parse as 曰若稽古， 帝堯曰放勳 (Legge: “Examining into antiquity, we find that the emperor Yaou was called Fang-heun”). As can be seen, the overall passage is mostly tetrasyllabic, but not entirely; and it is in the different possibilities of parsing the lines seemingly outside the tetrasyllabic scheme that differences in interpretation become most consequential. Legge, Karlgren, Gu Jiegang and Liu Qiyu, Pi Xirui, and Qu Wanli all interpret the first nine characters in largely the same way: beginning with two references in the Mengzi 孟子,4 the parallel version of the “Yao dian” in the Shiji 史 記5—which offers something of a translation of the text from a more archaic idiom into Former Han language—and another account in the Da Dai liji 大戴 禮記,6 there is broad support for this reading. It implies four different points: first, the opening characters yue ruo 曰若 write an initial compound particle that cannot be translated; in bronze inscriptions, as well as in early received texts, this compound is attested in the different forms of 粵若, 越若, and 雩 若;7 second, ji gu 稽古 refers to the anonymous narrative voice (“if we examine antiquity” or, when read together with the following two characters, “if we examine the ancient Emperor Yao”) that begins its text with a programmatic statement on the ancient emperor;8 third, the second yue 曰 that follows “Emperor Yao” is understood not as “to speak” but as “to be named”; and fourth, the final fang xun 放勳 is then read as Yao’s name, as in the Shiji, where the phrase

4 See Mengzi 5.4: 125 (“Teng Wen Gong 滕文公 shang”) and 9.4: 215 (“Wan Zhang 萬章 shang”). In 5.4, the phrase is “Fangxun said: …” (放勳曰). In 9.4, the Mengzi quotes the “Yao dian” as follows: “After twenty-eight years, Fangxun perished” (二十有八載，放勛[= 放勳] 乃徂 落). The received “Yao dian” has “After twenty-eight years, the emperor perished” (二十有八 載．帝乃俎落). 5 See Shiji 1: 14–15; see also 13: 489. 6 Da Dai liji VII.62: 121 (“Wu di de” 五帝德), VII.63: 126 (“Di xi” 帝繋). In “Wu di de,” the identification of Yao is even attributed to Kongzi 孔子: “Kongzi said: ‘The son of Gaoxin was called Fangxun” (高辛之子也，曰放勳). In “Di xi,” the Da Dai liji states: “Emperor Ku produced Fangxun, who was to be Emperor Yao” (帝嚳產放勳，是為帝堯). 7 See the discussions in Gu Jiegang and Liu Qiyu 2005: vol. 1, 2–5, and in Pi Xirui 2004: 3–5; see also Wu Zhenyu 2010: 274–279. 8 However, both Ma Rong 馬融 (79–166) and Zheng Xuan 鄭玄 (127–200) understand ji gu as an attribute of Yao, saying that Yao “followed and examined the ancient way” (shun kao gu dao 順考古道; Ma Rong) or “adhered to Heaven” (tong tian 同天; Zheng Xuan); see the discussion in Sun Xingyan 1986: vol. 1, 2–4; Gu Jiegang and Liu Qiyu 2005: vol. 1, 3–4; Karlgren 1970: 44–45, gloss 1207).

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

Language and the Ideology of Kingship in the “Canon of Yao”

121

is interpreted as such.9 In other words, the initial sentence of the “Yao dian” sets the stage for a historical narrative of remote antiquity that, however, is still accessible through careful “examination” (ji 稽).10 As the text continues, this reading necessitates taking the following six characters as another single phrase: qin ming wen si an an 欽明文思安安, a series of epithets that are then applied to Yao, the subject just introduced. Commentators differ regarding the interpretation of the individual characters, as traditional texts quote the passage with several variants, including se 塞 for si 思 and yanyan 晏晏 for an’an 安安. Without compelling parallels in other texts, any interpretation of such terms, and especially of reduplicative binomes, remains speculative.11 The initial four-character phrase yue ruo ji gu 曰若稽古 appears once more in the modern-text Shangshu and, in addition, twice more in the ancient-text version. To quickly dispose with the latter: the two chapters that in the ancient text follow the “Yao dian,” namely, the “Shun dian” and the “Da Yu mo” 大禹謨 9

10

11

An exception to this last point is the critical comment by the eighth-century commentator Sima Zhen 司馬貞, who questions whether the epithet fangxun is indeed Yao’s name; see Shiji 2: 49. Sima extends the same doubt to the “names” of Shun 舜 and Yu 禹 as they appear in the Shiji, Da Dai liji, and elsewhere, as well as in the opening lines of the respective ancient-text Shangshu chapters; see below. Likewise, the pseudo–Kong Anguo 孔安 國 commentary to the ancient-text Shangshu interprets fangxun as descriptive of Yao; see Gu Jiegang and Liu Qiyu 2005: vol. 1, 9. On the other hand, in his commentary to Shiji 1: 15, Sima Zhen claims that fangxun is Yao’s personal name while Yao is his posthumous temple name (shi 謚). The same is claimed by Zhang Shoujie 張守節 (fl. 725–735) in his commentary to Shiji 1: 14 and by Pei Yin 裴駰 (fifth century) in his commentary to Shiji 1:15. Zhang Shoujie, however, also gives specific meaning to the name fangxun: “Yao was able to imitate the merits of the previous era and thus was called fangxun” (堯能放上代 之功故曰放勳), an explanation likely inspired by Zheng Xuan’s commentary that Yao “imitated the meritorious transformation of previous generations” (放效上世之功化); for the latter, see Shangshu zhengyi 2: 118c. As David Schaberg (1996: 197) has argued, ji 稽 “specifically denotes the citation of historical precedents and language in the construction of deliberative and philosophical arguments.” See Gu Jiegang and Liu Qiyu 2005: vol. 1, 9–11. Recent manuscript finds have made it abundantly clear that the methods of traditional scholarship, including the meticulous investigations of Qing dynasty kaozheng 考證 philology, are powerful tools to compare textual parallels in received texts, but that they do not reach beyond the massive editorial interventions by Han (and later) scholars who translated and transcribed archaic texts into the words and characters of their own time. Looking at newly discovered manuscripts from late Warring States and early imperial times, one finds that binomes (such as an’an) and particles were particularly prone to a wide range of graphic variation whenever a traditional text was committed to writing; see Kern 2005, 2002.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

122

Kern

(“The Counsels of the Great Yu”), both imitate the beginning of the “Yao dian” and have been interpreted in accordance with its Han reading: “Shun dian”: 曰若稽古帝舜曰重華 (Legge: “Examining into antiquity, we find that the emperor Shun was called Ch’ung-hwa.”) “Da Yu mo”: 曰若稽古大禹曰文命 (Legge: “Examining into antiquity, we find that the great Yu was called Wăn-ming.”) These two parallels do not help us to understand the “Yao dian.” As read in the traditional way represented by Legge, they merely reveal their inspiration from the particular “Yao dian” reading that took hold in the Han, that is, long before the composition of the two ancient-text chapters. (The modern-text version, in which the “Shun dian” is part of the “Yao dian,” lacks the introductory paragraph referring to Shun.) There is, however, one more instance of yue ruo ji gu in the modern-text Shangshu, that is, in the presumably early version of the text. This true parallel is the beginning of the chapter “Gao Yao mo” 皋陶謨 (“The Counsels of Gao Yao”): 曰若稽古，皋陶曰：允迪厥德，謨明弼諧。Here, the following text makes it unambiguously clear that the final yue 曰 that follows the name Gao Yao cannot mean “is named” but must be taken as the introductory ­marker—that is, as the verb “said”—for Gao Yao’s following speech (Legge: “On examining into antiquity, we find that Kaou-yaou said, ‘If a sovereign sincerely pursue the course of his virtue, the counsels offered to him will be intelligent, and the aids of admonition will be harmonious’”). In other words, our only true parallel to the opening phrase of the “Yao dian” within the modern-text Shangshu does not support the Shiji reading of the “Yao dian.” Considering that the two passages are identical and clearly adhere to a formula, we should attempt to read both in a single, consistent fashion; and given that we cannot read the “Gao Yao mo” passage according to the Han interpretation of the “Yao dian,” we should read the “Yao dian” according to what the “Gao Yao mo” requires. In addition to the “Gao Yao mo” passage, one more parallel can be found: at the very beginning of the Yi Zhou shu 逸周書 chapter “Wu mu” 武穆. Here, yue ruo ji gu is directly followed by yue 曰, which then introduces a twelve-line, mostly tetrasyllabic, and partly rhymed poetic passage.12 Finally, another Yi Zhou shu passage, this one in the chapter “Wu jing” 寤儆, is illuminating: a speech attributed to the Duke of Zhou 周公 contains the phrase 奉若稽古維 12

Yi Zhou shu III.33: 339.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

Language and the Ideology of Kingship in the “Canon of Yao”

123

王, where the initial compound is not yue ruo but feng ruo 奉若, which traditional commentators have glossed as cheng shun 承順 (to receive and follow).13 Whether or not feng ruo might have such specific meaning or should be taken as just another, if phonetically distinct, version of the compound particle yue ruo, the following ji gu is emphatically attributed to the king: “He who appraises antiquity is the king.” This understanding is parallel to how the Han commentators Ma Rong and Zheng Xuan have interpreted ji gu 稽古 in the “Yao dian,” namely, as the attribute of Yao.14 Over the past two millennia, much erudition has been devoted to the interpretation of yue ruo ji gu,15 albeit without ever reaching a firm conclusion. Yan Shigu 顏師古 (581–645) in his Hanshu 漢書 commentary notes the despair that must have befallen readers already in Han times when a scholar capable of explaining the “Yao dian” spent thirty thousand words on the phrase.16 Considering the many parallels to yue ruo, I follow its by-now-accepted reading as an initial (emphatic?) compound particle.17 At the same time, I follow (pace Sun Xingyan, Pi Xirui, Gu Jiegang and Liu Qiyu, Legge, Karlgren, Qu Wanli, etc.) the earliest commentaries by Ma Rong and Zheng Xuan (as well as the “Wu jing” passage in Yi Zhou shu) in taking ji gu as attributive to Yao. This understanding is further echoed in the ancient-text Shangshu chapter “Zhou guan” 周官, which has the king uttering the following line: 唐虞稽古，建官惟 百。(Legge: “He said, ‘Yaou and Shun studied antiquity, and established a hundred officers’”). What is more, in the Yi Zhou shu “Wu mu” parallel, the yue 曰 following yue ruo ji gu clearly introduces the following speech—and this again I would also propose for the “Yao dian.” Thus, I do not accept the parsing and reading of yue fang xun 曰放勳 as “was named Fangxun,”18 nor do I understand the initial section of the “Yao dian” as a pseudohistorical narra­ 13 14 15 16

17 18

Yi Zhou shu III.31: 322. See n. 8 above. See, e.g., Gu Jiegang and Liu Qiyu 2005: vol. 1, 2–5; Jiang Shanguo 1988: 141–142; Karlgren 1970: 44–45, gloss 1207. Hanshu 30: 1724. Yan quotes Huan Tan’s 桓譚 (ca. 43 bce–28 ce) Xin lun 新論, which may have been ridiculing (and exaggerating) the effort; see Pokora 1975: 92n2; Xin jiben Huan Tan, Xin lun 9: 38–39. I suspect, however, that the ancient meaning of yue ruo was already lost to the earliest commentators. In rejecting fangxun as Yao’s designation, I consider the readings given in Shiji, Da Dai liji, and other Han sources to be misinterpretations. At the same time, the fact that already the Mengzi understands fangxun as Yao’s personal name raises two possibilities: either this reading, which runs against the structure of the Shangshu text itself, was indeed very early, possibly in a separate tradition of the Yao legend, or the two pertinent Mengzi pas-

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

124

Kern

tive document. Instead, I read the section as a performance text—a text quite possibly not merely to be read but to be staged—that was directly modeled on the much earlier (late Western Zhou?) speeches generally believed to form the historical core of the Shangshu (Shaughnessy 1993b). My following reading is consistent with both the “Gao Yao mo” and the two parallels in the Yi Zhou shu; it reveals a different linguistic structure and allows us to rethink the rhetoric and ideology of the “Yao dian”: 曰若稽古帝堯曰 Ah­—indeed! Appraising antiquity, Emperor Yao said: 放勳欽明 文思安安 允恭克讓

*-aŋ *-an *-aŋ

“Imitating [past] merits, respectful, and bright, accomplished, sincere, and greatly peaceful, truly reverential and able to yield!” 光被四表 格于上下

*-aw *-a

“The glory [of the ancient kings] covered [the lands within] the four extremities,19 reaching to [Heaven] above and [Earth] below.” 克明俊德 以親九族 九族既睦

*-ək *-ok *-uk

“They were able to make bright their lofty virtue; by this, they made affectionate to one another the nine family branches— the nine family branches were then close kin.” 平章百姓

19

*-eŋ

sages (5.4 and 9.4) were composed only under the influence of Han sources such as the Shiji. I divide the text according to its four different rhymes, not according to the number of lines in each rhyme.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

Language and the Ideology of Kingship in the “Canon of Yao”

百姓昭明 協和萬邦 黎民於變時雍

125

*-aŋ *-oŋ *-oŋ

“They made even and distinguished the [noble officials of the] hundred surnames— the hundred surnames where shining and bright. They regulated and harmonized the myriad states— the common folk were thus transformed and concordant.” In this reinterpretation, I read di Yao yue 帝堯曰 in its most straightforward way, with the following lines as Yao’s speech (as opposed to a descriptive and narrative account about Yao). Moreover, it is not only the anonymous narrator who “examines antiquity”; Yao himself looks to the past in search of a model of good rule and praises the ability of his forebears to “imitate [past] merits” (fangxun). In other words, the text commemorates and legitimates Yao for “appraising antiquity,” that is, for the very same turn to the past that Yao himself celebrates in lauding the earlier kings as “imitating merits.” If we parse the text in this way—instead of reading fang xun as Yao’s fancy personal name—everything else falls elegantly into place, resulting in an extended and remarkably well-ordered speech. This speech consists of four units of different length (three lines, two lines, three lines, and four lines), all of which, except for the concluding line, are tetrasyllabic. It is common in Warring States prose texts for a poetic passage to be capped with an extended concluding line (possibly signaling the end of the section); at the same time, the final line in this case contains two particles—yu 於 and shi 時—that in poetry in the style of the Shijing 詩經 (Classic of Poetry) do not count as metric units; in other words, the final line still conforms to the tetrasyllabic poetic meter. All four units employ their own scheme of rhyme or assonance on the final words of their lines. First, we find the rhyme *-aŋ on lines 1 and 3, further supported by the assonating *-an on line 2. Second, we find the rhyme *-aw and *-a. The third unit is marked by the three rusheng 入聲 assonances of *-ək, *-ok, and *-uk; and the final unit contains the rhymes and assonances *-eŋ, *-aŋ, *-oŋ, and *-oŋ. These regularities, combined with the regular meter, cannot be accidental.20 What we see here, in fact, is what is traditionally identified as poetry in the archaic style of the Shijing, which is formally defined by 20

None of the rhymed passages identified in the present essay—in fact, no passage from the entire “Yao dian” and “Shun dian” chapters—has been considered in Jiang Yougao 江有 誥 (d. 1851?) 1993: 116–118; Long Yuchun 1962–1963 and 2009: 182–283; or Tan Jiajian 1995.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

126

Kern

precisely the same features of rhyme and meter. We also find one reduplicative, an’an 安安 (or whatever other characters one may want to substitute for it), typical of the daya 大雅 ritual hymns in the Shijing but extremely rare in early prose, and two instances of anadiplosis (jiu zu 九族 … jiu zu 九族 and bai xing 百姓 … bai xing 百姓), again a feature typical of, and almost entirely restricted to, the same limited set of daya hymns. Both in the daya and in Yao’s speech, this language of poetry is the language for exalting the past. However one might want to rationalize the traditional reading of the passage, this set of hard linguistic data must be accounted for. There is no question that we are dealing with a poetic text modeled after the language of the daya, attributed to Emperor Yao, who is said to be uttering (yue 曰) it. What further identifies this passage as precisely such a poetic utterance is its uniqueness within the entire “Yao dian” proper (i.e., before the text moves on to Shun, whom Yao then addresses in similarly formulaic fashion, though even there, his speech is not nearly as well ordered as it is here). The remainder of the Emperor Yao narrative, which is about six times as long as the initial eulogy, shows only a limited use of tetrasyllabic meter, no instance of rhyme, almost no reduplicatives,21 no anadiplosis, and no other linguistic features typically identified with the ritual hymns of the Shijing.22 In other words, the initial passage of the “Yao dian” is in a diction and a register that decidedly set it apart from the rest of the text; following it, the text immediately falls into an entirely different mode. This combination of regularity (within Yao’s speech) and difference (from the remainder of the text) cannot be accidental. There is more to this reading of the opening passage than the reconstruction of an overlooked poetic speech attributed to Yao. As this speech—or song—sets the stage for the rest of the chapter, it also creates the ideological framework for what is to follow. This framework is a claim for tradition, spoken in the idiom of tradition. As I have argued elsewhere (Kern 2000c, 2009), the poetic form of Shijing ritual hymns, defined by rhythmic repetition, is a direct reflection of the ideology of the ancestral sacrifice and its commitment of the living to emulate the dead. Reproduction, to invoke Stephen Owen’s (2001) insightful analysis of the Shijing hymns, is not merely a theme but a linguistic structure—and, more specifically, a structure of mimesis, as aptly identified by David Schaberg (1996: 115–128 passim) for the early Shangshu speeches. This is the framework that Yao adopts when singing of good government: Yao does not speak of himself, nor does he appear as the creator of a new political 21 22

The only exception is one very brief passage in the later “interview” section where Yao looks for a functionary to ward off a disastrous flood; see below. For the salient formal features of these hymns, see Kern 2000c, 2009.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

Language and the Ideology of Kingship in the “Canon of Yao”

127

system. What is more, his speech (or song) does not have any particular audience. It is a self-referential utterance that performs its own act of comme­ moration as the model for ritualized remembrance, perpetuation, and repro­duction—in other words, the very acts by which Yao’s speech itself retains its presence throughout all further tradition.23 Such representation of an ancient culture hero as the successor to an existing order—as attributed to Yao, who in turns attributes the same gesture to his forebears—is itself traditional; an immediate example is the story of Lord Millet (Hou Ji 后稷) as told in the daya hymn “Sheng min” 生民 (Mao 245), where the sage’s mother reverently observed the inherited rituals and only because of this became pregnant with him. Altogether, the traditional reading of the initial “Yao dian” passage, ignorant as it is of linguistic structure and rhetorical pattern, seems very difficult to defend. But how did it become the accepted reading for more than two millennia? How was it possible for highly educated scholars since at least the Han—who were incomparably more deeply immersed in their tradition than any modern interpreter—to look past, even willfully so, what must have been obvious? Here we are largely left to speculation. I suspect that the story of Yao must have circulated in different versions, written or oral, already by Han times. In what appears to be the earliest of these versions, perhaps even built around the archaic poem identified above, fangxun was a verb-object phrase meaning “imitating [past] merits.” This is the version I identify in the received Shangshu. Yet parallel to this reading, something else developed no later than in Han times.24 How could what appears to have started as a phrase end up as a name? Consider the case of Saint Expeditus, a man mentioned in Roman martyrology. As explained by John J. Delaney in his Dictionary of Saints (1980: 219), “popular devotion to him may have mistakenly developed when a crate of holy relics from the Catacombs in Rome to a convent in Paris was mistakenly identified by the recipient as St. Expeditus by the word expedito written on the crate. They began to propagate devotion to the imagined saint as the saint to be invoked to expedite matters, and cult soon spread.”25 In the case of Yao, such a process 23 24

25

On the theme of “the rememberer remembered,” see Owen 1986; Kern 2000c, 2009. Given the uncertain textual history of the received Mengzi, including Zhao Qi’s 趙岐 (d. 201 ce) editorial interventions, we cannot determine its pertinent passages as preHan. An even more astounding story, in this case of an entirely redefined name, is that of Saint Josaphat, a Christian saint known since the Middle Ages. He is no other than the Gautama Buddha, whose name changed incrementally at each step of the way as his story travel­ed west and through a series of languages. For a useful account, see Wikipedia, s.v.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

128

Kern

may have been initiated by a similar act of misreading in one of two ways: first, by a simple misunderstanding of the very passage that opens the “Yao dian,” di Yao yue fangxun 帝堯曰放勳, or, second, by the erroneous connection of an early gloss of the type “to imitate past merits is called fangxun” with the figure of Yao himself. The fact that the phrase fangxun appears exclusively in connection with Yao may have contributed to such a misunderstanding. Whatever the case, Han sources such as the Da Dai liji and the Shiji are unequivocal in understanding the term as Yao’s personal name, and Mengzi 9.4 explicitly quotes the “Yao dian” as “After twenty-eight years, Fangxun perished” where the received “Yao dian” has simply “After twenty-eight years, the emperor [di 帝] perished,” possibly even suggesting a different early recension of the text—the same one that may well have influenced, or in turn may have been influenced by, the understanding in the Da Dai liji and the Shiji. What is striking here, however, is the fact that Yao was given a personal name (while “Yao” was reconceived as his posthumous temple name) that could be understood, and clearly was understood, as expressive of his virtue of “imitating past merits.” In other words, his newly acquired name was more than just a name: it was a powerful characterization that identified the core of Yao as a person, as a sage, and as an emperor. The fact that this identification mirrored Zhou and Han idealizations of the past—including the idealization of Yao himself— only enhanced his stature. Once this compelling name was established and adopted by the authors of the Mengzi, the Shiji, and the Da Dai liji, there was perhaps no going back. The authority especially of the Mengzi and the Shiji must simply have been too strong. The former vouched for the authenticity of the “Yao dian” while elsewhere exhibiting a critical attitude toward other texts considered Documents.26 The latter transformed the series of Yao’s performative speeches into a coherent narrative of history—a narrative where names are of utmost importance. Yet this reading always remained somewhat uneasy. In the Shisan jing zhushu 十三經注疏 edition of the seventh-century Shangshu zhengyi 尚書 正義, for example, the discussion of whether to take fangxun, chonghua 重華, and wenming 文命 as the personal names of Yao, Shun, and Yu or whether to understand “Yao,” “Shun,” and “Yu” as personal names or as posthumous temple designations extends, in fits and starts, for well over two thousand characters through pages of commentary at the outset of the “Yao dian.”27 Yet despite

26 27

“Barlaam and Josaphat,” accessed April 23, 2013, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barlaam_ and_Josaphat. For the latter point, see Mengzi 14.3: 325 (“Jin xin 盡心 xia”). See Shangshu zhengyi 2: 118b–119a.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

Language and the Ideology of Kingship in the “Canon of Yao”

129

these efforts, contradictions remained: while Ma Rong takes fangxun explicitly as Yao’s personal name, Zheng Xuan defines xun as gong 功 (merit) and interprets di Yao yue fang xun 帝堯曰放勳 as “Yao imitated the meritorious transformation of previous generations” (Yao fang shangshi zhi gonghua 堯放上世 之功化)28 without ever explaining the function of yue 曰 in front of fangxun. As both commentators understand everything after di Yao yue 帝堯曰 as characterizing Yao, it is possible that Zheng Xuan as well takes fangxun as Yao’s name—a name expressive of Yao’s virtue of “imitating past merits”—even though the commentary never says so. Moreover, even the later Shiji commentator Sima Zhen 司馬貞 (eighth century), who explicitly identifies fangxun in the passage under discussion as Yao’s name (Shiji 1: 15), and hence reads the following text as descriptive of Yao, questions this very identification shortly thereafter (without going back to explain the function of yue) (Shiji 2: 49). At the very least, the self-contradiction in Sima Zhen’s Suoyin 索隱 commentary suggests a greater fluidity of such commentarial material than is generally assumed. Yet more importantly, the existence of such contradictions and the uneasy way in which the Han commentators take fangxun as both Yao’s name and part of his narrative characterization reveal the lingering uncertainty about this central passage centuries after Mengzi and Shiji. And while it is not unusual for early Chinese historical figures to be referred to by designations acquired only later in life or posthumously (Goldin 2005a: 6–11), the idea that something like “imitating past merits” was the personal birth name (as asserted in traditional commentaries beginning with Ma Rong’s) seems utterly fantastical. Altogether, an even larger problem of the “Yao dian” looming in the background may account for some of the textual difficulties that have remained unresolved throughout the exegetical tradition. As argued by Bernhard Karlgren and more forcefully by Sarah Allan,29 the “Yao dian” is a composite text that combines vestiges of Shang dynasty and possibly even earlier knowledge with cosmological notions datable to Warring States times. As Allan (1991: 58– 62) has shown, the correlative cosmology of the “Yao dian” is already evident in Shang oracle bone inscriptions—albeit now expanded and integrated into the “Five Phases” (wuxing 五行) system of thought. A colorful example of such integration of archaic knowledge that even the earliest commentators on the “Yao dian” no longer recognized is the set of calendrical regulations. In traditional commentary, these characterize the dispositions of the people (min 民) according to the seasons: after the spring equinox is set, the people “disperse” 28 29

Shangshu zhengyi 2: 118c. Karlgren 1946: 264; here cited from Allan 1991: 58.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

130

Kern

(xi 析); after the summer solstice, they “act in accordance” (yin 因); after the autumn equinox, they are “at ease” (yi 夷); and after the winter solstice, they “keep in the warm” (yu 隩). While these terms are perfectly integrated with the larger description of each season, they also are something entirely different— the names of the winds of the four directions as recorded in Shang oracle bone inscriptions (Allan 1991: 60–61 and 79–83). Clearly, the “Yao dian” here conflates two distinct sets of knowledge, integrating a much older terminology into a new context. Allan has taken this argument further, suggesting that the “Yao dian” proper is not about Yao at all, but that it is the Shang high god di 帝 who appoints Shun as emperor. In this reading, the initial phrase di Yao yue 帝堯曰 would be a much later (Warring States?) interpolation.30 If so, the entire discussion about fangxun evaporates, leaving the “Yao dian” to start with a song in celebration of antiquity. In the following discussion, I will leave this intriguing possibility aside in order to tease out the different ideological representations of kingship that the text offered to its Warring States and Han readers.

The Narrative of Yao

The narrative that follows the initial section of the “Yao dian” is divided into two parts. The first shows Yao giving out appointments to members of the Xi 羲 and He 和 clans to determine the calendar according to correlative cosmology. Yao’s appointments are grounded in astrology, mapping human activity on the movement of the stars that determine the hemerological order: 乃命羲和：欽若昊天。曆象日月星辰。敬授人時。 Thereupon he issued his command to the Xi and the He: “Respectfully follow Vast Heaven! Calculate and make figures of the sun and the moon, the stars and the constellations, and deferentially arrange the proper seasons for human activities!” Following this emphatic command, he appoints four individual members of the Xi and the He clans to take up residence in the regions of the east, south, west, and north, respectively, and to determine the correct dates for the equinoxes and solstices so that both the folk (min 民) and the birds and beasts (niaoshou 鳥獸) live and act in accordance with the seasons. Thus—in the 30

Allan 1991: 58–62; further confirmed in personal communication (December 31, 2012).

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

Language and the Ideology of Kingship in the “Canon of Yao”

131

traditional interpretation of the text—after the spring equinox is set, “the people disperse, and birds and beasts breed and copulate” (jue min xi, niaoshou ziwei 厥民析，鳥獸孳尾); after the summer solstice is set, “the people act in accordance, and birds and beasts shed and begin to change their coats” (jue min yin, niaoshou xige 厥民因，鳥獸希革); after the autumn equinox is set, “the people are at ease, and birds and beasts grow snug new coats” (jue min yi, niaoshou mao xian 厥民夷，鳥獸毛毨); after the winter solstice is set, “the people keep in the warm, and birds and beasts have thick coats” (jue min yu, niaoshou rongmao 厥民隩，鳥獸氄毛). In other words, Yao’s officials adjust the calendar to its correct primordial order—the order of human and animal life before history.31 In this, Yao’s repetitive commands do not show him as a creator; he aligns human activity with the mechanics of the cosmic clockwork. After the year has been properly established in 366 days and the four seasons are fixed to schedule, the section concludes with a proverb-style tetrasyllabic couplet: 允釐百工， 庶績咸熙。　 Truly ordered are the hundred kinds of artisans; the multitudes all flourish. All this has been accomplished by Yao’s appointments, while the emperor himself does not take an active role in government beyond issuing his initial series of repetitive appointments. Up to this point, we learn nothing about Yao the person, nor are we told about any of his policies. The sage-emperor as created in these two sections is an abstract ceremonial function, a man without qualities. This changes with the final section of the “Yao dian” proper, before the text turns to Shun. Here, Yao strenuously searches for capable functionaries to manage his realm, to ward off natural disaster, and, finally, to succeed him as emperor. Through a series of brief dialogues with his advisers, Yao now emerges as a highly personal presence, speaking in an unmistakable and commanding voice that begins every utterance with an exclamation. Repeatedly, he asks his advisers to recommend an able administrator, and in one case (that of Gun 鯀) he even allows for a probationary period of nine years before concluding 31

In Qin and Han texts, this order is then much extended, and centered on the timely activities of the Son of Heaven in the “Monthly Ordinances” (“Yue ling” 月令) in Lüshi chunqiu 呂氏春秋, Liji 禮記, and Huainanzi 淮南子.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

132

Kern

that the candidate has remained incompetent. What stands out in this sequence of interviews is Yao’s emphatic display of personal, even harsh judgment that remains in constant disagreement with his officials; the matters of appointment and succession are not in their hands but are his own choice, beginning with his stark rejection of his own son: “Alas! He is deceitful and quarrelsome—how could he do?” (吁! 嚚訟可乎). Yao’s disagreements with his advisers show him as strong as they are weak: they have opinions, but they do not represent a developed, functioning system of government. The Yao of this lengthy interview section is individual and even idiosyncratic; if the previous sections had rendered him nearly invisible, an abstract, impersonal force operating through the dual authority of tradition and cosmology, now he speaks as an intensely personal figure of archaic charisma. At one point (before giving Gun his probationary appointment), he falls into a dramatic description of the disastrous flood that threatens the folk: 帝曰：咨四岳！ 湯湯洪水方割， 蕩蕩懷山襄陵。 浩浩滔天， 下民其咨。 有能俾乂。 The emperor said: “Alas, [Officer of the] Four Peaks!32 Swelling, swelling—the rising flood is causing damage all around! Vast, vast—it engulfs the mountains, overflows the hills! Gushing, gushing—it surges to Heaven; the folk below are groaning. Is there a capable man whom I could ask to attend to the situation?” In this speech of dramatic performance, Yao appears as a ruler who cares for his people and who grasps the urgency of protecting them. The power of this speech is further apparent from the fact that lines 3–5 appear nearly verbatim,

32

The term si yue 四岳 (lit. “four peaks”) is much debated in early commentaries. All of them concur that it is an official title, but there is widespread disagreement on (a) whether the term refers to a single officer or a group of functionaries and (b) who this or these might be; see the discussion in Gu Jiegang and Liu Qiyu 2005: vol. 1, 77–79.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

Language and the Ideology of Kingship in the “Canon of Yao”

133

though in different order, once again in the “Gao Yao mo,” this time attributed to Yu as he speaks of his own accomplishments in taming the flood.33 Remarkably, nothing in the entire interview section appeals to either tradition or cosmology—the points of reference in the earlier parts of the chapter—or, for that matter, to any other framework of governance. Yao even rejects the idea of hereditary kingship, a move that puts him squarely and fundamentally at odds with the dynastic model of both Zhou and early imperial rule.34

The Narrative of Shun

The overall rhetorical representation of Yao in the first half of the “Yao dian” differs considerably from the second part of the chapter, which in the ancienttext Shangshu forms a separate chapter, “Shun dian.” As noted above, it is only this second part that furnishes the textual evidence allowing Gu Jiegang, Chen Mengjia, Jiang Shanguo, and others to date the “Yao dian” (which they take always as a whole) to imperial Qin or Western Han times. While I would not suggest rehabilitating the ancient-text version, there is no evidence that before the empire, the “Yao dian” and “Shun dian” together formed a single “Yao dian” chapter,35 or that altogether, the modern-text version in any way represents some “original” Shangshu and not merely the text arranged in the early empire. Instead, I strongly suspect that the two were separate and, furthermore, that each contains its own diachronic textual layers. The earliest evidence for a unified chapter encompassing the accounts of both Yao and Shun is the so-called modern-text version, which may have taken shape at the Qin imperial court (if not later) and, from there, by way of the Qin “Erudite” (boshi 博士) Scholar Fu 伏生,36 was passed down to Han times. Instead, the notable ideological dis33 34 35

36

Sun Xingyan 1986: vol. 2, 88. In the ancient-text version, the passage is in the “Yi ji” 益稷 chapter. On the question of hereditary versus meritocratic kingship in early Chinese mythology and political debate, see Pines 2005a, 2010; Allan 1981, 2006. Interestingly, when Mengzi 9.4 explicitly quotes the “Yao dian,” it refers to a passage in the “Shun dian” part. While some may consider this to be strong evidence for the pre-Qin combination of the two parts, it may just as well be due to later (i.e., Han) editing of the Mengzi on the basis of the Former Han modern-text Shangshu. According to the citation index compiled by Chan Hung Kan and Ho Che Wah (2003: 17–47), Mengzi 9.4 is the only passage in all pre-Han literature that invokes a passage from the “Shun dian” under the title “Yao dian.” On the problematic construction of scholastic lineages for the classics in the Han, including Scholar Fu’s role with regard to the Shangshu, see Cai Liang 2011.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

134

Kern

tinction between the two parts suggests the original independence of the “Yao dian” from the “Shun dian.” As I will show below, unlike Yao’s archaic method of rulership, Shun’s is fully compatible with the imperial ideology of Qin and early Han times. Leaving aside the initial paragraph of the ancient-text chapter “Shun dian,”37 there are two different readings of the first section of what we may call “Shun’s text.” In the first reading, the “emperor”—who must still be Yao—only exclaims “Respectful indeed!” (qin zai 欽哉) before the anonymous narrative voice sets in, now with Shun as the implied topic.38 Yet again, a different reading can be offered, namely, to take the entire initial section as Yao’s first speech to Shun, after he had given him his daughters in marriage: 帝曰：欽哉！ 慎徽五典， 五典克從。 納于百揆， 百揆時敘。 賓于四門， 四門穆穆。 The emperor said: “Be respectful! [If you] cautiously harmonize the five statutory relations,39 the five statutory relations can be observed. [If you] engage with the hundred kinds of governmental affairs, the hundred kinds of governmental affairs will proceed with timeliness. [If you] formally receive those at the gates of the four directions, those at the gates of the four directions will be reverent, reverent.” While this passage lacks any regular rhyme pattern, the diction is not that of narrative but of well-ordered speech, with the six tetrasyllabic lines being tightly organized through the triple use of anadiplosis and capped with the 37

38 39

Missing in the modern-text chapter, this paragraph of twenty-seven characters at the outset of the ancient-text “Shun dian” appears like an abbreviated imitation of the beginning of the “Yao dian” (in the conventional punctuation: 曰若稽古，帝舜曰重華，協于 帝，濬哲文明，溫恭允塞，玄德升聞，乃命以位。). This is the reading suggested by Sun Xingyan, Gu Jiegang and Liu Qiyu, Qu Wanli, Legge, and Karlgren. There is no consensus among the commentators as to the meaning of wu dian 五典, which is here—following the Shiji parallel—tentatively translated as “five statutory relations.”

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

Language and the Ideology of Kingship in the “Canon of Yao”

135

reduplicative binome mumu 穆穆 (reverent, reverent).40 This is followed by a brief narrative before Yao once again turns to Shun: 納于大麓，烈風雷雨弗迷。帝曰：格汝舜，詢事考言，乃言厎 可績。三載汝陟帝位。 When [Yao] sent him to the foot of a mountain, blazing wind, thunder, and rain did not lead him astray.41 The emperor said: “Come here, you Shun! When consulting with you about government, I have examined your words—and your words are well founded and can be followed. After [by now] three years, you shall ascend to the imperial position!” It is only after these initial two speeches that the account of Shun turns into narrative. Aside from occasionally falling into a brief sequence of tetrasyllabic lines, this narrative shows none of the poetic features seen in some of Yao’s speeches; and while Yao’s speeches punctuate his entire account, it is unclear how much Shun gets to speak: according to the traditional reading, he remains silent through most of the chapter before finally engaging in interviews and making appointments. While it is possible that parts of what seems to be narrative may have been speeches (see below), they are not marked as such, nor do they ever sustain the extended emphatic diction accorded to Yao. However formulaic and impersonal some of Yao’s speeches may be, in the end he appears as a ruler of personal charisma—not least because of the forceful way in which he disagrees with his officials. Shun’s narrative has nothing of this; when he finally engages in dialogues with his officials over whom to appoint to a range of specific administrative tasks, his responses to recommendations are without exception in the affirmative, presenting the emperor not as a decisive or individual force but as a compliant one. Where Yao’s rule is based on the emperor’s personal judgment that overrules flawed advice, the quality and success of Shun’s rule rest with him not as a person but as the emperor, the pinnacle of a perfected, reliable, and authoritative administrative system. If the

40

41

This reading finds support in the parallel Shiji account (Shiji 1: 23), where the speech is introduced by the formula 堯 … 使舜 (“Yao made Shun” to “cautiously harmonize the five statutory relations …”). According to the paraphrase of the passage in Shiji, Yao sent Shun into the wilderness as a trial—another topos familiar from Lord Millet in “Sheng min.” After Shun weathered all adverse circumstances, Yao considered him a sage; see Shiji 1: 22. The story is paraphrased in various Han texts; see Gu Jiegang and Liu Qiyu 2005: vol. 1, 102.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

136

Kern

agency of Yao’s rule lies with the emperor himself, in the account of Shun it shifts to the administrative ranks. Although Shun appears not as a charismatic persona but as a personified governmental function, in his imperial role he is nevertheless far more activist than his predecessor. More specifically, while Yao’s officers of the Xi and He clans are concerned with the primordial order (in the end including the threat of the all-consuming flood) at the very beginning of history, it is with Shun that cosmic sovereignty is defined in much more specific social and political terms—and in terms that are fully congruent with the early empire. What is more, in his initial quest for cosmic order and his sovereignty over it, Shun does not delegate; he acts. Having received his imperial mandate on “the first day of the first month” (zhengyue shangri 正月上日) in the temple of “the accomplished progenitor(s)” (wenzu 文祖),42 he begins his rule by offering sacrifices to an entire series of cosmic deities, including the spirits of mountains and rivers. This creation of, and appeal to, a cosmic pantheon in support of political rule matches the state religious system of two early emperors: the Qin First Emperor and Emperor Wu 漢武帝 (r. 141–87 bce) of the Han, both of whom greatly expanded the cosmic sacrifices of their time, creating a cultic system with a host of newly recognized deities that included, among others, Shun himself, who was now venerated as a natural spirit residing on Mount Jiuyi 九嶷山.43 Both the Qin First Emperor (in 211 bce) and Emperor Wu of the Han (in the winter of 107/106 bce) performed the wang 望 sacrifice to him44— just as Shun himself had “performed the wang sacrifice to the mountains and rivers” (wang yu shan chuan 望於山川) immediately after his appointment, expressing his sovereignty over the entire realm.45 During all his ritual performances for the cosmic spirits following his enthronement, Shun does not speak a word—in fact, he is not even mentioned as the subject of his actions. The same is true for the following passage that narrates in the briefest terms his subsequent “tours of inspection” (to some extent parallel to the Qin First Emperor’s series of tours between 219 and 210; see Kern 42 43 44 45

It is unclear to what wenzu refers here, considering Shun’s humble pedigree. The term may refer to Yao’s ancestor(s) or even, as argued by some commentators, Heaven. See Bilsky 1975; Holladay 1967; Bujard 2000; Kern 2000a, 1997. For Emperor Wu’s extensive travels, see Loewe 2004: 605–606. Shiji 6: 260; Hanshu 6: 196. As Bilsky (1975: vol. 2, 248) notes: “The wang sacrifice was offered by [the Qin First Emperor] at the most distant point the tour reached to the gods of still more remote natural features. Thus, the wang was used to show the enormous extent of the empire and of imperial power.” By the time of the Qin First Emperor, the wang sacrifice was long established as the principal ritual of territorial sovereignty; see Kern 2000a: 115.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

Language and the Ideology of Kingship in the “Canon of Yao”

137

2000a) to the mountains of the four directions, undertaken during the second, fifth, eighth, and eleventh months, the months of the equinoxes and solstices: 歲二月。東巡守。至于岱宗。柴，望秩于山川。肆覲東后。協 時月正日，同律度量衡。修五禮、五玉、三帛、二生、一死。 贄如五器。卒乃復。 In the second month of the year, [he] went eastward to inspect those under his protection. [He] arrived at Mount Daizong. [He] made a burnt offering and performed in correct order the wang sacrifices to the mountains and streams. [He] then received the lords of the east. He harmonized the season, the month, and the [first] day of the first month [i.e., the beginning of the year]. [He] unified the pitch-pipes and the measures of length, capacity, and weight. He arranged the five kinds of rituals, the five kinds of jade, the three kinds of silk, the two kinds of living sacrificial animals, and the one dead sacrificial animal. The gifts were according to the five categories of nobility. When finished, [he] returned home. While Shun initiates cosmic and social order, all his ritual activities follow fixed patterns that are expressed in the form of seemingly comprehensive and in part numerically organized catalogs. In this, there is no space for a charismatic ruler. The impression of Shun as an impersonal function of government is further cemented by the repetition of his “tour of inspection” another three times; abbreviating the accounts of Shun’s specific activities, the text simply notes each time that the rituals were the same as before—a series of identical repetitions devoid of any particulars. Finally, the text invokes an even larger structure of order, of which the imperial tours are only a part: “Once in five years [he inspected] those under [his] protection. [In between,] the many lords visited for audience four times” (五載一巡守，群后四朝). This matterof-fact line is then followed by a set of formulaic phrases strangely at odds with the preceding diction—a rhythmic chant to express the seamless and uniform order followed by the subordinate lords: 敷奏以言。 明試以功。 車服以庸。

*-an *-uŋ *-uŋ

They broadly submitted reports by their words; they were clearly examined according to their merits; they were given chariots and robes according to their services.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

138

Kern

Considering how alien, in formal terms, these lines are to the preceding narrative, and that their subject is not made explicit, one might be tempted to read them rather differently, namely, as a chant performed to the subordinate lords. Furthermore, the final line can be read as the result of the first two: You have broadly submitted reports by your words; you were clearly examined according to your merits; [thus,] you are given chariots and robes according to your services. Nothing proves this interpretation. However, the very fact that the three lines are so clearly marked and separated as emphatic speech raises doubts about their being a mere continuation of the previous narrative. What is more, they also appear nearly verbatim in another Shangshu chapter, namely, “Yi ji” 益稷 (or “Gao Yao mo”), and there in a direct speech by Yu.46 In addition, in an explicit quotation from the “Xia shu” 夏書 (i.e., the first section of the Shangshu) in Zuo zhuan 左傳, the three lines are invoked in isolation from their context in either Shangshu chapter.47 All this suggests that they formed some kind of independent proverb-like saying that circulated on its own and was incorporated wholesale into early texts, including twice into the Shangshu. The next section continues in formulaic fashion, and once again without a subject: 肇十有二州， 封十有二山。 濬川。 象以典刑： 流宥五刑， 鞭作官刑， 扑作教刑， 金作贖刑。 眚災肆赦， 怙終賊刑。 欽哉欽哉！ 惟刑之恤哉！ [He] initiated the twelve provinces, 46 47

Sun Xingyan 1986: vol. 2, 109; Legge 1991: 83. In the modern-text Shangshu, “Yi ji” is part of “Gao Yao mo”; in the ancient-text version, the two are separate chapters. Chunqiu Zuozhuan zhu 1990: Xi 27, 445–446.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

Language and the Ideology of Kingship in the “Canon of Yao”

139

raised altars at the twelve mountains. [He] deepened the rivers. [He] made representations of the statutory punishments: banishment mitigates the five [principal] punishments; the whip is the punishment at the magistrates’ courts; the stick is the punishment at schools; money is the punishment for redeemable crimes. Inadvertent offenses and those caused by misfortune are pardoned; brazen and repeated offenses receive the punishment for miscreants. “Be respectful! Be respectful! Be cautious with punishments!” All commentators take the highly emphatic final two lines as Shun’s exhortation to his officials—simply because they cannot be part of the anonymous narrative voice. Yet note that nothing separates them from the preceding catalog of punishments (which, incidentally, is at least in part reminiscent of Qin and early Han law).48 The final line of five characters once again—just like the concluding six-character line in Yao’s initial speech—caps the entire tetrasyllabic passage while still adhering to the four-beat meter (as the particle zhi 之 does not count metrically). Moreover, the extensive catalog of punishments, always ending with the word xing 刑, is highly performative—and it is rhetorically emphasized through the single line that breaks the formal pattern: the one line that speaks of the relief from punishment (“Inadvertent offenses and those caused by misfortune are pardoned”) is also set apart formally by ending on a different word (she 赦), mimetically reflecting the escape from punishment (xing) also on the linguistic level.49 In terms of contents, we witness the same conflict already seen above: the representation of government as comprehensive, systematic, and impersonal is capped by what must be taken as direct speech. At the same time, nothing suggests that this speech—presumable Shun’s own—begins only with the final exclamation; instead, it may just as well encompass the entire tetrasyllabic catalog of punishments. Once again, the traditional habit of reading the chapter as a continuous narrative “document” may well obscure the possibly original nature of the text as largely performative, or perhaps as a collection of 48 49

For recent studies, see Sueyasu Ando 2009: 112–121; Zhang Jinguang 2004: 553–560; Cao Lüning 2006; Zhu Honglin 2007. To have linguistic structure mimetically represent the topic of speech is a feature of early Chinese rhetoric as seen in the Han dynasty fu 賦 as well as in early speeches of political persuasion; see Kern 2003.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

140

Kern

shorter performative utterances—perhaps even from diverse sources—now hung upon the skeleton of mythological narrative. One rhetorical characteristic of the text that contributes much to the uncertainties engulfing the question of voice is the fact that from Shun’s acceptance of the throne all the way to the moment of Yao’s death, when Shun once again goes to the ancestral temple, he is not mentioned once throughout the entire narrative—for some 270 characters. (By contrast, the final section, where Shun appoints his officials, is entirely dialogical, with the frequent use of “The emperor said.”) Since some lines are clearly distinguished as direct utterances, one may well assume that others, though less visibly, may represent speech as well. Following the admonition to be cautious with punishments, the text enters into another catalog, this time of the “four criminals.” As before, the subject is only implied. In the following, I use the conventional “he” although it may just as well be “I”: 流共工于幽州， 放驩兜于崇山， 竄三苗于三危， 殛鯀于羽山， 四罪而天下咸服。 [He] banished Gong Gong to Dark Province, exiled Huan Dou to Exalted Mountain, expelled the San Miao [people] to Threefold Precipice, sent Gun to the terminal point at Feathered Mountain— after these four sanctions, All-under-Heaven became submissive. What Shun performs here is more than the punishment of particular criminals (including an entire people). As commentators since Han times have pointed out, these criminals and their places of exile or execution were associated with the barbarian areas of the four directions: Dark Province in the north, Exalted Mountain in the south, Threefold Precipice in the West, and Feathered Mountain in the East.50 Once again, the text suggests a catalog both complete and systematic, this time measuring the physical space of the empire by the terminal points to which all crime is relegated. Furthermore, in choosing four different verbs, the passage applies a different type of punishment to each of the four criminals, creating a trifold catalog of different criminals, different punishments, and different locations that again suggests the absolute totality of 50

As made explicit in Da Dai liji VII.62: 121 (“Wu di de”).

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

Language and the Ideology of Kingship in the “Canon of Yao”

141

Shun’s rule, after which “All-under-Heaven became submissive.” Expressed in such diction is the very claim for totalizing sovereignty historically associated with the Qin First Emperor and his mission to make the realm both unified and uniform. Note also how the catalog culminates: after “banishing” (liu 流), “exiling” (fang 放), and “expelling” (cuan 竄) the other criminals, the emperor finally “sends to the terminal point” (ji 殛, here read as ji 極) the last offender, Gun, who is thus condemned to die in the liminal sphere between civilization and barbarism.51 Shun’s all-encompassing cosmology of the four directions continues through the next passage of unbound prose, before the text falls back into yet another instance of an entirely formulaic idiom that is at least partly in direct speech: 二十有八載，帝乃俎落。百姓如喪考妣。三載，四海遏密八 音。月正元日，舜格于文祖。 Twenty-eight years [after Shun had taken the throne], the emperor [Yao] expired.52 The [noble officials of the] hundred surnames mourned as if for a deceased father or mother. For three years, they stopped and silenced the eight musical notes in the realm within the four seas. On the first day of the first month, Shun went to the temple of the accomplished progenitor(s). 詢于四岳： 51

52

Not all commentators take ji 殛 as ji 極, even though the substitution (a) is perfectly acceptable within the limits of the ji 亟 xiesheng 諧聲 series and (b) fits the other terms exactly. See Duan Yucai 1988: 4B.10a–11a; the extensive discussions in Sun Xingyan 1986: vol. 1, 57; Pi Xirui 2004: vol. 1, 68–69; Gu Jiegang and Liu Qiyu 2005: vol. 1, 183–185; and the entries, with further references, in Hanyu dazidian 1986: 1391; and Feng Qiyong and Deng Ansheng 2006: 386–387. Karlgren’s (1946: 249n1) laconic argument against this substitution (and in favor of reading ji 殛 simply as “to kill”) is unconvincing. That said, the idea is still that Gun ultimately died at Feathered Mountain. The same is true for the other criminals, such as the San Miao (by commentators often understood as “the Three Miao Tribes”), who, in the parallel narratives in both Mengzi 9.3: 212 (“Wan Zhang shang”) and Da Dai liji VII.62: 121 (“Wu di de”), were “killed” (sha 殺) at Threefold Precipice. In a series of traditional sources, beginning with Mengzi 9.4, the subject here is given not as di 帝 (the emperor) but as fangxun 放勳, here clearly understood as Yao; see Sun Xingyan 1986: vol. 1, 58; Gu Jiegang and Liu Qiyu 2005: vol. 1, 187–188. Note also the unusual term 俎落 (“went into decline,” i.e., “perish,” also written 徂落) for Yao’s death, which seems to define his death as a cosmic event.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

142

Kern

闢四門， 明四目， 達四聰。 He deliberated with the [Officer of the] Four Peaks— to open the gates of the four [directions], to clear the vistas of the four [directions], to penetrate what could be heard from the four [directions].53 咨十有二牧曰： 食哉惟時， 遠柔能邇。 惇德允元， 而難任人， 蠻夷率服。 [He] said: “Alas, pastors of the twelve [provinces]!54 Be respectful indeed in this matter:55 53

54

55

These lines may well be constructed as another speech: “He deliberated with the [Officer of the] Four Peaks: ‘Open the gates of the four [directions], clear the vistas of the four [directions], penetrate what can be heard from the four [directions]!’” For the character zi 咨 (usually “to consult” or “to plan”), the parallel in Shiji 1.38 has ming 命 (to command). While Hanshu (83: 3406) has zi 咨, Jinshu 晉書 (14: 418, 423, 425, 428, 430, 436; 15: 449, 453) consistently writes zhi 置 (to establish). This seems to be an interpretative extension of ming rather than a variant of zi, as zi (*tsij) and zhi (*trək-s) are not phonologically close. Elsewhere in the “Yao dian,” zi 咨 repeatedly appears as an initial exclamation in Yao’s and Shun’s speeches, which in the Shiji parallels is consistently rendered (and clarified) as jie 嗟 (alas!). The way in which the Shiji resolves the seemingly different uses of zi in the same text is a typical case of providing an easier reading of an initially more obscure phrasing. While Chinese commentators have accepted this easier reading (see, e.g., Gu Jiegang and Liu Qiyu 2005: vol. 1, 194), it must be rejected according to the philological principle of lectio difficilior potior (the more difficult reading is the stronger). I follow Karlgren’s (1970: 96, gloss 1275) suggestion that the yue 曰in this line has been mistakenly transposed; in accordance with all parallels in the chapter, the line should read 曰咨十有二牧 instead of 咨十有二牧曰. Much has been argued about this line; see Gu Jiegang and Liu Qiyu 2005: vol. 1, 194–196; Karlgren 1970: 96, gloss 1276. With Karlgren, I follow the Qing scholar Xu Zongyan 許宗彥, who reads shi 食 as qin 欽 (respectful); at the same time, I follow Gu Jiegang and Liu Qiyu, who argue to preserve the overall structure of tetrasyllabic lines here. Shi 時 is, as often, to be read as the emphatic demonstrative shi 是 (this).

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

Language and the Ideology of Kingship in the “Canon of Yao”

143

if you are gentle to those who are distant, kind to those who are near,56 generous to those of virtue, trusting to those who lead the good ones, yet causing difficulties for the cunning men— then the Man and Yi tribes will be submissive and obedient.” After this speech, Shun makes nine appointments, some by merely issuing directives to individuals, others after asking his advisers for recommendations; in four cases, the appointee first declines but is then simply told to take up his duties. Altogether, Shun’s catalog of officials includes twenty-two persons— the twelve Pastors, the Officer of the Four Peaks, and the nine appointed function­aries—whom he then finally admonishes to support him in his Heaven-ordained duties. Every three years, the achievements of the appointees are examined; after three such examinations, promotions and demotions are conducted. In Shun’s speech, the subject of examining, promoting, and demoting remains anonymous: the system of bureaucratic government is depicted as running its inevitable course, and it is framed according to the notion of “performance and title” (xingming 刑名) associated with Shen Buhai 申不害 (fourth century bce) and Han Fei 韓非 (ca. 280–ca. 233 bce).57 Most of Shun’s appointment speeches are short—between just a few characters and four tetrasyllabic lines; of the speeches followed by an initial refusal from the appointee, the longest is just three lines. While none of Shun’s speeches are rhymed, two stand out for their length and rhetorical patterns: the speech to Gao Yao and the speech to Kui 夔: 帝曰：皋陶！ 蠻夷猾夏， 寇賊姦宄， 汝作士。 五刑有服， 五服三就。 五流有宅， 五宅三居。 惟明克允。 The emperor said: “Gao Yao! The Man and Yi tribes bring disorder to [our] Xia [realm]. 56 57

The same phrase appears in the daya 大雅 hymn “Min lao” 民勞 (Mao 253); for a lengthy discussion, see Karlgren 1964: 85–87, gloss 917. Goldin 2013a: 8–11; see also Makeham 1990–1991 and 1994: 67–83; Creel 1974: 119–124.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

144

Kern

There are robbers and bandits, the crafty and the treacherous— you shall take charge! The five kinds of punishments shall have their [determined] applications, the five kinds of applications shall have three kinds of gradations; the five kinds of banishments shall have their [determined] localities, the five kinds of localities shall have three kinds of [specific] places— it is clarity that makes [you] trustworthy!” Aside from the regular meter, the striking feature of this speech is its emphasis on numerological concepts and hierarchical order. Here, numbers are not just numbers; what are discussed are not some “five punishments,” “five applications,” and “three gradations,” or some “five banishments,” “five localities,” and “three places,” but the five kinds and the three kinds of punishments, applications, and gradations and of banishments, localities, and places. Moreover, for both punishments and banishments, we are given an increasing order of specificity, where an overall phenomenon (punishments or banishments) is determined with regard to its general execution (applications or localities), which in turn is further specified with regard to its concrete implementation (gradations and places). In other words, these phrases present the system of punishments in definite and comprehensive fashion. The speech to Kui is different and yet similar: instead of the tetrasyllabic meter, it employs conventional rhetorical patterns of expository prose, “A and yet B” and “A without being B,” together with a series of brief apodictic statements in trisyllabic form. Once again, the impression is one of comprehensive and perfect order—and of an order not described but prescribed: 帝曰：夔！命汝典樂，教冑子。 直而溫， 寬而栗， 剛而無虐， 簡而無傲。 詩言志， 歌永言， 聲依永， 律和聲。 八音克諧， 無相奪倫， 神人以和。

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

Language and the Ideology of Kingship in the “Canon of Yao”

145

The emperor said: “Kui! I command you to codify a system of music to teach our successive sons. They shall be upright and yet gentle, broad-minded and yet firm, hard without being cruel, grand without being arrogant. Poetry shall express intent, song shall extend the words, melody shall follow from [such] extension, and the pitch pipes shall harmonize melody. When the eight notes are made consonant, they will not encroach upon one another— by this means spirits and humans will be in harmony!” In sum, because Shun’s two major appointment speeches outline, first, the system of punishments and, then, the system of music, neither speech would be confused with poetry, unlike Yao’s two speeches—the first his praise of antiquity, the second his address to Shun—which share the diction of the daya hymns. It is their very specificity that makes us read these lines as prose; they are dominated by their contents, not by their emphatic poetic diction in the service of some more general pronouncement. Unlike Yao, Shun never appears as a charismatic speaker or personality.

Yao and Shun as Competing Models of Kingship

There are other differences between the two sections of the “Yao dian.” As noted above, Yao embraces the principle of meritocratic succession and appoints Shun as his successor while rejecting his own son. Across a range of Warring States and early Han texts, Shun is likewise portrayed as having appointed Yu 禹 as his successor, once again elevating meritocratic over hereditary rulership—an idea gravely at odds with both Zhou and imperial rule. Yet the “Yao dian”—the very text that stands at the core of the Shun legend—does not make this claim at all. In fact, it never touches on Shun’s succession; Shun never retires from the throne, never speaks of handing over his government, and merely appoints Yu as one functionary among others (Sun Xingyan 1986: vol. 1,

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

146

Kern

61–63). Considering the significance of the topic of abdication, this difference between the first and the second half of the “Yao dian” may not be accidental. If the “Yao dian”—or at least its second half, the “Shun dian” of the ancient-text version—dates to late Warring States or early imperial times, it cannot have been authored and transmitted in complete isolation from, and ignorance of, the entire range of texts that portray Shun as the second great champion of abdication and meritocratic succession.58 If the authors of the text decided to leave aside this central element of Shun’s legend, it was probably on the grounds of a particular ideological agenda—an agenda that was compatible with the ideology of the early empire. Shun was a model to follow, and a spirit to address with the wang sacrifice. Yao was not. Or put in different terms: Shun adheres to the imperial perspective on rulership in ways that Yao does not. In Former Han political philosophy, the reference to Yao created a profound dilemma: while in Dong Zhongshu’s 董仲舒 (ca. 195–ca. 115 bce) model of dynastic succession according to cosmological cycles, the Former Han could claim Yao as its typological prefiguration and derive its right to rule from him, an appeal to Yao’s model of abdication in favor of a new sage unrelated by blood was tantamount to treason. When, after the appearance of a series of strange portents in 78 bce, the court scholar Sui Hong 眭弘 suggested that the Han dynasty had run its cosmological course and was now destined to follow Yao’s model of abdication, he was charged with rebellion and put to death.59 After Sui Hong, the next figure to identify the Former Han with Yao in order to present Yao’s abdication to Shun as a historical model was none other than Wang Mang 王莽 (ca. 45 bce–23 ce). When governing as the de facto ruler— before putting an end to the Former Han by proclaiming his new Xin 新 dynasty and himself its founding emperor—Wang had asserted repeatedly that he was occupying the position of the Duke of Zhou (周公之位), that is, of the regent who protected the dynasty at the time of an infant emperor.60 Yet when Wang was on the verge of establishing himself officially as emperor, he reversed his purported identity: now he declared himself the “descendant of Em58

59 60

The prevalence of the theme of abdication and its application to both Yao and Shun have been archeologically confirmed by the bamboo manuscript “Tang Yu zhi dao” 唐虞之道 found at Guodian 郭店, Hubei. For the text, see Guodian Chu mu zhujian 1998: 39–41, 157–159; for a translation and discussion, see Allan 2006; for further analysis, see the excellent study by Pines (2005a, with extensive references to Chinese scholarship). In addition, the bamboo manuscripts “Zi Gao” 子羔 and especially “Rong cheng shi” 榮成氏 in the Shanghai Museum corpus discuss the issue of abdication; see Pines 2005a and 2010, again with a wealth of references. Hanshu 75: 3153–3154; see Arbuckle 1995: 588–589; Sukhu 2005–2006: 103–106. See the various passages in Hanshu 99A.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

Language and the Ideology of Kingship in the “Canon of Yao”

147

peror Yu [= Shun]” 虞帝之苗裔 who ruled because the spirit of the Han founding emperor, Han Gaozu 漢高祖 (r. 202–195 bce), had abdicated his dynasty in Wang’s favor.61 After assuming the throne, Wang continued to invoke the abdication to him, the new Shun, on various occasions not only in speech but also in ritual and administrative activities where he imitated the purported government structure of Shun’s reign, enshrined him in the imperial ancestral temple as Wang’s ancestor, and, in the hour of his death, carried Shun’s ceremonial knife.62 In short, the one person at the late Former Han imperial court who could invoke Yao’s abdication to Shun as a political model was the man who ended the existing dynasty to set up his own. To all others, the historical example of Yao’s abdication was fraught with ambiguity and peril. Nevertheless, and regardless of the core problem of abdication, the overall vision of Yao as presented in the “Yao dian” was acceptable to Han thinkers because it represented a historical time of kingship before the organization of an actual state. Yao was both charismatic and archaic; his refusal to follow his advisers evinced a political structure that was at best incipient, and his principal task at the dawn of history was to harmonize the primordial state of humanity with the course of nature. Shun, by contrast, was the ruler not merely of the next historical period but of a radically different stage in the development of human social and political organization. Shun appoints a set of administrators all with specific tasks; the result is a catalog of functionaries to run a system of government. This system is characterized by a number of features. First, it has no place for the ruler’s individuality; unlike Yao, Shun operates as the head of a functioning order. Second, it is particularized, regulated, and comprehensive, as seen not only in the unification of weights, measures, and rituals but also in its dealings with the different types of criminals, their punishments, and their places of exile. Third, it reveals a strong sense of order, manifest in the continuous use of numerological organization. Fourth, it is connected to a pantheon of cosmic spirits whose support is regarded as essential to the stability of the state. This stability is guaranteed not by a single deity such as Heaven; instead, it rests on a network of local spirits across the vast physical realm of the empire that could now, as an expression of his territorial sovereignty, be addressed by a cosmic ruler. This, as opposed to appeals to the single deity of Heaven, is also characteristic of Qin and early Han rule (Loewe 2004: 421–440). Fifth, the appointments handed out 61 62

Hanshu 99A: 4095. See also Sukhu 2005–2006: 120–124. For the complete genealogical construction, see Hanshu 98: 4013. See Hanshu 99B: 4105–4108, 4111, 4131, 4144; 99C: 4162, 4174, 4190. For a full account of Wang Mang’s claim to be Shun’s descendant, see the excellent study by Michael Loewe (1994).

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

148

Kern

by the emperor are invariably successful; the few cases where an appointee attempts to refuse are entirely formulaic, and they are immediately resolved by the emperor’s unquestioned command. Remarkably, this overall representation of Shun matches exactly how his successor Yu is portrayed in the long “Yu gong” 禹貢 chapter of the Shangshu, where the name Yu appears exactly twice: in the very first sentence and in the very last: “Yu laid out the land” (禹敷土) and “Yu presented [or: was presented with] the dark scepter to announce that his work was accomplished” (禹錫玄 圭告厥成功). Everything in between is a completely impersonal and totalizing account of the systematic organization of the realm that is merely initiated by the emperor but that otherwise just seems to fall into place (see Legge 1991: 93–150). The features of Shun’s (and Yu’s) system of government are eminently compatible with, and quite possibly a reflection of, the political ideology in the service of the Qin and early Han imperial court. What is more, the “Yao dian” does not merely describe the ancient rulers—through the very nature of the text, it stages them rhetorically. This is reflected in the different types of speeches attributed to Yao and Shun and even more profoundly in how Shun’s rule is depicted: for the most part, the emperor is never present or even mentioned. What has traditionally been read as a narrative with Shun as the implied subject is a largely subjectless text par excellence—a text that does not distinguish between the actions of the ruler and the successful workings of the anonymous bureaucratic state. Monarchs like the Qin First Emperor or Emperor Wu of the Han could not have failed to realize how much the representation of Shun was also their own. Thus, while a host of other early texts make us see “Yao and Shun” as the two primordial sages standing for the same political ideals of antiquity, the “Yao dian” sharply differs in their representation, most prominently with regard to the question of imperial succession. No learned man of the Qin and Han would have missed this point, which may once again confirm the unique status of the Shangshu as a truly imperial text—monopolized, edited, and possibly in parts written or rewritten at the imperial courts of the Qin and Han.63 One may wonder how to interpret the striking differences in the representations of the two mythological emperors. One way to understand the “Yao dian” 63

Chen Mengjia 1985: 135–136, 144–146; Jiang Shanguo 1988: 28; Kanaya Osamu 1992: 236– 240; Kern 2000a: 183–196. Thus, Wang Chong 王充 (27–ca. 100) was only half right when praising the stele inscriptions erected by the Qin First Emperor: “Those who contemplate and recite them see the beauty of Yao and Shun” (觀讀之者，見堯、舜之美); see Lunheng jiaoshi 20: 855 (“Xu song” 須頌).

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

Language and the Ideology of Kingship in the “Canon of Yao”

149

(including the “Shun dian”) is to take the two emperors as two types of rulers— or, rather, as personifications of two different types of rulership: here the archaic persona of the charismatic emperor who sings of antiquity, there the more recent and largely invisible technocrat who creates, as part of his comprehensive order, the very system of music in which singing has its place. To push this one step further, Yao and Shun may have been viewed not just as two different types after which a monarch could model himself. Instead, Yao and Shun could have been understood as representing two complementary aspects of imperial rule that could be alternately actualized according to the situation. In fact, at least for the Qin and early Former Han, we find not only accounts of bureaucratic government (i.e., Shun’s model) but also representations of charismatic, even idiosyncratic, rulership (Yao’s model). This includes an entire lineup of political heroes and emperors who on occasion burst into impromptu song performances, from Xiang Yu 項羽 (232–202 bce) to Liu Bang 劉邦 (Han Gaozu) and the Han emperor Wu (Kern 2004). In positive terms, such a list would also include Emperor Wen 漢文帝 (r. 180–157 bce) with his emphatically personal deathbed edict expressing his care for the people;64 in pejorative terms, the figure of the charismatic ruler—who yet also ran a ruthless state machinery—could include the erratic megalomaniac as portrayed in the figure of the Qin First Emperor in the Shiji, where his random acts of violence are narrated in juxtaposition to the texts of his solemn mountain inscriptions in order to rhetorically undermine the latter (see Kern 2000a: 154–163). In all these cases, we see the breakdown of the boundary between “the king’s two bodies”—the personal “body natural” and the institutional “body politic”—described in Ernst H. Kantorowicz’s classic study (1957) of medieval European sovereignty. Yet another way to look at the different representations of Yao and Shun in the Shangshu is to take the account of Shun as a response to that of Yao—that is, to read the account of Yao as merely leading up to that of Shun. In this reading, the new rulership of Shun truly effaces the old one of Yao, replacing the ideal of archaic rule from the onset of history—a history initiated by Yao— with the new ideal of a cosmic ruler who commands a well-functioning state. There are some indications that this political effacement of Yao is indeed what happened in the minds of the Erudites who studied, edited, and controlled the Shangshu at the imperial court.65 First, for unexplained reasons the moderntext version contains under the header “Yu Xia shu” 虞夏書 (“The Yu and Xia 64 65

Hanshu 4:131–132. Note that the copies of the classics in the hands of the court Erudites were exempted from the infamous bibliocaust in 213 bce, and that the Shangshu was transmitted into the Han

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

150

Kern

Documents”) the first four chapters: “Yao dian,” “Gao Yao mo,” “Yu gong” 禹貢, and “Gan shi” 甘誓; by contrast, the ancient-text version assigns the title “Tang shu” 唐書 to the account of Yao. As the terms “Tang shu,” “Yu shu” 虞書, and “Xia shu” 夏書 refer to the dynastic designations of Yao, Shun, and Yu 禹, respectively, the modern-text version does not regard Yao to have constituted a dynasty of his own but includes him under Shun’s dynasty of Yu 虞.66 In this, however, the modern text may not reflect the Shangshu transmitted by Scholar Fu: the received text of his Shangshu dazhuan 尚書大傳 contains the “Yao dian” (including the “Shun dian” of the ancient text) as “Tang shu,” and no text before the Latter Han appears to refer to the “Yao dian” proper as “Yu shu.” In other words, the subjugation of the “Yao dian” under Shun’s dynasty may be a distinct Latter Han phenomenon, as seen, for example, in the Shuowen jiezi 說 文解字.67 Next, it appears that in early imperial texts, direct references to Shun’s account (i.e., the “Shun dian” of the ancient-text version) outnumber those to Yao’s account (the “Yao dian” without the “Shun dian” part) by roughly two to one (Chan Hung Kan and Ho Che Wah 2003: 1–47). While this is not an entirely accurate measure of the relative importance accorded to Yao and Shun, it does suggest a general tendency of early imperial writers to pay considerably more attention to Shun’s rule than to Yao’s—not because they necessarily shared the imperial vision of rulership but because that vision had been propagated by the Qin and Han courts. It would go far beyond the scope of the present essay to examine in detail how each and every Qin and Han source refers to Yao and Shun. However, any such attempt to understand early imperial views toward the two primordial sages would have to begin with their remarkably different representations in the text that stands at the very center of their legends, the Shangshu. For now, I would hypothesize that it may have been precisely its status as a court-sponsored and court-controlled classic that separated the Shangshu from other representations of Yao and Shun (especially with regard to the all-important issue of abdication), and that much early imperial writing and debate outside the court might have responded, in one way or another, to the imperial vision advanced by “official learning” (guanxue 官學). The imperial vision of rulership as idealized in the “Yao dian” account of Shun may not have resonated well

66 67

by the Qin court scholar Fu 伏 (only later known as Fu Sheng 伏勝, as shown in Cai 2011); see Kern 2000a: 184–194 (with further references). For the “Yao dian” as part of the “Yu shu,” see Chen Mengjia 1985: 90–91. See Chan Hung Kan and Ho Che Wah 2003: 1–16. Of eighteen Shuowen quotations listed there, sixteen include the reference “Yu shu.”

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

Language and the Ideology of Kingship in the “Canon of Yao”

151

with those intellectuals who wrote, taught, and debated from a critical distance to the court—and who were the true victims of imperial persecution not only in 213 bce (by the Qin First Emperor) but then again in 136 bce (by the Han emperor Wu).68 At the same time, the imperial view of rulership, with the emperor in the role not of an autocrat but of a largely impersonal government function, reflected the interests of the official court scholars. The idealization of an emperor who delegated much of his power, followed the advice of his subordinates, and abstained from personal activism driven by his own convictions was precisely in the interest of the learned men who governed the state—and who could point to the model of Shun very effectively when asking their ruler for personal restraint. To praise one’s emperor as a sage always imposed on him the obligation to emulate the ancient model—that is, the very sage whose image had been created by the classical scholars serving in office. To this end, abandoning the idea of abdication and supporting a hereditary dynasty not only was a small price to pay but also helped to sustain the political stability that guaranteed the constant reproduction of the scholarly elite at court. Unsurprisingly, the two most activist and idiosyncratic rulers of the early empire—who also boasted the most monumental accomplishments—ended up with a decidedly negative press in the historical records, written by the scholars: the Qin First Emperor and Emperor Wu of the Han. Across the table, the court scholars who tended so well to their own interests in drawing up and perpetuating images of sagely governance were the salaried ru 儒, the group most often—and most misleadingly—called “the Confucians.” 68

As argued in Kern 2000a: 190–191.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

152

Kern

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

Language and the Ideology of Kingship in the “Canon of Yao”

153

Part 2 Textual Battles: Rulers, Ministers, and the People

∵

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

154

Kern

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

Problematic Partnership in the Building of Absolute Monarchy

155

Chapter 5

Monarch and Minister: The Problematic Partnership in the Building of Absolute Monarchy in the Han Feizi 韓非子 Romain Graziani Il y a entre nous comme un flux et un reflux d’empire et de soumission. Montesquieu, Lettres persanes, IX

…

黃帝曰：上下一日百戰。 The Yellow Emperor said: “Between superiors and inferiors a hundred battles are fought each day.” Han Feizi jijie II.8: 51

⸪ One of the most accomplished scholars of Chinese political culture, Liu Zehua 劉澤華, has time and again demonstrated—and lamented—the overall agreement on, and endorsement of, a monarchical regime among Warring States thinkers, in spite of the diversity of their agendas. From the Confucian vision of charismatic kingship, diffused through a halo of ritual reaching out to the hearts of the people, to the ruler in the Mozi 墨子 who trusts all his subjects to be his eyes and ears in cognitive and moral unison, to the bureaucratic writ of an overarching invisible monarch feared by his ministers and by the mob, the pre-eminent principle of monarchism never really varies. Monarchical * I would like to express my gratitude to the editors of this volume, whose fierce benevolence and unsparing scrutiny have spurred me on to improve the initial version of my essay. I reserve a special thanks to Yuri Pines, who devoted a considerable amount of time offering suggestions to reinforce this chapter’s overall composition and to bring my thesis to fruition. It goes without saying—but much better once said—that I remain accountable for all possible errors remaining in the following pages.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004299337_007 Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

156

Graziani

ideology possessed the thinkers of the Warring States to such an extent that they were unable to propound and impose any institutional mechanism as protection against the arbitrary power of the sovereign. The virtuous prime minister was left with preaching, persuasion, or remonstrance—so, in the end, with nothing genuinely coercive. Instead of being considered as one possible regime among others in an arena of political debate and philosophical discussion, monarchy thus became the condition for these very debates and discussions, a commonly agreed, unquestioned preconception. Rather, all the thinkers of the Warring States (perhaps with the exception of Zhuangzi 莊子 and his followers) pondered upon the most efficient means to secure and reinforce monarchical authority. As these debates increased in importance and in vehemence, the theory of absolute monarchy became universally endorsed and promoted (see Liu Zehua 2000; cf. Pines 2009: 25–53). Liu Zehua characterizes this ideology by adducing a mass of ad hoc expressions and key quotations, painting a picture of consistent and unanimous collective reflection, each thinker bringing his tribute of ideas, sayings, and arguments to reinforce an ideological creation of reunified empire. And yet, this monarchical ideology taken as a whole is not entirely consistent. When examined carefully, many cracks and flaws appear behind the rhetorical veneer of received texts on this subject. Here, I shall be considering one of the most sophisticated thinkers on political authority, and assuredly one of the most notorious ideologues of early China, Han Fei 韓非 (ca. 280–233 bce). The eponymous received book Han Feizi 韓非子 (Master Han Fei) is undoubtedly a major contribution to the theory of absolute monarchy, and yet, influential as it may have been throughout Chinese history, because of its complex ideological content and its shifting paradigm of political authority it remains a problematic one: the Han Feizi brims with contradictory ideas about absolute power.1 Whatever his preferred tendency in any particular chapter, Han Fei never seeks to criticize the institution of monarchy itself; he does not even seek to justify it (see Pines 2013a: 72) apart from one or two strongly rhetorical passages that assimilate monarchy with the Way, or Dao, making monarchy the natural depository of its power. For it is not monarchy itself that is the problem, it is the monarch as an individual, his capacity to adhere with all his being to Han Fei’s precise idea of monarchy as a type of ontological power able to regulate all living creatures. In sum, Han Fei does not seek to found monarchy on a basis of reason; rather, he desires to make it possible in reality by seeking, 1 On the Han Feizi’s thought, its evolution, and its theoretical loopholes, see Song Hongbing 2010: 335–353.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

Problematic Partnership in the Building of Absolute Monarchy

157

on the one hand, to protect the monarch and, on the other, to protect the idea of monarchy from the monarch (i.e., from the ineffectual or deleterious conduct of the ruler). One of the main difficulties in reading the Han Feizi is to identify and define the political actor who could resolve the state of chaos and violence that plagued the dismembered Chinese world in the Warring States period. The reader is confronted with the unsettling alternation of two radically different concepts of sovereignty and the exercise of power, and in particular two different visions of the ruler-minister canonical dyad. As we shall see, this opposition is ultimately subordinated to a wider opposition, that between the human factor and the objective functioning of the system. Theoretically, the only man in command is the Legalist ruler, the Prince whose very being is patterned on the Principle (Dao).2 He keeps his ministers and grandees, his officers and dignitaries, on a leash; he does not reveal his plans; he maintains secrecy concerning his policies; and above all he never delegates those powers that are at the source of his authority: the power to reward and to punish, the power of life and death over every subject.3 Yet as Han Fei warns unceasingly, this pivotal figure of the Prince is threatened by almost every person around him, especially his ministers, who, by the very nature of their position, prove to be seditious, corrupt, deceitful, and intent on regicide. Chapter 5, “Zhu Dao” 主道 (“The Way of the Master”), chapter 7, “Er bing” 二柄 (“The Two Handles”), and chapter 8, “Yang quan” 揚權 2 See, for instance, chapter 5, “Zhu Dao” 主道 (“The Way of the Master”), in which the author quotes sayings reminiscent of the Laozi that can indifferently refer to the ruler or to the Way: “So quiet, that it dwells in space without any [definite] position! So remote, no one knows its location!” (故曰：寂乎其無位而處，漻乎莫得其所). The passage that follows portrays the ruler as the mysterious One controlling all his subjects (qun chen 群臣) (Han Feizi jijie I.5: 27). The whole of chapter 8, “Yang quan” 揚權 (“Wielding Power”), evokes in a long stream of taut versified formulas the art of divine rulership, served by a rhetoric that assimilates the Prince (often called the “Sage”) with the Way or Principle (Dao). 3 See, for example, chapter 21, “Yu Lao” 喻老 (“Illustrating Laozi”; Han Feizi jijie VII.21: 159). Han Fei recommends that the sovereign sever all relationships where there is an element of dependence on other human beings, so that the law remains the monarch’s sole guideline, adviser, and norm. In chapter 9, “Ba jian” 八姦 (“Eight Villainies”), the radical postulate is put forward according to which no one is faithful or loyal, and all servants necessarily seek to pursue their own personal interests. Chapter 4, “Ai chen” 愛臣 (“The Ruler’s Favorites”), warns against “powerful and wealthy ministers,” who are by definition a danger to the sovereign, their interests being in conflict with those of the master they serve (Han Feizi jijie I.4: 25). The power of the entourage can grow only to the detriment of that of the sovereign. Han Fei thus considers it necessary to pass measures limiting the power, the prestige, and the fortunes of ministers and subordinates.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

158

Graziani

(“Wielding Power”), which can all be ascribed with relative certainty to Han Fei himself, concur on a radical warning against the ever-simmering conflict between the ruler and his ministers. In chapter 11, “Gu fen” 孤憤 (“A Lone Man’s Frustrations”), one of the chapters attributed with most certainty to Han Fei, it is clear that the Prince’s entourage represents the greatest scourge. In this chapter, Han Fei explains that conflict per se between the sovereign and his ministers and dignitaries cannot be resolved, as they have essentially irreconcilable interests.4 Han Fei sees ministers as essentially disloyal and conjures the image of the treacherous minister of Lu 魯, Yang Hu 陽虎 (fl. ca. 500 bce). Elaborating on Yang’s case, Han Fei plays on the meaning of his first name, Hu, when taken as a noun meaning “tiger,” in order to suggest that ministers are like wild and ferocious beasts.5 Han Fei furthermore enumerates and warns against all the possible factors that account for the decline of monarchical authority, from the misdemeanors of officials to the scandalous abuses committed by those who dwell in the inner palaces. In chapter 15, “Wang zheng” 亡徵 (“Signs of Ruin”), Han Fei describes all the ills and vices that will continue to rot the Chinese imperial system in the future: he points to the mechanisms that undermine political authority and, through his analysis, tries to arrest the forces disrupting the social order. What is the source of perennial threats to political stability? According to Han Fei, the problems identified arise not from the nature of the monarchical regime (such as the unilateral exercise of power) but from a deficit in monarchical authority benefiting covert and self-interested powers (the private entourage of the sovereign and his ministers). In reality, monarchy is the only proper institution; what ruins it is the fact that it is not absolute. In its empirical forms, it inevitably turns into a surreptitious oligarchy (at best, a dyarchy): power, de facto, is necessarily split between the different factions that revolve around the throne (retainers and relatives, wives and concubines, sons and eunuchs, etc.). Han Fei is obsessed with the depletion of power, to such an extent that he sees usurpation everywhere: usurpation is no longer envisaged as a coup d’état only but as the natural, ongoing erosion of authority, as if the 4 臣主之與相異者也 (Han Feizi jijie IV.11: 84 [“Gu fen” 孤憤]). In this way, Han Fei not only is aiming at the most corrupt and least loyal servants of political authority but also recognizes that a minister will tend naturally toward regicide and that he must be held constantly in check. “The reason ministers do not murder their lord is that their factions and cliques are not sufficiently prepared” (Han Feizi jijie II.8: 51 [“Yang quan”]). It would appear that Shen Buhai 申不害 (d. 337 bce) was the first vigorous exponent of the danger of usurpation of power by perfidious ministers (on this point and more generally on the anti-shi line of discourse, I refer the reader to Pines 2009: 173). 5 See Han Feizi jijie II.8: 50 (“Yang quan”); I.5: 28 (“Zhu Dao”); XVI.39: 382 (“Nan si” 難四).

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

Problematic Partnership in the Building of Absolute Monarchy

159

ruler’s pre-eminence were unmistakably “usurped” whenever he delegated a modicum of his authority. It is therefore necessary to constantly protect the monarchy from its representatives and its agents. And yet here comes another source of danger to the monarchy: the monarch himself. The figure of the absolute monarch, wielding the two handles (er bing 二柄) of political authority, overawing his ministers and extending his writ across the realm like a god, omniscient and invisible,6 is a powerful ideological construction, but problematic de facto. Even a cursory perusal of the fifty-five chapters of the Han Feizi shows the reader that the transcendent place of the monarch in the political system also implies his effective absence from the political stage. The greater his role, the less significant his person. Han Fei believes in and relies on the stabilizing power of laws and techniques. For him, moral constraints and appeals to personal conviction count for nothing in comparison with the coercive power of the law. Effective policies are implemented and concrete tasks must be carried out by loyal and competent ministers abiding by laws and in line with accepted methods (shu 術). Thus, Han Fei’s idea of an absolute monarchy protected from the ill-willed and secured by law hesitates between two different models of political organization and, above all, between two contradictory kinds of ruler-servant relationships. In devising historical anecdotes and theoretical antidotes to the disorder of the state and the weakness of political authority, the Han Feizi veers to and fro, constantly switching support from monarch to minister, extolling one at the expense of the other, and finally seeming to discredit both. In light of this ambiguity, the conundrum is whether we should view Han Fei’s project as a political system that goes beyond the kind of monarchism endorsed by all the thinkers of the Warring States, as a kind of absolute monarchy never previously envisaged, or, on the contrary, whether we should see Han Fei as persistently nullifying his insistence on an absolute monarchy, favoring instead a “soft” monarchy hinging on a dual system that implies collaboration—however problematic this might prove to be—with a wise and Legalist minister. My working hypothesis is that Han Fei and possibly other authors in the Han Feizi were primarily concerned with building a political system that could work 6 See, in particular, the first half of chapter 5, “The Way of the Master” (Han Feizi jijie I.5: 26–28), where the ruler is said to see everything while remaining invisible and to contemplate the origin of all beings, solve all matters, and control every action while remaining empty and quiescent, etc. See also relevant passages in chapter 8, “Wielding Power,” such as “All those who are sheltered within the Four Seas / The hidden side [yin] of the Way brings them to light” 四 海既藏，道陰見陽 (Han Feizi jijie II.8: 44), or “The ruler cloisters himself, sheltered in his inner quarters, and from his room can observe his court” 上固閉內扃，從室視庭 (Han Feizi jijie II.8: 48).

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

160

Graziani

smoothly and absorb shocks caused by unruly individuals whatever their position in the system. Seen from this perspective, both monarch and ministers were to play roles subservient to the monarchical order itself, though by their very antagonistic positions they were likely to become an inherent source of instability. Naturally, the very notion of a system whose structure takes precedence over the individuals inside the system could not be formulated as such. I shall start my analysis by considering the contradictions apparent in the choice of the key personality of the kingdom. What are the reasons for Han Fei’s hesitation? To what degree is his hesitation the symptom of a tension between his empirical observations and his theoretical creativity? And between the teachings of history and his attachment to doctrinal principles? I shall move then to explore his contradictory views of the ministers, now in favor of some of them, now against all of them—with an appreciable disproportion in the book, it should be noted, in favor of the antiministerial position. These contradictions have been observed and commented upon many a time,7 but with diverging conclusions about the composition, authorship, and inner consistency of the text.8 I stand here against the idea that a core doctrine can be identified in the Han Feizi, to be found only in certain chapters, and against the assumption that the chapters that seem to run counter to this supposedly original Han Feizi are therefore all forged or spurious.9 As I shall try to demonstrate in the last sections of this essay, these tensions or contradictions are inherent 7

8

9

Yuri Pines has offered the clearest formulation of the conflict between the need to protect the monarch from his entourage and the need to protect political authority from the personal intervention of the monarch. See Pines 2012: 44–75; 2013a: 69. The present study is in keeping with his understanding of the question of monarchy in the Han Feizi. The reader should bear in mind that the Han Feizi is not a book but a collection of texts and essays written at different stages of Han Fei’s life and selected by an anonymous editor after his brutal death. Han Fei therefore did not supervise this collation; hence, many inconsistencies have been left unresolved (see Goldin 2013a; Pines 2013a: 68–69; Hunter 2013). The authorship and authenticity of the Han Feizi, concerning at least all the numerous chapters not quoted by Sima Qian in his biography of Han Fei, as well as those that seem to run counter to the core of the Legalist doctrine, have been called into question. The first important modern study is that of Rong Zhaozu (1936), whose conclusions find few partisans nowadays. For a criticism of Rong Zhaozu’s hypothesis that the various currents of thought expressed in the Han Feizi correspond to different writers, see Goldin’s introduction to his Dao Companion to the Philosophy of Han Fei (Goldin 2013a) and, in the same book, Pines 2013a: 68. The most methodical and comprehensive studies are to my knowledge Lundahl 1992 and Zheng Liangshu 1993. One should also note that several chapters include the exposition of political conceptions and moral values that may have been transcribed by Han Fei but that hardly reflect his own thought. I abstain from quoting such possible passages when studying Han Fei’s own

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

Problematic Partnership in the Building of Absolute Monarchy

161

to Han Fei himself. They reflect in part his own intellectual development, his all-too-understandable hesitations over the course of his career, and finally the variety of his audiences, necessitating different kinds of arguments and uses of rhetoric.10

The Bliss and the Blight of Absolute Monarchy

Although Han Fei constantly emphasizes the need to protect the monarch from anything that would erode his authority, he also takes care to protect the state and the work of the bureaucrats against the folly, stupidity, or ignorance of a bad sovereign. This is why a sovereign who enjoys effective and absolute power is sometimes considered the ideal person to resolve the dissension and conflicts undermining the state but can also be looked upon as a scourge to be neutralized and reduced to an abstract symbol of authority. The sovereign is in effect often ignorant and capricious, unable to recognize where his own interests lie, a situation aggravated by the absence of institutional restrictions on his arbitrary decision-making. It is evident that Han Fei feels great frustration at having to spend so much effort trying to persuade and win the trust of such a contemptible individual. In the first case, the sovereign exerts political authority alone and against all, makes decisions on all matters, and never delegates power. Logic demands that he spend his time inspecting and ordering checks on all the information referred to him.11 In the second case, the monarch is a purely symbolic being, insignificant per se, only legitimated by his bloodline and his rank, who leaves others to act in his place and avoids interfering with the tasks and missions of his subjects.12 But in both cases, Han Fei accepts without ever questioning it the principle of hereditary transfer of power, which is the most secure,

10

11 12

conflicting views (as in the tetrad entitled “Nan” 難, or “Refutations”). On this point see also Goldin 2013a: 1. I have already supported this asseveration in my study of Han Fei’s rhetoric (see Graziani 2012: 49–50) and concur with Paul Goldin’s views, clearly expressed in Goldin 2005a: 62 and 2013a. Those who impugn the authenticity of portions of the Han Feizi often fail to recognize that one can point to contradictions or conflicting views in almost any writings from ancient philosophers, in Greece, in Rome, or during the Enlightenment for that matter. See chapter 17, “Bei Nei” 備內 (“Precautions against the Nearest”), Han Feizi jijie V.17: 116. On this chapter, see n. 42. See, e.g., Han Feizi jijie XI.32: 266 (“Wai chu shuo, zuo shang” 外儲說左上). In this passage, You Ruo 有若 scolds Mi Zijian 宓子賤 on his poor abilities and reminds him that a

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

162

Graziani

automatic, and impersonal way of legitimizing rulers. In this respect, he condemns transmission founded on merit (as was the case from Yao 堯 to Shun 舜) as well as the overthrow, by heavenly mandate, of a sovereign judged to be incompetent or debauched, as was the case with the founders of the Shang and Zhou dynasties, Kings Tang 湯 and Wu 武.13 Yet, inevitable as it is for Han Fei, the very principle of hereditary transmission of power constitutes from a logical point of view an obvious exception to his doctrine. It not only contradicts the meritocratic ideology that aims to abolish the system of hereditary responsibilities and personal recommendations, the system that allows the promotion of corrupt and incompetent individuals, but also places the sovereign above the norms and protects him from laws that should be universal and absolute. In this respect an oscillation can be observed in the Han Feizi between, on the one hand, the boundless confidence in the superiority of institutional and political mechanisms over all human factors and, on the other hand, the hopeless search for the competent man to hold the reins of the state in an entirely impartial manner. Although in many respects Han Fei questions the very foundations of the organization of the state since the establishment of the Zhou dynasty,14 he does not attack the idea of a head of state acceding to the throne by the chance of birth or the whims of succession. In chapter 22, “Shuo lin, shang” 說林上 (“Forest of Anecdotes, I”), it is evident that Han Fei does not carry his idea of meritocracy to the extreme: the core of the system, the king, still contradicts the general norm of the functioning of the state because Han Fei cannot find a solution to the clash between his doctrine and historical necessity. He is therefore obliged to integrate the unavoidable fact of absolute submission to an indiv­idual who is more often than not totally unqualified for the exercise of supreme command. Because of his principles, Han Fei cannot rid himself of this constraint. So he seems to opt for a practical solution that appears to preserve the traditional forms of political authority: this solution consists in

13

14

ruler with adequate techniques can idly remain in his palace, graced with the fresh complexion of a maiden, without causing any harm to his government. See in particular chapter 51, “Zhong xiao” 忠孝 (“Loyalty and Filiality”; Han Feizi jijie XX.51: 466–467), and chapter 36, “Nan yi” 難一 (“Refutations 1”; Han Feizi jijie XV.36: 349–350), which excoriate Yao, Shun, Tang, and Wu for all opposing the propriety of ruler and minister, thereby wreaking havoc on the teachings for future generations. Yao turned his minister Shun into a ruler and proved unable to foster (his talents) properly (xu Shun 蓄舜); not only was Shun a minister who reduced his ruler to a subordinate position, but even his undertakings as a minister could be lauded only at the detriment of Yao’s sov­er­eignty. See, e.g., chapter 6, “You du” 有度 (“On Having Standards”; Han Feizi jijie II.6: 94ff.).

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

Problematic Partnership in the Building of Absolute Monarchy

163

surreptitiously transforming effective power into symbolic sovereignty. Han Fei relieves the sovereign of all substance so that he is no longer an obstacle, and at the same time he purifies him of everything that normally constitutes a human being so that he is shielded from attack. Therefore, the ruler must at all costs avoid the faintest manifestation of human behavior, and, through the practice of calm and non-action, get rid of his (all-too) human characteristics: “(The ruler) exterminates expectations, suppresses thoughts, and is not driven by human desires.”15 In chapter 34, the author comments on a passage from Shenzi 申子 (i.e., Shen Buhai) according to which any display of knowledge, desire, or feeling on the part of the ruler constitutes an occasion for trapping or exploiting him, hence the necessity to remain in non-action, invisible, out of reach.16 In turning the sovereign into this strange creature, lacking all determination and all capacities, Han Fei kills two birds with one stone: he not only manages to impose the idea of a being immune to the temptations, partiality, and desires that obscure and enfeeble ordinary sovereigns but also renders the sovereign immune to the plotting, machinations, and calculations of his ministers and dignitaries. Yuri Pines (2013a: 81) says in the same vein: “The ruler will benefit twice by preserving secrecy and nullifying his desires. First, he avoids the traps of scheming ministers; and second, he is able to manipulate them and achieve glory and fame.” I would add that Han Fei also benefits twice in that by nullifying the ruler’s individuality, he partly reconciles the contradictions between his antiministerial onslaught and his mistrust of fully empowered rulers. He also keeps the hostile intentions of the ruler’s retinue (all the ministers, servants, advisers, and kin that mill around the throne) at bay, while parrying the ruler’s detrimental effect on the machinery of the state. In other words, by ridding the monarch of all emotional or human elements, Han Fei claims to make him coincide with the clear idea of absolute monarchy. In chapters 20, “Jie Lao 解老” (“Explaining Laozi”), 21, “Yu Lao 喻老” (“Illustrating Laozi”), and 24, “Guan xing 觀行” (“Observing Conducts”), Han Fei puts forward the idea of the asceticism of the sovereign, starting with physiological purification, in or-

15 16

絕其望， 破其意, 毋使人欲 (Han Feizi jijie I.5: 28 [“Zhu Dao”]). Han Feizi jijie XIV.34: 317–318 (“Wai chu shuo, you shang” 外儲說右上). The passage that immediately follows is in the same vein: the discussion about the art of trapping birds is an exhortation to permanent camouflage, which enables the two eyes of the ruler to control the myriad eyes spying on him.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

164

Graziani

der to produce a being who is reformed, clear-headed, and unaffected by his surroundings.17 Evidently, this idea is more theoretical than realistic. In sum, the annihilation of the ruler as a human being is the theoretical— and how very rhetorical—answer to a key contradiction between contending visions of rulership that run through the Han Feizi and partially compromise its philosophical coherence. It is clear, however, that this injunction to practice asceticism in order to commit body and mind to sovereignty—that is, to enable the sovereign to distance himself from all the attractions and all the traps of the senses—evinces a high degree of optimism, which is moderated in other chapters of the Han Feizi.18 Whether the sovereign has sufficient strength of character to be ascetic to the point of being able to reign with impartiality, or whether he is a person devoid of the will to intervene in the affairs of the kingdom, he must in all cases allow the system to function without interference from his own unwelcome subjectivity (preferences, opinions, intuition, personal viewpoints, etc.). Only the elimination of the human factor can guarantee the efficient and longlasting workings of the monarchy. Whether the sovereign is powerful and virtuous like Yao or cruel and grasping like Jie 桀, the prophylactics for the health of the body politic are the same: subjectivity, or, to use Han Fei’s own term, “personal partiality” (si 私), remains a constant threat. Again in chapter 5, “The Way of the Master,” the ideal sovereign is portrayed in mystical terms like the perfect synthesis of this double postulate: by describing him as confined by non-action, in retreat from human activities, secret, invisible but always informed of everything that is happening in the empire, Han Fei creates a conceptual figure, applicable both to the mediocre man and to the exceptional one. In both cases, the sovereign abstains from all subjective expression, from any “human, too human” act, whether through lack or excess of virtue. Chapter 8, “Wielding Power,” also teems with rhymed formulas pressing the ruler to remain invisible, motionless, and impersonal, in the image of the Way: “Once you 17

18

On chapters 20 and 21, I refer the reader to Sarah A. Queen’s (2013a) translations and commentaries. Regarding chapter 24, I see no valid reasons to reject Han Fei’s authorship. Lundahl (1992) has shown Rong Zhaozu’s arguments as being far from conclusive. A few comforting exceptions to this ascetic vision appear when Han Fei “allows” the sovereign amusement in the company of his favorites, on the condition that he remain impervious to their influence. E.g., in chapter 9, “Eight Villainies”: “When an enlightened ruler is in his women’s inner quarters, he may revel in sex with them, but he does not oblige when they petition him, and he does not satisfy the private favors they ask of him” (明君之於內也，娛其色而不行其謁，不使私請。Han Feizi jijie II.9: 56).

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

Problematic Partnership in the Building of Absolute Monarchy

165

reach emptiness, remain like this and wait; others will make the first move.”19 “If you rid yourself of affection and hate, the empty mind will be as an abode for the Way.”20 Both chapters 5 and 8 of the Han Feizi can be construed as an ideological exaltation of monism, monarchy being the refraction on the political plane of the action of the Way (Dao). Monism for the universe, monarchism for the empire, and monachism—so to speak—for the ascetic sovereign, who has purged himself of all feeling in order to become the center from which the power of the Dao radiates. Once Han Fei has created a verbal image of a king who is exempt from all the wrongs usually connected with a damaged and weakened political authority, he finds himself with an empty shell. One could go so far as to say that the hollower the figure of the monarch, the more absolute the monarchical power.

The Providential Appearance of the Legalist Minister

When the sovereign has succeeded in removing himself from the empire of the senses, the conflict between him and his ministers and the threat that the ­latter represent no longer exist, but at the cost of a conjuring trick whereby Han Fei appears to make the sovereign “disappear” and the ministers “dissolve.” The only unanimously commendable person in several chapters of the Han Feizi is the loyal minister, who is preoccupied solely with the well-being of the state and who must be wily enough in his dealings with the sovereign to­ remain in favor while imposing his train of reforms. But this Legalist minister is never more than the simple incarnation of the law, institutions, and techniques of government. Reading the Han Feizi, one cannot help observing how this commendable minister represents a startling exception in psychological and anthropological terms: in the Legalist dramatic rendition of the Chinese political landscape, he is the only personage unaffected by the vices, in­ clinations, or failings that Han Fei condemns in all other human beings. He is even represented, in a keen exercise of self-promotion by Han Fei, as being the only person capable of self-sacrifice for the good of his country.21 19 20 21

虛而待之，彼自以之。 (Han Feizi jijie II.8: 44 [“Yang quan”]). 故去喜去惡，虛心以為道舍。 (Han Feizi jijie II.8: 48 [“Yang quan”]). See the passage in chapter 12, “Shui nan” 說難 (“Difficulties of Persuasion”), in which the author recalls that sages like Yi Yin and Baili Xi 百里奚 allowed themselves to be humiliated and enslaved just to be heard and hired by their lords and thereby succor and serve the world: “In their situation, they had no other choice but to commit themselves to a

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

166

Graziani

This exemplary figure of the Legalist minister, best illustrated in the Han Feizi by ministers such as Shang Yang 商鞅 (d. 338 bce), Guan Zhong 管仲 (d. 645 bce), and Wu Qi 吳起 (d. 381 bce)—referred to below—is perhaps the only possible and coherent response to the problem of the incarnation of the monarchy, and even so, Han Fei refuses to envisage the consequences of such a postulate: that is, that a bad sovereign ought to abdicate in favor of his Legalist minister. This means that Legalist thought did not develop the effects of its doctrinal revolution to a logical conclusion.22 Legalism was restricted by the idea of hereditary sovereignty, implying the acceptance of all the sources of tension that its system claims to remove. Sources of conflict between the king and the law persist, even if Han Fei takes precautions on both sides by trying to imagine a system that could function in a relatively automatic manner while the monarch interferes as little as possible with this system. As Han Fei does not give preference to law over king,23 the latter is both the guarantee of the system and its weak point. The king remains the noon and the sunset of imperium. So this is the alternative confronting the careful reader of the Han Feizi: now the rejection of any temptation to rely on a competent and enlightened minister (as he would overshadow the sovereign, imposing his authority at the sole expense of the latter), now the promotion of the loyal and competent minister who represents the requisite support for all actions by the sovereign. When Han Fei situates himself in the course of history and argues from an empirical standpoint, the courageous, loyal, competent, and expert minister wins the day. Chapter 14 gives the examples of Yi Yin 伊尹, Guan Zhong, and Shang Yang, who all contributed to the power, the glory, and the authority of their masters. Such ministers enable great states and long reigns. In this historical perspective, as opposed to a theoretical one, the sovereign is more often than not described as a person who is difficult to convince, obstinate, capricious, and deaf to reason.24 This is the meaning of the story recounting the meeting

22

23 24

lowly condition in order to approach their lord, and therefore they debased themselves. Today, I too with my words would play as low as a cook or a slave if it enabled me to be heard and to be of any use to help the present age” (然猶不能無役身以進，如此其汙 也。今以吾言為宰虜，而可以聽用而振世。Han Feizi jijie IV.12: 92). Pines (2005a and 2009: 54–81) reflects on the reasons why this abdication paradigm, which seems to have gained partisans among the educated elite of the Warring States, eventually failed. This would be the role of a constitution, inconceivable at the time. Among many historical examples, Han Feizi recalls, in a sardonic tone, the tragic death of Lord Huan of Qi, whose terrible end resulted from his bad choice of prime minister, a man

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

Problematic Partnership in the Building of Absolute Monarchy

167

of Doctor Bian Que 扁鵲 with Lord Huan of Cai 蔡桓公 (r. 714–695 bce).25 The latter refuses to listen to the diagnosis and succumbs to the illness that is insidiously destroying him. Here, Bian Que is cast as the sagacious minister who fails to persuade the body politic to swallow the bitter medicine of his verdict.26 More alarmingly, suggests Han Fei, it is the lord’s own irresponsibility that makes the disease a mortal one. He is once again conjured up in this recurring story as the worst enemy of his own state. The contradiction in these choices for decision-making is evident. On the one hand, the Han Feizi insists on stripping the minister-adviser of all decisionmaking power and considers the judgment of the sovereign to be absolute (even if fallible de facto). But on the other hand, it constantly reveals the disastrous errors of judgment made by these sovereigns, whose lives end in tragedy and mockery. The stories in chapter 10, “Shi guo” 十過 (“Ten Errors”), illustrate the catastrophic decisions made by obstinate or greedy sovereigns, although they had benefited from having wise and clairvoyant advisers at their service, and who ended up as the scoff of the whole world. The conflict between these two visions of political authority leads us to ponder the two seemingly irreconcilable stances in the Han Feizi regarding the use and value of ministers. These contending visions of political authority and, on a formal plane, the bifurcation between theoretical views and empirical arguments (the latter made via historical examples and anecdotes) certainly suggest different intentions and distinct kinds of audience. Some texts obviously were written with the idea of directly persuading the ruler. Other texts, such as those that oppose the figure of a good and powerful minister to a stupid and mean ruler, cannot plausibly have been designed as a mirror for the monarch. But what kind of audience did they target, then? A private circle of personal disciples, a coterie of wandering intellectuals searching, as did Han Fei, for opportunities in Qin? Or just an imaginary audience of kindred spirits who would put Han Fei’s ideas to use? We cannot even ascertain what texts Han Fei wrote exactly, which texts

25 26

whom Guan Zhong had disparaged and advised against (see, e.g., Han Feizi jijie III.10: 74 [“Shi guo” 十過]). This is not a historical account but surely a fictitious encounter since the two men seem to have lived two centuries apart. See also the chapters “Illustrating Laozi” and “An wei”  安危 (“Security and Perils”), where Han Fei uses a therapeutic analogy to express the necessity for a painful remedy to heal the kingdom. The scalpel must be used to remove the ill that plagues the country, however painful the operation. Han Fei compares the good minister to the surgeon and the country to the diseased body ignorant of its ills. The sovereign himself resembles the patient who must cooperate and accept the pain in order that the talents of the minister/ physician be fully revealed (Han Feizi jijie VII.21: 161; VIII.25: 199).

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

168

Graziani

in the Han Feizi were meant to be widely circulated, which texts served as a basis for an oral address, or which ones are the reworked transcriptions of speeches initially pronounced in court. At least we should keep in mind this variety of practical contexts when reading the Han Feizi, since it may help us reduce the number of incompatible statements that we may be tempted to view exclusively in terms of logical contradictions.

Han Fei’s Optimism about Wise Ministers

Ideally, the sovereign should appear as a divine being who is endowed with the efficacy of a god through the sagacious use of the instruments of domination at his disposal. Han Fei describes the various administrative techniques that even a mediocre person on the throne can use to safeguard his dominion. But when the thinker or his followers pay heed to the lessons from the past and from recent history, they understand the need to rethink the doctrine of monarchy even with respect to mediocre leaders: the existence of grasping, immature kings justifies the cynical lessons in political psychology addressed to advisers and servants for survival at court. Hence, we have the many passages in favor of ministers, seen as the ultimate bulwark against chaos, though in most chapters (“normally,” one is tempted to say), Han Fei does not put the faintest trust in them. In the chapters inclined toward the pivotal role of the minister, it is difficult to find an adviser who is directly contradicted by events despite a plethora of stories describing all sorts of men formulating predictions or recommending certain courses of action to their lords.27 It is as if the counselor could always identify the necessary consequences of the situation and provide an infallible prognosis. The plans he formulates are never ruined by unexpected circumstances or unforeseen elements.28 His ability to predict the reactions of both enemies and allies is never questioned, either by his entourage during the narration or by the author of the story. The predicted events take place according 27

28

One must nonetheless acknowledge that in certain chapters, including the cluster of “Refutations” (“Nan” 難), we do find harsh comments and excoriating remarks about advisers and ministers whose moral judgment jars with the basic tenets of political intelligence. See in chapter 23, “Shuo lin, xia” 說林下 (“Forest of Persuasions 2”), the story of the gift presented to Han Jiu 韓咎, which can be understood as favorable, whether the sovereign prospers or falls (Han Feizi jijie VIII.23: 195). In these stories, the course of events always bends toward predictive logic (on a similar optimistic rendition of events in the Zhanguo ce 戰國策 [Stratagems of the Warring States], see Graziani 2012: 57–58).

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

Problematic Partnership in the Building of Absolute Monarchy

169

to the adviser’s implacable logic, and there is never an unexpected development. The blur of reality, the arrival of the unforeseen or unpredictable, and the power of contingency in the real world never arise in these didactic stories and episodes in the Han Feizi. As in a good game of chess, the consequences of a move are always predicted and anticipated in all their most distant developments. The only residual problem, then, from the political standpoint is when the sovereign does not act upon the advice given. It is the absence of adequacy, not between reality and discourse, but between discourse and its subjective effect upon the sovereign that is seen as the real obstacle. The minister is the understanding and the sovereign is reason. The former personifies knowledge and the latter represents judgment. The adviser suggests, the sovereign decides.29 The only uncertain element resides, not in the empirical course of phenomena, which are predicted in their entirety by the understanding of the adviser, but in the sovereign’s final decision; according to his character and his ability, he will or will not be aware of the finesse of the suggested plan. Indeed, error and defeat are the result of incompetent decisions and bad judgment made by the monarch who obstinately refuses the course of action suggested by his adviser.30 Examples of ministerial far-sightedness and the ruler’s short-sightedness permeate the Han Feizi. In the chapter “Ten Errors,” we find, for instance, the story of the skillful adviser Zhi Guo 智過, who finally manages to escape and change his name after discovering that his master, Zhi Bo Yao 智伯瑤, is insensitive to his objurgations and makes the worst possible decisions by betraying his Han and Wei allies.31 In the same chapter, the tragic example of 29

30

31

In this respect, one should note in the Han Feizi, in contrast to the Stratagems of the Warring States, how rare is the occurrence of the exposition of two widely differing courses of action, or two contradicting action plans presented by rival advisers, where the sovereign must settle the difference and reach a decision. The beginning of chapter 11, “Gu fen” (“A Lone Man’s Rage”), compares two sorts of advisers: the unprincipled ambitious man with political clout (zhong ren 重人) and the competent, honest, and upright scholar who can cleave to the law (neng fa zhi ren 能法之人) (Han Feizi jijie IV.11: 76). Han Feizi jijie III.10: 66–70 (“Shi guo”). Further on in the same chapter, a moral tale illustrates the damage wrought by the obstinacy of the sovereign who does not listen to his honest adviser: “Erring without listening to one’s faithful adviser and acting on one’s own intent lead to the loss of one’s good name and the mockery of the whole world” (過而不 聽忠臣，獨行其意，則滅其高名，為天下笑之始也). I am inclined to accept the position of Liang Qichao (1936: 50), Rong Zhaozu (1982: 59a–b), Zheng Liangshu (1989b: 255–256), Zhou Xunchu (1980: 69–75), and Lundahl (1992: 215–218), according to which

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

170

Graziani

Bigan 比干and Guan Longpang 關龍逢 is brandished by a wise minister, Yan Zhuoju 顏涿聚, condemned to death by Lord Jing of Qi 齊景公 for having reminded him of his duties.32 This chapter contains a series of stories in the same vein, some fairly detailed, portraying perceptive ministers and advisers faced with feeble and obstinate sovereigns. The figure of the loyal and competent minister, recurrent in the Han Feizi, has as his expected opposite an ignorant and benighted master. In chapter 14, “Jian jie shi chen” 姦劫弒臣 (“Perfidious, Fierce, and Regicidal Ministers”), the models for competent and enlightened men are the ministers Yi Yin, Guan Zhong,33 and Shang Yang, who brought prestige and power to their master.34 Achieving peace, power, and prosperity hinges, if we are to believe this set of stories, on the choice of a good prime minister. The author’s reading of the past and his use of the rhetoric of history serve the idea that ministers and advisers are the ones who in fact govern, who make alliances and conquests, who cause the reversals and betrayals in the enemy camp. Failures and defeats all have their sources in the sovereign and his bad decisions.

32

33

34

the chapter was not penned by Han Fei but by a later disciple who was evidently more preoccupied with morality than was Han Fei, but the chapter, nevertheless, does not run afoul of Han Fei’s doctrine. On the translation of shi 飾 as chi 飭, see Chen Qiyou 1958: 311; Lundahl 1992: 189n180. Han Feizi jijie III.10:73 (“Shi guo”). It should be noted that the author of chapter 19, “Shi xie” 飾邪 (“Taking Measures against Wicked Conduct”) condemns this type of rhetorical tactic (Han Feizi jijie V.19: 127). To moderate this praise, the reader should be aware that Guan Zhong is also severely criticized, reviled even, in the Han Feizi, notably for having arrogated excessive power to the detriment of Lord Huan and for not having taught his master the principles of authority (Han Feizi jijie XV.36: 352). It should be noted that in chapter 19 “Taking Measures against Wicked Conduct”, a chapter which I hold, following Pan Chonggui (1966: 95–96) and Lundahl, to be a memorial written by Han Fei himself to the king of Han, the author rails against those who in a specious manner use the examples of Yi Yin and Guan Zhong to mislead the Prince or who brandish the example of the martyrs Bigan and Wu Zixu in insulting diatribes against their sovereign. By denouncing the instrumentalization of these historical precedents, Han Fei belies the rhetorical strategies at work in other chapters. The denunciation of the fallacious rhetoric that advocates illustrious kings or exemplary ministers of the past is also situated at the core of chapter 51, “Loyalty and Filiality.”

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

Problematic Partnership in the Building of Absolute Monarchy



171

“Too Close for Comfort”: The Specter of the Threatening Minister

In another set of chapters, however, the Han Feizi departs from the foregoing “proministerial” view. Han Fei emphasizes that no one is faithful and loyal by nature and that all the servants of the throne have only their personal interests at heart. He proceeds to make a neat but rigid comparison between objective criteria for judgment and subjective preferences.35 In chapter 9, “Ba jian” 八姦 (“Eight Villainies”), the author details the different means by which the monarch finds himself stripped of his power by his ministers and retainers. The worst enemies are, as one can expect, the ministers, who all purport to be serving the ruler while shirking their duties and surreptitiously plotting against him. Han Fei does not even consider it worthwhile to seek a loyal and dependable minister, since they are all seen as seditious and as potential traitors (jian 姦). Chapter 17, “Bei nei” 備內 (“Precautions against the Nearest”), where everyone in the royal entourage conspires to betray and kill the sovereign, is exactly in the same vein: ministers are considered even worse than family because the sovereign cannot count on ties of kinship and natural affection to moderate their interest in lucre. This oscillation between minister and monarch can be summarized as follows. When Han Fei considers ministers as a class or group gravitating around the sovereign, he blackens the picture and portrays them as prowling tigers hungering for power. But when he reviews historical precedents represented by specific and illustrious individuals such as Guan Zhong or Shang Yang, he idealizes the figure of the competent, loyal, and successful minister, whose ideal incarnation is obviously a Legalist reformer—that is to say, a Han Fei propelled toward achievement of his ambitions. However, the two visions of political authority run counter to each other. When Han Fei discourses on the status and function of the monarch, he exalts absolute monarchy and offers it eulogies tinted with mysticism. But when he considers monarchs as individuals, he is aware of the disasters they can cause and how necessary it proves to secure the system against their detrimental effect. In this dialectic between the position and the individual,36 between the 35

36

In chapter 14, “Jian jie shi chen” 姦劫弒臣 (“Perfidious, Fierce, and Regicidal Ministers”), a chapter that is generally deemed to be from Han Fei’s hand and that expresses his core ideas about the threats incurred by rulers, the author voices virulent charges against ministers who are ignorant of real politics, which is based on penalties and punishments, and who are influenced by opinion instead of following the letter of the law. On the opposition between the sovereign as a human being (the king) and a divine ­person (the King), and the dialectic involved in the tension between the position and the

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

172

Graziani

status and its incarnation, we see the same duality as between the monarch and his minister: Han Fei has simply internalized this opposition between the groups of men struggling for supremacy. The opposition between the ideological plane and the historical perspective translates in the Han Feizi as a contradiction between the monarchy as a doctrine and the monarchy in its concrete incarnation (i.e., in individuals rarely achieving the required status or possessing the necessary competence). The richness and the ambiguity of the Han Feizi reside in the complex links between these different elements, its varying preferences and dislikes constantly weighing the scales to one side or the other, now in favor of the minister, now in favor of the king.

The Ideological Choice of King over Minister

Ultimately, Han Fei reserves his mystical eulogies for the king and not for the enlightened minister. As we have seen above, chapter 5, “The Way of the Master,” celebrates the pure idea of the monarch, untrammeled by empirical or historical context. In a more pragmatic vein, Han Fei nonetheless keeps reminding the reader that a ruler necessarily has all his ministers in league against him, eager to conspire and betray him. As Yuri Pines (2013a: 74) notes, such a serious accusation against ministers is unique to Han Fei and finds no equivalent among his predecessors. However, this permanent and widespread suspicion is partially moderated in chapter 14, “Perfidious, Fierce, and Regicidal Ministers,” where the author affirms that in a well-governed state, where social harmony and the welfare of the people are assured, the sovereign and his ministers can create a close and trusting relationship.37 From a doctrinal standpoint, the reconciliation between minister and monarch should end the continual swing from the idealization of the loyal and competent minister to the invincible, splendid, and solitary monarch38 who muzzles his ministers and suspects them all. When Han Fei accepts that the sovereign is imposed by the contingencies of

37 38

i­ ndividual, see Ernst Kantorowicz’s classical analysis in The King’s Two Bodies  (1957). “The ruler and his ministers are close together” 君臣相親 (Han Feizi jijie IV.14: 102). As Paul Goldin (2013a: 10) also notes: “Unable to share his innermost thoughts and feelings with anyone around him, or to love or hate or be motivated by any emotion at all, a ruler is the loneliest of men.” In the many analyses of the monarch figure in the Han Feizi, insufficient emphasis has been laid on the superhuman psychological resistance necessary to be able to accept the permanent mental isolation and the consensual deprivation of all confidants, friends, or intimate companions. Only the Zhuangzi has analyzed the

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

Problematic Partnership in the Building of Absolute Monarchy

173

history, whereas the Legalist minister is appointed for his competence, he evokes the exemplary partnerships between Lord Xiao of Qin 秦孝公 (r. 361– 338 bce) and Shang Yang, between Lord Huan of Qi 齊桓公 (r. 685–643 bce) and Guan Zhong, or between Cheng Tang 成湯 and Yi Yin. Such testimonials are rare in the Han Feizi, though: these relationships between minister and monarch that are stamped with the seal of honesty and harmony are illustrated by the three historical—and frequently quoted—precedents, but such exceptions can hardly serve as models and should not arouse expectations. Han Fei’s hatred of duality39 prevents him from imagining the possibility of a fair sharing of power or even collaboration between sovereign and minister, unless they are tainted with suspicion and subject to constraint and threat. Selfish interests are ultimately the only “reliable” tie bonding the sovereign and his ministers.40 When he takes sides with the informed and enlightened minister facing the weak sovereign who allows his authority to be sapped, Han Fei positions himself in the wake of the thinkers and statesmen of the Springs-and-Autumns period, who created the paradigm of the competent and virtuous man able to hold the reins of government, to the detriment of the ruler, who is condemned for his various errors (Pines 2002a: 212–214). When, on the contrary, Han Fei brings into play a host of mystical images and expressions to exalt the person of the monarch, ruling in a solitary manner, keeping his senior ministers and dignitaries on a leash, he appears as a true child of his time, a knee-jerk partisan of absolute monarchy upheld at a metaphysical level by the cult of unity.

39

40

psychological damage caused by the isolation of the sovereign (see Graziani 2011: 161– 211). On hatred of doubling and of duality as a principle for control and organization, see, for example, chapter 8, “Wielding Power,” in which the author indulges in wise sayings in the style of the Laozi: “Two roosters in a coop, what scramble and squabble!” or “Two heads in one family, much labor lost” (一家二貴，事乃無功; Han Feizi jijie II.8: 52). This hatred, I should note, is not a defining feature of the Han Feizi. Such hostility against duality was typical among thinkers and statesmen throughout the Warring States period and helps to account for the strong consensus on monarchy. For further references, see Han Feizi II.7: 39–43 (“Er bing”); Lüshi chunqiu 17.8: 1143 (“Zhi yi” 執一); Guanzi XVII.52: 998–999 (“Qi chen qi zhu” 七臣七主); Xunzi VII.11: 223–224 (“Wang ba” 王霸); Huang Di shu 1.30–31 (“Da fen” 大分, originally named “Liu fen” 六分); Shenzi 48 (“De li” 德 立). See, e.g., chapter 19, “Taking Measures against Wicked Conduct”: “The relationships between a ruler and his ministers are shaped by calculations of profit” (君臣之交，計 也。Han Feizi jijie V.19: 128).

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

174

Graziani

Varieties of the Ruler-Minister Partnership

Now, to summarize the foregoing analysis, several conflicting scenarios can be observed in the Han Feizi concerning the exercise of political authority (I do not mention here the fictional situations that the various chapters deplore or evoke with sarcasm). The most evident possibility is that of an all-powerful monarch holding his sway over his ministers, all of whom are potentially seditious. Here again we must refer to chapter 5, which sketches the portrait of a monarch who distances himself from all human activities, taking no direct part in running the state. His fusion with the Way keeps him at a distance from any worldly business, and he derives his terrifying power over others from nonaction (wuwei 無為) and to a certain extent from “nonspeaking” (wuyan 無言), a form of disconcerting silence. In this model, ministers beaver away while the ruler luxuriates in idleness. Free from ethical constraints, this kind of ruler must constantly remind his subjects that he is the sole bearer of authority and must avoid delegating to his servants the slightest scrap of his power to reward and punish.41 Yet, if one accepts that the sovereign has a personal role, even if only at higher levels, in the evaluation, inspection, and surveillance processes because finally he cannot rely on anyone, logically he is obliged to test, inspect, and verify all information that is brought to him. In this situation, the ruler must continuously endeavor to confuse and confute his ministers and servants. So the sovereign is at the same time the most inactive and the most active individual in the kingdom.42 But how then can he remain in non-action and assume his authority alone against a ubiquitous menace (his ministers and various leagues and clans)? Therein lies a difficulty that we can attempt to re-

41

42

The prerogative to distribute favors and punishments (xing de 刑德) constitutes the very essence of power: see, e.g., the passage in chapter 7, “The Two Handles”: “Today rulers relinquish this exclusive power to punish and reward and put it at the disposal of their ministers. That is how they end up subjugated by their own servants” (今君人者，釋其 刑德而使臣用之，則君反制於臣矣。Han Feizi jijie II.7: 40). For similar views, see Han Feizi jijie I.5: 29 (“Zhu Dao”); V.16: 114 (“San shou” 三守); VII.21: 159 (“Yu Lao”). See, for example, chapter 17, “Precautions against the Nearest,” one of the texts that shows most clearly Han Fei’s acute suspicion and where he reminds the reader of the need for continuous and general surveillance, the need to verify all the data in an inquiry, to control and multiply all avenues of information, to compare witnesses’ evidence, and to hold confrontations to disclose treachery in all parts of the kingdom (Han Feizi jijie V.17: 116).

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

Problematic Partnership in the Building of Absolute Monarchy

175

solve by proposing two solutions that have their place in the Han Feizi, although they remain only in the background.43 The first possible solution, which is characteristic of totalitarian regimes, is that the sovereign uses a special administration to watch the actions of the regular administration, and that he creates a police force for surveillance of the police, inspecting the work of detectives, commissioners, and magistrates. But in reality this obsession with surveillance, suspicion, and denunciation demands an infinite regress, since each judicial and administrative agent charged with inspecting and controlling must logically be subject to inspection and control himself. Han Fei’s concept of maximum security suggests that any administrative entity requires its reduplication at a higher level. If this was not the case, the system would risk abuse of power, arbitrary decision-making, and corruption. So if, in any given society, these principles of security were to be instituted fully and without exception, all private or public, community, family, or professional relations would become alienated, and the administration would no longer function. It would be constantly obliged to duplicate itself at a higher level into a meta-administration responsible for the surveillance of work at the lower level. The second solution to be considered is probably more viable: creating a limited police and judiciary corps who observe and evaluate each other as anonymously as possible. In this case, the sovereign would not be obliged to intervene constantly. Yet it would still be necessary for the functioning of these relationships between the different state corps to be observed by an external, independent, and unbiased arbiter. If this supreme judge is not the sovereign, the latter would be deprived of his authority in the last resort by the person he appointed and he would also be dependent on one single channel for 43

Pines (2013a: 76–77), who notices this difficulty in the Han Feizi, quotes a text in which Han Fei attempts to solve the problem by explaining that the sovereign, rather than seeking to verify everything himself, should be satisfied with trusting the law and administrative methods (fashu 法術). According to Pines, Han Fei’s argument is only a “smokescreen” intended to limit the intervention of the sovereign in politics. I consider that this is a rhetorical resolution to eliminate the “human factor” without explaining how laws and methods can work automatically. In chapter 36, “Refutations 1,” the author evokes once again the great danger of having someone between the throne and the people intercepting all information. To avert this, the ruler must confine every subject to one single and specific activity and prevent persons who are close to each other from evaluating each other. Then, rashly concludes the text, the administrative machine will function without any loopholes or obstacles, the ruler’s perspicacity will allow him to know everything that takes place in the kingdom, and the legal system will guarantee that nothing bad happens behind his back (Han Feizi jijie XV.36: 353).

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

176

Graziani

obtaining decisive information. If, however, the sovereign himself were the supreme judge and ultimate recipient of all the most important reports on the empire, relying, if need be, on diverse sources of information, he would be in danger of falling into the trap of administrative overactivity inherent in the first solution. How then can one avoid the trap of administrative self-exhaustion of the ruler? Han Fei advocates an alternative model of the sovereign. Another facet of his reflection consists in restricting the individual on the throne to a passive role, justifying the literal interpretation of non-action and investing the prime minister with responsibility for the prosperity and fortune of the state. The only form of intelligence necessary for such a monarch consists in entrusting the reins of the state to an intelligent, loyal, competent minister who is inspired by a Legalist agenda. Han Fei’s ideological wager consists in saying that once reforms have been undertaken, institutions established and laws passed, the system will be sufficiently virtuous to perpetuate itself while its resilience allows it to sustain mediocre political personnel. Of course, one day a perverse sovereign might prove to be destructive enough to ruin the system, but the legal and administrative fortress that Han Fei wishes to build is supposedly the least vulnerable and the most enduring that could be devised (the system relying on the personal qualities of an outstanding sovereign being, in contrast, the most precarious).44 A related line of reasoning in the Han Feizi favors the solution of a virtuous sovereign-minister partnership, whose cooperation is founded on trust and competence sharing, ensuring the order, strength, and security of the country. As we have seen earlier, Han Fei enumerates three historical examples of such a relationship, but one has to admit that the contemporaneous existence of both the wise sovereign and the enlightened minister is highly unlikely, if not completely improbable. The only type of prime minister to escape the general paranoia of the Han Feizi, briefly evoked in the preceding pages, is the “Hanfeizian” or Legalist minister who transcends, for some unspecified reason, the laws of anthropology laid down by Han Fei that state that all men are motivated only by their personal interests and that their main concern is to benefit their own lives and to avoid suffering. This “good Legalist minister” is an incomprehensible exception given the political climate of pervasive suspicion in

44

See, in particular, chapter 40, “Nan shi” 難勢 (“On Critics of the Doctrine of Positional Advantage”), which mentions a political apparatus based on law (fa 法) and positional advantage (shi 勢) explicitly designed for mediocre rulers and expected to last a thousand generations (Han Feizi jijie XVII.40: 392).

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

Problematic Partnership in the Building of Absolute Monarchy

177

the Han Feizi.45 The existence of such a minister is indeed wildly out of tune with Han Fei’s convictions and his views as to how the different actors in the political system are prone to act. The good minister, just like the fictitious figure of a self-effacing, transcendent monarch hovering above the hurly-burly of actual political life, is a wild card leveled against the threats of all the players in the game: the treacherous self-interested ministers, the conspiring private entourage, and the wayward ruler. Moreover, this minister is a troublesome exception. His virtues of detachment and abnegation, at the base of his loyal and impartial conduct, secretly match him with the stereotypical portrait of those whom Han Fei elsewhere identifies as true enemies of the state: the notorious “sages,” who do not fear death and cannot be motivated by riches and renown and therefore cannot be curbed by the law.46 The strange similarity of the “Legalist minister” to these seditious and unruly elements makes his figure highly problematic in the overall context of the Han Feizi. So why this revalorization of the figure of the minister in the Han Feizi? It appears to me to be dictated by Han Fei’s disappointments and frustrations at the empirical representatives of authority. Ideally, the sovereign is a divine being who has no need for the advice or opinions of his entourage: in real terms, sovereigns are, in most cases, incompetent and subject to influence, but they are, nevertheless, still necessarily part of the equation. The sovereign is at once the most revered figure, who transcends the system, and at the same time, according to his historical definition, concentrates all the vices deplored by Han Fei. He occupies the first rank not on the basis of merit, personal qualities, or achievements, but only by virtue of his bloodline and rank. The sovereign is also constantly subject to flattery, whim, desire, or greed; he rules arbitrarily and makes exception to the universality of the law. Assured of his complete impunity, he can tamper with all the legal and institutional machinery created to ensure the perennial nature of the state. In other words, the monarch is both metaphysical fantasy and recurring nightmare to the author(s) of the Han Feizi.

45

46

As Pines (2013a: 84) noted also: “What remains unclear throughout the chapter (and throughout the entire corpus of Han Fei’s works) is how the ‘possessors of techniques’ overcome their innate greediness and selfishness.” See, e.g., Han Feizi jijie IV.14: 105–106 (“Jian jie shi chen”). See also Han Feizi jijie XX.51: 466–467 (“Zhong xiao”) on the danger of sages who place themselves above duties and hierarchies or of brave knights (lie shi 烈士) who do only what they please, defying their ruler, unafraid of death.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

178

Graziani

Han Fei’s constant vacillation concerning the type of monarch on whom the system relies (a superman capable of complete emotional asceticism, stripped of all human sensitivity, or a mediocre, talentless individual who nonetheless does not prove detrimental to the system) depends upon the temporal dimension of the monarchy. In the order of ideal representations, the exceptional man holds the advantage. But should such a monarch exist, he would be unable to find a successor. One cannot rely on the virtue of a sovereign to reinforce the kingdom and prolong its power. Laws and techniques win in the long run. Han Fei realizes that he has to construct his system in relation to mediocre and worthless sovereigns, as it is this kind of man that prevails over time. Indeed, in chapter 40, “Nan shi” 難勢 (“On Critics of the Doctrine of Positional Advantage”), the author of the refutation of Shen Dao’s opponent regarding the value of shi (power of position) reminds us that great sages such as Yao and Shun and monstrous tyrants—the likes of Jie and Zhou 紂—appear only once in a thousand generations. “Therefore, when I discuss this notion of positional power, it concerns only mediocre rulers. By mediocre, I mean those who, above, do not attain to a Yao or a Shun and who, below, never act like a Jie or a Zhou.”47 Hence, from this golden rule of mediocrity comes the revalorization of the role of minister, who alone works to maintain and strengthen the monarchy against the monarch himself as an individual.

Concluding Remarks on the Monarchy

The review of the different possibilities that might reconcile the two basic ideologies of absolute monarchy as formulated by Han Fei (a sovereign set apart from the management of political business and an overactive sovereign reluctant to delegate even a minimal amount of authority and subjecting everyone to constant surveillance) shows that the sources of conflict in the role devolving to the sovereign persist because of Han Fei’s contradicting requirements. For Han Fei a monarchical regime is both a scourge and a boon. It is a boon because a single locus of power is the only way to ensure political stability and 47

吾所以為言勢者， 中也。中者、上不及堯、舜， 而下亦不為桀、紂。 (Han Feizi jijie XVII.40: 392 [“Nan shi”]). See also chapter 51, “Loyalty and Filiality,” in which Han Fei asserts that one cannot judge the utility of rewards and punishments on the basis of extreme cases like that of Robber Zhi, who was unafraid of chastisements and death, or that of the hermit Xu You, who refused the empire. “What government means is governing the ordinary. What order means is ordering the constant” (治也者，治常者也；道 也者，道常者也。Han Feizi jijie XX.51: 469).

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

Problematic Partnership in the Building of Absolute Monarchy

179

social order. But it is also a scourge, and for the same reason: the exclusive center of guidance and decision-making, which is extolled as the animating and structuring force of the universe, must necessarily take human shape. The individual in question cannot be freely chosen, as he is forcibly imposed by historical contingencies. And history teaches that most sovereigns, in spite of their wise and clear-thinking servants, have shown themselves to be destructive and deaf to reason. Their folly often cost them their lives and they became the laughingstocks of All-under-Heaven, but one cannot forget that they also tortured and executed intelligent and faithful advisers and aides. If Han Fei evokes the martyrdom of these ministers and counselors repeatedly throughout his writings, it seems to me that it is not because of a morbid fascination for these gory acts of violence or because he sensed that these precedents foreboded the fate awaiting him. Rather, his insistence on these episodes of uncontrollable violence evinces the rage and the indignation he feels when he is reminded, by the lessons of the past or by his personal history, that intelligence and competence become useless tools when faced with a stupid sovereign, in a world that allows obstinate and sadistic men to create chaos and cause death with impunity. The constant reminders of the suffering of so many courageous and unjustly executed servants of the state have their counterpart in the Han Feizi, like a symbolic revenge, in the icily sarcastic reminders of all the feckless sovereigns who perished in the worst possible ways because they decided to ignore the admonitions of their stalwart advisers. The ideal figure of the king ultimately appears as the negative reflection of Han Fei’s moral exasperation: he removes from the ruler anything he can diagnose as the cause of obstruction, weakness, and ruin, until all that is left is the fascinating concept of a Prince honed into the Principle Way (or Dao), but who is actually an empty shell. In this fabricated figure of absolute power, the conflict between ruler and minister is momentarily—but completely—eliminated. But in the long run, Han Fei discredits both ministers and rulers. Political culture in China retained its grip on this fantasized status of the monarch. It continued to feed on the idea of absolute monarchy although in practice absolute monarchy often proved to be a failure, and it never sought to create real institutional limits to the arbitrary rule of the emperor. All the problems clearly diagnosed by Han Fei in his description of the relations between the sovereign and his attendants, or more widely the dangers menacing the state and threatening ruin, are illustrated with exemplary regularity throughout the history of China. Whoever has cast his eye, even briefly, on the succession of imperial dynasties is sure to find in certain passages of the Han Feizi an epitome of all the old demons who haunt every chapter of the Chinese imperial past: the case of Yang Guifei 楊貴妃 (d. 756) could testify to the excessive

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

180

Graziani

influence of favorites in the Tang 唐 (618–907) dynasty; the role of the eunuchs at the end of the Latter Han 後漢 (25–220), Tang, and Ming 明 (1368–1644) dynasties clearly illustrates the dangers lurking in the inner chambers of the palace; the exorbitant administrative activities willingly undertaken by the despotic Zhu Yuanzhang 朱元璋 (r. 1368–1398), the first Ming emperor, or, for that matter, by the Kangxi 康熙 (1661–1722) and Yongzheng 雍正 (1723–1735) Emperors respond like a distant echo to Han Fei’s warnings to the sovereign to avoid working like a carthorse and to allow his subjects to slog away at the daily grind. Ironically, though, inactive emperors, whom Han Fei might have preferred, could also bring about huge damage to their polity, as the case of the Ming Wanli Emperor 萬曆 (r. 1572–1620), immortalized in Ray Huang’s 1587: A Year of No Significance (1981), demonstrates. But the messianic figure of a godlike monarch dreamt of by Han Fei was not only the ideological negation of his political nightmare (i.e., treacherous ministers and weak rulers) but likewise the negation of his possible role as a prime minister given great leeway to introduce reforms. Han Fei’s difficulty lay in devising an ideological construct that allowed room for a minister of his kind, at the service of a ruler neither too powerful and competent (in which case he would be of little service) nor too fractious and unwise (in which case he would end up demoted or executed). The choice of a mediocre king—a ruler not up to much but unobtrusive—as the best way to secure the political system not only is a sensible wager in terms of probability but also mirrors Han Fei’s own political ambition: this kind of ruler would have facilitated his accession to a position of authority, enabling him, at last, to get the work done. The slurs and slanders of sly ministers made this long-awaited dream of short duration for Han Fei. What remains is a series of writings that, although all jumbled up and impossible to reorganize, enable us to ponder once more the reasons for his failure as a minister and his force as an ideologue.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

The Changing Role of the Minister in the Warring States

181

Chapter 6

The Changing Role of the Minister in the Warring States: Evidence from the Yanzi chunqiu 晏子春秋 Scott Cook In recent years, newly unearthed manuscripts from ancient China have prompted a number of important studies reexamining changes in conceptions of the role of minister during the Springs-and-Autumns (Chunqiu 春秋, 770– 453 bce) and Warring States (Zhanguo 戰國, 453–221 bce) periods, especially as they relate to notions of “loyalty” (zhong 忠), “trustworthiness” (xin 信), and just what may constitute appropriate forms of remonstrance. Such studies have shown how the notion of “loyalty” gradually changed from one of selfless action in accordance with the long-term interests of the state, under the guise of which ministers could occasionally find grounds to act independently of the directions of the ruler, to one in which itinerant advisers, with interests less tied to any particular state, shifted the locus of loyalty to more abstract ideals and precepts and thereby redefined the role of minister as a more independent actor demanding a greater degree of reciprocal respect on the part of the ruler.1 The present essay seeks to shed further light on this complex set of issues by focusing on one particular corpus in which such issues are brought into sharp relief: the Yanzi chunqiu—a work that itself involves both the Springs-andAutumns and the Warring States periods in interesting and complicated ways. At the same time, it will also attempt to demonstrate how the examination of these issues may cause us to reevaluate the importance of this long-neglected work to the study of pre-imperial Chinese political and intellectual history, and may even lead us to gain some tentative insights into the dating of the work itself.

Yanzi and the Yanzi chunqiu 晏子春秋

Perhaps more than any other literary and historical figure in the early Chinese tradition, Yanzi, or Yan Ying 晏嬰, aka Yan Pingzhong 晏平仲 (d. 500 bce), is 1 These studies include Pines 2002b; Yi Sǔng-ryul 2001, 2003; Yuasa Kunihiro 2001; Huang Junliang 2003; and Satō Masayuki 2007, 2010.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004299337_008 Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

182

Cook

essentially defined by his refusal to place private loyalties over allegiance to the state and its people. His first appearance in the Zuo zhuan 左傳 in a narrative of any extended length has him ironically defining the proper conception of ministerial loyalty through an act of self-preservation: his refusal to show his respect for his recently assassinated ruler, Lord Zhuang of Qi 齊莊公 (r. 553– 548 bce), by dying or fleeing. Lord Zhuang had just been murdered by the very man who had been responsible for bringing him to the throne in the first place, his prime minster Cui Zhu 崔杼, after Lord Zhuang had severely offended Cui through private acts of folly and arrogance. Yanzi, in his indelible wisdom, refuses to take the fall on behalf of such a morally intractable ruler, opting instead to remain alive and well in Qi, reasoning as follows: 晏子立於崔氏之門外，其人曰：「死乎？」曰：「獨吾君也乎 哉，吾死也？」曰：「行乎？」曰：「吾罪也乎哉，吾亡也？ 」曰「歸乎？」曰：「君死安歸？君民者，豈以陵民？社稷是 主。臣君者，豈為其口實？社稷是養。故君為社稷死，則死 之；為社稷亡，則亡之。若為己死而己亡，非其私暱，誰敢任 之？且人有君而弒之，吾焉得死之？而焉得亡之？將庸何歸？ 」門啟而入，枕尸股而哭。興，三踊而出。人謂崔子：「必殺 之！」崔子曰：「民之望也，舍之得民。」 Yanzi was standing outside Cui’s gate, and one of his followers asked him: “Will you die [for your ruler]?” “Was he my ruler alone? Why would I die [for him]?” replied Yanzi. “Will you take your leave?” “Was [his death] my crime? Why would I flee?” “Will you return home?” “With our ruler now dead, to where shall I return? Does he who rules the people do so for the purpose of bullying them? It is the altars of state that he is to preside over! Does he who serves as minister to the ruler do so for the purpose of filling his own mouth? It is the altars of state that he must nourish! Thus, if the ruler dies for the altars of state, one should die for him; if he flees for the sake of the altars of state, one should flee with him. But if he dies or flees for his own reasons, who but his personal cronies would dare take on such a burden? Now this person [Cui Zhu] has his [own choice for] ruler [established] and then assassinates him—what would give me cause to die for [this ruler]? What would give me cause to flee for him? To what end would I return home?”

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

The Changing Role of the Minister in the Warring States

183

 When the gate opened, he entered, laid his head atop the corpse’s thigh,2 and sobbed. When he arose, he gave three ritual stomps of his feet in anguish, then left. Someone said to Cui, “You must kill him!”  Cui replied: “The people look up to him; if I spare him, I will obtain the people’s [allegiance].” (Chunqiu Zuozhuan zhu, Xiang 25 [548 bce]: 1098– 1099) Yet Yanzi would not simply sacrifice his convictions to serve idly alongside the regicidal minister Cui Zhu, as the narrative soon goes on to indicate upon the latter’s establishment of Lord Zhuang’s younger half brother, Lord Jing 景公, on the throne: 丁丑，崔杼立而相之，慶封為左相，盟國人於大宮曰：「所不 與崔慶者──」晏子仰天歎曰：「嬰所不唯忠於君，利社稷者 是與，有如上帝！」乃歃。 On the nineteenth day of the cycle, Cui Zhu established [Lord Jing] and served as his prime minister, with Qing Feng serving as chancellor of the left. They held an oath alliance with men of the capital in the ancestral temple and [began to] swear: “All those who do not align themselves with Cui and Qing …” Yanzi looked upward to Heaven and sighed, [interrupting]: “Should I align myself with those who are neither loyal toward their ruler nor bring benefit to the altars of state, may the Lord-on-High be my judge!” He then smeared his lips [in oath]. (Chunqiu Zuozhuan zhu, Xiang 25 [548 bce]: 1099) It is soon after in the same narrative that we find the famous story of the successive scribe-brothers who were executed because they insisted on recording in their annals the entry “Cui Zhu assassinated his ruler.” It was only after realizing the futility of trying to stop them that Cui finally spared the third of these brothers (for more on this story, see Schaberg 2001: 261–262). Yanzi’s words and actions pose a complicated set of issues in an attempt to define more precisely the duties of a loyal minister vis-à-vis the ruler and the state. On the one hand, Yanzi demands of Cui and Qing loyalty to both of those and signals to them his unwillingness to serve alongside them with the implication that they had been loyal to neither. While Lord Zhuang may have brought about his own demise through personal misbehavior, Cui was surely no less selfishly motivated in assassinating his ruler, a taboo act under any set 2 Or perhaps: “pillowed the corpse’s head upon his thigh.”

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

184

Cook

of circumstances. Yanzi indeed demands loyalty to the ruler, but that loyalty is to be subsumed under the greater concept of loyalty to the state and its people. This is not a novel concept: that a ruler must earn his mandate to rule through steadfast attention to the public good can be seen in the earliest documents of the Zhou dynasty. But the attempt to clearly define the duties of a loyal minister in relation to this ruler-state dynamic may be a problematic that is only just beginning to work itself out in texts of the period from which the Zuo zhuan derives.3 A somewhat-different version of the same account appears again in a work the composition of which many have long dated to a much later period, the Yanzi chunqiu 晏子春秋 (Annals of Master Yan). The main portion of the narrative is more or less exactly the same, but the narrative is also “augmented” by a brief introduction, in which Yanzi is said to have fallen out of favor with Lord Zhuang, who no longer had much use for his political counsel.4 After retreating from court, Yanzi engages in a brief conversation with his carriage driver, in which he predicts both Lord Zhuang’s downfall and his own ability to escape death in the aftermath of this event—the implication being that Lord Zhuang’s distancing of him in turn distanced his own obligations to follow his ruler into death. The introduction also “adds” a brief conversation between Yanzi and Cui Zhu—occurring just after Yanzi enters the gate but before he cries atop the corpse—which runs as follows: 門啟而入，崔子曰：「子何不死？子何不死？」晏子曰：「禍 始，吾不在也；禍終，吾不知也，吾何為死？且吾聞之：以亡 為行者，不足以存君；以死為義者，不足以立功。嬰豈其婢子 也哉？其縊而從之也？」 When the gate opened, he entered, and Master Cui said to him: “Why have you not died? Why have you not died?” 3 In his study of early narratives concerning worthies of the late Chunqiu, Onozawa Seiichi 小 野沢精一 discusses how this emphasis on loyalty to the “altars of state” 社稷 appears as something of a novel idea in the mouth of Yanzi compared with the types of ruler-minister relations espoused by other figures (such as Zichan 子產) as portrayed in works like the Zuo zhuan. Onozawa avers that this particular emphasis may be related to certain ritualized sacrificial practices and social structures unique to the state of Qi; for details, see Onozawa 1974: 78. I thank Yuri Pines for alerting me to this source. Note here that the term “altars of state” is normally used to refer to the state as a collective entity. 4 Whether this in fact constitutes an augmentation depends, of course, on how one views the actual temporal relationship between these two different textual witnesses to the story.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

The Changing Role of the Minister in the Warring States

185

 Yanzi said: “When this disaster began, I was not present, and when it finished, I was likewise unaware—why should I die? Moreover, I have heard that to take fleeing as one’s proper course of action does nothing to preserve the ruler, and to take dying as one’s proper duty does nothing to achieve merit. Am I his concubine? Should I strangle myself and follow him [to the grave]?!” (Yanzi chunqiu jiaozhu 5.2: 225–226 [“Nei pian, Za shang” 內篇雜上]) No, Yanzi obviously did not view himself as a concubine: as one who served only at the pleasure of the ruler and pledged undying devotion to him, regardless of the circumstances. For Yanzi, the loyalty of a true minister was different from that of a concubine: his ultimate loyalty was to the state and its people, and his loyalty to the ruler himself pertained only to the extent that the ruler upheld those principles. Ultimately, it may be impossible to determine for certain whether this dialogue was added onto a passage culled from the Zuo zhuan, or whether it was omitted when the Zuo zhuan compilers stitched together their own narrative from earlier sources, but the philosophical position stated therein is entirely consistent with the rest of the story—and, for that matter, with the Yanzi chunqiu as a whole. That Yanzi would end up with such a large collection of anecdotes containing speeches attributed to him suggests that there must have been something novel about the political achievements or philosophical wisdom of this figure—at least in the way he was imagined and remembered—worthy of being written down and widely circulated. The very existence of such a collection thus demands that it receive our attention as a serious object for scrutiny, to determine just what the essential characteristics of its expressed philosophy may be and how they figure into the intellectual-historical background from which they derive. To properly make such determinations, however, we must first give a brief account of the nature of the work as far as we are currently in a position to understand it.

On the Nature and Dating of the Yanzi chunqiu

The Yanzi chunqiu, in some form or another, was already known to Sima Qian 司馬遷 (ca. 145–ca. 85 bce), as he makes reference to the work, and the fact that it was well circulated in his time (世多有之), in the “Biographies of Guan and Yan” 管晏列傳 chapter of the Shiji 史記. A citation of Liu Xin’s 劉歆 (ca. 46 bce–23 ce) “Qi lüe” 七略 by a Tang dynasty commentator to that same biography mentions the Yanzi chunqiu as a “Ru” 儒家 work in seven pian 篇,

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

186

Cook

whereas the “Yiwen zhi” 藝文志 chapter of the Hanshu 漢書 actually lists the text (also as a “Ru” work) as Yanzi in eight pian, clearly ascribing it to Yan Ying 晏嬰, posthumously named Yan Pingzhong 晏平仲, minister to Lord Jing of Qi. The “Jingji zhi” 經籍志 chapter of the Suishu 隋書 once again records the work as a “Ru” one in seven pian (a record duplicated in the equivalent chapter of the Jiu Tangshu 舊唐書), but a number of later bibliographic sources, such as the Chongwen zongmu 崇文總目 (completed 1041 ce), list it as comprising twelve juan 卷.5 Most crucially, a description of the process by which the definitive edition of the Yanzi chunqiu 晏子春秋 came to be established is found among the surviving records of Liu Xiang’s 劉向 (79–8 bce) collation notes. The relevant portion of his “Yanzi xulu” 晏子敘錄 reads as follows: 所校中書《晏子》十一篇，臣向謹與長社尉臣參校讎，太史書 五篇，臣向書一篇，參書十三篇，凡中外書三十篇，為八百三 十八章。除復重二十二篇，六百三十八章，定著八篇二百一十 五章，外書無有三十六章，中書無有七十一章，中外皆有以相 定。 Along with Shen, lieutenant of Changshe, I carefully collated the Yanzi of the imperial library, in eleven pian [bundles], against the five pian possessed by the grand scribe, the one pian in my possession, and the ­thirteen pian in Shen’s possession: thirty pian in all among the manuscripts from both within and without the imperial library, comprising a total of 838 passages [zhang]. After getting rid of twenty-two duplicate pian and 638 duplicate passages, we established a definitive edition of eight pian, or 215 passages. Among these, there were thirty-six passages not found among the external manuscripts, and seventy-one passages not found among the imperial-library manuscripts, so that both sets had parts to com­plement the other [toward a definitive version]. (Yan Kejun 1999: 382–383)6 Given that received editions of the Yanzi chunqiu conform exactly to these numbers of eight pian and 838 zhang, this evidence alone strongly suggests 5 See Pian Yuqian 2000: 7; Zhang Xincheng 1999: 607–609. See also the entry on the work in the Siku quanshu zongmu 四庫全書總目, which lists it in the “Histories” 史 section as a work of biography; Yongluo (Qing) et al. 1965: vol. 57, 514. The Tang commentary in question is Zhang Shoujie’s 張守節 Shiji zhengyi 史記正義; for this and the Shiji reference, see Shiji 62: 2137. For the Hanshu entry, see Hanshu 30: 1724; for the Suishu entry, see Suishu 34: 997. 6 By my count, that means that there were 108 passages in common to both sets (roughly half the total), some of which must have had many duplicates. It is unclear where the extra 15 passages came from after subtracting the 638 duplicates from the 838 total.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

The Changing Role of the Minister in the Warring States

187

two things: (1) the Yanzi chunqiu has, more or less as we know it today, been around since the time of Liu Xiang; and (2) prior to that time, the “work”—to use that term very loosely—was widely circulated in many different assemblages of individual manuscripts.7 Given these circumstances, it is perhaps more accurate to refer to the Yanzi not as a “work” at all but rather a collection of anecdotes derived from such prior assemblages, the precise relationships among which are not entirely clear, but many of which, if not all, more than likely date from pre-Han times.8 In spite of this, the Yanzi chunqiu has long been suspected of being a relatively late work, with such scholars as Liang Qichao 梁啟超 (1873–1929) arguing that it was written during the early years of the Han, and Wu Zeyu 吳 則虞 (1913–1977) similarly contending that it was a post-unification work (see Pian Yuqian 2000: 14–15; Zhang Xincheng 1999: 607–609). While such critical evaluations were all established on relatively speculative grounds, their influence has been far-reaching, with the result that the Yanzi chunqiu has often been neglected as a serious source for research on pre-imperial intellectual history. Archeological finds over the last half a century have begun to change such thinking. No fewer than four manuscript remnants of Yanzi materials were unearthed in the 1970s, the most substantial being the cache of 102 bamboo strips and fragments excavated in 1972 from a Former Han tomb (Tomb 1) in Yinqueshan 銀雀山, Linyi County 臨沂縣, Shandong Province, constituting sixteen passages corresponding to eighteen passages dispersed throughout

7 Despite this, a minority group of scholars, including such Qing dynasty figures as Wu Dexuan 吳德旋 and Guan Tong 管同, have attempted to argue, on rather tenuous grounds, that the received work is in fact a Six Dynasties (220–589 ce) forgery. For details, see Pian Yuqian 2000: 13. 8 To my mind, the situation described in Liu Xiang’s collation notes does not differ entirely from that described in his notes to his collation of the Xunzi 荀子, that is, “Sun Qingzi shulu” 孫卿 子書錄, where, however, an even greater percentage of duplicate pian (290 out of 322) are eliminated, and no mention is made of individual zhang passages. To be sure, these latter facts may suggest a somewhat-greater degree of integrity for that work, especially at the level of the pian—to be expected given the discursive essays that dominate the Xunzi, along with the fact that Xun Qing himself may have authored the bulk of them—and the much larger overall number of pian may likewise suggest an even greater circulation. Nonetheless, there is no compelling reason, on the face of it, to treat the Yanzi chunqiu any differently from a work like the Xunzi in terms of both its being a collection recovered from likely pre-imperial sources through Han dynasty reclamation efforts and one whose definitive redaction was not established until the time of Liu Xiang.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

188

Cook

different portions of the received text.9 Yinqueshan Tomb 1 is datable to the time of Emperor Wu 漢武帝 (r. 141–87 bce), while the other three tombs date from the times of Emperor Wen 漢文帝 (r. 180–157 bce) to Emperor Xuan 漢 宣帝 (r. 74–49 bce).10 While the amount of textual material is small relative to the overall size of the received Yanzi chunqiu, these discoveries show that at least a portion of the chapters found in that collection were in relatively broad circulation by the early years of the Han, strongly suggesting that the collection itself—in one form or another, or, more accurately, in many different forms and configurations—derived largely if not wholly from pre-imperial times. The Yanzi chunqiu was obviously not authored by Yan Ying himself, and while the narratives therein may possibly reflect Yan Ying’s actual positions in some vague manner, it would be a leap of faith to assume that the words they purport to record are in any sense a reliable transcription of actual dialogues. But this does not prevent them from providing us with a wealth of useful historical information, as they still at least represent the way a certain group or lineage among the ministerial class of (most likely) Qi chose to remember and portray the man, surely reflecting something of their own political ideals and aspirations. In what follows, I will tentatively treat passages from the received Yanzi chunqiu as an integral set of products from a particular early Warring States ministerial perspective, to see what they may be able to tell us about the development of the ruler-minster relationship during the later years of the Eastern Zhou. At the conclusion of this essay, I shall have somewhat more to say about what this exercise may have to suggest regarding the temporal makeup of the Yanzi chunqiu itself.

9

10

In addition to the Yinqueshan strips, fragments of Yanzi materials were also discovered at Tomb 40, Ding County 定縣 in Hebei; Tomb 1 at Shuanggudui 雙古堆, Fuyang County 阜 陽縣, Anhui Province; and at the Jiajuhouguan 甲渠侯官 site, Juyan 居延, Inner Mon­ golia. The passages of the Yinqueshan strips are all separated by markers, but two of the sixteen passages thus separated are each further divided into two separate passages in the received text, thus corresponding to a total of eighteen passages in the latter. For more details on all this and the Yinqueshan find in particular, see Pian Yuqian 2000: 10–11. The Shuanggudui tomb dates to the time of Emperor Wen; the Jiajuhouguan discovery, to the time of Emperor Wu; and the Ding County tomb, to the time of Emperor Xuan.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

The Changing Role of the Minister in the Warring States



189

Warring States Conceptions of Loyalty

The terms zhong 忠, or “loyalty,”11 and xin 信, “trustworthiness,” have formed an important pair of philosophical notions since at least the Springs-andAutumns period. A recently excavated text from the mid–Warring States period, the “Zhongxin zhi dao” 忠信之道manuscript from Tomb 1, Guodian 郭店, Hubei, expressly extols them in the highest possible terms: 不 （訛）不匋（慆），忠之至也。不惎（欺）弗智（知）， 信之至也。忠 （積）則可 （親）也，信 （積）則可信 也。忠 (1) 信 （積）而民弗 （親）信者，未之又（有） 也。(2) ...  （配）天墜（地）也者，忠信之胃（謂）此（哉）！ (5) To neither deceive nor ingratiate is the height of loyalty; to not cheat the uninformed is the height of trustworthiness. When one’s loyalty builds up, he may be held dear; when one’s trustworthiness builds up, he may be trusted. There has never been one who built up loyalty and trustworthiness and yet whom the people did not hold dear and trust. … Are not loyalty and trustworthiness what is meant by “a match for Heaven and Earth”?!12 The concepts of loyalty and trustworthiness in this text are arguably focused more upon the ruler himself than his ministers, and one can certainly find a number of cases where this is so in earlier texts as well. Nonetheless, this 11

12

It is commonly pointed out how the relatively standard interpretation of “loyalty” cannot adequately capture the full range of the term 忠 in many contexts; for a recent treatment, see Goldin 2008. Goldin defines zhong as “being honest with oneself in dealing with others” (169), which indeed fits most contexts; but the very unwieldiness of such a definition necessitates the use of a single term, for which, to my mind, “loyalty” remains the best standby—so long as we understand it as much in the sense of loyalty to one’s own sense of integrity and fairness as loyalty to a lord or state (note that Goldin himself has no objections to using the translation “loyalty” in the contexts in which zhong is being utilized here). This transcription and translation are taken from Cook 2012: 575–579; the preliminary discussion of zhong and xin that follows immediately below here also derives from the introduction to that translation in my book. For an alternative translation of this passage, including a structural analysis of the text as a whole, see Dirk Meyer 2005/2006: 57–78; alternatively, see Meyer 2012: 31–52. The numbers in parentheses in the Chinese text stand for strip numbers.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

190

Cook

particular pair of virtues has, since its earliest appearances, most prominently been defined in terms of the role of the minister, whose position vis-à-vis the ruler has been subject to change as historical circumstances evolved. The pairing of zhong and xin would appear to predate “Zhongxin zhi dao” by a few centuries, at least to the extent that the accounts of the Zuo zhuan 左傳 and Guoyu 國語, where the two terms occur together with some frequency, may constitute an accurate record of earlier statements. In a detailed analysis of changing conceptions of loyalty in early China, Yuri Pines argues that the notion of zhong began to gain currency only in the Springs-and-Autumns period, as the breakdown of the old familial order necessitated a recon­ ceptualization of ministerial obligations toward the ruler. With their conflicting goals of restoring political stability, and hence strengthening the ruler’s position, while simultaneously maintaining their own positions of influence, ministers of the time proffered zhong as the virtue of selfless action in accordance with the long-term interests of the state, under the guise of which they could serve as intelligent political agents capable of acting, when necessary, independently of the directions of the ruler (Pines 2002b: 43–45). This is precisely what we see at play in the Yanzi passage cited above. Satō Masayuki (2007: 1–33) makes a similar set of arguments regarding the development of the notion of zhong (and the pairing of zhong xin) during the social changes of the Springs-and-Autumns period, contending that political turmoil by the end of that period—when ministerial families began to wrest power from the hands of the regional lords—dictated the rise of a notion of “loyalty” that would reaffirm the interests of the state. Satō draws again primarily upon such works as the Guoyu, Zuo zhuan, and bronze-vessel inscriptions from the tomb of the King of Zhongshan 中山王陵 (interred roughly 310 bce), noting how they all portray zhong and xin as the only secure foundations upon which a society can rest, and how loyalty is defined primarily in terms of steadfast service on behalf of the altars of state and the public good (or at least that of the ruling house), and only secondarily toward any particular ruler.13 Zhong was thus contrasted with the complementary, yet occasionally conflicting virtue of xin, which often involved instead a more unconditional obedience to the ruler’s commands.14 As an example of this contrast, these 13 14

See also Satō 2010: 49–71. Satō both builds upon and at times departs from the prior studies of such scholars as Takada Shinji 高田真治 and Hamaguchi Fujio 賓口富士雄. The notion of xin as rigid fidelity was, however, occasionally challenged in early texts, as in a 479 bce entry in the Zuo zhuan: “To [necessarily] fulfill one’s words [at all costs] is not the same as trustworthiness; to be set upon death is not the same as courage” (復言，非

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

The Changing Role of the Minister in the Warring States

191

same studies cite Chu Ni’s 鉏麑 final words upon being ordered by his ruler to murder a virtuous minister of the state, as recorded in the Zuo zhuan (607 bce): “To murder the people’s ‘master’ would be disloyalty, [but] to abandon the ruler’s command would be infidelity” (賊民之主，不忠； 棄君之命， 不信).15 Other examples from these texts go even further in suggesting that ministers’ obligations toward their rulers were limited to public, rather than private, matters, that, as Pines (2002b: 48–49) notes, “they owed their ultimate allegiance to the altars, not personally to the ruler.”16 As forms of public morality, however, both zhong and xin were, in fact, occasionally applied in accounts of the Springs-and-Autumns period as obligations for the ruler as well, on whose person loyalty and trust meant benefiting the people with impartiality and setting the example of faithful virtue for others to follow.17 The situation began to change in the Warring States period, these studies suggest, as the social mobility brought about by an increase in bureaucratic specialization led to the rise of an itinerant shi 士 class, which, lacking hereditary possessions, no longer had much vested interest in unwaveringly serving the altars of any particular state. The locus of ministerial loyalty thus shifted toward the more abstract, normative ideal of the “proper Way” 道, in

15

16

17

信也；期死，非勇也). See Chunqiu Zuozhuan zhu, Ai 16: 1700; cf. Huang Junliang 2003: 37–38. See Pines 2002b: 47 (translations here differ slightly); cf. Satō Masayuki 2007: 15–16. As Pines (2002b: 45–46) notes, xin was not the only term that zhong was regularly paired with in the Zuo zhuan; others include jing 敬, “reverence,” and zhen 貞, unwavering “faithfulness,” as in a 651 bce entry, wherein zhong, by contrast to zhen, is defined as “acting on any knowledge that will be of benefit to the lord’s household” (公家之利，知無不為) (for the original text of the examples in question, see Chunqiu Zuozhuan zhu, Xuan 2: 658–659, Xi 5: 304, Xi 9: 328–329). Another type of contrast is suggested in a sound-gloss definition given in the “Jinyu 8” 晉語八 chapter of the Guoyu: “Loyalty comes from within, whereas trustworthiness comes from the self [in action]” (忠自中，而信自身); Guoyu jijie 14.10: 429 (忠 and 中 were identical in sound, while 信 and 身 shared common finals and had proximate initials). At the same time, however, Pines (2002b: 49–52) notes how these sources also suggest that a competing notion of loyalty had developed among the lower members of the aristocracy, one that entailed loyalty to a master as his “household servant” (jiachen 家臣), wherein such personal loyalty appeared to take precedence over loyalty to the ruler of the state itself. See esp. the example he cites (51) from a 637 bce account in the Zuo zhuan (Chunqiu Zuozhuan zhu, Xi 23: 402–403) where the term zhong is specifically applied to this notion. Note that Pines’s analysis concerns the changing understandings of “loyalty” as an idea more generally and is not limited to an examination of the term zhong per se. For textual examples of zhong and xin applied to the ruler in the Zuo zhuan and Guoyu, see Huang Junliang 2003: 38–39; for examples from later texts, see Goldin 2008: 167.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

192

Cook

sole devotion to the ethical precepts of which one could rightfully leave one ruler to serve another elsewhere.18 Such cases, however, did not generally entail the use of the term zhong per se. Where zhong and xin did appear in Confucian texts, the focus tended to be on how they constituted the true inner substance of ritual, the virtues by which the rites and practices of ancient times remained infused with significance. And when loyalty was discussed more in terms of personal ministerial allegiance, it now at least demanded a more reciprocal treatment of courtesy and respect on the part of the ruler— the idea that “the ruler directs the minister in accordance with ritual, and the minister serves the ruler with loyalty” (君使臣以禮，臣事君以忠).19 Eventually, Pines and others note, the practice of shifting allegiances would engender an atmosphere of mistrust between rulers and ministers, which would result in an emphasis on legalistic and bureaucratic methods to ensure steadfast loyalty to the ruler against any possible defiance or defections, as seen in the works of Han Fei 韓非 (ca. 280–233 bce) and some of his predecessors.20 The tension over what kind of ministerial behavior constitutes true loyalty is perhaps most acutely expressed in the Guodian manuscript “Lu Mu Gong wen Zisi” 魯穆公問子思. In this brief text consisting of a simple narrative, Lord Mu of Lu (r. 407–377 bce) asks Zisi 子思 (483–402 bce) what it is that makes for a “loyal minister,” and Zisi gives the most unexpected of replies: 魯穆公昏（問）於子思曰：「可（何）女（如）而可胃（謂） 忠臣？」子思曰：「恆21 （稱）（1）其君之亞（惡）者，可 18

19 20 21

This is a notion we also see reflected in a number of other Guodian texts. See Pines 2002b: 53–56, and his discussion of the “Liu de” and “Yucong” texts on pp. 38–42; see also the section “The Priorities of Internal and External” in my introduction to “Liu de” in Cook 2012: 757–762. According to Huang Junliang (2003: 39), as a result of the ideological and social changes of the times, “zhong became the monopoly of the minister in the Warring States.” For more on both the shift of the locus of loyalty toward an abstract ideal (often in the name of “propriety” 義) and the issue of whether a frustrated minister could rightfully leave the state (an idea of which the Mohists were in fact somewhat critical), see Yuasa Kunihiro 2001: 51–52 and 56–57; cf. Satō Masayuki 2007: 24–25. For details, see again Pines 2002b: 56–61; the quotation is from the “Ba yi” 八佾 chapter of the Lunyu 論語 (Lunyu 3.19: 30). See Pines 2002b: 62–71; Huang Junliang 2003: 41; cf. Yuasa Kunihiro 2001: 53. The predecessors in question include Shang Yang 商鞅, Shen Buhai 申不害, and Shen Dao 慎到. Note that Chen Wei (1998) and others would see the 亙 element of this graph as equivalent here to the closely similar 亟, taking it in the sense of either “sharply” or “repeatedly.”

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

The Changing Role of the Minister in the Warring States

193

胃（謂）忠臣矣。」公不敓（悅），咠（揖）而退之。成孫弋 見，（2）公曰：「向（嚮）者 （吾）昏（問）忠臣於子思， 子思曰：『亙（恆） （稱）其君之亞（惡）者可胃（謂）忠 （3）臣矣。』 （寡）人惑安（焉），而未之得也。」成孫弋 曰：「 （嘻），善才（哉），言 （乎）！（4）夫為其君之 古（故）殺其身者，嘗又（有）之矣。亙（恆） （稱）其君 之亞（惡）者（5）未之又（有）也。夫為其君之古（故） 殺其身者，交（效） （祿） （爵）者也。亙（恆）（6） 【稱其君】之亞（惡）【者，遠】 （祿） （爵）者【也。為 仁 】 義 而 遠 （ 祿 ） （ 爵 ） ， 非 （ 7） 子 思 ， （ 吾 ） 亞（惡）昏（聞）之矣？」 ▌（8） Lord Mu of Lu asked Zisi: “What kind of person may be called a ‘loyal minister’?”  Zisi replied: “One who consistently mentions his ruler’s flaws may be called a ‘loyal minister.’”  Lord Mu was displeased and dismissed him with a hand-clasped bow. Chengsun Yi22 was given audience, and Lord Mu said to him: “Just now, I asked Zisi about the [nature of a] ‘loyal minister,’ and Zisi replied: ‘One who consistently mentions his ruler’s flaws may be called a “loyal minister.”’ I am perplexed by this and have failed to understand it.” Chengsun Yi replied: “Ah, how great these words are! For there have been those who have sacrificed themselves for the sake of their ruler, but there has never [before] been one who consistently mentioned his ruler’s flaws. Those who would sacrifice themselves for the sake of their ruler are those who devote themselves [on behalf of] salary and rank, whereas 【those who】 consistently 【mention their ruler’s】 flaws 【are】 those who 【dis­tance themselves from】 salary and rank. 【To act for humanity(?) and】 propriety and hold salary and rank at a distance—who but Zisi have I ever heard of [acting thus]?”23 That the minister is obliged to provide frank remonstrance to his ruler and correct his errors of judgment is nothing new, but rarely do we see this duty expressed as a philosophical position in such blunt terms. The unusual frankness of the statement is consistent with the persona of Zisi as portrayed 22 23

This figure is otherwise unknown. The transcription, translation, and much of the following discussion of the text derive from Cook 2012: 419–427. Note that words in coarse brackets supply lacunae in the manuscript.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

194

Cook

in the Mengzi 孟子 and elsewhere, where he consistently demands to be treated with genuine respect by Lord Mu, making Zisi a character long identifiable with an emerging new sense of ministerial self-worth in the early Warring States—an ideal that Mengzi himself would later do his best to emulate. Still, the figure of such an independent-minded minister is not without precedent, and Yanzi himself, as portrayed in the Zuo zhuan, may in some ways have been one of the earlier literary—if not historical—models for the figure of Zisi. Nonetheless, the text most often cited as expressing a philosophy most closely akin to that of “Lu Mu Gong wen Zisi” comes from the late Warring States: the “Chen dao” 臣道 chapter of the Xunzi. One of the key passages there runs as follows: 從命而利君謂之順，從命而不利君謂之諂；逆命而利君謂之 忠，逆命而不利君謂之篡；不卹君之榮辱，不卹國之臧否，偷 合苟容以持祿養交而已耳，謂之國賊。 To heed commands and thereby benefit the ruler we call “compliance”; to heed commands and thereby disadvantage the ruler we call “sycophancy.” To oppose commands and thereby benefit the ruler we call “loyalty”; to oppose commands and thereby disadvantage the ruler we call “usurpation.” To have concern for neither the glory or disgrace of the ruler nor the good or ill of the state, simply finding some obsequious means to get along while receiving a salary and cultivating connections, we call this being a “villain of the state.” (Xunzi jijie 9.13: 249)24 The text then goes on to enumerate four categories of resistance given in the face of a ruler’s plans or actions that threaten to “imperil the state or topple its altars” 危國家隕社稷: “remonstrance” 諫, wherein one warns the ruler but forsakes him 去 if unheeded; “contention” 爭, wherein one is insistent with his warnings to the point of sacrificing himself 死; “assistance” 輔, wherein one gathers the support of like-minded ministers so that force of numbers compels the ruler to change his mind for the good of the state; and “defiance” 拂, wherein one blatantly disregards the ruler’s commands and usurps his prerogatives but does so for the benefit of the state and the good of the ruler himself. The text considers all four types of ministers to be treasures of the state, whom enlightened rulers eventually see fit to honor and reward, and whom benighted rulers invariably punish or execute; in support of this, it cites 24

For an alternative translation, see Pines 2002b: 69.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

The Changing Role of the Minister in the Warring States

195

a “Tradition” 傳 as saying, “Follow the Way, not the ruler” (從道不從君).25 The text further goes on to enumerate three grades of loyalty: the “greatest loyalty” 大忠, wherein the minister “envelops the ruler in virtue and thereby transforms him” (以德復[覆]君而化之); “secondary loyalty” 次忠, wherein he assists the ruler by moderating the ruler’s actions (以德調君而輔之); and “lower loyalty” 下忠, wherein he manages to anger the ruler through upright remon­ strance (以是諫非而怒之). Below these three come the aforemen­tioned “villains of the state,” who simply comply with the ruler’s whims.26 Of course, Zisi’s ostensible definition of a loyal minister as one who “consistently mentions his ruler’s flaws” could easily lead to the type of provocation that would consign it to the Xunzi’s category of “lower loyalty,” but it certainly still falls within the range of the latter’s definition of “loyalty” in general as “opposing commands and thereby benefiting the ruler.” Given this rough conformity with “Chen dao,” there are some who would suggest that Zisi’s utterance in “Lu Mu Gong wen Zisi” could have arisen only within a late Warring States compositional context.27 But is there anything really all that new in this? The notion that frank remonstrance is the inherent responsibility of the minister is entirely in line with the longstanding notion that loyal service to the ruler is never blindly unconditional, but must be predicated on the ruler’s relative willingness to implement the proper ways of governance. The 25 26 27

Xunzi jijie IX.13: 250; note that some would read 拂 as 弼, thus making it close in sense to 輔. For a full translation of the passage in question, see Pines 2002b: 69. Xunzi jijie IX.13: 254. For more on “Chen dao,” see Xi Panlin 2000: 207–208; Pines 2002b: 68–71. See in particular Yi Sǔng-ryul 李承律, who additionally cites for support examples from the “Lu wen” 魯問 chapter of the Mozi, the “Zhizhong” 至忠 chapter of the Lüshi chunqiu, and other texts that stress how the loyal minister’s task is to remonstrate his lord’s faults, even if they grate on the ears—though, Yi adds, none going so far as to use the abrasive term e 惡 for the ruler’s transgressions. On the basis of such references, Yi asserts that “emphasis on remonstrations against the ruler’s ‘faults’ by ‘loyal ministers’ begins in earnest in the final years of the Warring States period.” He also contends that around that same time, when such writings as the Han Feizi appear to define the ruler-minister relationship in terms of self-interest, other texts, like the “Geng Zhu” 耕柱 chapter of the Mozi, are seen to extol the ostensibly rare ideal of “striving toward propriety while turning one’s back on salary” 倍祿而鄉義者 that is emphasized in “Lu Mu Gong wen Zisi.” See Yi Sǔng-ryul 2001: 60–69, or his 2003: 347–355; for the references in question, see Mozi XIII.49: 735, Lüshi chunqiu 11.2: 584, and Mozi XI.46: 659. As Satō Masayuki (2010: 77) observes, however, the more general framing of such broad moral values as humanity or propriety in opposition to individual interests or personal benefits is already clearly evident in somewhat-earlier texts, such as in the opening passage of the Mengzi or in such core Mozi chapters as “Jian ai” 兼愛 and “Fei gong” 非攻.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

196

Cook

ideal of straightforward reproach in the face of immoral rulership is one expressly reflected in a number of texts ascribed to or associated with such notably Confucian figures as Zengzi 曾子 and, once again, Zisi 子思, including texts that evidence suggests most likely dated from no later than the mid– Warring States and may well be generally contemporaneous with those of the Guodian corpus.28 Regardless of how one chooses to date these texts, however, it seems more reasonable to conclude only that both “Lu Mu Gong wen Zisi” and, perhaps somewhat later, the Mengzi were written at a time when this new concept of ministerial integrity and loyalty defined directly in terms of outspoken and uncompromising criticism was only just beginning to make its way to the forefront of philosophical discourse. But it was never simply just lurking in the background either: the duty of the minister to criticize his ruler openly whenever the latter’s actions threatened the political interests or stability of the state has been part and parcel of the conception of a loyal minister, at least implicitly, ever since political narratives first started to make their appearance.29 In light of all this, as we go on to examine the conception of the minister as manifested in the Yanzi chunqiu, it is perhaps best to focus on the questions that scholars like Pines and Satō already point to, that is, in the service of whom or what is loyalty defined: the ruler, the state and its people, or some higher ideal like “propriety” (yi 義) or “the Way” (dao 道)? And what are to be the consequences if one’s remonstrance is not heeded—does one give up, contend to the death, or leave the state altogether to serve some other ruler?

28

29

This includes the notion that the “noble man speaks and acts straightforwardly” (君子直 言直行) in the “Zengzi zhi yan” 曾子制言 chapter of the Da Dai Liji and the idea that “when the ruler’s commands are perverse, the minister may oppose the commands” (君 命逆則臣有逆命) in the “Biao ji” 表記 chapter of the Liji. See Da Dai Liji jiegu V.55:93 and Liji jijie LI.32: 1316; for these and related references, see also Liang Tao 2008: 435–437. For further references and discussion, see Cook 2012: 423–424. The question as to exactly when that initial appearance may have been is, to be sure, a somewhat-contentious one, depending as it does on the dating of the Zuo zhuan and its sources. For different approaches to the latter issue, including comprehensive surveys of the relevant secondary literature, see Schaberg 2001; Pines 2002a; Li Wai-yee 2007. Differences aside, these three scholars, not to mention the vast majority of Chinese and Japanese scholars who have studied the issue at length, all agree that the Zuo zhuan was composed or compiled no later than the fourth century bce. I thank Yuri Pines for confirmation of this general assessment of the consensus of the secondary literature.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

The Changing Role of the Minister in the Warring States



197

Yanzi and the Role of the Minister

The passage from the Zuo zhuan (and Yanzi chunqiu) cited above already points to Yanzi’s answers to these questions (for convenience, I shall pro­ visionally treat this literary figure as an historical person with a consistent philosophical position): his ultimate loyalties are to the state, not the ruler per se; he does not take fleeing in the face of political failure lightly, and selfabnegation is most definitely not in his playbook. But does he ever contemplate serving another lord in the name of an ideal that is higher than the state itself? To try to answer that question, let us take a more in-depth look at the figure of Yanzi as he is portrayed in different passages of the Yanzi chunqiu to see whether any sort of consistent philosophical position emerges. We may begin with a passage, already cited in some of the studies mentioned above, in which Yanzi is directly asked to define the notion of a “loyal minister”: 景公問晏子曰：「忠臣之行何如？」對曰：「不掩君過，諫乎 前，不華乎外；選賢進能，不私乎內；稱身就位，計能定祿； 睹賢不居其上，受祿不過其量；不權居以為行，不稱位以為 忠；不揜賢以隱長，不刻下以諛上；君在不事太子，國危不交 諸侯；順則進，否則退，不與君行邪也。」 Lord Jing asked Yanzi: “What are the actions of a loyal minister?”  Yanzi replied: “He does not cover up his ruler’s faults; he remonstrates to his face but does not make any external show of it. He selects and promotes the worthy and capable, with no bias toward relatives. He takes up only positions that befit him and determines salary in accordance with ability. If he sees someone worthy, he will not place himself above him, and he never accepts more than his share of salary. He chooses the proper course of action without concern for his station and maintains his loyalty without regard to his position. He does not hide the worthy to keep his seniors in the dark, and he does not cut down his subordinates to ingratiate himself with superiors. While his ruler is still alive, he does not serve the crown prince, and when the state is in peril, he does not cultivate connections with other feudal lords. When circumstances are favorable, he advances; when not, he recedes; he does not assist his ruler to act improperly.” (Yanzi chunqiu jiaozhu 3.20: 167–168 [“Nei pian, Wen shang” 內篇問上]) Yuasa Kunihiro (2001) emphasizes the ideas here of “not covering up the ruler’s faults” and “not assisting the ruler to act improperly” as examples of the notion

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

198

Cook

that the minister should always speak with the interests of the state in mind and, citing the same passage with the Zuo zhuan parallel that we discussed two sections above, proffers the Yanzi chunqiu as a work in which the interests of the ruler and the interests of the state are contrasted in sharp relief.30 Beyond this, the passage here defines the duties of a loyal minister in terms that can be summed up as follows: (1) He is courageously critical of his ruler’s errors (but only to his face), never assisting his ruler to do ill; (2) he is not self-serving, always promoting other worthies and never taking on more than he is capable of; (3) he maintains his loyalty regardless of his personal circumstances, insofar as that loyalty is properly directed; and (4) he does not shift his loyalty to another when his ruler or state is in peril. The passage that comes just before this finds Lord Jing asking a nearly identical question—and this time has Yanzi giving an answer every bit as outrageously shocking as that which Zisi gave to Lord Mu in our excavated text: 景公問于晏子曰：「忠臣之事君也，何若？」晏子對曰：「有 難不死，出亡不送。」公不說，曰：「君裂地而封之，疏爵而 貴之，君有難不死，出亡不送，可謂忠乎？」對曰：「言而見 用，終身無難，臣奚死焉；謀而見從，終身不出，臣奚送焉。 若言不用，有難而死之，是妄死也；謀而不從，出亡而送之， 是詐偽也。故忠臣也者，能納善于君，不能與君陷于難。」 Lord Jing asked Yanzi: “In what manner does a loyal minister go about serving his ruler?”  Yanzi replied: “If there are troubles, he does not submit to death; and if [the ruler] has to flee, he does not accompany him on the journey.”  Lord Jing was not pleased and said: “The ruler severs off a piece of land to enfeoff him, dispenses a rank to ennoble him, and yet he does not submit to death when the ruler meets with troubles and does not accompany the ruler when he has to flee—could this be called loyal?”  Yanzi replied: “If [the minister’s] words were employed, [the ruler] would meet with no trouble to the end of his days—wherein would the minister submit to death? If his counsel were followed, [the ruler] would never have to flee—to where would the minister accompany him? [But] if his words were not employed and yet he submitted to death when there were troubles, this would be to die recklessly; and if his counsel were not employed and yet he accompanied the ruler when he fled, this would be 30

Satō Masayuki (2010: 84) also singles out the “not covering up the ruler’s faults” of this passage as finding a close echo in “Lu Mu Gong wen Zisi.”

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

The Changing Role of the Minister in the Warring States

199

to commit deception. Thus, a loyal minister is one able to contribute excellence to his ruler, and not one who falls into trouble with him.” (Yanzi chunqiu jiaozhu 3.19: 165–166 [“Nei pian, Wen shang” 內篇問上]) Note how closely all this dovetails with the Zuo zhuan passage we examined earlier: there, Yanzi is actually faced with the choice to submit to death or flee upon his ruler’s assassination, but chooses neither, under much the same rationale as that given in theoretical form here: his words of counsel had not been employed, and so Lord Zhuang’s death basically had nothing to do with him. Supposing that we could plausibly read these two passages against each other as actual historical statements, we might say that Yanzi is providing Lord Jing with theoretical justification for his own prior act of self-preservation in the face of the death of Lord Jing’s predecessor, and telling him in no uncertain terms that he would not hesitate to act the same way once again. Also note how closely the passage here parallels the narrative of “Lu Mu Gong wen Zisi”: the ruler asks his chief adviser to define the role of a “loyal minister,” that adviser gives an answer in a manner designed to appear shocking, the ruler becomes angry and asks a follow-up question for clarification, and a more detailed answer is given to explain the rationale behind the utterance, showing the ruler how his conventional valuation is to be turned upon its head. The only differences are the precise content of the utterance and the fact that Yanzi defends that utterance himself rather than going through a surrogate.31 The conventional wisdom here is also probably even somewhat more conventional than the assumptions that are undercut in “Lu Mu Gong wen Zisi”: that the minister is expected to sacrifice himself for his ruler’s sake or accompany him when he is forced to flee are acts that Lord Jing, here the representative of conventional expectations, obviously presumes any loyal minister would carry out. In the face of such expectations, the Yanzi chunqiu is clearly offering here some sort of reevaluation of how the relationship between ruler and minister is to be conceptualized. But how does the role of minister manifest itself in passages in which “loyalty” per se is not the topic of discussion? Consider the following passage related to some of Lord Jing’s acts of reckless bestowal: 景公燕賞于國內，萬鍾者三，千鍾者五，令三出，而職計莫之 從。公怒，令免職計，令三出，而士師莫之從。公不說。晏子

31

Satō Masayuki (2010: 85) also observes, though without further comment, how the dialogue here is “similar in narrative structure to ‘Lu Mu Gong wen Zisi.’”

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

200

Cook

見，公謂晏子曰：「寡人聞君國者，愛人則能利之，惡人則能 疏之。今寡人愛人不能利，惡人不能疏，失君道矣。」   晏子曰：「嬰聞之，君正臣從謂之順，君僻臣從謂之逆。今 君賞讒諛之民，而令吏必從，則是使君失其道，臣失其守也。 先王之立愛，以勸善也，其立惡，以禁暴也。昔者三代之興 也，利于國者愛之，害于國者惡之，故明所愛而賢良眾，明所 惡而邪僻滅，是以天下治平，百姓和集。及其衰也，行安簡 易，身安逸樂，順于己者愛之，逆于己者惡之，故明所愛而邪 僻繁，明所惡而賢良滅，離散百姓，危覆社稷。君上不度聖王 之興，而下不觀惰君之衰，臣懼君之逆政之行，有司不敢爭， 以覆社稷，危宗廟。」   公曰：「寡人不知也，請從士師之策。」32 Lord Jing held a banquet in which he bestowed rewards upon [people] within the state, with three receiving ten thousand tons [zhong 鍾] of grain and another five receiving a thousand tons. He gave the order three times, but each time the officer of accounting paid no heed. Lord [Jing] got angry, and he ordered that the officer of accounting be relieved of his duties. He gave this order [of dismissal] three times, but the master of officials each time paid no heed. Lord [Jing] was displeased.  Yanzi was given audience, and Lord [Jing] asked him: “I have heard that the ruler of a state may profit those men he cherishes and distance those men he detests, but now I am allowed to neither profit the former nor distance the latter and have [thus] lost the way of rulership.”  Yanzi replied: “I have heard it said that when the ruler is upright and the ministers follow, we call this ‘compliant’ [shun 順]; when the ruler is biased and the ministers follow, we call this ‘contrary’ [ni 逆]. In the present case, my lord is rewarding obsequious ministers and demanding that the officials follow his commands—this is what is causing my lord to lose his way of rulership and the ministers to lose their responsibilities. When the former kings established those they cherished, they did so for the purpose of encouraging goodness, and when they removed33 those they detested, they did so for the purpose of prohibiting violence. The 32

33

The Yuan edition concludes this passage with nine additional characters: 國內之祿，所 收者三也. They are not included in the Qunshu zhiyao 群書治要 citation of the passage and would appear to be some sort of accretion. For a brief introduction to the various late imperial Yanzi editions, see Zhang Chunyi’s “Fan li” 凡例 in Yanzi chunqiu jiaozhu, pp. 3–4. I follow the Qunshu zhiyao reading of 去 for 立.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

The Changing Role of the Minister in the Warring States

201

rise of the three dynasties in ancient times [was because their rulers] cherished those who benefited their states and detested those who harmed their states. Thus, when they made it clear whom they cherished, the worthy and good [serving them] were many, and when they made it clear whom they detested, the depraved and biased were extinguished. Thus, the world was in orderly peace, and the hundred surnames were harmoniously united. When [those dynasties] declined, [their rulers’] practices became dissolute and frivolous, and [the rulers] themselves became lax and given to self-enjoyment. They cherished whoever accorded with their wishes and detested whoever ran contrary to them. Thus, when they made it clear whom they cherished, the depraved and biased proliferated, and when they made it clear whom they detested, the worthy and good were extinguished. The hundred surnames were [thereby] alienated in disarray, and the altars of state were in peril of collapse. My lord has not considered the rise of the sage-kings above, nor has he observed the decline of the indolent rulers below. I fear that my lord will be practicing a contrary form of governance and that none of the officers will dare to admonish you, so that the altars of state will be overturned and the ancestral temple will be in peril.”  Lord [Jing] said: “I have been ignorant. Let us follow the judgment of the master of officials.” (Yanzi chunqiu jiaozhu 1.7: 18–21 [“Nei pian, Jian shang” 內篇諫上]) There is much to be gleaned from this brief passage, which, while no doubt imbued with certain literary fictions and rhetorical embellishments, presents a narrative that must have at least been plausible enough to be taken seriously. First, it comes as no surprise that currying favor with the ruler was viewed by many as a feasible path to wealth and status, and it was clearly recognized that obsequious ministers had had a long history of personal success. Second, and somewhat more unexpectedly, there were apparently at least some officials of government—even those of such relatively low status as the accounting officer—who felt free to disregard a direct order from the ruler if it conflicted with their proper sense of duty. This, naturally, is where literary license may have come into play, for while there are always extremes by which certain upright individuals will not abide, it is difficult to imagine that such defiance would have been any sort of normal reaction to an order that involved nothing worse than excessive and undeserved rewards. Who, after all, is the officer of accounting to take it upon himself to decide whether a reward is justified? Nonetheless, it is intriguing that Lord Jing offers nothing more draconian in the way of punishment than the attempt to remove the officer from his post,

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

202

Cook

and then reacts with nothing more than displeasure to the refusal of the master of officials to allow this to happen—Lord Jing is clearly more generous with his rewards than he is liberal with his punishments. Equally fascinating is Yanzi’s claim that by “demanding that the officials follow his commands,” Lord Jing is actually “losing his way [of rulership]” (君失其道) and causing the ministers to “lose their responsibilities” (臣失其守). It is as if Lord Jing can rule only by suggestion, that governance is to be implemented by committee, and that the ruler of state should not actually hold the final authority in matters of personnel.34 Yanzi, of course, seeks to redefine for Lord Jing the entire basis upon which rewards and punishments should be meted out, and in the process reconceptualizes for him the very definitions of the terms “compliant” and “contrary”—noting, in effect, that “going with the flow” of the ruler’s wishes may, in certain circumstances, be to “go against” the current of the interests of the state. The ideal, once again, is that ministers follow their ruler’s wishes only when they are upright, but disregard them—or at least object to them—when they are biased or corrupt. Rewards and punishments must be established on the basis of encouraging goodness and prohibiting violence; in short, rulers should cherish those who benefit the state and detest those who harm it, and this is proffered as the only stable course of successful practice, the risk for violation being nothing less than the toppling of the state itself.35 Here we see again how the “interests of the state” argument directly serves the interests of the minister as well. There is probably no greater advantage to be extended to the minister than the power to disregard direct orders, but that 34

35

It is also worth noting that here, as with much of the Yanzi chunqiu, this potentially subversive idea is conveyed in the form of an anecdotal narrative rather than an explicit statement of philosophy—allowing it to be expressed both powerfully and vividly and yet in a manner somewhat more immune to the adverse political consequences that any more direct statement would surely entail. One might compare this to the philosophically argued “practical solution” that would be offered by Han Fei 韓非, as described in Romain Graziani’s chapter in this volume, which “appears to preserve the traditional forms of political authority” by “surreptitiously transforming effective power into symbolic sovereignty”; I thank the anonymous reviewer of my chapter for drawing this connection. Not surprisingly, Zhang Chunyi references the “Chen dao” chapter of the Xunzi in his commentary to this passage, noting how the wording resonates well with such lines as “those who serve a sagely ruler [need] only to follow, and never to remonstrate” (事聖君者，有 聽從，無諫爭), whereas “those who find some obsequious means to get along [with their ruler], like Cao Chulong toward [Shang King] Zhou, may be called the ‘villains of the state’” (偷合苟容，若曹觸龍之於紂者，可謂國賊矣). There, as here, the interests of the state are seen as the ultimate determinant (Yanzi chunqiu jiaozhu, p. 19).

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

The Changing Role of the Minister in the Warring States

203

is precisely what is being argued for in those cases when such orders run contrary to the interests of the state.36 Other passages find Yanzi taking direct action in the service of such interests, assuming, on one occasion, the prerogative of arresting a group of favored entertainers in an attempt to curb the behavior of his ruler: 晏子朝，杜扃望羊待于朝。晏子曰：「君奚故不朝？」對曰： 「君夜發（廢）不可以朝。」晏子曰：「何故？」對曰：「梁 丘據入歌人虞，變齊音。」晏子退朝，命宗祝修禮而拘虞，公 聞之而怒曰：「何故而拘虞？」晏子曰：「以新樂淫君。」公 曰：「諸侯之事，百官之政，寡人願以請子。酒醴之味，金石 之聲，願夫子無與焉。夫樂，何必夫攻〈故〉哉？」對曰：「 夫樂亡而禮從之，禮亡而政從之，政亡而國從之｛國衰。臣懼 君之逆政之行。有｝歌，〔桀作東歌南音〕，紂作〔朝歌〕北 里，幽厲之聲，顧夫淫以鄙而偕亡。君奚輕變夫故哉？」公 曰：「不幸有社稷之業，不擇言而出之，請受命矣。」 Yanzi went to pay court, but found the gate barred37 and [people] pacing around there expectantly. Yanzi said: “Why has our lord not come to court?”  “He stayed up all night and is unable to attend court,” was the reply.  “Why did he do that?” asked Yanzi.  “Liangqiu Ju brought in some singer-entertainers,38 who performed jazzed-up versions of Qi music,” was the reply.  Yanzi withdrew from court, ordered the officer of sacrifices to reform the rituals, and had the entertainers arrested. When Lord [Jing] heard about this, he inquired angrily: “Why did you arrest the entertainers?”  “They were debauching my lord with new music,” replied Yanzi.

36

37 38

Andrew Meyer also observes how the Yanzi chunqiu (along with early portions of the Guanzi) repeatedly emphasizes the idea that “the personal development and functioning of an intellectual is inseparable from his role as servitor of the state.” He understands this, however, more as a function of its possible derivation from a Qi 齊 patronage community in which texts were constructed in a manner designed to legitimize the political claims of the usurping Tian 田 clan, providing a “forum in which Tian leaders could broadcast and seek to institutionalize new concepts of statehood and rulership.” See Meyer 2010–11: 52, 65–66. Sun Xingyan 孫星衍 (1753–1818) takes 杜扃 as the name of a person; my interpretation here follows that of Yu Chang 于鬯 (1862–1919). I take 虞 here not as a singer’s name but rather as equivalent to 娛.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

204

Cook

 Lord [Jing] responded: “I am more than willing to request your [advice] regarding the affairs of the regional lords or the administration of the hundred officials, but I wish that you would take no part in matters pertaining to the flavors of fine alcohols or the tones of bronze bells and stone chimes. Why must you insist that the music be traditional?”39  Yanzi replied: “When the music is lost, the rituals will follow; when the rituals are lost, the governance will follow. When the governance is lost, the state will follow it {into decline.40 I fear that my lord’s actions run contrary to [the interests of] governance.}41 When we look back upon such songs as [the Eastern Songs and Southern Music,] created by [King] Jie [of Xia], [Zhaoge and] Beili, created by [King] Zhou [of Yin], or the sounds of [the Zhou kings] You and Li, [we see that] they were all decadent and vulgar, and all resulted in a loss [of governance.]42 How can my lord lightly depart from the ancient traditions?”  Lord [Jing] responded: “It is unfortunate that the responsibility of the [sacred] altars of state rest upon [such a person as I, who] utters words without thinking. Please allow me to accept your instruction.” (Yanzi chunqiu jiaozhu 1.6: 16–18 [“Nei pian, Jian shang” 內篇諫上]) Would a real minister have dared to do anything so audacious? Perhaps not. But by constructing a narrative in which Yanzi gets away with acting so independently, in the interest of the ruler’s own good and that of the state, the text attempts to establish a standard to which the minister of its own time might appeal in an attempt to assume more authority than he would otherwise be accorded.43 39 40 41

42

43

This follows Sun Xingyan’s emendation of 攻, “attack,” to 故, “ancient,” as some editions have it. I follow Liu Shipei 劉師培 (1884–1919) in treating the second 國 as extraneous. As Gu Guangqi 顧廣圻 (1770–1839) argues, the eleven graphs 國衰臣懼君之逆政之行 有 were likely displaced here from the next chapter (where, however, they are still found, with the exception of 國); see Wu Zeyu 1977: 25. I indicate these graphs in the transcription and translation by the use of braces. These lines appear to be corrupted and have text missing. The words 桀作東歌南音 are tentatively supplied, following Sun Xingyan, on the basis of a Yanzi chunqiu citation found in Liu Yuanlin’s 劉淵林 annotations to the “Wudu fu” 吳都賦 in the Wenxuan 文 選; the 朝歌 below is also supplied after Sun’s emendation. I indicate these supplied words here by the use of large brackets. As David Schaberg has cogently discussed elsewhere, the “ways of historical understanding and of narration” of early Chinese historiographers “belong to a specific moment in Chinese history and thought, a moment that emerges more clearly for us when we recog-

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

The Changing Role of the Minister in the Warring States

205

The role of the minister as an independent voice is perhaps best encapsulated in Yanzi’s famous dictum that ruler and minister should be “in harmony, not uniformity” 和而不同, wherein it is the minister’s solemn duty to support his ruler through corrective disagreement with whatever the minister finds unacceptable in the ruler’s decisions, in the same way that a chef adds different flavors to a broth to lessen the strength of any dominating ingredient, or a music master balances different instrumental tones and timbres into an everunifying yet never-uniform compositional whole.44

The Case of Lord Jing’s Protracted Illness

Yanzi is unmistakably a figure who promotes the vehicle of open remonstrance as vital to the continued health and success of the state. In one passage, it is even linked to the physical health of the ruler himself. This passage is of particular import, given that it exists in four different versions: one in the Zuo zhuan, two in the Yanzi chunqiu (with the “Outer Chapters” version being almost identical to the one in the Zuo zhuan), and one among the recently unearthed Shanghai Museum manuscripts, the latter complete with its own title, 競公 (usually read “Jing Gong nüe” 景公瘧; see Ma Chengyuan 2007: 16–59, 158–191). As the story goes, Lord Jing develops a chronic skin disease that does not improve for over a year,45 and so he sends out an astrologer-scribe 史 and invocator of sacrifices 祝 to ensure that generous sacrifices are offered to the spirits of the mountains, rivers, and departed ancestors, with the numbers

44

45

nize that their intellectual performances were directed to their contemporaries, not to ourselves.” Interestingly, Schaberg relates such rhetorical acts to Nietzsche’s concept of ressentiment, insofar as the historiographers naturally identified themselves with the ministerial class, for whom the “narrative itself accomplishes the transformation of values” in which that group stakes claim to the moral and intellectual high ground. See Schaberg 2001: 259. See Chunqiu Zuozhuan zhu, Zhao 21: 419–420; Yanzi chunqiu jiaozhu 7.7: 332–336 (“Wai pian, Chong er yi zhe” 外篇重而異者). See also Yanzi chunqiu jiaozhu 1.18: 48 (“Nei pian, Jian shang”). For an excellent recent discussion of this passage and others utilizing similar metaphors, along with some of the likely political and religious associations of such metaphors, see Sterckx 2011: 59–65. I have elsewhere argued at some length that the “malaria” 瘧 of the Yanzi “Inner Chapters” text derives from a misreading of the graph (like the one we see in the excavated version), which should here be properly read 痼, a “chronic” or “entrenched” illness, and that the 痁 we find in the Zuo zhuan and Yanzi “Outer Chapters” version, also glossed as 瘧, or “malaria,” is in turn a graphic error for , that is, 痼. See Gu Shikao 2008.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

206

Cook

of victims and other sacrificial offerings doubling those of his predecessor. As his illness only grows worse, he proposes sacrificing the two officers themselves in an attempt to appease the Lord-on-High (or Supreme Thearch 上帝) and asks Yanzi, along with two other ministers, for their opinions about this. As usual, Yanzi is the sole detractor, asking Lord Jing whether he thought that the acts of invocation offered by the sacrificial officers were of any use in the first place. Once Lord Jing falls for the trap by answering in the affirmative, Yanzi expresses his thoughts as follows—here according to the “Inner Chapters” version: 「若以為有益，則詛亦有損也。君疏輔而遠拂，忠臣擁塞，諫言 不出。臣聞之，近臣嘿，遠臣瘖，眾口鑠金。今自聊、攝以 東，姑、尤以西者，此其人民眾矣，百姓之咎怨誹謗，詛君于 上帝者多矣。一國詛，兩人祝，雖善祝者不能勝也。且夫祝直 言情，則謗吾君也；隱匿過，則欺上帝也。上帝神，則不可 欺；上帝不神，祝亦無益。願君察之也。不然，刑無罪，夏商 所以滅也。」 “If you find prayers of invocation to be beneficial, then it follows that curses must also be detrimental. My lord keeps both assistance 輔 and defiance 拂 at a distance, and so loyal ministers are obstructed and words of remonstrance are not forthcoming. I have heard that when close ministers are silent and distant ministers are mute, the mouths of the masses are able to melt even bronze. Now in all the territory east of Liao and Nie and west of the Gu and You Rivers [i.e., the entire state of Qi], the people are quite numerous, and those among the hundred surnames who condemn, disparage, and curse my lord to the Lord-on-High are many. With an entire state cursing, and just two men invocating, even the most skillful invocators would be unable to gain the upper hand.  “Moreover, if the invocators were expressing the plain truth [to the spirits], they would [in effect] be disparaging my lord; if they were covering up [your] faults, then they would be deceiving the Lord-onHigh. If the Lord-on-High is numinous, then he cannot be deceived; if he is not numinous, then the prayers of invocation would be of no benefit in the first place. I hope my lord will examine the matter thoroughly. Otherwise, to punish the guiltless—that is how the Xia and Shang dynasties came to an end!” (Yanzi chunqiu jiaozhu 1.12: 30–33 [“Nei pian, Jian shang” 內篇諫上])46 46

For the Zuo zhuan version, which appears in 522 bce, see Chunqiu Zuozhuan zhu, Zhao 20: 1415–1418. Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

The Changing Role of the Minister in the Warring States

207

Yanzi has certainly mastered the art of sophisticated rhetoric, once again employing a line of argumentation that would have made the most skilled of wandering persuaders proud. Take the statements of both this and a previously cited passage: 「且夫祝直言情，則謗吾君也；隱匿過，則欺上帝也。上帝神， 則不可欺；上帝不神，祝亦無益。」 “If the Lord-on-High is numinous, then he cannot be deceived; if he is not numinous, then the prayers of invocation would be of no benefit in the first place.” 「言而見用，終身無難，臣奚死焉；謀而見從，終身不出，臣奚 送焉。若言不用，有難而死之，是妄死也；謀而不從，出亡而 送之，是詐偽也。」 “If [the minister’s] words were employed, [the ruler] would meet with no trouble to the end of his days—wherein would the minister submit to death? If his counsel were followed, [the ruler] would never have to flee—to where would the minister accompany him? [But] if his words were not employed and yet he submitted to death when there were troubles, this would be to die recklessly; and if his counsel were not employed and yet he accompanied the ruler when he fled, this would be to commit deception.” Now compare them to the way the archery officer who snatches the elixir of immortality from the king of Chu 楚 similarly pushes things to their logical conclusions (or, in this case, logical absurdity) in his audacious attempt at selfdefense, as recorded in the Zhanguo ce 戰國策 (“Chu ce 4” 楚策四): 「且客獻不死之藥，臣食之而王殺臣，是死藥也。王殺無罪之 臣，而明人之欺王。」王乃不殺。 “Moreover, the guest submitted an elixir of immortality [to Your Highness]. If I drank it and Your Highness [successfully] had me executed, then [that would imply that] it is an elixir of mortality. Your Highness would have executed a guiltless minister and also manifested the fact that someone had deceived you.” The king consequently spared him. (17.8: 890–892)

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

208

Cook

More to our point, however, is the line “My lord keeps both assistance and defiance at a distance, and so loyal ministers are obstructed and words of remonstrance are not forthcoming” (君疏輔而遠拂，忠臣擁塞，諫言不 出), as this quite remarkably utilizes two of the four key terms of ministerial resistance found in the “Chen dao” chapter of the Xunzi: “assistance” 輔 and “defiance” 拂—the only other instance of this pairing to be found in a (presumably) pre-Qin text.47 Given this fact, it is necessary to point out that this line is not to be found in either the Zuo zhuan/“Outer Chapters” version of the passage or the Shanghai Museum manuscript version—giving us cause to wonder whether this “Inner Chapters” version may even perhaps have been altered under the influence of the Xunzi chapter. It must also be added that the aforementioned logic-pushing form of argumentation here also fails to present itself in either of those other versions. Such discrepancies give us pause to consider more carefully precisely what degree of internal integrity we might ascribe to the Yanzi chunqiu, which otherwise reveals remarkable consistency in philosophical position. As for the excavated version of the “protracted illness” passage, it differs from both the Zuo zhuan and the Yanzi “Inner Chapters” version in a number of substantial ways and yet has distinct points of overlap with each. In fact, in this case it is the Yanzi “Inner Chapters” version that is the most concise overall, and the Zuo zhuan version the most elaborate, with the bamboo manuscript— insofar as can be judged from a reconstruction of its remnants—probably closest to the latter yet significantly more concise.48 This situation should serve to discourage all facile attempts to view any particular version of the passage as a simple elaboration or truncation of another, pointing rather to a scenario in which the materials had undergone a long period of revision and elaboration, such that by the end of the fourth century bce, by which time the excavated version had most likely been copied, the story could be found in at least two or three utterly distinct versions—and the two versions found in the Yanzi chunqiu may well separately represent both pre– and post–Zuo zhuan instan­ tiations of the narrative.49 While it may well be impossible to ever sort out the chronological layers with any precision, it is in any case difficult to dismiss the more general argument that a substantial portion of the Yanzi chunqiu probably represents materials in circulation well before the compilation of 47 48 49

The pairing does occur, however, in both the Huainanzi 淮南子 and the Shiji 史記. For details of this comparison, which lie beyond the scope of the present essay, see Gu Shikao 2012. For further discussion of the methodological principles involved here, see Zheng Liangshu 2001 and my response to that article in Gu Shikao 2012.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

The Changing Role of the Minister in the Warring States

209

the Zuo zhuan. As such, the work must undoubtedly be taken seriously as a source for the study of ruler-minister relations in the early Warring States period. Despite the differences in narrative structure and rhetorical strategy, however, all the versions of this passage hold to a common theme, and one that we find reoccurring throughout the Yanzi anecdotes of both the Yanzi chunqiu and the Zuo zhuan: it is the duty of the minister to forcefully remonstrate against his ruler’s faults, as it is above all the preservation of the state—and not the pleasure of the ruler or, for that matter, some abstract higher principle— that is to be the minister’s source of preoccupation and target of his loyalty.

Conclusion

Yanzi is a figure defined in early literature by his renunciation of any private loyalties that might conflict with all greater loyalties to the state and its people—a theme that consistently characterizes his role as he is portrayed in both the Zuo zhuan and the work compiled under his name. While the right to rule itself had long been seen as contingent on service to the public good, the attempt to define a loyal minister exclusively in terms of this principle is one that would—as prior studies have demonstrated—begin to receive focus only in texts of the period most likely represented by these works: the early Warring States. The Yanzi chunqiu is a text entirely devoted to the figure of Yanzi and the specific set of ideals that he represents, and the existence of this work is a tribute to the importance of those ideals for at least one subset of the literate class during the Warring States. While centuries of inadequately conceived scholarly consensus have cast the antiquity of the work into doubt, both excavated texts and surviving records from the Han demonstrate rather conclusively that the work as we have received it dates to no later than the Former Han, and that portions of the work must derive from the Warring States. The nature of textual overlap among competing received and excavated witnesses to certain passages, moreover, points to a scenario in which versions of their stories must have been circulating, in the form of individual manuscripts, since no later than the mid–Warring States period. While evidence surely points to the existence of distinct chronological layers within the Yanzi, there is little reason to doubt that the oldest of those layers may well go back to the earliest years of that period. The conception of the “loyal minister” as portrayed throughout the Yanzi (and Zuo zhuan) also makes great sense as an early Warring States conception

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

210

Cook

as explored in prior studies of the development of this notion over the course of the period, one of great political upheaval and sweeping changes in the sociopolitical order, in which a state and its nominal ruler could no longer be so closely identified with one another. While the duty to admonish a ruler’s faults had long since been at the core of how ministerial loyalty was conceived, the express prioritization of state interests over those of the ruler himself as stressed in these narratives marks a subtle yet important shift reflective of that newly prevailing order. At the same time, however, the Yanzi narratives do not, for the most part, reveal any tendency to subordinate the interests of the state and its people to some higher and more universal abstract principle in the way seen in texts of the later Warring States, when loyalty in a much broader sense could no longer be confined to the interests of any particular state. Yanzi’s loyalties remain steadfastly to the altars of Qi, and the notion of itinerant loyalty to a greater ideal is never even seriously considered as an option. None of this proves conclusively that the bulk of the Yanzi chunqiu was written (or otherwise transmitted) by the early Warring States period—it could, after all, always represent a nostalgic reflection of earlier times. However, a careful examination of all the evidence—textual, archeological, and intellectual-historical—would nonetheless appear to weigh in favor of such a view, at least for sizable portions of the work. Save for the inertia of centuries of unsubstantiated scholarly opinion, there should be little to dissuade us from starting to take the Yanzi chunqiu more seriously as an essential source for the study of Warring States political thought. By doing so we gain a richer picture of the changing role of minister during that period, and one in which the narrative thrust of the anecdotes reveals concerns that would appear to fit well only within an early Warring States context. Though temporal distinctions may be detected among its layers, the Yanzi chunqiu nevertheless reveals, overall, a remarkable consistency of both style and philosophical position, indicating that the bulk, if not all, of the collection may well have been the product of a single lineage and written over a period of time that most likely began at a point not too distant from that of the Yanzi narratives found in the Zuo zhuan, a number of which find versions in the Yanzi chunqiu. Yet regardless of how we view the Yanzi chunqiu as a whole, the picture that consistently emerges from an examination of its passages, along with related ones from the Zuo zhuan, is that of a ministerial class asserting its right to express an independent voice, in the name of the state and its sacred altars, that is both free and obliged to oppose the whims and wishes of the ruler.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

Peasant and Merchant in Warring States China

211

Chapter 7

Ideologies of the Peasant and Merchant in Warring States China Roel Sterckx A recurring observation in scholarly accounts of the social and economic history of early China is the claim that its rulers invariably prioritized agriculture over commerce and crafts. The early Chinese are said to conceive of farming as a “root” (ben 本) profession, they take wealth generation through secondary, or “branch” (mo 末), occupations as undermining the fate of the farmer, and they insist on the separation of the professions (fen gong lun 分工論).1 “Agri­ culturalism”—a term I coin for the purpose of this essay to mean any ideology that defends the primacy of agriculture over trade and crafts—is highlighted in nearly every study of the history of Chinese agriculture.2 * I would like to thank Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin, Martin Kern, and Michael Loewe, who have been very generous with comments and corrections on previous drafts of this essay. I am also grateful for feedback I received from the participants of the conference held at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in May 2012, where this volume was conceived. 1 The list of statements in secondary scholarship emphasizing agriculture as the bedrock of early Chinese society is endless. For examples, see Chen Ying 2010: 351–363; Zhang Hong 2003: 1; Li Genpan 1997: 3; Lu Baoli 2011: 66–68; Zhong Xiangcai 1997: 3–6; Meng Zhaohua 1999: 133–139; Wu Song 2000: 67, quoting the preface to Jiang Jianping 1990. That agriculture was hailed by most Warring States, Qin, and Han political thinkers as the economic foundation of the state has become an almost axiomatic paragraph in any history survey of the period. See, e.g., Lewis 2007: 106, referring to Lewis 2006: 101–104; Yong and Cotterell 1975: 44; Roberts 1999: 20, 23. A corollary of this analysis is the picture of agriculture as one of the enduring features of a continuous and slowly evolving dynastic China. See, e.g., Bray 1984: 1, 47–48. For a more balanced assessment, see Loewe 1968: 152; Hsu 1980: 3. 2 In Chinese and Japanese secondary literature, shifting attitudes toward agriculture and trade are often identified by means of elliptic quotations lifted from primary sources. These include phrases such as 重農, “lending weight to agriculture”; 本農, “making agriculture the root”; 上 農, “exalting agriculture”; 重農抑商, “lending weight to agriculture and repressing trade”; 背 本趨末, “turning one’s back to the roots and pursuing the branches”; 尚本, “valuing the roots”; 務本禁末, “to be devoted to the roots and restrict the branches.” Hara (2005: 6–7) speaks of nōhon shugi 農本主義 (agriculturalism). It should of course not be taken for granted that terms such as ben 本 or mo 末 invariably refer to the same set of ideas and referents. See Zhang Shoujun 1988; and Wang Daqing 2006: 42–88, which attempts to refine the meaning of the “root-and-branch” concept across some late Warring States texts.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004299337_009 Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

212

Sterckx

Events and debates that took place during the Former Han 西漢 (206/202 bce–9 ce) have no doubt fueled these assumptions. After all, the need to emphasize agriculture was brought up at the courts of nearly all Former Han emperors.3 It is also during Han, with the rise of a powerful class of merchants, that antimercantile sentiment rang loud, despite pleas for a more diversified economy by figures such as Sima Qian 司馬遷 (ca. 145–ca. 85 bce) and Sang Hongyang 桑弘羊 (152–80 bce).4 I will not deal here with the complex political and economic realities specific to the Former Han context that may have influenced calls to restore the farmer to his rightful station and restrain the power of merchants through legal discrimination and state monopolies. These merit a more detailed treatment elsewhere.5 What concerns me here is that, by Han times, both those who spoke in favor of the primacy of agriculture and those who were critical of it bolstered their arguments by invoking the 3 Hanshu 4: 117, 4: 125 (Emperor Wen 文帝, 167 bce); 5: 152 (Emperor Jing 景帝, 141 bce); 29: 1685 (Emperor Wudi 武帝, 111 bce); 7: 232 (Emperor Zhao 昭帝, r. 87–74 bce); 8: 245 (Emperor Xuan 宣帝, r. 74–49 bce; agriculture as the foundation to encourage virtue, 興德之本). 4 One vociferous proponent of a “return” to agriculture was Jia Yi 賈誼 (200–168 bce), who persuades Emperor Wen 漢文帝 (r. 180–157 bce) to revive the imperial plowing ceremony, declare agriculture a “root” profession, and abolish taxes on land and agricultural produce. See Shiji 10: 428; Hanshu 24A: 1130; Xinshu jiaozhu 3: 103 (“Gui wei” 瑰瑋); Hsu 1980: 158–160; Swann 1950: 156–157. Chao Cuo 鼂錯 (d. 154 bce) convinces the same emperor to grant ranks and redeem crimes in return for contributions of grain to the state’s granaries. See Hanshu 24A: 1131, 1133; Hsu 1980: 160–163. Dong Zhongshu 董仲舒 (ca. 195–115 bce) laments the fate of the poor farmer forced to give up nearly half of his yield as rent to wealthy landowners, whereas Gong Yu 貢禹 (124–44 bce) recommends the abolition of metal coinage to remedy the abandonment of farming. See Hanshu 24A: 1137 and 72: 3075; Hsu 1980: 163–164, 166–167. Critics of the government during the court debates of 81 bce invoked the ideal of a “well-field”type distribution of land and supported the idea of “reverting to the roots” (fan ben 反本) by managing the relationship between fundamental versus peripheral occupations. See Yantie lun I.2: 29 (“Li geng” 力耕), II.12: 162 (“You bian” 憂邊); cf. Levi 2010: II.4, XII.4. In contrast, Sima Qian argues that agriculture and mercantile activity need not be mutually opposing spheres. More benefit can be gained by running them in tandem and by preventing certain trades from being monopolized by government. See Shiji 129: 3272; and the discussion in Hui Fuping 2000: 162–170. Imperial counselor Sang Hongyang, of merchant stock himself, notes that in antiquity the basic and peripheral professions complemented each other, with the market acting as both the spatial and the temporal catalyst for the circulation of goods: “if only agriculture had sufficed to take care of one’s family and nourish life, Shun would not have worked as a potter, nor Yi Yin as a cook” (使治家養生必於農則舜不甄陶而伊尹不為庖). See Yantie lun I.1: 3 (“Ben yi” 本議); I.2: 28 (“Li geng”); I.3: 43 (“Tong you” 通有). For Shun’s 舜 career as a potter, see n. 42 below; for Yi Yin’s career as a cook, see Sterckx 2011: 65–76. 5 Some of the major developments are outlined in Loewe 1974: 91–112; 1986: 152–198; 2006: 135–168.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

Peasant and Merchant in Warring States China

213

pre-Han past as an epoch when agriculture was extolled unquestionably over all other economic activities and agents. Some spoke of the golden age of Zhou as an agricultural utopia of dutiful peasants and sage-rulers who ensured the economic sustenance of their toiling subjects. Others commented that this model agrarian society declined as new ideas on the management of people, land, and goods in subsequent times reshaped the fabric of economic life, while the interests of the farming and trading professions increasingly impinged on each other.6 Yet despite differing views on the merits of the economic policies professed by those who had preceded them, the dominant image associated with the pre-Han past was one that hailed the primacy of the peasant. To be sure, there can be little doubt that food production was a high priority for most thinkers and men of power who operated during the formative four or five centuries leading up to and into imperial times. Whether or not agriculture’s alleged privileged status reflects the socioeconomic realities of the time nevertheless remains hard to corroborate. Historians of agriculture, ideally, can draw on a representative set of data from a variety of sources, including received texts, paleographic sources, and archeology. Yet given that quantitative evidence on farming populations, farmsteads, cultivated land, crop yields, and livestock remains inevitably insufficient and geographically dispersed, much of our understanding of agriculture in pre-imperial China continues to be driven by ideological agendas that are prominent in some of the key texts of the period. We can examine how people “thought” about agriculture or how they expected a farming population to conduct itself. But this by no means corresponds neatly to what may have happened on the fields. Even agricultural thought was not without its controversies, however. How exactly did Warring States period (Zhanguo 戰國, 453–221 bce) thinkers conceive of the role of agriculture and the peasant? What social values did life in an agrarian society impart in the eyes of those who ruled? And if “agriculturalism” was high on the agenda, did this then imply a mind-set that was anti­ merchant or anticommerce? In what follows I hope to show that Warring States rhetoric on the peasant and the professions was more complex than a 6 Jia Yi notes that from antiquity through to the present plowing and weaving and storing up harvests were the ultimate mechanism to “order All-under-Heaven” (zhi tianxia 治天下). Chao Cuo hails the resourcefulness of Tang 湯 and Yu 禹, who managed to build up reserves and sustain the people despite successive years of droughts and floods. Dong Zhongshu deplores the alleged abolition of the well-field system (jing tian 井田) and the agrarian reforms instigated by Shang Yang. Dong speaks of ancient times as a period of fair taxation and corvée obligation and argues in favor of creating an institution that “somewhat comes near to the ancient system” (yi shao jin gu 宜少近古). See Hanshu 24A:1128, 1130, 1137.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

214

Sterckx

straightforward acknowledgment that rulers should put agriculture first. Agriculture formed a leading ingredient in an ideological narrative that propelled the Central States from a world of chaos and division to one of political unification, order, and social control. Not only was the image of the peasant linked with political “unifiers” or the political center, but farming life itself was depicted as an exemplary matrix for a stable society. The image of the peasant, as the great stabilizer of society, offered a grid for social theory and human psychology. Peasants embodied sedentary stability, whereas merchants, as “nomads” of commodities and speculating on market forces rather than the forces of agricultural labor, exemplified the opposite. Working the land was seen as a way to forge human character to accord with the expectations of the ruler. Yet even the notion that agriculture should be defended at the expense of trade and manufacture was not accepted as a given by all Warring States thinkers. My analysis will show that the purported antagonism between farming and commerce and the discourse on the separation of the professions may have been largely ideological and rhetorical in nature. At any rate this tension appears less prominent in Warring States times than those who have looked back at the past—be they advisers at the Han court or historians of agriculture today—may lead us to believe. In what follows I focus exclusively on ideology, in the knowledge that such an emphasis on ideas leaves many important questions on the socioeconomic context behind these ideas unanswered.

The Farming Habitus

Depictions of agriculture and the Houji 后稷 figure—the ancestor of the Zhou ruling clan and one of the alleged inventors of agriculture—are attested in several odes preserved in the Shijing 詩經 (Classic of Poems), most famously in “Sheng min” 生民 (“Birth to the People”; Mao 245).7 Generally, however, 7

Useful summaries of agricultural activities in the Shijing include Zeng Xiongsheng 2008: 66–80; Liang Jiamian 2002. On the evolving status of Houji, see Cao Shujie 2006: chapter 2; and Tomita 2010. Note that, to set apart the Zhou, the Shang are not infrequently described as a trading society (beyond the pun on the graph shang 商), which makes for a nice dialectic with the succeeding Zhou, who were agriculturalists. This association of the term for trade or commerce 商 with the Shang 商 people has been made by several scholars, starting with Xu Zhongshu 徐中舒 (1898–1991) and Guo Moruo 郭沫若 (1892– 1978) in the 1930s and 1950s. It continues to be rehearsed, including in the recently published, comprehensive Yang Shengnan and Ma Jifan 2010: 448. For another example, see Wu Song 2000: 64. The evidence, however, remains dubious and is mostly limited to a statement by the Duke of Zhou in the “Jiu gao” 酒告 in which he characterizes the people

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

Peasant and Merchant in Warring States China

215

besides an early plea for the importance of agricultural production in the Guoyu 國語, Springs-and-Autumns period (Chunqiu 春秋, 770–453 bce) and related sources do not contain much discussion of agriculture as labor or as a profession.8 The Zuo zhuan 左傳 uses the image of the peasant (nongfu 農夫) in a number of analogies but refers to the peasant generically and mostly together with other professions. So Lord Wen of Wei 衛文公 (r. 659–635 bce) is said to “devote himself to generating resources, instructing his people in agriculture, promoting the circulation of trade, and being kind to craftsmen” (務 材，訓農，通商，惠工).9 The state of Chu 楚 is said to sustain heavy expeditionary demands upon its armies without major disruptions among its professions, which are listed as itinerant merchants, farmers, artisans, and stationary traders.10 The stability of the state of Jin 晉 is attributed to its people devoting themselves wholly to agricultural pursuits and its merchants, craftsmen, menials, and servants not changing occupation.11 Yet references to the professions aside, these early analogies are revealing, as they already contain a register of character traits that would later be associated more frequently with the peasant in Warring States texts. Take the following statement by Zichan 子產 (Gongsun Qiao 公孫僑, d. 522 bce): 政如農功，日夜思之，思其始而成其終，朝夕而行之。行無越 思，如農之有畔，其過鮮矣. Governing is like agricultural labor; one must think of it day and night, concentrate on its beginnings, and see things through to the end. From dawn to dusk one carries it out. In carrying it out, one should not go beyond what has been thought out, just as farmers have dividing ridges between their fields, with those transgressing them being rare. (Zuo zhuan, Xiang 25: 1108) The peasant here stands for a person dedicated to a task, following it through to completion, never overreaching, and respecting the boundaries set out for

8

9 10 11

of Yin (Shang) as folk who went to peddle their goods on oxcarts once the farming season was over to earn extra income to maintain their parents. See Guoyu 1.6: 15–22 (“Zhou yu 周語, shang”), in a remonstrance by Lord Wen of Guo 虢 文公 to King Xuan of Zhou 周宣王 (r. 827–782 bce). Note that the Guoyu is a Warring States source, but it does contain materials dating to the Springs-and-Autumns and, possibly, Western Zhou period. Chunqiu Zuozhuan zhu (hereafter Zuo zhuan), Min 2: 273. 商農工賈不敗其業 (Zuo zhuan, Xuan 12: 722). 其庶人力於農穡 and 商工皁隷不知遷業 (Zuo zhuan, Xiang 9: 966).

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

216

Sterckx

him by his ruler. Marking off fields by means of boundaries and canals and parceling out land in equitable proportions are activities that belong to the core vocabulary describing efficient, controlled, and orderly rule. Zichan (anno 543 bce) is on record as having marked off the fields in Zheng 鄭 with boundary ridges and irrigation ditches and as having farmhouses arranged in fives.12 A ditty preserved in the Zuo zhuan suggests that his interventions were received skeptically at first, but within three years, he was praised for rendering the fields fertile and its people amenable to instruction.13 Instilling order and setting up proper divisions of agricultural land produces people with minds receptive to instruction and authority. Plotting land facilitates plotting people and plotting minds. The ideal of collectively cooperating farming households organized in wellfield communities (jing tian 井田), first described in the Mengzi 孟子, draws on the same assumptions.14 Whether, as Mark Lewis (2007: 248–249) argues, the well-field symbolizes the idea that “division is the basis of social order and good government” or, as Benjamin Schwartz (1985: 45–46) notes, Mencius’s emphasis is on equality among the peasants and their inclination toward mutual cooperation and solidarity, at the core here lies the idea that intervention in the physical and spatial layout of the farming landscape impacts the psychology of those who work it.15 The Mencian farming household, receiving from its overlord one hundred mu 亩 of farmland and some extra on which to rear animals, grow mulberry trees, and put up a cottage, is autarkic and perfectly balanced.16 An overlord takes the income of a ninth plot jointly tilled by eight families. Land is a privilege to be granted, and corvée a way to repay usufruct of the land. It is this cooperative unit of eight families (lu jing ba jia 廬井 八家), taxed proportionately at the rate of a tithe (shi yi 什一) on their land, that constitutes the idealized farming community that many in Han accused Qin to have dispensed with.17 It is a farming community, as Hsu Cho-yun points out (1980: 9–10), that embodies the ideal of “levelled wealth.” How much of an economic reality was the well-field? Scholars, starting with Hu Shi 胡適 (1891–1962), have been divided between those who relegate the well-field model entirely to the realm of utopia versus those who believe that it 12 13 14 15 16 17

田有封洫， 盧井有伍 (Zuo zhuan, Xiang 30: 1181). Zuo zhuan, Xiang 30: 1182. See also Lüshi chunqiu 16.5: 999 (“Le cheng” 樂成); Han Feizi XIX.50: 446 (“Xian xue” 顯學). Mengzi 5.3: 118. Schwartz (1985) is keen to point out that Mencius does not mention the hardships that the peasants likely suffered at the hands of overlords who required labor service. Mengzi 1.3: 5; 1.7: 17; 13.22: 310. See, e.g., Wang Mang 王莽 in Hanshu 99B: 4110.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

Peasant and Merchant in Warring States China

217

represented an economic reality.18 The answer probably lies somewhere in between. Suffice it to note that very few concrete references to jing tian occur in Springs-and-Autumns and Warring States period texts, and the majority of our information is derived from Han sources.19 Boundary-marked landed plots are not without a historical base. Some scholars speculate that pictograms of parceled fields can be identified as early as the Shang oracle bone script (Wang Qizhu 1994: 161–162). The fact that poems in the Shijing are adduced to associate the origins of the well-field system with legendary sages in distant antiquity who open up uncultivated land, penetrate the wilds, mark out boundaries, and divide and measure up lots of lands, indicates that implicated in the wellfield model are expectations of social order and unity of mind among cooperative communities organized in a grid.20 While we cannot be sure what agro-economic reality the well-field stood for, it is beyond doubt that it offered the ideological adversary of a model of land reform advocated by Shang Yang 商鞅 (d. 338 bce). The exact nature of the land reforms in Qin remains the subject of much uncertainty. The land reforms do not form a topic of discussion in the Shang jun shu 商君書 (Book of Lord Shang) itself. Nevertheless, guided by Han sources, most premodern and modern commentators accept that Qin replaced a type of well-field system, or some derivative thereof, with a grid of pathways dividing land into blocks or, in the much-quoted formula of Sima Qian, that Qin, “in order to create arable lands, opened up the paths and ridges that marked the boundaries of the 18

19

20

Hu Shi took a highly skeptical view in his essay “Jing tian bian” 井田辯 (1919). In 1929 Guo Moruo 郭沫若 did not believe there was any historical reality to the well-field system, but by the 1950s he had changed his mind, as his views on the textual sources that document it changed. See Cao Yuying 2005: 3–7. For recent assessments, see Zhong Xiangcai 1997: 28–30; Satake 2006: 348–371; Zhang Jinguang 2013: 344–360. The well-field continues to invite some of the most historically dubious claims, such as in Lu Baoli 2011: 32, where it is argued that the Xia implemented it. Likewise, some Western scholars have too easily accepted it as an economic reality. See, e.g., Maspero 1927: 67–68. For instance, there is a rare exhortation in the “Chi mi” 侈靡 chapter of the Guanzi 管子 encouraging the ruler to “specify” or “measure” the size or number of well-fields (斷方井 田之數; Guanzi XII.35: 689), but the chapter is, as Guo Moruo has argued, likely of early Han provenance and/or, as other scholars emphasize, corrupt. See Rickett 1998: 297–304, 319; Hu Jiacong 2003: 298–306. Much quoted in this respect are “Da tian” 大田 (“Large Fields”; Mao 212), which distinguishes between “the lord’s fields” (gong tian 公田), presumably worked by the public, and fields for private use (wo si 我私); and “Xin nan shan” 信南山 (“Truly, Southern Mountains”; Mao 210), where Yu the Great is at work drawing boundaries and dividing plots.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

218

Sterckx

fields” (為田開阡陌封疆).21 It is somewhat unfortunate that Shang Yang’s reforms are often taken to imply that he completely uprooted and destroyed the feudal polity; that Qin farmers were empowered through private landownership and the availability of sophisticated iron tools;22 or even that peasants became free or independent.23 Recognition of private landownership and the power to trade land continue to be highlighted as a main cause for Qin’s political and military success. The term “ownership,” however, is problematic. It implies that peasants could contractually buy and sell land. Note that a core agriculturalist chapter in the Shang jun shu, “Ken ling” 墾令 (“Ordinance to Cultivate Wastelands”), does not refer to property.24 There is, as yet, very little evidence prior to the Han or the very end of the Qin dynasty that peasants could sell their plots.25 For instance, evidence from the imperial Qin local archive of Qianling 遷陵 County, discovered in 2002 at Liye 里耶 (Hunan), does not indicate that land was regularly sold or purchased (Liye Qin jian (yi) 2012: 4). “Possession” therefore at most might have meant that the Qin farmer could temporarily occupy his plot and had the right to manage and harvest it (much like usufruct or a freehold tenancy). No evidence so far in the form of sale contracts or documents attesting to ownership confirms that alienating agricultural land was either permitted or widely practiced. This must partly account for the fact that, as I will show later, despite the ideological stance taken in the Shang jun shu in favor of the oppression of merchants and the monetary economy, few Warring States thinkers could have witnessed a vibrant class of merchants buying or selling 21 22

23 24

25

Shiji 68: 2232; see also Shiji 5: 203. The technical meaning of this phrase remains contested among scholars ever since Zhu Xi’s 朱熹 (1130–1200 ce) “Kai qian mo bian” 開阡陌辨. For a detailed list of Warring States archeological sites (up to 2007) across China where iron agricultural tools have been found, see Li Yaguang 2009: 2–22. Iron plows and murals depicting plowing scenes have been found on sites across Han China. For a recent survey of sites, see Du Qingyu 2010: 47–49. See, e.g., Hsu 1980: 13–14; Lewis 2007: 18; Duyvendak 1963: 27ff.; Marks 2012: 67, 84, 96. There remains debate over whether the “Ken ling” chapter can be associated with the historical Shang Yang. Yang Kuan 楊寬 has suggested that it is a late Warring States policy document put forward by followers of the Legalist “school”; yet the balance of opinion situates its origins near 359 bce and Shang Yang himself, even though it may not have been the original text of what he put to Lord Xiao. For a summary of the arguments, see Zhang Linxiang 2008: 76–81, 107–109; Tong Weimin 2013: 81–96. A record of the sale of inherited land in the Baoshan 包山 materials (Jingmen, Hubei; burial dated ca. 316 bce) may at present be the only and earliest example. See Baoshan Chu jian 1991: 28 (slips 151–152) and discussions in Chao Fulin 2003: 644–646; Pines 2005– 2006b: 172–173n37.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

Peasant and Merchant in Warring States China

219

land and, as a consequence, could have advocated radical antimercantile philosophies. To what extent, then, was Shang Yang’s program about the emancipation of the farmer and the generation of produce? Two references loosely link Shang Yang with the legendary Shennong 神農 (Divine Husbandman). The first is bibliographical and in the form of a comment by Liu Xiang 劉向 (79–8 bce) in his Bielu 別錄 (Listings by Separate Categories);26 the second is a passage in the “Hua ce” 畫策 (“Planning Policies”) chapter (18) of the Shang jun shu. The passage hails a utopian world under Shennong, following which human civilization irreversibly declines: 神農之世，男耕而食，婦織而衣，刑政不用而治，甲兵不起而 王。神農既沒，以彊勝弱，以眾暴寡. In the age of Shennong, men plowed to obtain food, and women wove to obtain clothing. Without the application of a policy of punishments, order prevailed; without the raising of armored soldiers, he reigned as a monarch. After Shennong’s demise, the powerful were overcoming the weak, and the many oppressed the few. (Shang jun shu IV.18: 106–107)27 It may appear un-Legalist to find a reference in the Shang jun shu to an agrarian golden age in which no force or government intervention was needed to instill order. In his much-acclaimed study of the so-called “Nong jia” 農家 (School of Tillers), Angus Graham notes that one would expect a claim for the need for harsh policies and punishments from the very beginning of human civilization. Graham then, rather wildly, speculates that mention of the golden age of Shennong must have slipped into the Shang jun shu through farming manuals known to Legalists that escaped the burning of the books in 213 bce (Graham 1979: 69–73, 93–94). However, reference to a lack of force and punishment need not necessarily be contradictory when it occurs in an origin narrative. The point in invoking an agriculturalist utopia here is to show that it was unsustainable and had declined, and that a new political agenda with a sage at the helm was required to rectify deviations from this original order.28 And it is 26

27 28

Yan Shigu’s 顏師古 (581–645) gloss on Hanshu cites Bielu, according to which the Shennong shu 神農書 (Book of Shennong) contained “theories of Li Kui 李悝 and Shang Yang” (Hanshu 30: 1743). Cf. Duyvendak 1963: 132. Yuri Pines (2013b: 31–35) has recently made the point that, in these narratives, Shang Yang’s assumption is that a peaceful stateless society is untenable: monarchic rule is

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

220

Sterckx

this call for biophysical and psychological order, rather than the blunt use of punishments, that dominates the analysis of the farming condition in the Shang jun shu. First, measuring out the right proportion of farmers per area of land is said to guarantee optimal cultivation. 29 The ecological model is one in which land is parceled out in such a way that each territorial unit includes a proportional share of all major landscape features and natural resources: 地方百里者，山陵處什一，藪澤處什一，谿谷流水處什一，都 邑蹊道處什一，惡田處什二，良田處什四。以此食作夫五萬， 其山陵、谿谷、藪澤，可以給其材，都邑、蹊道，足以處其 民，先王制土分民之律也。 In a territory of a hundred square li, mountains and hills should occupy one-tenth, marshlands and swamps another tenth; valleys, dales, and running rivers another tenth; cities, towns, and highways another tenth; two-tenths should be taken up by barren fields, and four-tenths by fertile fields. In this way 50,000 laborers can be fed; its mountains and hills, valleys and dales, marshlands and swamps can provide the required natural resources, and the cities, towns, and highways should suffice to manage its people. This was the standard according to which the former kings regulated the land and divided the people. (Shang jun shu IV.15: 86–87 [“Lai min” 徠民])30 Perfectly balanced geophysical qualities of a territorial unit enable the ruler to “place,” “locate,” and hence “deal with” (chu 處) the population in such a way that it is easily and accessibly controlled. Ordering land enables one to divide or distribute one’s people across it. Although this passage and an earlier variant in “Suan di” 算地 (chap. 6) suggest that exploiting natural resources should complement agriculture, a passage in “Ken ling” (chap. 2) emphasizes that marshlands ought to be monopolized to prevent those who dislike farming, or

29

30

required once society becomes more complex and stratified. For an explicit reference to Shennong, stating that his way of rule was appropriate to his times but damaging nowadays, see Shang jun shu II.6: 47 (“Suan di” 算地). Shang jun shu I.3: 24 (“Nong zhan” 農戰); cf. Duyvendak 1963: 92. Note that manipulating the topography and dividing up the lands is also a prominent trope in the First Emperor’s stele inscriptions. See, e.g., Shiji 6: 252; Kern 2000a: 43, lines 22–33; and my discussion below. Cf. Duyvendak 1963: 86. Variant at Shang jun shu II.6: 43 (“Suan di” 算地); cf. Duyvendak 1963: 103.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

Peasant and Merchant in Warring States China

221

those who are lazy, from seeking a living through foraging.31 The state is to be in full control of both human and natural resources, neither of which should fall into private hands. In terms of their underlying ideology, there are significant commonalities across Classicist and Legalist models of the farming society: in essence, the Mencian-type well-field community or usufruct-based tenancy relationship is also based on the core idea that plotting out land and agricultural labor provides the best model for social order and control. Yet whereas in the Mencian model cooperative labor defines the peasant’s relationship with other households and his superior, in the Shang jun shu, turning wastelands into arable lands (geng cao 耕草) takes on a highly moral and psychological character. In the Legalist state the peasant is not merely an agent for agricultural output. More importantly, agriculture secures a population whose minds are amenable to control: the farming habitus assumes mental simplicity or even stupidity (yu 愚).32 Farming detracts the mind from temptations presented by other professions, by literature, by education. Farming is the antidote to glib talk, to deviant curiosity, craftiness, and intellectual disputation. It embodies an uncarved purity of mind (pu 樸) and single-mindedness of purpose (yi 壹) (i.e., an unquestioning mind). Shang Yang’s farming population is a tabula rasa inscribed according to the will and wits of the ruler.33 Thus, when exposure to other professions has been prevented: 愚農不知，不好學問，則務疾農。知農不離其故事，則草必墾 矣。 If stupid farmers do not become knowledgeable or fond of learning, they will apply themselves energetically to agriculture. If knowledgeable farmers do not abandon old ways, then it is certain that wastelands will be brought under cultivation. (Shang jun shu I.2: 15 [“Ken ling”])34

31 32 33

34

Shang jun shu I.2: 12; cf. Duyvendak 1963: 95. See, e.g., Shang jun shu I.2: 7, 13 (“Ken ling”). Shang jun shu I.3: 24–25 (“Nong zhan”); cf. Duyvendak 1963: 93. There is an echo of this in the “Sheng ma” 乘馬 chapter in the Guanzi: “Therefore, what [only] the intelligent understand and the stupid do not understand should not be used to instruct the people; what [only] the skilled are capable of and the unskilled are incapable of should not be used to instruct the people. Unless it is something that the people will submit to carry out as the result of one single order, it cannot be considered very good. Unless it is something that everyone can do, it cannot be considered to have great merit” (Guanzi I.5: 91). Cf. Duyvendak 1963: 88. Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

222

Sterckx

Simplicity of purpose produces a law-abiding population.35 The single-mindedness (yi 壹) of the people ensures that they are simple (pu 樸), which in turn naturally leads them to farming. Farming fosters diligence (qin 勤), which in turn may result in wealth creation (fu 富).36 For Shang Yang poverty is a necessary precondition to stimulate productivity. It encourages people to work hard and even develop an eye for profit.37 In addition to fostering an unquestioning mind, farming is also linked to a propensity for domesticity, registration, and socioeconomic fixity. The peasant symbolizes the sedentary rather than movement, the inner sphere rather than the outer: 一則農，農則樸，樸則安其居而惡出 … 民入則樸，出則惑，故 其農勉而戰戢也。 Having unity of purpose, people will farm; if they farm, they will be simple; and being simple, they will dwell quietly and dislike going out. … If the people are simple at home and anxious abroad, then they will exert themselves in farming and be alert in warfare. (Shang jun shu II.6: 48 [“Suan di”])38 The aim is to prevent people from wanting to escape (chu 出) their controllable social unit: anchorage to the land permits registered population control.39 What needs to be avoided at all cost is a population of landless peasants.40 As much as the Shang jun shu advocates a blunt discriminatory treatment of merchants and condemns the monetary economy, it is important to note that, throughout, its analysis of the relative benefits of agriculture is predominantly formulated ex negativo. The farmer is not the instinctively cooperative agriculturalist as found in Shennong’s utopia; he is a lesser evil that is more amenable 35 36 37

38 39

40

Shang jun shu II.6: 44 (“Suan di”); cf. Duyvendak 1963: 103–104. Shang jun shu III.8: 61 (“Yi yan” 壹言); cf. Duyvendak 1963: 112. Shang jun shu IV.6: 44–45 (“Suan di”), III.9: 64 (“Cuo fa” 錯法); cf. Duyvendak 1963: 104, 113. For poverty leading to success, see also Shang jun shu III.13: 78–79 (“Jin ling” 靳令); cf. Duyvendak 1963: 119. Cf. Duyvendak 1963: 106. Shang jun shu I.4: 32 (“Qu qiang” 去彊); cf. Duyvendak 1963: 97: “If the whole population is registered at birth and erased at death, there would be no people who would escape producing grain and in the fields there would be no fallow land.” Another passage describes agriculture as an “internal affair of the people” (民之内事), as opposed to warfare, which is linked to the realm of the external (外). See Shang jun shu V.22: 128 (“Wai nei” 外内); cf. Duyvendak 1963: 141. Shang jun shu V.23: 131 (“Jun chen” 君臣); cf. Duyvendak 1963: 143. Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

Peasant and Merchant in Warring States China

223

to the ruler’s control: farming shields one from distractions; farming is the ultimate mental and economic equalizer. The sages’ forceful conversion of the populace to agriculture is nothing less than the imposition of new norms and a radical transformation of existing customs (li fa hua su 立法化俗).41 Shang Yang’s peasant is the epitome of the psychologically unquestioning individual and the politically submissive society. This stance is softened significantly in Legalist writings of the late Warring States period and imperial Qin. As we will see, the Han Feizi 韓非子 will concur in acknowledging that cultivating land and producing food should be at the heart of the Legalist state, yet Han Fei is not so much concerned with the farming mind as with farming as a profession and social agency among other occupations. Let us now turn to the Confucius figure. In the Lunyu 論語 Confucius is torn between the advocacy of agriculture as a necessity for good society and the question of whether farming can be considered a respectable profession. While Confucius is regularly adduced, in the Lunyu and elsewhere, to praise the virtues of agriculture,42 he takes a distant view of agricultural labor, which he ranks below an official career: 子曰：君子謀道不謀食。耕也，餒在其中矣；學也，祿在其中 矣。君子憂道不憂貧。 The Master said, “A gentleman devotes his mind to the Way and not to securing food. When you till the land, ending up being hungry could be a matter of course; when you study, ending up with an official salary could be a matter of course. The gentleman worries about the Way, not about poverty. (Lunyu 15.32: 168) Confucius here portrays farming as a lesser gateway to wealth creation and social status, an idea reinforced in his exchange with Fan Chi 樊遲 in Lunyu 13.4. There he insists that agriculture and horticulture are the business of the petty person, whereas the gentleman should be able to muster his people with moral values only (ritual propriety, righteousness, trust). This idea that 41 42

Shang jun shu III.8: 60 (“Yi yan”); cf. Duyvendak 1963: 111. For instance, the Confucius figure in the Han Feizi praises Shun for solving disputes among farmers, fishermen, and manual laborers while admitting that it is not the sage’s duty to be engaged in these sorts of preoccupations in normal circumstances. See Han Feizi XV.36: 349 (“Nan yi” 難一). For Shun, farming, fishing, and firing pots before taking up the reigns of office, see also Mengzi 3.8: 82–83, 12.15: 298; Mozi II.9: 77 (“Shang xian 尚 賢 zhong”), XIII.49: 736 (“Lu wen” 魯問); Lüshi chunqiu 14.6: 809 (“Shen ren” 慎人); Huainanzi 1: 23 (“Yuan Dao” 原道); and the discussion in Pines 2005a: 249ff.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

224

Sterckx

the sage should uphold the division of labor and not engage in self-sus­taining agriculture is carried forward more vociferously in the Mengzi, where the primitivist Xu Xing 許行 (fl. 315 bce) is at the receiving end of a scathing tirade by Mencius (Mengzi 5.4: 123–126). So amid the Ru acknowledgment of food production as the undeniable engine of society lurks a criticism of farming labor as an occupation distinctly inferior to the labor of the mind—or, perhaps, as Derk Bodde (1991: 211–212) has suggested, an exhortation for the gentleman not to become a technical specialist. It is hard not to detect a modicum of disdain in Confucius’s (and Mencius’s) tepid comments on the merits of tilling the soil or, at least, to ignore the implicit suggestion that a gentleman should not be preoccupied with it.43 In this the Ru are unlike the worthies (xian 賢) in the Mozi 墨子, who, in governing a township, “leave early and come back late, plowing and harvesting, planting trees and gathering pulse and grain.”44 The Mozi concurs that a lack of food is one of the great misfortunes that can befall a state,45 and it condemns offensive warfare (cf. the Legalist agenda) and music (cf. Ru-ist ritual) on the grounds that they disturb the planting, sowing, and cultivating of trees as well as reaping and sowing.46

43

44 45

46

Li Ling (2007: 235–236), for instance, takes Confucius’s attitude as one that counters “agriculturalism” 重農主義 (his words) and is quick to remind his readers that Mao Zedong took offense! Wang Zhangmin (2009) suggests that Confucius simply wants his disciples to be concerned with moral principles rather than ask about the trivialities of physical labor. Lunyu 13.4 has also been adduced to make the tenuous claim that, already in Springs-and-Autumns times, grain farming and the production of fruit and vegetables were two diversified and specialist industries. See Gu Derong and Zhu Shunlao 2001: 211–212. Mozi II.9: 75 (“Shang xian, zhong”). Mozi I.5: 35 (“Qi huan” 七患). On the importance of food production, see also Mozi I.6: 47 (“Ci Guo” 辭過), IX.37: 425–426 (“Fei ming 非命 xia”). Obviously, one must be cautious in assuming that the Mozi persona is consistent throughout the received Mozi. In a conversation with Wu Lü 吴慮 in the “Dialogues,” Mozi is happy to excuse himself from farming because his teaching and the spreading of his doctrine of righteousness are greater achievements, while teaching others to plow is of greater merit than only performing the plowing oneself. See Mozi XIII.49: 736 (“Lu wen”). Mozi V.18: 202 (“Fei gong 非攻 zhong”), VIII.32: 381 (“Fei yue 非樂 shang”). Interestingly, Wolfram Eberhard (1948: 56) characterizes Mozi almost as a proto-businessman: “His ideal of social organization resembles organizations of merchants and craftsmen which we know only from later periods. His stress upon frugality, too, reflects a line of thought typical of businessmen. The rationality which can also be seen in his metaphysical ideas, and which has induced modern Chinese scholars to call him an early materialist is fitting

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

Peasant and Merchant in Warring States China

225

The association of the farming habitus with simplicity of mind and a malleability toward authority, advocated directly in the Shang jun shu and indirectly by the Confucius figure, is echoed in other, later Warring States writings, most notably the Xunzi 荀子 and the Lüshi chunqiu 呂氏春秋. Xunzi (d. after 238 bce) stresses the importance of agriculture: the ruler brings wilderness lands into cultivation, fills granaries and storehouses, and provides useful tools.47 Yet he also rehearses the Shang jun shu’s image of the toiling and unadorned farmer: agricultural activities ought to be inspected and salaries well managed to ensure that the farming population remains simple through hard labor (puli 樸力) and to make sure that limits can be imposed on what they are able or allowed to do (gua neng 寡能).48 This is accompanied by progressive taxation and the use of statistical records to keep down the numbers of merchants and traders and to prevent farmers from leaving their fields except in the off-season.49 Yet, unlike the Shang jun shu, Xunzi speaks of a farming population that appears more receptive to instruction and self-improvement, albeit that the language used remains predominantly a vocabulary of enforcement and social control: rural supervisors are to ensure that districts and hamlets are obedient (shun 順), that farming residences are fixed (ding 定), that peasants are admonished “to be transformed through instruction” (jiaohua 教化), that they are urged (cu 趨) to be filial and have brotherly affections, and so on. All this serves to create a farming population that heeds commands (shun ming 順命) coming from the ruler.50 It is in one of the four agricultural chapters in the Lüshi chunqiu, “Shang nong” 上農 (“Exalting Agriculture”), that we encounter agriculturalism at its most political. “Shang nong” reiterates the Shang Yang idea that agriculture is a tool whereby one leads (dao 導) and organizes the people. Even more so than in the Shang jun shu, agriculture is a political instrument: it keeps people fixed in one location, simple-minded, and easy to use (yi yong 易用). To reinforce the idea that agriculture serves to indoctrinate the blank mind of the peasant, “Shang nong” invokes Houji (Lord Millet), who identifies farming and weaving as a “fundamental (moral) doctrine” (ben jiao 本教). In its claim that without

47 48 49 50

to an age in which a developing money economy and expanding trade required a cool, logical approach to the affairs of this world.” Xunzi V.9: 156, 173 (“Wang zhi” 王制), VI.10: 196 (“Fu guo” 富國); cf. Knoblock 1988–1994: vol. 2, 99, 110, 136. Xunzi V.9: 168 (“Wang zhi”), VII.11: 229 (“Wang ba” 王霸); cf. Knoblock 1988–1994: vol. 2, 106, 169. Xunzi VI.10: 179 (“Fu guo”); cf. Knoblock 1988–1994: vol. 2, 123. For a rehearsal of these ideas closely echoing Xunzi, see Han shi waizhuan V.31: 198. Xunzi V.9: 168 (“Wang zhi”); cf. Knoblock 1988–1994: vol. 2, 106.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

226

Sterckx

having the people physically labor in the fields (li tian 力田), both state and household would be difficult to control (國家難治), the chapter acknowledges agriculture as a prime agency for order and social control.51 A language of social control also forms the undertone to the image of the farmer as it appears in the so-called monthly ordinances or almanacs preserved in the first twelve sections of the Lüshi chunqiu. The tone of the seasonal ordinances that concern agriculture is entirely dirigiste. The language is riddled with imperatives (ming 命, lao 勞, quan 勸, qu 趣, bi 必, etc.). The farmer in the calendar is deprived of any sense of subjectivity, agency, or autonomy. He seems entirely incapable of making any decisions by himself either in assessing the ecological environment of his crops or in planning for seeding and harvesting. Throughout, the issuance of prohibitions and the temporal banning of certain activities are more dominant than the rhetoric of encouraged use and permission.52 The seasonal ordinances exemplify what Wittfogel (1957: 3) has referred to as the “agromanagerial,” “agrobureacratic,” or even “agrodespotic” character of a society. The assumption is again that the farmer is uneducated and unable to organize his own activities. Officials determine, fix, and inspect the boundaries of the fields, and farmers work them. Officials assess the quality of the soil, issue orders concerning seeds and crops, guide the farming population by means of instructions (以教道民), and personally participate in the work.53 Farmers are made to labor; people are exhorted (勞農勸民) not to miss the season.54 The sole license to understand or assess the workings of the natural world and the agricultural seasons lies with the political center, not the farmer. Punish-

51

52

53 54

Lüshi chunqiu 26.3: 1718–1720 (“Shang nong”). Histories of Chinese agriculture tend to overlook the ideological tone that marks the opening of this chapter and jump straight to the remaining three chapters (“Ren di” 任地, “Bian tu” 辨土, “Shen shi” 審時), which are largely technical in nature with an emphasis on the right timing of crops. See, e.g., Yang Zhimin 2006: 58–67. There is one other story preserved in the “Gui dang” 貴當 chapter that bespeaks agriculturalism, although it is largely allegorical. This is the case of a hunter who is able to buy a better hunting dog after earning money through plowing: “Such is not so only in the case of hunting, but it applies to all other activities. From antiquity to the present, there has never existed a case of someone becoming lord-protector without putting plowing first [xian geng 先耕]” (Lüshi chunqiu 24.6: 1638). A similar point is made in Le Aiguo 2004: 160, with reference to the Guanzi, which also contains far more references to the use of seasonal prohibitions (jin 禁) than references to the permitted use/release (fa 發) of land and natural resources. Lüshi chunqiu 1.1: 2 (“Meng chun ji” 孟春紀). Lüshi chunqiu 4.1:189 (“Meng xia ji” 孟夏紀).

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

Peasant and Merchant in Warring States China

227

ment is incurred when agricultural directives are not followed.55 Farmers produce, but officials gather farming products and count, register, and store them.56 Farmers offer labor, but officials organize the workforce and supply and repair tools.57 To sum up, in the eyes of the Warring States masters of philosophy, agriculturalism was as much a political philosophy as an economic doctrine. The peasant did not simply embody a profession but offered a desirable prototype for human character and behavior. At the heart of political agriculturalism was the idea that shaping the land and agro-management enabled a ruler to shape the character of those who worked it. Agricultural labor embodied a notion of order and a receptiveness to the impositions of social control. But where did farming rank among the other occupations? How ideologically tight was the theory that agriculture was to be privileged over other professions?

Farmer versus Merchant

A salient feature of ideologies is that they tend to formulate their core values in a simplified and prescriptive language that often privileges one idea at the exclusion of another. The assumption that commerce develops at the detriment of agriculture may serve as a good illustration of this. To test it we need to examine to what extent agriculturalism in Warring States texts de facto implies hostile or negative attitudes toward the so-called branch (mo 末) professions. In what follows I will show that repeated insistence on the separation between merchants and peasants may be a tacit admission that such a separation was not upheld in reality. The Mengzi, again, is a good place to start. Mencius leaves no doubt that agriculture is a cornerstone of the state: when a ruler is able to cause his people to plow deep and weed thoroughly, this is a sign of good rule; a sage should “govern the world so that pulse and grain will be as plentiful as water and fire.” The politics of the granary are also mentioned.58 Yet what is striking is that, aside from the image of the parceled farm-scape or well-field that is invariably highlighted as evidence of his emphasis on a distinctively agrarian sociology, Mencius has much more to say about merchants, taxation, the politics of wealth creation, the mechanics of the market, and the morality of making or 55 56 57 58

Lüshi chunqiu 8.1: 427 (“Zhong qiu ji” 仲秋紀); 11.1: 575 (“Zhong dong ji” 仲冬紀). Lüshi chunqiu 9.1: 473 (“Ji qiu ji” 季秋紀). Lüshi chunqiu 12.1: 622 (“Ji dong ji” 季冬紀). Mengzi 1.5: 10; 13.23: 311; 2.4: 33.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

228

Sterckx

refusing to accept profit.59 The agriculturalist tone in the Mengzi is rather modest: Houji’s merits take care of only the basic human desires. More important as a threat to the state than uncultivated fields or a lack of amassed goods is the absence of ritual propriety and education. Those who, like Shang Yang, force people to open up lands for cultivation deserve punishment.60 The pursuit of wealth through means other than farming is viewed very positively in the Mengzi, as long as the wealth is shared. Taxation is not so much an attack on the nature of commerce or an attempt to annihilate merchants as it is a way to restore an original balance.61 The Mencian ideal of the market is that of a catalyst for the perfectly balanced exchange of goods and produce. Taxation is merely a corrective that serves to restore the original flow of goods and services: 古之為市也，以其所有易其所無者，有司者治之耳。有賤丈夫 焉，必求龍斷而登之，以左右望，而罔市利。人皆以為賤，故 從而征之。征商自此賤丈夫始矣. When the ancients set up markets, they did so in order to exchange what one had for what one lacked. The supervising authorities merely ensured good order. Then there came this despicable fellow who always had to seek out a vantage point and, climbing up on it, would gaze into the distance to the left and to the right in order to secure for himself all the profit there was in the market. The people all thought him despicable, and as a result, they taxed him. The taxing of merchants began with this despicable fellow. (Mengzi 4.10: 103–104) Taxation is explained here almost as a moral corrective, a measure that helps instill some type of moral rectitude, a means to redress a deviation from what should be humans’ natural and original understanding of commercial exchange. The exemplary ruler in the Mengzi taxes in such a way that he attracts all professions to his state, not simply farmers. The ancients, Mencius points out, conducted inspections at the borders and in marketplaces but im-

59

60 61

Note, by contrast, the interesting biographical anecdote (preserved in Gu Lienü zhuan 古 烈女傳 1: 15) in which Mencius’s mother decides to move their residence away from the market for the sake of his education. Mengzi 5.4: 125; 7.1: 162; 7.14: 175. Mengzi 2.4: 33; 2.5: 36. Levies at the rate of a tithe are deemed ideal (Mengzi 5.3: 118–119; 6.8: 153).

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

Peasant and Merchant in Warring States China

229

posed no levies.62 Market mechanisms are inevitable for Mencius, which is why, in his attack on Xu Xing’s ideal of the autarkic sage, among other things, Mencius mentions the absence of price diversity on the market as a non sequitur since, he argues, it is part of the nature of things that they should be unequal. It is difficult to identify Mencius as being antimercantile.63 By contrast, the Shang jun shu is unambiguously clear in its stance on merchants. It is, in my view, the only Warring States text that contains a sustained ideological stance in favor of the suppression of merchants. “Ken ling” starts off with the idea that farming represents purity and noncorruption, and it is pitched as the opposite pole to “private profit” (si li 私利). Agriculture and commerce may potentially be interdependent, but, Shang Yang argues, the prospect of commercial transactions between farmers and merchants will create a class of economic parasites: 使商無得糴，農無得糶。農無得糶，則窳惰之農勉疾。商無得 糴，則多歲不加樂。多歲不加樂，則饑歲無裕利。無裕利則商 怯。商怯則欲農. Do not allow merchants to buy grain nor farmers to sell grain. If farmers can’t sell their grain, then the lazy and inactive ones among them will exert themselves and be energetic. If merchants do not get to buy grain, then they have no particular joy in abundant harvests. Having no special joy in abundant harvests, they do not make copious profit in years of famine, and making no copious profit, merchants become fearful. Being fearful, they will wish to farm. (Shang jun shu I.2: 8–9 [“Ken ling”])64 Shang Yang wants farmers and merchants to stand in an antagonistic relationship: “If the tolls at the borders and on the market are made heavy, farmers will come to hate merchants, and merchants will have a heart full of doubt and laziness.” Merchants deserve to be harassed so that “the ritual of sending gifts back and forth [去來賫送之禮] will not pervade the hundred districts.”65 62 63

64 65

Mengzi 3.5: 77; 2.5: 36. Mengzi 5.4: 123–124. While it remains hard to corroborate for the early period, several medieval commentators have linked the well 井 with the market 市 on the grounds that communal water wells were the place where people gathered and peddled their produce. This has led to speculation that the well-field model may have influenced small-scale agricultural commerce. See Wu Yucheng 2010: 76–85. Cf. Duyvendak 1963: 86. Shang jun shu I.2: 17–18; cf. Duyvendak 1963: 88–89 (重 關 市 之 賦 ， 則 農 惡 商 ， 商 有疑惰之心).

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

230

Sterckx

Forced registration of merchants and their followers should serve to make merchants’ lives miserable (shang lao 商勞).66 Merchants therefore can and should be taxed out of existence: 欲農富其國者，境內之食必貴，而不農之徵必多，市利之租必 重。則民不得無田. 無田不得不易其食。食貴則田者利。田者利 則事者眾。食貴，糴食不利，而又加重徵，則民不得無去其商 賈、技巧，而事地利矣。故民之力盡在於地利矣。 If one desires to enrich the state through agriculture, then within the borders grain should be expensive, taxes for those who do not farm must be many, and levies on market profit must be heavy; this being the case, people cannot but till. If they do not till, they will be obliged to buy their grain. If grain is expensive, then those who till the land will profit. When those who till the fields gain profit, there will be many who will make [agriculture] their business. When grain is expensive, and dealing in it is not profitable, while, moreover, heavy levies are imposed, then people cannot fail to get rid of itinerant and resident merchants and those who gain a living through crafts and clever tricks and instead occupy themselves with profit from the soil. Thus, the strength of the people will be fully exerted to draw profit from the soil. (Shang jun shu V.22: 129 [“Wai nei” 外内])67 Shang Yang’s philosophy is based on the conviction that the agrarian economy in kind should be prioritized and maintained over and above the monetary economy.68 Money causes a disproportionate outflow of grain. Just as farming folk should be prevented from leaving their unit, the image here is that of the state being threatened by “outlets” (kong 空 / 孔), that is, uncontrollable fissures in the economic polity that allow wealth to seep away.69 In short, unlike for other Warring States thinkers, agriculturalism, for Shang Yang, is a force that excludes and negates the other professions. It is not simply a hierarchy of one over the other. Shang Yang advocates farming as the sole acceptable eco-

66 67 68 69

Shang jun shu I.2: 18 (“Ken ling”); cf. Duyvendak 1963: 97. Cf. Duyvendak 1963: 141. Shang jun shu I.4: 32–34 (“Qu qiang”). Shang jun shu III.13: 81 (“Jin ling”), 5.20: 124 (“Ruo min” 弱民).

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

Peasant and Merchant in Warring States China

231

nomic preoccupation. In doing this he stands out among Warring States thinkers, including later Legalists.70 That the antimercantile stance in the Shang jun shu may have been the exceptional, rather than the common, position becomes immediately clear when we compare that text with ideas associated with Xunzi, whose thought is often considered a conduit to later Legalist figures such as Han Fei and Li Si 李斯 (ca. 280–208 bce). Though more present than in the Mengzi perhaps, agriculturalism is not particularly prominent as an ideology in the Xunzi. There is also little evidence that Xunzi seeks to demote mercantile activity as the lesser profession. More often the professions are mentioned alongside each other as part of the same argument or analogy. So Xunzi’s director of the marketplace “follows the appropriate season in his preparations and enables merchants to travel about in peace, and goods and products to circulate freely” (貨財通).71 In one analogy he invokes both the good farmer (良農) and good merchant (良賈) as models for sages and scholars.72 In fact, comparisons with all professions are called upon to define the properties of the sage: 故聖人也者人之所積也。人積耨耕而為農夫，積斲削而為工 匠，積反貨而為商賈，積禮義而為君子。 Thus, to be a sage is the result of what a person has accumulated. A person who accumulates hoeing and plowing will become a farmer. A person who accumulates chopping and hewing will become a carpenter. A person who accumulates trafficking in and merchandizing goods will become a merchant. A person who accumulates ritual propriety and righteousness will become a gentleman. (Xunzi IV.8: 144 [“Ru xiao” 儒 效])73 Xunzi also takes a generally positive view of wealth creation by means other than agriculture and praises farsighted folk who store up. Hoarding goods as a 70

71 72 73

Interestingly, the “Qu qiang” chapter identifies the three “permanent offices” (chang guan 常官) in a state as farmers (nong 農), merchants (shang 商), and “officials” (guan 官), and it entirely ignores artisans or an equivalent category of craftsmen in its analysis. See Shang jun shu I.4: 26 (“Qu qiang”). Xunzi V.9: 170 (“Wang zhi”); cf. Knoblock 1988–1994: vol. 2, 107. Xunzi I.2: 27–28 (“Xiu shen” 修身); cf. Knoblock 1988–1994: vol. 1, 154. Cf. Knoblock 1988–1994: vol. 2, 82. My translation keeps the rather-unidiomatic “accumulates hoeing and plowing” to give full weight to the concept of ji 積, which is prominent across several Xunzi chapters.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

232

Sterckx

means of perpetuating one’s wealth is human nature.74 On several occasions there are positive comments about the commercial flow of goods, and Xunzi upholds the circulation of profits as a model. In one passage, a smooth flow of goods is even hailed as one of the fibers of his harmonious society: 通流財物粟米，無有滯留，使相歸移也, 四海之內若一家 … The circulation and transport of natural resources and foodstuffs is not impaired by obstructions or hindrances, which causes them to be freely presented and interchanged so that all within the four seas will resemble one family. (Xunzi V.9: 161 [“Wang zhi” 王制]) This passage, which appears in the “Wang zhi” (“The Monarch’s Regulations”) chapter, continues with a lengthy discussion pointing out that the “great divine order” (da shen 大神) in the world is one in which goods flow from regions where they originate in abundance to where they are needed. Interestingly, the emphasis throughout is on the circulation of goods rather than people, and Xunzi argues that this flow of goods ensures that no one needs to abandon one’s own profession: “Farmers need not carve or chisel, nor fire or forge; yet they will have sufficient utensils and implements. Artisans and traders need not till the fields, yet they will have enough beans and grains.”75 For Xunzi, commerce and crafts are essential to allow agricultural labor to continue undisturbed. The ideal is not one of mutually competing or exclusive professions; instead, it is one of clearly distinguished professional roles that echo how roles function within the state or family: “In a ruler acting as ruler, a minister as minister, a father as father, a son as son, an older brother as older brother, a younger brother as younger brother, there is a unitary principle. In the farmer acting as a farmer, the scholar-knight as a scholar-knight, the artisan as an artisan, and the merchant as a merchant, there is a unitary principle.”76 The crux for Xunzi therefore does not lie with agriculturalism or antimercantilism. The emphasis is on allowing specializations to flourish through clear

74 75 76

Xunzi II.4: 67 (“Rong ru” 榮辱). 農夫不斲削，不陶冶而足械用，工賈不耕田而足菽粟 (Xunzi V.9: 162 [“Wang zhi”]); cf. Knoblock 1988–1994: vol. 2, 102). 君君，臣臣，父父，子子，兄兄，弟弟一也; 農農，士士，工工，商商一也 (Xunzi V.9: 164 [“Wang zhi”]); cf. Knoblock 1988–1994: vol. 2, 103). For another mention of the roles of the professions to illustrate the need for social division, see Xunzi VII.11: 214; VII.4: 221.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

Peasant and Merchant in Warring States China

233

task descriptions and professional hierarchies.77 There is need for an elite of Ru to lead society, but the greater mass of the population (眾人) should include all professions: artisans, farmers, merchants, and traders.78 Xunzi’s ruler therefore is not the multitasking sage who masters all crafts, professions, and skills. The worthy and wise are not universally capable: 相高下，視墝肥，序五種，君子不如農人：通財貨，相美惡， 辨貴賤，君子不如賈人；設規矩，陳繩墨，便備用，君子不如 工人. In assessing high- and low-lying land, in assaying the fertility or barrenness of fields, and in determining the distribution of the five [types of] seeds, the gentleman is inferior to the farmer. In understanding goods and products, in appraising their fineness or baseness, and in differentiating their value or worthlessness, he is inferior to the trader. In setting up compass and square, in applying the blackened marking-line, and in ease of handling tools, he is inferior to the artisan. (Xunzi IV.8: 122 [“Ru xiao”])79 Xunzi entrusts the ruler with the oversight and management of the professions, yet, echoing Confucius perhaps, the sage-ruler manages from a distance while farmers, merchants, and artisans do the work on the ground.80 The presence of an enlightened ruler guarantees a cooperative of distinct professions that will realize their full potential and bring about an order Xunzi refers to as “ultimate peace” (zhi ping 至平).81 As in the Shang jun shu, there is an expectation that professional roles in society come with expected behavior in the form of a strict respect for hierarchy and the imperative that there should be no transgression of tasks. Unlike in the case of the Shang jun shu, however, there is little in the Xunzi to suggest that agriculture is to negate commerce. It is indeed remarkable how little Xunzi’s alleged disciple and inheritor of the ideological legacy of Shang Yang, Han Fei, has to say about the agricultural economy or indeed the relationship between farmers and merchants. Any ref77

78 79 80 81

The “Fu guo” 富國 chapter, for instance, advocates a moderate use of goods to enable the storage of surplus and creation of wealth but at the same time subscribes to the need for clear class divisions in society. See Xunzi VI.10: 183–184. Xunzi IV.8: 145 (“Ru xiao”); cf. Knoblock 1988–1994: vol. 2, 83. Cf. Knoblock 1988–1994: vol. 2, 71. Xunzi XV.21: 399 (“Jie bi” 解蔽); partly repeated in Xunzi XIX.27: 504 (“Da lüe” 大略). Xunzi II.4: 71 (“Rong ru”); cf. Knoblock 1988–1994: vol. 1, 195. Perhaps ping here also implies a Xunzian view of “equality” as fundamentally hierarchic.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

234

Sterckx

erence to it is generic.82 There is no mention of the four professional categories (scholars, farmers, craftsmen, merchants) that often appear in other Warring States texts. The Han Feizi makes passing reference to Shang Yang’s granting of prominence to farmers and warriors and to the contrast between farmer-warriors and those engaged in secondary professions (mo zuo zhi min 末作之民). He also praises rulers for personally handling the plow or hoe.83 Great leaders such as Yu 禹 and Zichan are commended for draining flooded areas, clearing fields, and planting mulberry trees despite being despised by the people for being cruel and greedy.84 Yet at the heart of Han Fei’s thought is not so much an appraisal of agriculture as the sole legitimate source of wealth but rather the idea that there should exist a balance between the professions. Commerce can lead to greater wealth—hence the power to purchase office. The enlightened ruler should therefore limit the number of people who trade, are engaged in crafts, or roam around, and he should disparage the reputation of these professions so that people concentrate on primary tasks (ben wu 本務) and are urged away from secondary occupations (mo zuo 末作).85 In a chapter borrowed from the Shang jun shu, the Han Feizi acknowledges that, in times of surplus grain production, farmers may be granted rank in return for their physical labor (jue bi yi qi li 爵必以其力), but farming should not be a direct pathway to office.86 On the other hand, occupying office without firsthand experience of farming and warfare is undesirable.87 The charge that broad knowledge serves no cause without a background in laboring on the land is leveled at Confucius and Mozi: “Erudite, learned, eloquent, and knowledgeable as Confucius and Mozi were, Confucius and Mozi did not till and weed farming land, so what did the state obtain from them?”88 82 83

84 85 86

87 88

Han Feizi IV.13: 96 (“He Shi” 和氏). Han Feizi IV.13: 97 (“He Shi”); V.15: 112 (“Wang zheng” 亡徴); XV.37: 367 (“Nan er” 難二); XVII.44: 408 (“Shuo yi” 說疑); XVIII.46: 416 (“Liu fan” 六反); XIX.49: 452 (“Wu du” 五蠹); XIX.50: 459 (“Xian xue” 顯學). Note though that the ideal of the self-sufficient farming reclusive is condemned, whereas that of the farmer-warrior is favored. See Han Feizi XIII.34: 315–316 (“Wai chu shuo you, shang” 外儲說右上). Han Feizi XIX.50: 464 (“Xian xue”). Han Feizi XIX.49: 455 (“Wu du”). Han Feizi XX.53: 472 (“Chi ling” 飭令). For the textual history of this chapter and the relation between its versions in the Shang jun shu and the Han Feizi, see Zheng Liangshu 1989a: 82–96. Han Feizi XIX.50: 461 (“Xian xue”). 博習辯智如孔墨，孔墨不耕耨則國何得焉。 (Han Feizi XVIII.47: 425 [“Ba shui” 八 説]).

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

Peasant and Merchant in Warring States China

235

The Han Feizi is less concerned with attempting to define the primacy of agriculture or the malleable mind of the farmer. Nor should we look for laudatory comments about the farmer or his relationship to the land in the text.89 Instead, it is emphasized that an increase in the number of people aspiring to (purchase) office through alternative forms of private wealth should be prevented. Commerce and craft need not be eradicated. Yet Han Fei stresses that, whereas agriculture can be a great equalizer of minds, commerce, literacy, and office can be great dividers, taking attention away from warfare and farming.90 In this respect, a ruler should also never seek to achieve false equality among his subjects through progressive taxation, as this undermines the basic principle that wealth is justified if it results from diligent effort and restraint in consumption.91 By far the most extensive exposition of the political economy of early China, and hence the single most quoted source in discussions of agriculture, is the Guanzi 管子. The text is associated with the figure of Guan Zhong 管仲 (d. 645 bce) and the state of Qi in Springs-and-Autumns times, but as will become clear below, its discussions of agriculture and commerce clearly belong to a late Warring States or early Former Han milieu. This is evident in the fact that the Guanzi contains an (imperfect) synthesis between core agriculturalist ideas, on the one hand, and, on the other, an acknowledgment that sophisticated market mechanisms are inevitable and need proper handling. Its use of vocabulary—most notably its more abstract use of terms such as ben and mo to refer to economic agency—and its frequent reference to a four-part division of the professions (si min 四民) indicate that the bulk of its chapters converse with ideas espoused by the Warring States masters discussed so far while probably also reflecting Han concerns. Let us first turn to its agriculturalist component. In its opening and one of the earlier chapters, “Mu min” 牧民 (“Shepherding the People”), inexhaustible granaries and storehouses are identified as one of the sure signs of a well-run state.92 The fundamental role of land and its proper distribution as the basis of 89

90 91 92

In fact, one of the few stories in the Han Feizi that describes the motivation of agricultural laborers insists that they are simply after their rewards in the form of good soup, cash, and cloth. See Han Feizi XI.32: 274 (“Wai chu shuo zuo, shang”). Han Feizi XI.32: 263–264, 280–281 (“Wai chu shuo zuo, shang); XVII.45: 411–413 (“Gui shi” 詭使); XIX.49: 448 (“Wu du”). Han Feizi XIX.50: 458–459 (“Xuan xue”). Guanzi I.1: 2 (“Mu min”). Rickett (2001: 52) dates this chapter to the early or middle fourth century bce. For hypotheses about the provenance and approximate dating of individual Guanzi chapters, I have mostly been guided by scholarship as summarized in Rickett’s chapter introductions.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

236

Sterckx

government (地者政之本也) are acknowledged in several other chapters that are thought to be of Warring States provenance.93 There is a significant concern with the definition of various lots and plots of land. Likewise, the age-old idea of maintaining, repairing, and periodically redefining or altering (更) boundaries and earthen banks between fields and household plots is on the agenda.94 The Guanzi further leaves no doubt as to the intensity with which farmers should apply themselves to their tasks. On a few occasions agriculture is presented as warfare with the soil and equal to military preparation. Agricultural tools are compared to weapons.95 Resoundingly Legalist too are recurring images of cultivating the wilds (ye 野) and “shepherding” the people. The need to bring barren lands under cultivation is highlighted as a priority over “branch production” (mo chan 末產), and law and order are said to encourage the people to “return to the roots” (fan ben 反本).96 Interpreting the use of this “root” and “branch” vocabulary in the text requires caution, however. These terms contain a variety of meanings and do not necessarily always refer to a profession or economic activity. “Tending to,” “sticking to,” or “returning to” fundamentals often connotes the general idea of going back to the basics, being incorrupt, or focusing on important issues first. Grain is not simply produce in the Guanzi; it is the core commodity in its economic model. The manipulation of grain prices is the benchmark of the qing zhong 輕重 (light and heavy) policies advocated in the economic chapters. These policies emphasize respect for the agricultural seasons. Strategies for the storage of grain by the state are at least partly explained as a measure to prevent merchants from hoarding supplies (see also Liu Jiapeng 2010: 40–47). The idea of curbing hoarding is included in expressions such as “nurturing the

93

94 95 96

Guanzi I.5: 84 (“Sheng ma” 乘馬). For agriculture as the prime source of wealth, see also Guanzi XI.31: 585 (“Jun chen xia” 君臣下); XVII.52: 989 (“Qi chen qi zhu” 七臣七主). For the strategic use of trade (in deer and fox fur) to weaken an enemy’s agricultural base and deplete grain supplies, see Guanzi XXIV.84: 1520–1521 (“Qing zhong, wu” 輕重戊). Guanzi I.5: 90 (“Sheng ma”) also insists that water tables are to be observed carefully and taxes adapted according to the risk of drought and flood. Guanzi XVII.53: 1016 (“Jin cang” 禁藏). The final “Qing zhong” chapter ends with similar martial imagery. See Guanzi XXIV.85: 1540 (“Qing zhong, ji” 己). Guanzi I.3: 48 (“Quan xiu” 權修); XV.47: 920 (“Zheng shi” 正世). Rickett (1998: 172) chooses to translate fan ben throughout as “reverting to the essential industry of agriculture.” It is not always obvious in my view that the text effectively calls for such a narrow reading of ben 本.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

Peasant and Merchant in Warring States China

237

roots” (君養其本), “grasping the roots/beginnings” (cao ben/shi 操本/始), and the like.97 It is important to stress that, despite its emphasis on grain, the Guanzi does not advocate the suppression of commerce. Rather, it proposes mechanisms to ensure that markets do not impinge on agricultural production.98 Agriculture and grain sit at the heart of its economic model: yet it is not merely production but, rather, the politics concerning the circulation and hoarding of grain—that is, the manipulation of market forces—that is ultimately most important. Agri­culture calls for carefully managed commerce. Economic knack is superior to bare productivity: 故[ 強本節用] 可以益愈，而不足以為存 … 天下下，我高。天下 輕，我重，天下多，我寡。然後可以朝天下. Thus, [strengthening the roots and being frugal with expenses] enables one to improve matters greatly, but this is not sufficient to ensure survival. … When the world lowers its prices, we should raise ours. When it treats something lightly, we should value it. When the rest of the world increases its supply, we should curtail ours. Then we will be able to bring the rest of the world to our court. (Guanzi XXIV.81: 1453–1454 [“Qing zhong, yi 乙”]) “Root” activity therefore includes the promotion of farming, but it also connotes a whole gamut of strategies that range from putting one’s own state first to being crafty in devising trading schemes that ensure a flow of goods toward one’s own court. While it is tempting to zoom in on the Guanzi’s full granaries in support of agriculturalist arguments, one should not overlook that the entire economic model presented in the text depends on commerce: the agents and agencies that ensure the flow, trade, and exchange of grain. As the discussion above already shows, there are clearly different strands of thought on the agrarian economy at work across the different chapters that 97 98

Guanzi XXII.73: 1269 (“Guo xu” 國蓄); XXIII.78: 1378 (“Kui du” 揆度); XXIII.80: 1422, 1439 (“Qing zhong, jia 甲”), insisting that every peasant should be farming. Guanzi XXIII.78: 1379 (“Kui du”): “Excellence in bringing order to commerce requires the careful supervision of markets. If the markets are well supervised, they will become less and less busy. If they become less busy, farms will have plenty of manpower. If they have plenty of manpower, the people will have sufficient wealth. If they have sufficient wealth, the prince will be able to collect taxes from them without draining them dry.” See Rickett 1998: 435. Noninterference during the nodal moments in the agricultural cycle is emphasized in Guanzi XXII.74: 1290–1291 (“Shan guo gui” 山國軌).

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

238

Sterckx

make up the received Guanzi. Teasing these out with greater clarity, if possible at all, will require a separate study. Our understanding of many of the arguments in the Guanzi, I suspect, can be fruitfully advanced only as part of an analysis of views on agriculture and commerce held during the Former Han. For now, I would note that while an emphasis on land cultivation and grain management, often formulated with a Legalist overtone, is clearly present in the older chapters (mid- to late Warring States), the “light and heavy” model and the politics of market mechanisms (storage vs. circulation) seem to occur mostly in chapters that bear a Han signature (including “Qing zhong” 輕重, “Guo xu” 國蓄, “Kui du” 揆度). Yet even among those later chapters, some appear more agriculturalist than others. For instance, “Zhi guo” 治國 (“Ordering the State”) appears to be the only chapter that explicitly argues for the primacy of agriculture over nonessential production. Not only does its subject matter appear akin to the arguments in memorials by Han commentators such as Jia Yi and Chao Cuo (see n. 4 above), but likewise, its definition of “secondary,” “nonessential,” or “peripheral” activities is broader than simply commerce or mercantile activity and comprises activities expressed in more abstract terms such as “nonessential creations” (mo zuo 末作) or “artful luxuries” (qi qiao 奇 巧).99 To my knowledge, “Zhi guo” also contains the only passage in the received Guanzi that argues in favor of the exchange of the fruits of labor rather than professional autarky or the separation of the professions, that is, ideas that may well chime with Han voices that favored a diversified economy (such as Sima Qian and Sang Hongyang): 故先王使農士商工四民交能易作，終歲之利，無道相過也. Therefore, the former kings made the four classes of people—peasants, shi, merchants, and craftsmen—exchange their skills and perform each other’s work so that there was no way in which the benefits at the end of the year could be excessive for any one class. (Guanzi XV.48: 926 [“Zhi guo”])100 Elsewhere, the Guanzi fully insists on the separation of the four professions. But this does not imply putting farmers above merchants and craftsmen or denying that the latter have an important role to fulfill. Not only peasants are expected to contribute to public works, but so should traders and artisans who are not otherwise engaged in official work. At stake in the Guanzi is not the 99 100

Guanzi XV.48: 924 (“Zhi guo”). Cf. Rickett 1998: 176–180.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

Peasant and Merchant in Warring States China

239

nature of one’s profession but the intention with which it is carried out: only honest traders should be permitted to trade, and the same applies to artisans and peasants. By analogy, only trustworthy gentlemen should be permitted to hold office.101 Professional specialization receives a great deal of attention as a positive influence on the economy. The state should even be organized in districts according to the professions, albeit merchants and craftsmen should occupy fewer than half the number of districts occupied by the gentry and farming population.102 The engineered cohabitation of people of the same profession enforces continuity and the transmission of skills; social mobility across the professions is therefore undesired, unless one rises to shi 士 status.103 While the desired character of farmers is still described in terms of uncultivated simplicity (puye 樸野), different behavioral codes serve to enhance the functioning of each profession: the shi are to be incorrupt (lian 廉); the farming population, stupid (yu 愚); merchants and artisans, honest (yuan 願).104 The good ruler in the Guanzi is therefore one who ensures that, while keeping the professions separate, no single group gains the upper hand to the detriment of another. The Guanzi thus counterbalances Shang Yang–style agriculturalism with Mencian market optimism: 野與市爭民。家與府爭貨，金與粟爭貴，鄉與朝爭治；故野不 積草，農事先也；府不積貨，藏於民也；市不成肆，家用足 也；朝不合眾，鄉分治也。故野不積草，府不積貨，市不成肆, 朝不合眾，治之至也。 The countryside should rival the marketplace in population. Private households should rival public storehouses in goods. Currency should rival grain in value. Local districts should rival the court in good government. Thus, the countryside will not accumulate weeds, because agricultural tasks have been put first. The public storehouses will not accumulate goods, because they have been stored by the people; marketplaces will not be filled with stalls, because private households have sufficient supplies; and masses will not gather at the court (to complain), because the local districts are governed well. Therefore, when the countryside is not 101 102 103 104

Guanzi I.5: 91 (“Sheng ma”). Guanzi VIII.20: 400 (“Xiao kuang” 小匡). Rickett (2001: 321) proposes a date for this chapter of around 300 bce. Guanzi VIII.20: 402 (“Xiao kuang”); with a parallel in Guoyu 6.1: 220–222 (“Qi yu” 齊語). Guanzi X.30: 550 (“Jun chen shang”).

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

240

Sterckx

overgrown with weeds, the public storehouses are not piled high with goods, the marketplaces are not filled with stalls, and the masses do not gather at court—this is the ultimate sign of good government. (Guanzi I.3: 52 [“Quan xiu”])

Qin

It is in this atmosphere of a polymorphous landscape of the professions, rather than the world of blunt Shang Yang–like agriculturalism, that we ought to situate the First Emperor of Qin 秦始皇帝 (emp. 221–210 bce). The idea that farming was to be extolled at the expense of mercantile activity and crafts is hard to corroborate when we examine evidence directly or indirectly linked to the First Emperor and the period immediately before and after unification. I am aware of only one explicit mention of the promotion of agriculture (nong 農) that is paired with the elimination of the “branch” professions. This occurs in a line in the Langye 琅邪 inscription (219 bce): 皇帝之功, 勤勞本事, 上農除末, 黔首是富. The merits of the August Emperor lie in being diligently devoted to basic affairs, exalting agriculture and eradicating the branch [occupations], so that the black-haired people may be rich. (Shiji 6: 245)105 Yet I question whether an expression such as chu mo 除末 here can be anything else but a generic expression or a trope referring to any activity or state of mind that detracts from agricultural labor. If it is understood to imply the eradication of crafts and commerce, it sits uncomfortably next to, for instance, a line in the Jieshi 碣石 inscription that refers to the First Emperor’s “bounty extending to every occupation”106 or a line in the Mount Tai inscription that speaks of “the various professions finding their appropriate place”107 or another line in the Langye inscription noting that “all professions flourish and prosper.108 While an insistence on the separation of the professions is made 105

106 107 108

For an alternative translation, see Kern 2000a: 26–27, lines 14–16. For an example of how this particular line is often inflated with hypothetical assumptions regarding Qin’s ruthless antimercantilism, see Gong Xian 2010: 7–8. 惠被諸產 (Shiji 6: 252); see also Kern 2000a: 43, line 31. 諸產得宜 (Shiji 6: 243); see also Kern 2000a: 20, line 14. 諸產繁殖 (Shiji 6: 245); see also Kern 2000a: 32, line 54.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

Peasant and Merchant in Warring States China

241

explicit in the Mount Zhifu 之罘 and Kuaiji 會稽 inscriptions,109 I see no evidence of hostility to merchants or craftsmen in these inscriptions. Equally inexplicit is a fragment among the recently recovered Liye 里耶 materials that states: □[ 黔] 首習俗好本事而不好末事，其習俗槎田嵗更，以異中縣 …The black-haired people [of Qin] are accustomed to preferring fundamental tasks and disliking peripheral tasks; they are accustomed to clearing land [for agriculture] in annual rotations [of labor service], and this differentiates them from the central districts.110 The wider context of this fragment is lost. It is reasonable to interpret this statement as an acknowledgment that the Qin settlers in this remote frontier area of Qianling County had to put their minds first and foremost to the basic task of clearing land for agriculture and had less time than their neighbors in the Central States to engage in other forms of economic activity. Yet nothing suggests that the “peripheral tasks” mentioned here should refer specifically or exclusively to commerce. By contrast, one might argue that the so-called unifying measures introduced by the Qin (currency, roads, weights, measures, etc.) could only enhance processes such as the circulation and accounting of goods or the efficiency and expansion of itinerant commerce.111 Until more concrete evidence is uncovered documenting antimercantile measures, we must be cautious about inferring large-scale suppression of merchants during the Qin. It is only Sima Qian who tells us that the First Emperor forced merchants to be registered at markets and that he moved hundreds of thousands to labor in uncultivated territories.112 Yet we must allow for a degree of Han rhetoric at play in those accounts. 109 110

111

112

Shiji 6: 250; see also Kern 2000a: 39, lines 25–27. Shiji 6: 261; see also Kern 2000a: 46, line 17. Chen Wei 2012: 136–137 (slip 8–355). The editors suggest that 嵗更 may refer to some system in which one alternates cultivation per season. Hulsewé translates 更 as a “turn of duty.” Like Hulsewé, I am not sure how this system may have worked in practice, but we can assume that geng refers to an annual corvée labor assignment or possibly the period between turns of duty. See Hulsewé 1985: 26 (A4), n. 3; 32 (A14), n. 1. As Marcel Granet (1957: 103) noted decades ago: “But if the Chinese did not remain, as he [the First Emperor] wished, a people entirely devoted to agriculture, the opening up of great ways of communication, by which commerce profited, must have helped largely in the process of national unity.” See also Wu Cunhao 1996: 300–301. The question remains though to what extent such forced registrations of merchants can be interpreted as fully-fledged suppression. In his chapter on the moneymakers, Sima

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

242

Sterckx

After all, it is only in the Han that the growth of commerce and the accumulation of private land could be conceived of as a linear process that began in the Warring States and had led to the circumstances they were facing. The Shiji’s “Basic Annals of Qin” (秦本紀) (Shiji 5: 203) refers to the promotion of agriculture only at the point when Shang Yang offers his program to Lord Xiao 秦孝 公 (r. 361–338 bce) in 359 bce and when it mentions the so-called land reforms that affected the layout of the capital, now relocated to Xianyang 咸陽 (350 bce). There is, however, no further mention of an ideological shift toward agriculture. To the contrary, there is a reference to Li Si, who indicates in a memorial that it is good to have the common people in their homes devoting themselves to agriculture and crafts.113 The only (and indirect) reference to farmers in the entire “Basic Annals” presents them as subjects exploited by the Second Emperor: they have to provide supplies for the capital and are possibly even prohibited from eating their own grain if they reside within a radius of three hundred li from the Qin capital.114 In practice, then, the Qin imperial agenda seems to be feeding the army. Although this was clearly clad in a version of the Legalist ideology of agriculture-cum-warfare (nong zhan 農戰), there is little evidence that this implied emancipating the farmer and suppressing other professions. Indeed, as I mentioned before, pre-unification evidence of an acquisitive and expanding merchant class buying up land is scant. If measures to suppress merchants were really substantial, would one not expect to find traces of this in administrative law? So far, received Qin legal documents, patchy as they are, may be telling in this respect. The Shuihudi 睡虎地 corpus, for instance, does

113 114

Qian is happy to note that the First Emperor granted honors to a herdsman, Wuzhi Luo 烏 氏倮, who had made a fortune trading his animal stocks against silk and other commodities. See Shiji 129: 3260. 百姓當家則力農工 (Shiji 6: 255). One may argue that gong here could refer to weaving. I think it refers to craftsmen more generally since Li Si continues by mentioning the shi. Shiji 6: 269. It is not entirely clear what the text means here. Nakai Sekitoku 中井積德 (1732–1817) suggested that a prohibition against residents within the Xianyang periphery consuming their own grain may have been a later interpolation since it would be inconsistent to impose such a measure when extra supplies already had to be brought in to feed newly stationed garrisons and their livestock, and when the periphery’s couriers were told to bring their own food. Fang Bao 方苞 (1668–1749) suggests that it was the couriers who were forbidden to source food from within an area of three hundred li around the capital. See Shiki kaichū kōshō 1932–1934: vol. 2, 6: 74. I would add that feeding armies at the expense of the local population would not be an inconsequential policy for Legalists, or anyone else for that matter. Regardless of what happened, Sima Qian’s picture of the farming population here is one of hardship and self-sacrifice.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

Peasant and Merchant in Warring States China

243

not include a single mention of nong 農 or shang 商 designating the professional category of farmer or merchant, whereas it does contain provisions for artisans (gong 工).115 Agricultural labor and those involved in it are referred to with the modifier or noun tian 田. These documents are silent on prohibitions against the accumulation of land by merchants. They deal with the repayment of debt, the borrowing of government tools, the price-labeling of market goods, the circulation of cash versus cloth money, and proper accounting, but there are no generic prejudices or strictures against traders and merchants embedded in these documents.116 Likewise, it is noteworthy that the Shuihudi legal documents, which are concerned in great detail with managing the harvest and storing grain, have nothing to say about the management or ownership of land, with the exception of one item: an article that deals with the thievish shifting of border marks (feng 封) and that attempts to explain feng in relation to field paths (qian mo 阡陌), pan 畔 borders, and qing 頃 (100 mu) plots.117 Furthermore, from the badly damaged imperial Qin legal and administrative documents unearthed in 1989 in Tomb 6 at Longgang, Yunmeng 雲夢龍崗 (Hubei), it also appears that Qin maintained public ownership of land; although in these documents it is also clear that encroachment on public lands by individuals had become increasingly common.118 An isolated statute on agriculture retrieved from Tomb 50 at Haojiaping 郝 家平 in Qingchuan 青川 (Sichuan) was issued by King Wu of Qin 秦武王 (r. 310–307 bce) and dated September 27, 309 bce. It goes into quite some detail attempting to define terminology and surface area for plots, paths, and bordermounds. This statute includes an instruction to “rectify the field borders and clear the large weeds from the field paths” (正彊 [ 疆] 畔及發千百[ 阡陌] 之 大草). The verb zheng 正 here implies the idea of correcting or possibly even modifying plots. To be sure, the Qingchuan document predates Shuihudi and imperial Qin by several decades, and it may reflect a peculiar situation in the 115

116

117 118

According to the CHANT database, the graph nong 農 occurs only once, not in the statutes on agriculture (tian lü 田律) but in the statutes on the controller of works (si kong 司 空), where it means to return home for agricultural work (gui tian nong 歸田農). See Shuihudi Qinmu zhujian 2001: 253 (slip 144); cf. Hulsewé 1985: 67 (A67). The graph shang 商 does not occur at all. For the lack of occupational differentiation in the Qin census documents unearthed in Liye, see Charles Sanft’s chapter in the present volume. Shuihudi Qinmu zhujian 2001: 38 (slips 77–79), 39–40 (slips 82–85), 36 (slip 68), 37 (slip 69), 42 (slip 97), 44 (slip 101), 49 (slips 126–127), 101 (slip 32); cf. Hulsewé 1985: A39, A41, A45, A46, A51, A55, A74, D26. See also Zhang Zexian 2003: 363–369. Shuihudi Qinmu zhujian 2001: 108 (slip 64); Hulsewé 1985: 164 (D136). See Zhang Jinguang 2013: 112–146, esp. 120–123 on “thieving fields” 盜田.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

244

Sterckx

recently occupied area of Sichuan, in which delineation of plots was topographically—and perhaps politically—more difficult than in the Qin homeland in the Wei 渭 River basin.119 Yet, speaking more broadly, for all the rigor with which the Qin land reforms are usually presented, Qin documents bespeak a degree of confusion and uncertainty about one of the basic instruments for managing land effectively: namely, the correct positioning of border marks and agreement on the units with which to measure plots. Their inclusion in the legal code could be interpreted as a tacit admission that people were trying to accumulate land by foul play. But, perhaps more importantly, it may indicate that the so-called Qin land reforms were conducted in a trialand-error fashion or, at least, were much more in flux than the language of fixed and determined territorial management in received texts makes us believe.120 The much-debated comment in the “Basic Annals” that is attributed to Xu Guang 徐廣 (352–425 ce) and that suggests that in 216 bce Qin relaxed state control on land by “making the black-haired people occupy land of their own accord” (使黔首自實田) may well be the first acknowledgment of private landownership, and it possibly reflects an intermediate stage toward fully fledged private land possession in early Han times.121 But there is as yet little evidence to suggest that these early signs of discourse about land ownership during the Qin were formulated in terms of an antagonism between the professions of the peasant and the merchant. At any rate there is no clear evidence of a condemnation of merchants or explicitly agriculturalist rhetoric present in the Qin legal documents uncovered so far. In its conception and management of the professions, imperial Qin therefore does not represent a radical break from theories proposed in Warring States times. There is an acknowledgment 119 120

121

See Sichuan Sheng Bowuguan and Qingchuan Xian Wenhuaguan 1982; Hulsewé 1985: 212 (G1). See also a discussion of this document in Korolkov 2010: 58–98. For a detailed assessment, see Zhang Jinguang 2004: chaps. 2–3. Zhang’s discussion emphasizes that the so-called land reforms, including the definitions of boundaries and field limits, were evolving and perhaps internally subject to several changes (168–169). Xu Guang’s statement, quoted in Pei Yin’s 裴駰 (fifth century ce) jijie 集解 commentary (Shiji 6: 251), has and continues to spark endless discussion. It is as yet the only tangible hint at an official acknowledgment of landownership, but it originates from a commentator active five centuries later. Likewise, the meaning of the verb shi 實 remains problematic and highly disputed. It is not clear at all whether we are dealing here with the private occupation of (new) land that was not under government control, or whether, as some have suggested, Qin subjects were asked to report on the size of the plots they were, de facto privately, occupying to enable accurate taxation. My translation broadly follows Yuan Lin 1987.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

Peasant and Merchant in Warring States China

245

of the importance of farming and the benefits of specialization that might ensue from separating the professions, yet beyond the rhetorical surface, antimercantilism or discriminatory policies toward the craftsmen are low key. This brings me to a final question. What should we make of the insistence in virtually every source discussed so far that there should be a strict separation between the professions and that a transgression of these boundaries or leaving one’s professional “habitat” should be prevented? Future evidence in the form of more administrative and legal documents will need to bear out how successful this policy was in reality or whether it was mostly an ideological expectation. I would argue that a vociferous insistence on clearly defined boundaries between the professions and their practitioners more likely signals that, in reality, multitasking and crossing professional boundaries were rife. This distance between ideas and practice may even be reflected in the biographical narratives of some of the main proponents of so-called agriculturalist ideas. Let us start with the figure of Guan Zhong. He is said to hail from a merchant background, giving up trade before entering into the service of Lord Xi 僖 of Qi (r. 730–698 bce). Yet his merchant origins are most likely a Warring States version of his biography since the Guan clan no doubt belonged to the Springs-and-Autumns period nobility, and such social mobility would be exceptional in pre–Warring States times.122 Likewise, among the imagined sociology that surrounds Confucius’s disciples, it is noteworthy that one of his most prominent followers, Zigong 子貢, was known as a merchant par excellence. The title of the Shiji chapter dealing with the moneymakers (“Huo zhi liezhuan” 貨殖列傳) is alleged to derive from a statement by Confucius on Zigong’s ambition to pursue wealth (cf. Lunyu 11.19); and there appears no objection here to wealth creation through means other than agriculture. Even more revealing is the fate of Lü Buwei, the man associated with the text that contains some of the most outspoken agriculturalist and agronomical materials to have survived from pre-imperial China. Lü Buwei is on record not as some sort of physiocrat or enlightened scholar-farmer living off his land but, instead, as a successful merchant and peddler of schemes and ideas. If agri­ culturalism was anything more than a largely ideological package by the close of the Warring States period and in early Han times, it is noteworthy that 122

Zhanguo ce zhushi 7.8: 288 (“Qin ce 秦策 5”); Shiji 62: 2131–2134. I am grateful to Yuri Pines for drawing my attention to the Warring States elements that permeate Guan Zhong’s purported biography. Note that virtually no thinker who promotes agriculturalism in Warring States and Han times seems to hail from a farming background. There is Bu Shi 卜式 (fl. 111 bce), but he herded sheep (Sterckx 2002: 151).

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

246

Sterckx

Lü Buwei’s Shiji biography emphasizes practices and virtues that would be diametrically opposed to the doctrines espoused in the text compiled under Lü’s patronage. Sima Qian’s biography opens unambiguously by stating that Lü was a great merchant (da gu ren 大賈人) who, by traveling here and there, buying cheap and selling dear, had amassed a fortune of thousands in gold.123 I am not aware of any record that links Lü Buwei in a positive way to agriculture. On the contrary, not only does an episode in the Zhanguo ce 戰國策 highlight his merchant background, but the story also has him ponder the merits of agriculture first, and trade next, as a route to wealth, and then dismiss agriculture, when compared with statecraft and even trade, as an inferior avenue to personal wealth.124 Coincidentally or not, another story in the Zhanguo ce plays off merchants against ministers following a complaint lodged by Lord Jianxin 建信 (in Zhao) that Lü Buwei had been disrespectful to him: 希寫曰：「 臣以為今世用事者，不如商賈。」 建信君悖然曰： 「 足下卑用事者而高商賈乎？」 曰「 不然。夫良商不與人爭 買賣之賈，而謹司時。時賤而買，雖貴已賤矣；時貴而賣，雖 賤已貴矣。 … 今君不能與文信侯相伉以權，而責文信侯少禮， 臣竊為君不取也。 」 Xi Xie 希寫 [speaking on behalf of Lü] said: “I take those who serve their states nowadays not to be as good as merchants.”  Lord Jianxin countered: “Do you mean you find merchants worthier than officials?”  “Not at all,” said Xi Xie, “but the good trader does not wrangle with people over the price for buying or selling; he only pays careful attention to timing/the seasons. When the times produce low prices, he buys. Even though he may buy something for a relatively high price, it will be cheaper than he could buy it in times of high prices. When the season forces high prices, he sells. Even though he sells for a relatively low price, it will still be higher than he could have gotten in times of low prices. … Now you cannot win in a contest of power with Lü Buwei [文信候] so you reproach him for being poor in propriety. This I, your humble servant, would not do if I were you, my lord.” (Zhanguo ce zhushi 20.20: 756 [“Zhao ce 趙策 3”])125 123 124 125

Shiji 85: 2505. Zhanguo ce zhushi 7.5: 269 (“Qin ce 5”). Shao Yiping (2005: 17) notes that the Zhanguo ce does not contain any accounts about merchants other than Lü Buwei and wonders why, in contrast with Shiji, there is this dearth of references to merchants in Zhanguo ce. Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

Peasant and Merchant in Warring States China

247

Here the good statesman is characterized as a good merchant. The persona of the First Emperor’s patron is not one that speaks of eradicating trade; on the contrary, he appears as a merchant-manipulator par excellence. And one might be excused for detecting skills here that mirror those of a good farmer: as the farmer sows and harvests in the proper seasons, the merchant observes the seasons and the flow of produce in order to time and adjust his buying and selling. Peasants and merchants may well appear to be agents that, sociologically, pull in opposite directions, yet the activities and agencies they represent suggest that, throughout the Warring States period and into Qin times, they may have been at least as complementary to each other as they were mutual opposites.

Concluding Remarks

The merits of farming folk in the unification of empire may be recounted in the form of a story with multiple plots, counterplots, and subnarratives. The story certainly is more complex than a simple struggle of peasants versus merchants or the myth that grants agriculture an exclusive pride of place in explanations of the rise of Chinese civilization and empire. From the perspective of ideology, it would be an oversimplification to argue that Warring States thinkers merely advocated controlling or suppressing merchants.126 Moreover, agriculture is a referent that covers many meanings. The same structures that were invoked as vehicles to promote agricultural productivity also functioned as mechanisms for social control that enabled rulers to manage every single ­aspect of the farmer’s life, from the fields he was allocated, to the timing of sowing, to reporting the rat holes in the granaries.127 In evaluating early Chinese society as an exemplary agrarian economy, we need to distinguish, therefore, between agriculture as an economic program and agriculture as a political doctrine or ideology. The peasant and merchant, as will be revealed in the much richer record available for later imperial China, do not simply appear as agents of certain modes of wealth creation and economic sustenance. Instead, they embody an amalgam of values, morals, and stereotypical behavior, and not infrequently, they are caricatured as diametri126

127

Wu Song 2000 is one of the few studies by Chinese scholars I have seen to argue that the suppression of trade and crafts starts with the Warring States, Qin, and Han and that, prior to this, there is no sign of it. Wu’s point of reference here is Hu Jichuang 1981: 6, who may have been among the first to have hinted that there is no evidence in pre–Warring States texts of the devaluation of mercantile activity. Shuihudi Qin mu zhujian 2001: 128 (slip 152); Hulsewé 1985: 162–163 (D130). Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

248

Sterckx

cally opposed exemplars of views on loyalty, devotion, social responsibility, and the like. In the absence of sufficient data to allow the writing of an economic history or a history of agriculture in early China (many of which continue to be written, however), one would do well to write an account of the role of the idea of agriculture as a key catalyst in the political economy of the period—that is, a history of ideas as much as one of crop yields and technological advances only.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

Population Records from Liye: Ideology in Practice

249

Chapter 8

Population Records from Liye: Ideology in Practice Charles Sanft The Warring States period (453–221 bce) saw the emergence of bureaucratic techniques that connected the state with the population. These new technologies embraced—at least ideally—all individuals within the polity, associating each with precise characteristics and specific administrative structures. One of these was a system of household registration that sought to record the entire population. Registration made each person known and knowable to the state and enabled the calculation of taxes and labor service requirements. This knowledge created a new kind of power relationship and permitted the assignment and tracking of accountability at a level that would otherwise have been impossible. With the unification of the Warring States era polities under the Qin in 221 bce, registration came to encompass the populace of the new empire. In the process of becoming and remaining registered, each person entered into and maintained a relationship with the state. Just as the state collected information through local bureaucratic structures, so did it distribute messages about the extent of the state’s reach throughout society, making the population aware of its presence. These practices conveyed a conception of the state’s structures and capabilities to each member of the population. Although historians have long known that systems of population registration existed in early China, there were no examples of the forms they took. In this chapter, I discuss two types of documents that archeologists have recovered in recent years from a Qin era bureaucratic center at Liye 里耶, Hunan: household registries and reckonings of debts owed by men doing military service away from home that made use of the data the registers contained. The registries contain little information about each person; just a few words sufficed to identify each one. The debt reckonings show how that information moved through the Qin bureaucracy to follow individuals from one place to another. These two types of documents together reflect a political state in a condition of mutual knowledge with its population and represent in important ways the Qin conception of their society.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004299337_010 Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

250

Sanft

The Liye Site

The Liye archeological site takes its name from the modern town Liye, located on the You River 酉水河 in the heart of the Wuling 武陵 Mountains. The site was noted and excavated in connection with the Wanmipo 碗米坡 hydroelectric project, the main part of which was carried out in 2002. Reports about the find appeared quickly in the popular press, including the Chinese national geographic magazine, that same year (Zhang Chunlong and Long Jingsha 2002). The first formal report was published in 2003 (Hunansheng wenwu kaogu yanjiusuo et al. 2003a, 2003b), and the final archeological report appeared as a book in 2007 (Hunansheng wenwu kaogu yanjiusuo 2007). The Liye site has produced thousands of bureaucratic documents—most, but not all, coming from an ancient well. The documents indicate that in Qin times this was the government center of Qianling County 遷陵縣, Dongting Commandery 洞庭郡.1 Only a portion of the documents that archeologists found at Liye has been published so far. A number have appeared only in transcription form in the archeological report and in articles; a small portion have appeared in slim volumes that combine very high quality photographic reproduction with good transcription and low cost (Zhang Chunlong 2010). In addition to the primary find of the well, archeologists have also discovered small numbers of wooden strips around the Liye site. These included the population registries, which archeologists recovered in 2005 from a pit in what they identify as a defensive moat. The book version of the report first published the content of twenty-two examples along with a few more that are so damaged they contain no legible text (Hunansheng wenwu kaogu yanjiusuo 2007: 22, 26, 203–208). Zhang Chunlong 張春龍 (2009) published a further selection of some fifty additional registries and related documents from the well. The first volume of what promises to be the complete set of Liye documents was published in 2012, as was a companion volume containing transcriptions and commentary by another research group (Liye Qin jian (yi) 2012; Chen Wei 2012); future publications promise further materials.

1 For a summary of the find and the recovered materials, see Yates 2012–2013.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

Population Records from Liye: Ideology in Practice



251

Population Registers

At Liye, archeologists recovered more than twenty examples of Qin population registration documents, most in fragments. The following is one example, which, like the others, comprises a single wooden strip: 1 南陽戶人荊不更黃得 2 妻曰嗛 3 子小上造台 子小上造□2 子小上造[ 定] 4 子小女虖 子小女移 子小女[ 平] 5 五(: 伍) 長

Nanyang householder Jing bugeng (fourth  rank) Huang De Wife called Qian Child: minor shangzao (second rank) Tai Child: minor shangzao (illegible) Child: minor shangzao Ding Child: minor girl Hu Child: minor girl Yi Child: minor girl Ping Pentad leader3

The official who wrote out this record divided the text into five sections by drawing horizontal dividers on the strip with ink. The top section, here as in all examples, contains the village, householder status, social rank, and name of the householder. In most of the recovered registries, the householder is a male, although a few examples of female householders exist.4 Hsing I-t’ien 邢義田 (2014: 162) has asserted that householders were necessarily adults. However, while adult householders were surely the general rule, information from Liye shows that there were at least some minor householders.5 The householder had the legal power to decide many matters that would have required the intervention of the authorities if they were to occur in broader society.6 Yu Zongfa 余宗發 (1992: 211–213) has suggested that in legal 2 Note that while the transcription has only an empty space here, nos. 3 and 4 on color pl. 36 in Hunansheng wenwu kaogu yanjiusuo 2007 show that there is a graph present. I have thus marked it as illegible. 3 Hunansheng wenwu kaogu yanjiusuo 2007: 203 (K1/25/50); cf. translations of a different example in Venture 2011: 86 and Yates 2011: 359–360. Note that here and in all transcriptions of excavated texts, I convert graphs to standard modern equivalents. The various published versions of the Liye documents do not number them according to a single system; in my notes I refer to each strip according to the serial number given in the text I cite. 4 See Liye Qin jian (yi) 2012: 24; Chen Wei 2012: 120 (8-237); see also Zhang Chunlong 2009: 192 (9-43, 9-1475). 5 See, e.g., Liye Qin jian (yi) 2012: 11; Chen Wei 2012: 32–33 (8-19). 6 Lau 2005; Yu Zhenbo 2005; cf. discussion in Sanft 2010–2011.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

252

Sanft

terms a Qin householder essentially owned all property and persons of the household, in that he or she had wide powers of disposition over them. Records of householders transferring property to their children found among the Liye documents show them exercising their power to dispose of chattels freely.7 In this case the householder is a resident of Nanyang village, holding the social rank bugeng 不更 (fourth rank), with the surname Huang 黃 and the personal name De 得. Before Huang De’s rank comes the designation Jing 荊, another name for Chu 楚. In Shiji zhengyi 史記正義, Zhang Shoujie 張守節 (eighth century) explains that the Qin referred to Chu as Jing in observance of a taboo on the word “Chu,” which was the personal name of the Qin King Zhuangxiang 莊襄 (r. 250–247 bce).8 Most of the published registries have this geographic designation, and the distinction between Qin and Jing/Chu is reflected in at least one other context among the Liye documents.9 There is disagreement among scholars about what Jing signifies in the household registries. Some suggest it indicates a rank converted from the Chu system or a person of Chu origin. Others believe it marks a rank given to a former Chu subject as part of a policy of appeasement. Zhang Rongqiang 張榮強 (2010: 27–31) argues in favor of this last possibility, conjecturing that such ranks brought fewer privileges than the standard versions and so needed to be distinguished from them.10 I believe it more likely that the classification Jing reflects that the household (not the person or rank) was of Chu origin, in what was then newly conquered territory. This is because the designation Jing is found only in the householder’s section and never in that of any other rank-holder in a household. It seems unlikely that all the householders except one among the published examples had Chu ranks or were of Chu origin, while not even a single other male held such a rank or came from such a background. Hence, it appears that the occurrence of the term “Jing” once on a given record marked that household as a Chu household, in the same way that the village listed in the first section denoted the place of residence of all members of the household.

7 8

9 10

Liye Qin jian (yi) 2012: 70–71; Chen Wei 2012: 326 (8-1443, 8-1455), 356–357 (8-1554). Shiji 6: 234; Venture 2011: 80. Cf. Du Yu’s 杜預 (222–284 ce) commentary in Chunqiu Zuo zhuan zhengyi 8: 1766c, which states that Jing was the original name for Chu, and Yang Bojun’s commentary in Chunqiu Zuo zhuan zhu, Zhuang 10.5: 181. Zhang Chunlong 2009: 194 (9-1209). Cf. Cai Wanjin 2007: 31–33; Chen Jie 2009: 26; Suzuki Naomi 2008: 8; Yang Guangcheng 2010: 9; Hsing I-t’ien 2007, 2014; Li Shisheng 2009: 184–185.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

Population Records from Liye: Ideology in Practice

253

The second section on the registry gives the name of the householder’s wife, here Qian 嗛 (or Xian). No other information is present, suggesting that the status of wife was in itself sufficient. There is one example in which a wife is specified to be of “adult woman” (danüzi 大女子) status, but that is an exception.11 In most cases, like here, merely “wife” and a name appear. The third and fourth sections contain children and are labeled simply “child(ren)” (zi 子), although in practice sons and daughters were separated. The example lists in the third section three sons, all of whom hold the rank of xiao shangzao 小上造 (minor of the second rank). The fourth rubric records three daughters, all minor girls (xiao nüzi 小女子). The fifth section of the register contains additional entries as needed. In this case, it notes that the householder was the leader of his pentad (wu 伍), the five-household groups associated with Shang Yang 商鞅 (d. 338 bce) and characteristic of Qin society (Sanft 2014b). Some registries also record slaves in the fifth section, although none is present here.12 While this example is a straightforward nuclear family, other records include extended families consisting of one or more parents with adult sons and of adult brothers who were married and yet lived in a ­sing­le household (Chen Jie 2009: 32–35). On the registers, all members of the household were defined in relation to the householder, as sibling, wife, child, or slave. Brothers are invariably younger, as the senior male member of the family was by definition the householder. Thus, it is no surprise that while some of the strips list the householders’ mothers, none mentions a father.13 The inclusion of slaves in the registries reflects membership in the household; the fact that no goods or lands are found there reflects the tacit recognition that slaves were human, albeit of a lowered status (Yates 2002, 2014).

The Information

Both the information present in the household registries and that absent from them are significant. The information included is focused and distilled. Each household registry begins by listing the village of residence. In the case I presented above, this is Nanyang; other records mention other villages. For every person there is a name (accompanied in the case of males by a rank) and position in the family. Marking minors as minors signals that all those without 11 12 13

Zhang Chunlong 2009: 193 (9-2064). See, e.g., Hunansheng wenwu kaogu yanjiusuo 2007: 203 (K27). Cf. Li Mingzhao 2009: 7–8. Li notes the lack of fathers and finds it strange.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

254

Sanft

that designation are of adult status. Health status is also implied, as we know from one example that the registry would record chronic illness.14 Li Mingzhao 李明釗 (2009: 7) has furthermore suggested that extra space was left on the strips for later additions. The registries were probably updated at least annually: early Han statutes required verification of the data every year through personal contact with all inhabitants, and the same presumably applied under the Qin as well.15 The Liye registers confirm the primacy of what historians, such as Gao Min 高敏 (1987: 74–75), have determined was the core identifying information for imperial subjects. “Fengzhenshi” 封診式 (“Forms for Sealing and Investigating”) from Shuihudi Tomb 11 describes the procedures for sealing and investigating crime scenes and defendants’ property. “Fengzhenshi” refers repeatedly to the necessity of establishing ming 名, shi 事, and li 里: the name; position, which in context refers to social rank; and the village of residence of a person, a combination that served to identify individuals.16 In Hanshu 漢書, too, we find the same constellation of personal data, with the addition of county (xian 縣), in an edict from Emperor Xuan 漢宣帝 (r. 74–49 bce), where they serve to identify persons taken into custody.17 Gao Min (1987: 74-75) pointed out before the recovery of the Liye documents that this set was the core identifying information for individuals under the Qin. Emperor Xuan’s edict indicates that the collection and use of this information persisted into the Han. In a few instances, the Liye documents include what appear to be individual entries on separate strips: 皙色, 長二尺五寸, 年五月, 典私占. 浮皙色, 長六尺六寸, 年卅歲, 典私占. Zeng: white in color; height: two chi five cun (58 cm); age: five months. Entered by dian18 Si. 14 15 16

17 18

Cf. Hunansheng wenwu kaogu yanjiusuo 2007: 207 (K33). Ernian lüling 2007: 225–226 (slips 337–340); Yang Jiping 2007: 14–15. Shuihudi Qinmu zhujian 2001: 148 (slip 6), 150 (slip 13), 154 (slip 40), 155 (slip 45); Hulsewé 1985: 185–186 (E4), 187 (E5), 193 (E15), 194–195 (E16). Although the translations of the Shuihudi statutes are my own, I include reference to Hulsewé’s versions here and below for the convenience of readers who may wish to consult his work. See also Yang Xiaohua 2011: 113. Hanshu 8: 253, including Yan Shigu’s 顏師古 (581–645 ce) commentary there. The official title dian 典 is not attested as a title in received historical sources but occurs in several different sets of recovered materials. Some scholars suggest it designated a village-level official, as one example in the Liye documents refers specifically to a “village

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

Population Records from Liye: Ideology in Practice

255

Fu: white in color; height: six chi six cun (152 cm); age: thirty years. Entered by dian Si.19 This recalls third-century ce registries, in which some individual entries are recorded on separate strips that in groups represented households; there, the place of residence occurs only on the householder’s strip, while the other strips contain the information pertaining to other members.20 It is likely that officials used the information from such individual documents to create the record for each household. In the specific case shown here, a baby girl has been recorded together with her mother, presumably because she was still an infant and did not yet warrant an independent entry. This is the only appearance of an infant among the Liye strips published to date. The inclusion of her age expressed in terms of months suggests that such documents recorded how old each person was at the time of registry, using months for those who were not yet one year old.

Classifying the Registers

Researchers do not agree about the nature of the strips that I refer to as population registries.21 The issue is not whether or not they record the population; it is obvious that they do. But there is discussion about whether this sort of document represents huji 戶籍 registries (i.e., the core record of the populace) or some other sort of record (cf. Yang Guangcheng 2010: 8). Many scholars do not acknowledge the problem of identification, despite the fact that these strips are unlabeled, and simply refer to them as huji strips or something similar. Hsing I-t’ien (2007, 2014) has addressed this issue explicitly, arguing that these documents are in fact huji. In addition to considering their content, he notes that the registries were written on wood, which the

19 20 21

dian” (lidian 里典); see Chen Wei 2012: 94–95 (no. 8-157 and n. 3). However, references in slightly later materials leave open the possibility that dian may have been in charge of various offices, in which case the present instance might well not refer to a village dian; see Tomiya 2006: 131–132n3. Nothing of the exact function of the dian here can be deduced at present—except of course that he was responsible for recording individuals’ personal information. Liye Qin jian (yi) 2012: 70–71; Chen Wei 2012: 178 (8-550). For similar examples, see Chen Wei 2012: 327, 394 (8-1444, 8-1807). See Taniguchi 2007: 24; Changshashi wenwu kaogu yanjiusuo et al. 2003: 953, 954, 1005, 1031, 1064 (slips 2867, 2908, 5326, 6657, 8206). The following discussion is based on Sanft 2014a and 2014b.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

256

Sanft

Shuihudi statutes say is for proper documents; Hsing thinks copies would have been on bamboo. Second, the strips are two Qin-Han feet (chi) in length, which Hsing says was the length of formal documents rather than copies. Others have argued against this understanding. Liu Min 劉敏 (2008: 32–34) maintains that these are not actual huji records but rather ad hoc documents. His reasons include what he perceives as the insufficiently elevated position of the householder on them, the fact that persons of particular status within the family (e.g., brothers) show up in different sections of the strips, and the absence of age data. Chen Jie 陳絜 (2009: 27) calls the strips “name registries” and says they are not huji, which he supposes must have been more detailed.22 Suzuki Naomi 鈴木直美 (2008: 4–7), like Liu Min, points out that the Liye examples do not list age. Furthermore, following Ishioka Hiroshi 石岡浩, Suzuki believes that the Qin distinguished between adult and minor status on the basis of height, so she thinks huji should have recorded height. Ikeda On 池田温 published his seminal study of the Chinese household registration system in 1979. Ikeda was writing shortly after the discovery of the Shuihudi materials and well before the discoveries at Liye. He refers to the “Fengzhenshi” summaries of cases from Shuihudi, some of which include detailed descriptions of the possessions of persons who had been arrested. For instance, one example lists clothing, implements, and livestock and describes the subject’s house all the way up to its tiled roof and ten mulberry trees out front.23 Ikeda (1979: 19) argues that sort of detailed document represented the structure and content of household registry records; other scholars, such as Zhang Jinguang 張金光 (2004: 788–789), share this opinion. This understanding posits Qin household registries to have contained much more information than the Liye examples do. I nevertheless accept that the Liye population registers are huji records for several reasons. The first is the fact that the Shuihudi documents indicate that name, status, and village of residence were the core identifying information for Qin subjects, as already discussed. The population records from Liye convey precisely this information for each individual. In addition, two of these three pieces of information feature in other documents that officials generated to summarize the population; one such example from Liye lists the numbers of households at each rank,24 and another gives just the raw number of households in the county.25 The information contained in those higher-level records 22 23 24 25

See also Ouyang Fenglian 2009: 61–62; Zhang Xintong 2010. Shuihudi Qinmu zhujian 2001: 149 (“Fengzhenshi,” slips 8–12); Hulsewé 1985: 184–185 (E3). Zhang Chunlong 2009: 190–191; Liye Qin jian (yi) 2012: 11; Chen Wei 2012: 32–33 (8-19). Liye Qin jian (yi) 2012: 39; Chen Wei 2012: 178 (8-552).

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

Population Records from Liye: Ideology in Practice

257

matches closely what is found in the registries. Furthermore, strips labeled hukoubu 戶口簿 (“record of households”) from Former Han Tomb 19 at Tianchang 天長 (Anhui) contain a simple summary of information that provides only the numbers of households and persons in a Han county.26 I believe Ikeda and those who follow him to be mistaken in asserting that huji registries in Qin times contained the sort of extensive data one finds in the “Fengzhenshi” records of convicts’ sealed property. Furthermore, I do not think that Suzuki’s argument is tenable: by all appearances, after 231 bce adult status was based on calendar age (Gao Min 2000: 7–14). Reference to “age registries” (nianji 年籍), identifying documents, and descriptions of persons from Liye listing ages confirm that such data existed separately.27 And at any rate, in the household registries, adult or minor status—however it was determined—is unambiguously indicated for each person listed. I suggest that the absence of age information in these records is the result of their position in the development of huji over time. Ikeda On (1979: 14–17) argued for the existence of population registries in earliest times. Yet there is no evidence for universal population registration before the fourth century bce. All evidence points to approximate numbers; to counts of particular groups, such as prisoners; counts undertaken for specific purposes; or else the available evidence simply dissolves upon skeptical consideration, as in the case of historical arguments about Springs-and-Autumns (Chunqiu 春秋, 770–453 bce) or Warring States period systems based on later texts.28 Scholars commonly mention Zhouli 周禮 in this context, accepting that text to represent the historical situation at some time before unification (see, e.g., Zhang Rongqiang 2010: 18). They refer to passages such as “The manager of people was in charge of presenting the counts of the myriad people, from the time of teething on, which were all written upon slats” 司民掌登萬民之數, 自生齒以上, 皆書於版; the Han commentator Zheng Zhong 鄭眾 (d. 83 ce) explained “slats” in this case as equivalent to the household registries of his day.29 Another section of Zhouli relates that the “overseer of the demesnes”

26 27 28

29

Tianchangshi wenwu guanlisuo et al. 2006: 11 (M 19: 401); Hsing 2014: 170–175. Liye Qin jian (yi) 2012: 54, 57; Chen Wei 2012: 244, 257 (8-894, 8-988); see also Hsing 2014: 160–161. For further discussion of this, including references to specific examples, see Sanft 2014a. For a recent discussion of the problems inherent in using received texts to study preimperial history, see Richter 2013. Zhouli zhushu 35: 878 (“Simin” 司民).

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

258

Sanft

(suiren 遂人) reported statistics about the population, including noting those who were too young, too old, or too sick to work.30 The dating of Zhouli is uncertain but its idealized depiction of a bureaucratic state probably comes from the late Warring States period. David Schaberg (2010) has suggested that the Qin may have drawn upon Zhouli in developing the structure of their bureaucracy, a hypothesis that explains a great deal.31 Some other scholars, however, have based historical arguments about the earlier development of registration systems on depictions in Zhouli alone, an approach that is intrinsically flawed. Even if one were to treat Zhouli as a factual representation, something clearly different is going on under the Qin. Lü Simian 呂思勉 (1982: 1108–1109) accepted the historicity of the sources I doubt. Nevertheless, he pointed to the fundamental difference between early population counts, which generated figures to support planning for things like food production and distribution, and the thorough description of the population created through universal household registration, which he believed began in the pre-unification state of Qin. In my view, the absence of detailed information in the published records of households found at Liye reflects that the “Fengzhenshi” Ikeda considered were specifically legal materials and not ordinary administrative records. We know from references in other Liye texts and from the Zhangjiashan 張家山 legal documents that many additional sorts of records existed, including some that appear to have had information similar to that found in “Fengzhenshi.”32 Later household registries were more detailed and, after no later than ca. 100 bce, noted each person’s age, like the still-later materials recovered from Juyan 居延.33 This indicates that the Liye registries do not represent the final form of huji. They show the system of registration still developing, after it expanded to include the entire population but before it integrated the greater depth of detail that it would later incorporate.

The Population

The question of how the Qin recorded the populace is important for many reasons. Such records surely served to track corvée labor and tax obligations. From the perspective of political thought and practice, registration was crucial 30 31 32 33

Zhouli zhushu 15: 140 (“Suiren” 遂人). On Zhouli generally, see Jin Chunfeng 1993. See Ernian lüling 2007: 223 (slip 331). Examples cited in Suzuki 2008: 4–5.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

Population Records from Liye: Ideology in Practice

259

above all because a population is something other than simply the people in a given space. A population in its capacity as a population is defined; it has a boundary that divides members from nonmembers and is not contiguous with a geographic territory. It is this definition that gives a population its enumeration and its enumerability. The clear scope of a populace also gives it a political character (Schmitt 1933). The population, and not merely the people in an area, is the essential political body, and registration was one way the Qin dynasty defined its population and created its polity. In the Liye household registries, we see a population described as a set with all members individually named, known, and characterized: a mass of people, but a mass with identities. Individuals were not just named but identified in terms of standardized data: as holders of centrally controlled social ranks, as members of five-household groups, as affiliates of villages and counties. Each member was identified in terms of characteristics that were counted to describe the population set. Records summarizing the size of the population and the numbers of people who held various types of status from Liye and elsewhere reflect that these things were in fact quantified.34 The registration system did more than gather information about the state and its people; it recorded the data that constituted the population as the set of individuals who were to be governed. In Former Han times, the equivalence of registration with membership in the ordinary population was so strong that the two merged into a single term that denoted commoners: the phrase “enrolled households and ordered people” (bianhu qimin 編戶齊民) came to mean “the common population.”35 In the Liye case, we see registration as a way to incorporate a previously distinct group into the Qin population. The intellectual background of this change is important in several respects. The first is the influence of the fourth-century bce political thinker Shang Yang, who is believed to have propounded a system of universal, birth-to-death registration for all inhabitants of the realm and the gathering of statistics about the state in the form of the “thirteen numbers.” Information about the population was an important part of these thirteen kinds of quantifiable data and included the numbers of males and females, the aged, and the infirm.36 In Shang Yang’s conception, these figures enabled the state to ascertain the labor 34 35 36

E.g., Zhang Chunlong 2009: 189–191 (8-1726, 16-950, 9-2341, etc.); Yuan Yansheng 2011: 61. E.g., Hanshu 24B: 1183; 91: 3628. See discussion in Du Zhengsheng 1990. Shang jun shu II.4: 34 (“Qu qiang” 去彊) names these thirteen numbers as those of the granaries, storehouses, adult men and women, those too old or too weak to work, officials, shi 士, beneficial people (limin 利民, probably farmers), horses, oxen, and the quantities of hay and straw.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

260

Sanft

and other resources it possessed and develop its strength. The household registries represent one form of those ideas in practice.

Tracking the Population

When people moved around Qin territory for whatever purpose, their core identities continued to denote them. Village of residence, for example, was not where a person slept on a given day, or even for a given month or year. Village of residence was a piece of identifying information and not merely an indication of where the person in question happened to be. This can be seen from the following document. Recto 卅三年四月辛丑朔丙午, 司空騰敢言之: 陽陵宜居士五(: 伍) 毋死 有貲, 餘錢八千六十四. 毋死戍洞庭郡, 不智(: 知) 何縣署. 今為錢 校券一, 上謁言洞庭尉, 令毋死署所縣責以受陽陵司= 空=, [ 司空] 不名計, 問何縣官計. 年為報. 已訾其家=, [ 家] 貧, 弗能入(: 納). 乃 移戍所. 報署主責發. 敢言之.   四月己37 酉陽陵守丞廚敢言之: 寫上, 謁報=, [ 報] 署金布發. 敢 言之 / 儋手 33rd year, 4th month, which had xinchou as its first day, on the bingwu day [May 14, 214 bce],38 Chief of Corrections Teng39 affirms:40 Habitant 37

38 39

40

Hunansheng wenwu kaogu yanjiusuo 2007 and Zhang Chunlong et al. 2010 transcribe this as ji 己; Wang Huanlin 2007: 57 says it is yi 乙. The form of the graph as written is neither a standard ji nor does it match other examples of yi; it appears to be an in-between form. Either this was a nonstandard form (potentially of either ji or yi) produced out of haste, or it represents a development toward a cursive ji, which is not reflected in other instances of ji in this document. Because there was no yiyou 乙酉 day in that month and there was a jiyou 己酉 day, I believe ji was intended. My thanks to Matthias Richter for his advice on dealing with this and other troublesome graphs. Dates here and below have been converted following Wang Shuanghuai et al. 2006. I translate sikong 司空 as “chief of corrections”; see Hanyu dacidian, s.v. “sikong”; see also Hanshu 66: 2901, including Yan Shigu’s commentary. Bielenstein (1980: 222) has “Chief of Works,” a translation that does not account for duties like those the present document touches upon, although the sikong did have charge of laborers. This Teng is mentioned in the other examples of very similar documents. The phrase ganyanzhi 敢言之 literally means “dares to say.” However, scholars have noted that it serves two purposes in documents like the present one. First, it indicates the start and close of the actual content of the document, preventing any addition to it. Second, it

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

Population Records from Liye: Ideology in Practice

261

Wusi of Yiju [Village], Yangling [County], had a fine, and 8,064 coins remain outstanding. He is doing border service in Dongting Commandery; we do not know what county he is stationed in.41 Now I am making out this debt reckoning42 to submit and request that the commandant of Dongting command the county of Wusi’s station to collect [the money owed]43 in order to give it to the Yangling chief of corrections. The chief of corrections does not keep name records and asks which county office keeps those records. Reply with the year [in which Wusi’s service will end].44 We have already attempted to collect45 from his family, but the family is poor and could not pay. Only thus are we sending46 to his place of border service. Reply that the one in charge of debts47 at his station opened this. I affirm this.  4th month, jiyou day [May 17, 214 bce], Acting [County] Assistant48 Chu of Yangling affirms: Write and submit; send a reply. In the reply, write that the Currency and Commodities [Office] opened this. I affirm this. Written by Dan.

41 42

43 44

45 46

47 48

also marks a document as intended for persons of a rank superior to that of the originator; different phrasing would be used for peers (gangao 敢告) or for subordinates (e.g., xia 下); see Li Xueqin 2003: 74; Chen Zhiguo 2007: 64. Since ganyanzhi is a purely formal phrase marking the portion of the document for which the named official is responsible, I render it as “affirm.” See Ma Yi 2007: 163. Cf. Wang Huanlin 2007: 59–60, who takes xian 縣 and shu 署 to be in coordination. Jiao 校 has the meaning “to calculate”; see Yan Shigu’s commentary at Hanshu 24A: 1135. Quan 券 originally referred to a document split into two halves, which could be matched up in tally fashion; here I understand it simply as a document showing money due; cf. Ma Yi 2007: 141; Wang Huanlin 2007: 38. Cf. Ma Yi 2007: 163. The text here appears to be shortened. Wang Huanlin (2007: 61) and Ma Yi (2007: 171) explain it as a version of “Attach his years of service and reply” (付署計年報), and my interpretation follows theirs. I take zi 訾 here in the sense of “to levy a fine,” in context meaning “to collect a fine.” Dai Shijun (2011) understands it similarly. Cf. Ma Yi 2007: 164; Wang Huanlin 2007: 61. I take yi 移 as “to send,” in the sense of “to write (to)”; see, e.g., Li Xian’s 李賢 (651–684 ce) commentary on Hou Hanshu 10: 211. For other examples of this usage, see Hunansheng wenwu kaogu yanjiusuo 2007: 194 (16-9); Ernian lüling 2007: 222 (slip 328). Zhu 主 occurs in a number of bureaucratic contexts where it signifies “the person in charge” of either a post or of some matter, as here. On shoucheng 守丞 as “acting [county] assistant,” see discussion in Chen Zhiguo 2006: 55–60. Sun Wenbo 2012 demonstrates that shoucheng refers to someone acting as assistant in the absence of that official.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

262

Sanft

Verso 卅四年六月甲午朔戊午, 陽陵守慶敢言之: 未報, 謁追. 敢言之 / 堪手.   卅五年四月己未朔乙丑, 洞庭叚(: 假) 尉觽謂遷陵丞: 陽陵卒署 遷陵. 其以律令從事, 報之. 當騰= / 嘉手. 以洞庭司馬印行事. 敬手 34th year, 6th month, which had jiawu as its first day, on the wuwu day [July 19, 213 bce], Acting [County Assistant] Qing49 of Yangling affirms: As you have not replied, we are sending a request for follow-up.50 I affirm this. Written by Kan. 35th year, 4th month, which had jiwei as its first day, on the yichou day [May 22, 212 bce], Dongting Interim Commandant X­i says to the Qianling [county] assistant: The soldier from Yangling is stationed at Qianling. Carry out the matter according to the statutes and ordinances, and report it. To be sent by official delivery.51 Written by Jia. Carry this out under the seal of the Dongting major. Written by Jing.52 Twelve examples of this sort of text, which I term a debt reckoning, have been published. These documents called on officials in other places to collect a debt on behalf of the originator.53 They reflect how the Qin bureaucracy used personal details to track individuals who moved from one area to another. 49

50

51

52

53

As above, I understand shou here as an abbreviation for shoucheng, “acting [county] assistant.” A shoucheng named Qing appears on strip 9-10, another of the set of similar documents, although Ma Yi (2007: 171) is unsure whether it is the same person; see Hunansheng wenwu kaogu yanjiusuo 2007: 189. Wang Huanlin (2007: 63) thinks that it is probably the same person, which would indicate that the two titles were equivalent. Ma Yi (2007: 165) and Wang Huanlin (2007: 63) refer to what appears to be a use of zhui 追, “to follow up,” in the same sense in a bureaucratic context in Shuihudi Qinmu zhujian 2001: 61 (“Qin lü shibazhong” 秦律十八種, slip 185). Note that the editors of the Shuihudi volume understand this word differently; cf. Hulsewé 1985: 86 (A96). I read dang teng teng 當騰[ 騰] following Dai Shijun (2010: 99–100), who summarizes six previous readings, the variety of which reflect the difficulty of understanding this phrase. Cf. also Ma Yi 2007: 165–166, and the extended discussion in Wang Huanlin 2007: 123–132. My translation is thus necessarily tentative. Dai’s reading has the advantage of connecting to the Shuowen jiezi 說文解字 definition of teng as “to pass along, transmit; transmittal” (chuan/zhuan 傳); see Shuowen jiezi 10A: 201. For text and primary commentaries, see Hunansheng wenwu kaogu yanjiusuo 2007: 185– 186 (9-1); Wang Huanlin 2007: 57–65; Zhang Chunlong 2010: vol. 1, 11–17; Ma Yi 2007: 170–171 (see also 162–166); Riya Shin kan kōdokukai 2004: 106–108. Cf. Giele (2005: 364–365), which briefly discusses these documents. Hunansheng wenwu kaogu yanjiusuo 2007: 185–190 (9-1 to 9-12); Ma Yi 2007: 162–181.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

Population Records from Liye: Ideology in Practice

263

This debt reckoning, like all examples of the form, identifies the debtor with the four pieces of information that Emperor Xuan’s edict mentions: county, village, status, and name. Reference to individuals in a context where the county could be unclear required specifying it, as here; the household registers themselves, by virtue of their local nature, could elide that information. In the example, although Wusi of Yiju was no longer physically in that village in Yangling County, it was still his place of registration and remained so even though the document indicates he was in Qianling County for at least two years. Yiju village was part of his personal identification information, and changing that required a particular process. Law attested in the Shuihudi documents indicates that anyone who changed place of residence was required to report that fact to a local official, who in turn was to carry out a formal alteration of the registration. Recently published documents include apparent references to this procedure.54 Until that process was carried out, a person’s registered home place remained unchanged. Like every other subject of the realm in good standing, the habitant Wusi of Yiju, Yangling, had a defined identity and place among the masses and in the empire.55

Classifying the Debt Reckonings

While there is much discussion about certain details of the debt reckonings, their general sense is clear. Yet questions persist about the fundamental issue of what these documents represent. Some scholars believe that the reckonings record fines or other debts, for which the debtors had been sent to do military service because they could not pay the amount due.56 These men clearly owed money to the government, and one of the examples specifies that the debt was due to a “redemption” (shu 贖) fine.57 There are, however, real difficulties with explaining those debts as the reason the men were doing military service. One such difficulty concerns the terminology used to refer to the debtors, which indicates men doing military service and not men being punished. In every case, the reply from the Dongting authorities calls the man simply “sol-

54 55 56 57

Shuihudi Qinmu zhujian 2001: 127 (“Falü dawen” 法律答問, slip 147); Hulsewé 1985: 161 (D125); Liye Qin jian (yi) 2012: 87; Chen Wei 2012: 402 (8-1873). Cf. Foucault 1981a. Huang Zhanyue 2009: 127–140; He Shuangquan and Chen Songmei 2009. Cf. Ma Yi 2007: 164. Hunansheng wenwu kaogu yanjiusuo 2007: 189 (9-9).

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

264

Sanft

dier” (zu 卒).58 If these men had been transported because they could not afford to pay a fine or the cost of redeeming a punishment, it seems that they ought to have been referred to in terms reflecting that status. For example, a different Liye document refers to persons working in lieu of cash payment to the government as “held for fines” (juzi 居貲) and “redeeming debt” (shuzhai 贖責[: 債]).59 Another inserts the word “penal laborer” (tu 徒) before the rank of a man to indicate his status.60 A number of the clay markers from the graves of laborers buried near the First Emperor’s tomb indicate that the occupants were working off debts to the government (Yuan Zhongyi 1987: 27–28). But nothing like this occurs in any debt reckoning from Liye. A second problem concerns the periods of time represented in the documents, which do not accord with the amounts owed. The statutes from Shuihudi specify the rates for working to offset debts to be 6 coins per day if one received food from the government and 8 if not.61 In the example, Wusi’s debt of 8,064 coins would require 1,344 or 1,008 days of work to pay off. That fits the time frame mentioned in his debt reckoning. However, in other cases the dates on the documents indicate more time had passed than should have been necessary for redemption. An extreme case is that of a man who owed 384 coins and spent at least two years at his station, rather than the just over two months that would have sufficed to pay off his debt, if it were the reason for his service.62 Huang Zhanyue 黃展岳 (2009: 17) believes these men were sent to do military service in order to pay off their debts. He acknowledges the problem of excessive duration and blames the situation on the chaos of war and breakdown of the legal system, which he supposes left the men stranded. That seems doubtful. The strips date to the time when the First Emperor was alive and ruling, and government was running as well as it ever did under the Qin. At the very least, the fact that these documents were delivered, processed, and responded to indicates that those systems were operational. Zhang Jinguang (2010: 93–96) suggests that the men named in the documents had been sent to the border for military service, but their status changed while at their station because they owed money to the government. To Zhang,

58 59 60 61 62

Hunansheng wenwu kaogu yanjiusuo 2007: 185–190 (9-1 to 9-12). Hunansheng wenwu kaogu yanjiusuo 2007: 192–193 (16-5). Chen Wei 2012: 149 (8-439 + 8-519 + 8-537). Shuihudi Qinmu zhujian 2001: 51 (“Qin lü shibazhong,” slip 133); cf. Hulsewé 1985: 67–69 (A68). Hunansheng wenwu kaogu yanjiusuo 2007: 188 (9-5).

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

Population Records from Liye: Ideology in Practice

265

this explains both the terminology used, which was that of their original status, and why they were there for so long, as they were retained to pay off new debts. While Zhang explains the situation in a logical way and takes more factors into account than the others do, I do not accept his suggestion for several reasons. First, the documents do not indicate that the men experienced a change in status at any point, nor is there any reason internal to the texts to think one occurred. Furthermore, two of the reckonings mention “remaining” (yu 餘) money owed, implying that at least part of the debt had already been paid before the men left their home places.63 In these cases, if nowhere else, it seems sure that the amount due had been determined and partially remitted before the creation of the documents. If these men had been sent to the border to pay off debts, their status should have been clear before they departed their home county, and most definitely was clear before the debt reckonings were drawn up. Hence, the documents ought to reflect a status other than simple soldier for them, yet none does. Second, Zhang also does not explain how these men would have incurred debts in their home counties—which are of varying amounts but in some cases quite large—while residing elsewhere. Finally, two examples from the set of twelve similar documents specify that those instructed to collect the debts were not to permit the debtor to put them off with excuses, saying, “Do not heed empty words” 毋聽流辭.64 If the debtors had been sent to these places to work off money owed, or if their status had been changed while they were there because of debts, empty words would be beside the point; the onsite officials would have needed only to ensure these men worked the requisite number of days. Since the officials would have no discretion in the matter, excuses would not have meant anything. But dunning someone to pay a cash debt is another matter, especially when the debt is owed to another county: I can imagine that in such a situation excuses could help, and evidently Chief of Corrections Teng thought they might, too. A statute from the “Jinbu lü” 金布律 (“Statutes on Currency and Commodities”) section of the Shuihudi texts indicates what sort of documents the debt reckonings are: 有責(: 債) 於公及貲、贖者居它縣, 輒移居縣責之. 公有責(: 債) 百 姓未賞(: 償), 亦移其縣, 縣賞(: 償).

63 64

Hunansheng wenwu kaogu yanjiusuo 2007: 185–186, 190 (9-1 and 9-11). Hunansheng wenwu kaogu yanjiusuo 2007: 187, 189 (9-3, 9-9).

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

266

Sanft

If someone owes a debt to the public treasury—a fine or a redemption charge—and resides in another county, always send to the county of residence to collect it. If the public treasury owes a debt to an ordinary person and has not repaid it, also send to the county [where the person resides], and the county shall repay it.65 The debt reckonings from Liye represent this sort of document, which called upon officials at a debtor’s station to collect money on behalf of another county’s treasury. This understanding accords with the language of the Liye debt reckonings, which ask that the commandery-level authorities charge those at the county with receiving and forwarding the funds to the originators of the documents. Two distinct bureaucratic functions were at work in the creation of the Liye debt reckonings: military conscription and debt collection. The surety with which the Qin bureaucracy tracked members of the population meant that debt collection was not urgent and that it did not preclude the mobilization of troops. This accounts for both the glacial pace of collection and why debtors could be absent for military service. The reckonings have various dates of inception, but all published examples were last handled on the same day: May 22, 212 bce. As Hsing I-t’ien (2006: 283) notes, they were surely placed together for this reason, presumably first for storage. Their eventual disposal likewise impacted them as a set (or part of a set)—even if that set was simply those documents that happened to be stacked together because of having been filed away on the same day. The records thus exist as a group because of happenstance. There is no reason to think the men all owed money for the same reason or reasons. Given the variety of amounts due to the Yangling authorities, it seems certain that the debts accrued in different ways. Qin statutes appear to have specified one type of document for all such debts. The combination of this single form for all debts with specific document storage and disposal practices explains why archeologists found so many nearly identical records together.

65

Shuihudi Qinmu zhujian 2001: 38 (“Qin lü shibazhong,” slip 76). Cf. Hulsewé 1985: 48 (A38). A number of scholars have discussed this statute in the context of the debt reckonings; see, e.g., Zhang Jinguang 2010: 95.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

Population Records from Liye: Ideology in Practice



267

Ideology and Institution

The significance of the population registers and debt reckonings goes beyond the bounds of institutional history. More than simply demonstrating how specific systems functioned, these documents show aspects of how the Qin ordered and conceived of the world. The economist Douglass C. North is famous for his work on ideologies and institutions, which he treats as abstract structures that work to order social activities. In North’s analysis, organizations are groups of people working within the bounds of such institutions and include entities such as government bureaus (North 1990: 3, 5). North also discussed ideologies, which he, writing together with Arthur T. Denzau, defined as “[t]he shared framework of mental models that groups of individuals possess that provide both an interpretation of the environment and a prescription as to how that environment should be structured” (Denzau and North 1994: 4).66 Information articulated in terms of these mental models is not necessarily false or factually incorrect; an accurate representation of a political body can be as ideological as a distorted one (Jost, Federico, and Napier 2009: 310). Viewing the Liye records in these terms shows that their significance extends beyond simple recording. The documents from Liye are the products of institutions that governed the official gathering, compilation, and use of information about the population in the Qin empire. They structured and interpreted information about the populace according to Qin ideology. In Qin times, as in early imperial China generally, the basic constituent of society was the household. This defined, legal entity also gave shape to population registration. In the registries, hierarchies of seniority and gender within the household are depicted on each strip, with the householder possessed of special status and privilege, at the apex of this unit. In the registries, important details of place come before the householder’s name only but apply to the whole household. Each person had a place within the household hierarchy and a semipermanent link to a specific locality that could be changed only by a bureaucratic process and not by simple presence somewhere else. Residence was determined by the state, not by one’s physical location. These matters were components of Qin institutions and ideology. 66

Many scholars see the concept of ideology as problematic, even in its application to the present day, as there is a general lack of agreement about what it means. The various definitions and explanations of ideology can go beyond differing from each other to being utterly contradictory. See Gerring 1997: 957 and passim. I employ the term here as North, Denzau, and others who follow them do.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

268

Sanft

Both the household registries and the debt reckonings posit the money economy as a mode of interaction between government and individual, another part of the mental model of Qin government. The practical function of the registries comprised, inter alia, the extraction of taxes and corvée labor— obligations that varied according to personal characteristics like age and gender. In the debt reckonings, unpaid fines followed each debtor through society, expressing and reinforcing the inescapable reach of Qin government. The absence of all indication of occupation in the records is noteworthy. The other registries I mentioned above, like the “Fengzhenshi” descriptions, also lack all such information. This recalls social theory attributed to Shang Yang, which divided the population into just three groups: farmers, merchants, and officials.67 The status of convicted criminals separated them from the rest of the community (Shiga 2003). The presently available evidence indicates that from the ideological standpoint of the Qin, the mass of ordinary people was undifferentiated.68 While it is certain that people subsisted by various means, there is no indication that Qin population ideology or institutions acknowledged that. As discussed above, every person in the Qin realm had an individual identity, framed in terms of core information: name, social rank, and village of residence, with county included as necessary. Since maintaining registration was the responsibility of the individual or, for children, the family, and since the registries were verified annually, people knew they were known. The debt reckonings furthermore reflect that authorities at least up to the level of the commandery could track individuals living temporarily in other areas by means of their identifying information. From the standpoint of early imperial ideology, the common people were thus both differentiated and not differentiated. Within the system of the population registry, each was individually known, but from the perspective of the empire, ordinary people formed a single group. Qin systems for registering and monitoring the populace worked by permitting the Qin bureaucracy to recognize each person both in terms of group membership and as an individual. These systems supported the creation and exercise of political power—not in the form of compulsion (although compulsion surely played a part) but rather a power that functioned through moni67 68

Shang jun shu II.4: 28 (“Qu qiang”). The material relating to population registration that is presently available gives no indication that the Qin recorded occupation, suggesting strongly that they did not—just as the writings of Shang Yang, which lumped everyone together, would lead one to expect. Cf. Yuan Yansheng (2012: 207–212), who discusses the position of convicts and slaves vis-à-vis household registries in Han times.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

Population Records from Liye: Ideology in Practice

269

tor­ing and managing. This was akin to what Michel Foucault (2007) called governmentality, power exerted over persons and groups by means of organization and surveillance. Many scholars have described household registration and related early systems as oppression.69 Certainly, the information they generated could have had such uses. But more generally, we would do better to see it as a mechanism of power that instantiated specific concepts of government and of the world, ideas associated with Qin institutions and ideology. These institutions worked to support effective governance in the new empire and functioned as tools more sophisticated than mere enablers of brute force. They were media by which the Qin promulgated their ideology. 69

See discussion in Sanft 2014a.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

270

Sanft

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

Population Records from Liye: Ideology in Practice

271

Epilogue Ideological Authority in China: Past and Present

∵

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

272

Sanft

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

The Concept of the “Sage-Monarch” and Its Modern Fate

273

Chapter 9

Political and Intellectual Authority: The Concept of the “Sage-Monarch” and Its Modern Fate Liu Zehua

Translated by Yuri Pines

Chinese scholars commonly assume that the Way (Dao 道) and the Monarch (wang 王) are two conceptually separate entities. The Way is supposed to represent the supreme intellectual authority, while the Monarch represents the utmost of political authority. From the Warring States period (453–221 bce) on, most thinkers promoted the idea that the Way rests with the members of their stratum, the so-called “shi who possess the Way” (有道之士). Many current scholars routinely assume that intellectual authority was indeed determined by the intellectuals; in particular, modern adherents of Confucius believe that the power of Confucianism throughout the centuries derived from its exceptional intellectual appeal. In what follows I shall question this view. First, I want to demonstrate that throughout the imperial millennia, the question of intellectual authority was intrinsically linked to that of political power, and the fusion of the two was represented by the concept of the “sage-monarch” (sheng wang 聖王), or the “Sagacious Heavenly Monarch” (tian wang shengming 天王 聖明). Second, I want to show that the legacy of this appropriation of intellectual authority by political power holders outlived the Chinese empire and continues to influence our current lives.

Preface: Confucius as a Sage and Confucius as a World Savior?

Among the followers of Confucius, the common idea was that Confucius 孔子 (551–479 bce) possessed supreme intellectual authority. This view can be traced back to Confucius’s lifetime. For instance, Confucius’s disciple Zigong 子貢 claimed: “Indeed, Heaven directs him [Confucius] to become a sage.”1 Later, Mengzi 孟子 (ca. 380–304 bce) said: “From the beginning of human­1 固天縱之將聖 (Lunyu 9.6: 88 [“Zi han” 子罕]).

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004299337_011 Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

274

Liu Zehua

kind, there was nobody like Confucius.”2 Yet later, under the Han 漢 dynasty (206/202 bce–220 ce), this led to the full deification of Confucius by some of his followers (see more below). For many Ru 儒 (“Confucians”), Confucius was the incarnation of the Way, which, naturally, meant that he possessed supreme intellectual authority. In recent generations, not a few scholars have maintained that Oriental culture can save the world, and at the core of this culture stands Confucianism, with Confucius as its ancestor and teacher. Liang Qichao 梁啟超 (1873–1929) summarized this view in his Impressions from a Voyage to Europe 歐游心影錄: “To resolve problems of material civilization, rely on Occidental culture; to resolve the problems of spiritual civilization, rely on Oriental culture.”3 Yan Fu 嚴復 (1854–1921) in his late years strongly advocated the return to tradition and establishment of Confucianism as the national religion; he also said: “When I look back at the Way of Confucius and Mengzi, really it stays on a par with Heaven and Earth; its beneficence covers the entire realm.”4 In a lecture delivered in the 1980s, Liang Shuming 梁漱溟 (1893–1988) remarked: “Sixty years ago I said that the future world culture should be the restored Confucian culture, and nowadays I still support this idea.”5 Indeed, much earlier he had said in his book Occidental and Oriental Cultures and Their Philosophy 東西文 化及其哲學 that “Chinese culture is represented by Confucius; its core is the Ru doctrine; its fundamental standards are ethical norms. This is the final destination of human culture; it is more magnificent than Occidental culture.”6 He asserted categorically: “The future culture of the world is the resurrected Chinese culture!”7 Yet he also said: “In this society nobody understands the real meaning of Confucianism; only I, Liang Shuming, understand this.”8 I am perplexed: if Liang alone is able to understand it, how will Confucian theory become the “final destination of human culture”? A few years ago, Cheng Chung-ying 成中英 effusively advocated the view that the Confucian value 2 自有生民以來，未有孔子也。 (Mengzi 3.2: 64 [“Gongsun Chou 公孫丑 shang”]). 3 解決物質文明靠西方文化，解決精神文明靠東方文化 (Liang Qichao [1920] 1991). 4 囘觀孔孟之道，真量同天地，澤被寰區 (Yan Fu, “A Letter to Xiong Chunru” 與熊純如 書, in Yan Fu ji 1986: 692). 5 我60 年前就說過，將來的世界文化必定是孔子與儒家文化的復興，我現在仍然堅 持這一觀點。 6 中國文化以孔子為代表，以儒家學説為根本、以倫理為本位，它是人類文化的理 想歸宿，比西洋文化來得高妙。 7 世界未來的文化，就是中國文化的復興！ 8 這個社會没有任何人真正的懂孔門儒家學説的真實意义，只有我梁漱溟一个人 懂。All citations of Liang Shuming follow the Chinese translation of his biography (Alitto 1986).

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

The Concept of the “Sage-Monarch” and Its Modern Fate

275

system should develop into a global guiding force.9 This view is not exclusive to Cheng Chung-ying; actually, many other eminent people explore this idea from different angles. According to the opinions of the scholars mentioned above, Confucius possesses supreme intellectual authority not only in China but actually in the entire world. This viewpoint is not just extremely biased but also a vast exaggeration. Recall that Chinese traditional intellectual culture was diverse, and Confucius’s position outside the Ru current differed considerably from what the above citations suggest. For instance, some of the Daoists and Buddhists considered Confucius a dishonest or simply an unattractive personality; and there were also those who completely denigrated Confucius.10 The global framework, I dare not discuss; but I am afraid that promoting Confucius to the position of the apex of world thought is laughable. Let us return to China now and explore the nature of Confucius’s intellectual authority. In particular, let us focus on a question that was prominently discussed throughout the twentieth century but that is somehow overlooked by current proponents of Confucianism: namely, how was Confucius’s intellectual authority related to political power? And, more broadly, what was the role of political power in intellectual life?

The Meaning of “Sagacious Heavenly Monarch”

Who is the “Sagacious Heavenly Monarch” and how is this concept related to intellectual authority? In traditional thought, the concepts of “the Way” (Dao 道) and “the sage” (sheng 聖) can be roughly defined as an ideal and the personification of this ideal. Since nearly every intellectual current adored “the 9

10

“Confucianism’s modern task is to develop global axiological ethics” 儒學的當代使命： 發展全球價值倫理; talk given at the conference commemorating the 2,560th birthday of Confucius, Beijing, September 24, 2009. Among the most radical detractors of Confucius, one may mention the authors of the “Dao Zhi” 盗跖 (“Robber Zhi”) chapter of the Zhuangzi (Zhuangzi jinzhu jinyi 29: 776– 780), the authors of the “Yang Zhu” 楊朱 chapter of the Liezi 列子 (Liezi 7: 232), and much later the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom 太平天國 (1850–1864) rebels (for whose attitudes toward Confucius, see, e.g., Spence 1996: 97–98—Translator). Yet acerbic remarks about Confucius abound in the imperial literature as well, from the writings of Ji Kang 嵇康 (223–262) (see his “Letter of Breaking off Relations with Shan Tao” 與山巨源絕交書, in Ji Kang ji: 38–43) to Li Zhi’s 李贄 (1527–1602) Fen shu 焚書 (see, e.g., “Reply to Minister of Justice Geng” 答耿司寇, Fen shu 1: 29–39; “Discussion of He Xinyin” 何心隐論, Fen shu 3: 88–90).

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

276

Liu Zehua

Way” and “the sages,” these concepts may be considered as more representative of Chinese thought in general than the ideas of Confucius and his followers in particular. I have explored the relations between the Way and the sage in two articles and shall not address this topic anew here.11 I would just like to call to mind that despite the honorifics lavishly bestowed on Confucius by various emperors (e.g., “Perfectly Sagacious Primary Teacher” 至聖先師, “The Prince Who Propagates Refinement” 文宣王), there was a more important title that by far surpassed these honorifics. This title is “Sagacious Heavenly Monarch” (tian wang shengming 天王聖明) or “Sage-Monarch” (sheng wang 聖王). The sage-monarch is superior to average sages and to average monarchs, as was aptly summarized by Xunzi 荀子 (d. after 238 bce): “The sage is the pinnacle of ethical norms; the monarch is the pinnacle of political institutions. The two pinnacles combined are the ridgepole of All-under-Heaven. Hence, men of learning make the sage-monarch their teacher; when adjudicating, they make the institutions of the sage-monarch their law.”12 To put it differently: the sagemonarch (or Sagacious Heavenly Monarch) personifies the unity of supreme political and supreme ideological authority. From the First Emperor of Qin 秦始皇 (emp. 221–210 bce) on, sagacity was intrinsically linked to the imperial institution. The emperors’ position, their conduct, their speech, their activities, their food and garments—all were modified with the word “sage.” Due to the excessive power of the monarchs, a complex situation ensued. On the one hand, the monarchs wanted to appropriate the designation “sage” in order to make sagacity their own quality, and they wanted to employ the concept of “sage” so as to boost their position and bolster their legitimacy. On the other hand, our imperial thinkers, who were overwhelmingly dependent on the monarchs’ power and identified themselves with the idea of monarchic rule, used the term “sage” to express what they hoped the monarchs would be. Since the “sage-monarch” was an ideal cherished by almost every thinker, the thinkers did not propose any conceptual dissociation between sages and monarchs. Moreover, fearful of the imperial power, the thinkers acquiesced in granting the designation “sage” to the emperors of the reigning dynasty. In the final account, then, the supreme intel-

11

12

These articles are “The Way and the Monarch: Between Bifurcation and Unification of the Two” and “The Monarch and the Sage: Between Bifurcation and Unification of the Two”. Both are collected in Liu Zehua 2000: 400–448. For the translation of the second of these articles, see Liu Zehua 2014. (Translator) 聖也者，盡倫者也 ； 王也者，盡制者也 ； 兩盡者，足以為天下極矣。 故學 者以聖王為師，案以聖王之制為法。 (Xunzi XV.21: 407 [“Jie bi” 解蔽]).

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

The Concept of the “Sage-Monarch” and Its Modern Fate

277

lectual authority was supposed to rest not with ordinary sages but with sage-monarchs, who combined political and intellectual leadership. The appeal of the concept of the sage-monarch, the one who combines sagacity with political power, was so strong that some Ru, who might have felt that sagacity alone was not sufficient to exercise full intellectual authority, were not satisfied with the identification of Confucius as a mere sage but rather requested the position of “monarch” for him. Already Confucius himself had hinted at his self-identification with monarchic position, saying, “With King Wen 文王 [d. ca. 1047 bce] dead, is not culture [wen] invested here in me?”13 Clearly, he considered himself heir to King Wen. His disciples put Confucius above (the sage-thearchs) Yao 堯 and Shun 舜; thus, Zaiwo 宰我 argued that Confucius was “by far worthier than Yao and Shun.”14 The “Gongmeng” 公盟 chapter of the Mozi 墨子 records the view of a follower of Confucius, Gongmeng, who believed that Confucius should have become the Son of Heaven.15 Mengzi also was highly ambitious; he boldly declared: “Yet [Heaven] does not want to order All-under-Heaven; should it want to order All-under-Heaven, who will cast me aside in our generation?”16 Although we cannot deduce from this that Mengzi declared himself a monarch or a thearch, he, just like Confucius, ranked himself as belonging to the same line as King Wen. After Mengzi, the tendency to posthumously elevate Confucius to the position of a king became more pronounced. Xunzi was the first to put forward this idea: “Confucius was undistracted in his benevolence and knowledge; he learned the techniques of ordering calamities, which suffices to put him on a par with monarchs of antiquity.”17 Later Ru elevated Confucius to the position of “unadorned king” (su wang 素王): like opium smokers whose spirit becomes addicted, they were attracted to the dream of a sage who becomes monarch.18 Some Ru remained submerged within this dream indefinitely; thus, during the Qing 清 dynasty (1644–1912), Zeng Jing 曾静 (1679–1735) said: “It is appropriate that one of our Ru will become the emperor; it should not be just one of the regular heroes.” In Zeng’s opinion, Confucius, Mengzi, the Cheng brothers (Cheng Yi 程頤 [1033–1107] and Cheng Hao 程顥 [1032–1085]), Zhu Xi 朱熹 (1130–1200), and Lü Liuliang 呂留良 (1629–1683) all should have become 13 14 15 16 17 18

文王既没，文不在兹乎？ (Lunyu 9.5: 88 [“Zi han”]). 賢於堯舜遠矣。 (Mengzi 3.2: 63 [“Gongsun Chou shang”]). Mozi 公盟 XII.48: 704 (“Gongmeng”). 未欲平治天下也；如欲平治天下，當今之世，舍我其誰也？(Mengzi 4.13: 109 [“Gong­sun Chou xia”]). 孔子仁知且不蔽，故學亂術足以為先王者也。 (Xunzi XV.21: 393 [“Jie bi”]). For the idea of “unadorned king,” see, e.g., Queen 2000. (Translator)

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

278

Liu Zehua

emperors.19 To summarize, among the Ru, being a monarch was a higher stage than being a mere sage. The boldness and high aspirations of the Ru are implied also in such ideas as “being the sage inward and monarch outward” 内聖外王 or proceeding from “cultivating” (oneself) toward “ordering” (one’s house) toward “governing” (one’s state) toward “pacifying” (All-under-Heaven) 修治齊平.20 Xunzi, in his chapter “Contra Twelve Masters” 非十二子 (Xunzi III.6: 96–97), placed a superior man, a sage, and a sage-monarch on a continuum; if the superior man continues to work hard, he will be able to become a sage-monarch. In “The Effectiveness of the Ru” 儒效, Xunzi discussed the possibility that a “Great Ru” might become a monarch or a thearch: “When positioned above the rest, he has the qualities of kings and lords; when positioned below others, he becomes the servant of the altars of soil and grain, the great treasure of the ruler.” Elsewhere, he said: “When [the Great Ru] succeeds, he unifies All-under-Heaven; when he fails, he establishes alone his noble fame.”21 Clearly, the way of the Great Ru is similar to that of thearchs and monarchs. The “Records of Learning” 學記 chapter of the Records of the Rites (Liji 禮記) contains a similarly thought-provoking passage: “When the superior man is able to become a teacher, he is able to become a leader; when he is able to become a leader, he is able to become a ruler. Hence, [being] a teacher is the way to learn to become a ruler.”22 Once again, the supreme goal is to become not just a teacher but a monarch. In light of this overall importance of monarchic position, we may understand the impact of the appropriation of sagacity by emperors. The concept of “sage” was the loftiest ideal of competing thinkers, the acme of their aspirations; the sage was the possessor of unrivaled intellectual and moral authority. When the emperors succeeded in appropriating this designation as their attribute, they hugely bolstered their power over intellectual affairs. Elsewhere, I have discussed in greater detail how the political power holders in China 19

20

21 22

皇帝合該是吾學中儒者做，不該把世路上英雄做。Citing Zeng Jing’s Zhi xin lu 知 新錄. For Zeng Jing and his odd relations with the Yongzheng Emperor (r. 1723–1735), see Spence 2001 (for partial translation of the citation, see 89). Lü Liuliang was a scholar from whose legacy Zeng Jing received his inspiration. (Translator) The first reference is to Zhuangzi 33: 855–856 (“Tianxia” 天下); the second is to the opening paragraph of the Great Learning (Da xue 大學) (Sishu zhangju, “Da xue”: 3–4). (Translator) 埶在人上，則王公之材也；在人下，則社稷之臣，國君之寶也 and 通則一天 下，窮則獨立貴名 (Xunzi IV.8: 118, 138). 能為師然後能為長；能為長然後能為君。故師也者，所以學為君也。 (Liji jijie XXXVI.18: 968).

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

The Concept of the “Sage-Monarch” and Its Modern Fate

279

imposed their control on social and economic life.23 Appropriation of sagacity was the crucial step toward establishing imperial control over the intellectual realm as well.

The Sagacious Heavenly Monarch as the Supreme Intellectual Authority

Below I shall analyze the notion of the “Sagacious Heavenly Monarch” to explain why it is the ruler who possesses supreme intellectual authority. Heaven as the Source of the Monarch’s Authority The concept of the “Son of Heaven” (tianzi 天子) is one of the pivotal concepts in traditional Chinese political culture. On the one hand, it postulates the monarch’s inferiority to the supreme deity, Heaven; Heaven is supposed to monitor the ruler, to caution him through portents and omens, and, in an extreme situation, to replace him with a new incumbent (the idea of the Mandate’s transfer, geming 革命). Indeed, resort to Heaven could often be utilized to moderate the ruler’s excesses. Yet, on the other hand, the idea of the monarch’s intimate relation with Heaven could also be used to strengthen the ruler’s authority, and it is on this latter aspect that I shall focus in what follows. The very notion of “Son of Heaven” already contains the idea of the deification of the emperor: insofar as it makes every monarch into Heaven’s son, a product of the intercourse between Heaven and a human being,24 it imbues emperors with divine and superhuman qualities. Yet China’s rulers were still not satisfied and directly appropriated the designation of “Heavenly.” Whenever we encounter such terms as “Heavenly monarch” 天王, “Heavenly beginning” 天元, “Heavenly lord” 天公, “Heavenly father” 天父, “Heavenly August” 天皇, “Heavenly August Great Thearch” 天皇大帝, and so on, we must carefully analyze their meaning: at times they refer to Heaven’s divinity, at times to emperors and monarchs.

23 24

For a summary of these views, see Liu Zehua 2000: 1–113. Recall that most dynastic founders or progenitors were said to be the product of intercourse between a human mother and Heaven or the supreme Thearch (Di 帝). At times the term “Son of Heaven” 天子 could refer directly to the children resulting from this union (see, e.g., the Zigao 子羔 manuscript from the Shanghai Museum collection, discussed in Pines 2005–2006a: 161–164; Allan 2009). (Translator)

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

280

Liu Zehua

The ruler is the Son of Heaven; he received the Mandate from Heaven; he rules on Heaven’s behalf; he is the “Master of the People” selected by Heaven.25 The True Monarch (wang zhe 王者)26 stands in a trinity with Heaven and Earth: “Heaven blessed him and made him the master of numinous deities.”27 “The Son of Heaven is the most revered; his spiritual essence pervades Heaven and Earth; his blood and breath contain the essence of the Five Thearchs.”28 The emperors are able to communicate with deities, or themselves are divine. Heaven is the ancestor of human beings and also the parent of the Son of Heaven; thus, “the designation Son of Heaven means Heaven’s son”; “the Son of Heaven treats Heaven as his parent and nourishes the people as his children.”29 These statements sacralize the cosmos itself and relate it to humans in kinship terms. The Son of Heaven acts in Heaven’s stead; the ruler’s mandate is Heaven’s Mandate;30 “the Master of Men occupies the position of granting life or death; his power of regulating changes is shared with that of Heaven.”31 “The Son of Heaven is the only one who receives his Mandate from Heaven; All-under-Heaven receive the mandate from the Son of Heaven; a single state receives its mandate from its ruler. When the ruler’s mandates are obeyed, this means the people comply with the Mandate; when the ruler’s mandates are contravened, this means the people contravene the Mandate. Hence, it is said: one man is blessed and the myriad people rely on it.”32 Heaven is the supreme object of worship, while the Son of Heaven is the chief priest of this superreli25

26 27 28 29 30

31 32

The term “Master of the People” (min zhu 民主) appears in the “Duo fang” 多方 chapter of the Classic of Documents (Shujing 書經) as one of the epithets of the monarch. In modern Chinese parlance these two characters denote “democracy”; Liu Zehua puns on their double meaning. (Translator) This is my translation for the term wang zhe (lit. “he who acts in the way the monarch should act”). (Translator) 天胙之，為神明主。 (Yang Xiong 楊雄 [53 bce–18 ce], Fayan 10.11: 241 [“Chong Li” 重 黎]). 天子至尊也，神精與天地通，血氣含五帝精。 (Apocryphal Chunqiu “Baoqian tu” 春秋保乾圖, cited from Taiping yulan 76: 355). 天子號天之子也 and 天子父母事天，而子孫畜萬民。 (Chunqiu fanlu LXVII: 404 [“Jiao ji” 郊祭]). Referring to the Zuo zhuan: “The ruler is [like] Heaven” 君，天也 (Zuo zhuan, Xuan 4: 684); “Ruler’s Mandate is [like that of] Heaven” 君命，天也 (Zuo zhuan, Ding 4: 1546). (Translator) 人主立於生殺之位，與天共持變化之勢。 (Chunqiu fanlu XLIV: 332 [“Wang Dao tong san” 王道通三]). 唯天子受命於天，天下受命於天子，一國則受命於君。君命順，則民有順 命；君命逆，則民有逆命。故曰：「一人有慶，兆民賴之。」 (Chunqiu fanlu XLI: 319 [“Wei ren zhe tian” 為人者天]).

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

The Concept of the “Sage-Monarch” and Its Modern Fate

281

gion. All other religions are fundamentally placed below the Son of Heaven; they are regulated by the Son of Heaven. The so-called Confucian religion (Kong jiao 孔教) is not an exception. In traditional Chinese thought, the idea of “serving Heaven and following predestination” (feng tian cheng yun 奉天承運) is a hugely important topic.33 Although some of the greatest political thinkers in Chinese tradition put forward the idea that “Heaven hears through the people’s hearing,”34 only the Son of Heaven was able to serve Heaven and follow predestination. For millennia our culture accumulated manifold concepts that buttressed the monarch’s special relations with Heaven, all of which can be roughly synonymous with “serving Heaven.” Thus, from the Tang 唐 dynasty (618–907) on, most posthumous titles and honorifics of emperors opened with such phrases as “belonging to Heaven” 統天, “modeling himself after Heaven” 法天, “taking Heaven as standard” 儀天, “responding to Heaven” 應天, “moving Heaven” 感天, “embodying Heaven” 體天, and so on; each of these titles indicated that the emperors had special relations with Heaven, that they implemented Heaven’s Mandate. Let me here cite the views of just a few outstanding emperors on the monarch’s relations with Heaven. Emperor Wen of Sui 隋文帝 (r. 581–604) said: “Can the emperorship be contested simply by force? Confucius had the talent of a Great Sage and still did not attain All-under-Heaven.”35 Tang Gaozu 唐高 祖 (r. 618–626) said: “Emperors and monarchs are those who possess Heaven’s Mandate; it is not something that a small child can take.”36 Tang Taizong 唐太 宗 (r. 626–649) said: “The enterprise of emperors and monarchs can be contested neither by cleverness nor by force.”37 Zhu Yuanzhang 朱元璋 (1328– 1398; i.e., Ming Taizu 明太祖, r. 1368–1398) asserted: “Originally, I had no intention to possess All-under-Heaven”; he became emperor only because

33

34 35 36 37

“Serving Heaven and following predestination” was a conventional phrase from the time of the Ming founder, Zhu Yuanzhang 朱元璋 (r. 1368–1398), and thereafter. As Liu Zehua explains in greater detail elsewhere (Liu Zehua 2000: 400–429; 2014: 93–98), this short phrase incorporates manifold notions of Heaven’s Mandate as they evolved through the centuries. (Translator) 天聽自我民聼。 Referring to the “Great Oath” 泰誓 document from the Classic of Docu­ ments, as cited in Mengzi 9.5: 219 (“Wan Zhang 萬章 shang”). (Translator) 帝王豈可力求！孔子以大聖之才猶不得天下。 (Zizhi tongjian 178: 5567). 帝王自有天命，非小子所能取。 (Zizhi tongjian 186: 5824). 帝王之業，非可以力爭者矣。 (Taizong’s preface to his Models for the Thearchs [Di fan 帝範], p. 2).

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

282

Liu Zehua

“Heaven specifically mandated it”.38 According to Qing Taizong 清太宗 (i.e., Huang Taiji 皇太極, r. 1627–1643): “Heaven’s movement is cyclical; whenever it moves anywhere, it will return; when the Son of Heaven is deposed to become a commoner, or a commoner rises to become the Son of Heaven, this is all Heaven’s intention, not something that can be attained by human force.”39 Sima Guang 司馬光 (1019–1086) represents in the following words the mainstream view of political thinkers: “The True Monarch receives Heaven’s Mandate and governs all within the Four Seas; above, he follows Heaven’s order; below, he rectifies human government.”40 We should pay specific attention to the meaning of such conventional phrases as “serving Heaven and following predestination” in political thought and to their imperceptible influence. Speaking politically, such designations and phrases as “Sagacious Heavenly Monarch,” “serving Heaven and following predestination,” “heeding Heaven’s Mandate,” and so on are the distillation of the concept of determinism as perceived by traditional Chinese political culture. They are the melding of religious, kinship, and political consciousness; they interweave the sacred and the mundane; they are the permanent pattern of control embedded in traditional Chinese political culture. Simultaneously, they are the supreme standard for the people’s political behavior. Speaking religiously, we may aver that the very concept of the “Son of Heaven” invoked the belief in Heaven’s overarching divine power; the moment one accepted this term, one became—consciously or not—a believer. The imperceptible impact of this belief was that the moment it was internalized, it granted emperors incontestable and absolute authority, while fixing the position of the rest of the society as the emperor’s subjects. This acceptance of the ruler’s intrinsic links with the supreme deity had a far-reaching impact on political and intellectual matters. It created a huge and unbridgeable gap between the emperor and his subjects. Suffice it to take a brief look at the self-humiliating language adopted by imperial literati to manifest their inferiority in their communications with the throne. Take, for instance, the words of some of the most audacious and proud Tang intellectuals. One of them, Han Yu 韓愈 (768–824), proclaimed in a memorial to the throne: 38 39

40

本无意据有天下 and 天特命之。Statements scattered throughout the Veritable Records of Ming Taizu (Ming Taizu shilu 明太祖實錄) (Translator). 天運循環，無往不復，有天子而廢為匹夫者，亦有匹夫而起為天子者，此皆 天意，非人力之所能為也。 (Veritable Records of Qing Taizong [Qing Taizong shilu 清 太宗實錄], juan 5, 3rd year of Tiancong 天聰, 11th month, bingshen [Qing shilu 5: 27]). 王者受天命，臨四海，上承天之序，下正人之統。 (Sima Guang, “Jinshi cewen shiwu shou” 進士策問十五首, in Chuan jia ji 75: 9).

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

The Concept of the “Sage-Monarch” and Its Modern Fate

283

“Am prostrating myself, hoping that you would pardon my crime of ignorance and stupidity.”41 Han Yu’s contemporary Liu Zongyuan 柳宗元 (773–819) said in another memorial: “My body, hair, and skin, all are granted by your sage nourishment; my garments, food, and drink, all are attained through your imperial grace.”42 Han Yu echoed him: “That I succeeded to proceed toward learning, that I have read the texts of the Six Classics, cultivated the Way of the former kings, and attained some coarse knowledge—all these are thanks to the Emperor’s grace.”43 In reality, neither Liu Zongyuan’s life nor Han Yu’s learning had anything to do with the emperors; yet the conventional intercourse with the ruler implied that, when facing the monarch, the minister could speak only of his own errors and faults and praise monarchic munificence. However, this was not an empty convention but rather a true reflection of the orientation of social consciousness. It had a profound impact on traditional intellectual culture. It hugely diminished the ability of the literati to criticize the monarch, let alone the monarchic institution. Unable to openly defy the imperial authority in mundane affairs, the literati had to acquiesce to the emperor’s supremacy in the intellectual realm as well. “Embodying the Way”: Integration of the Monarch and the Way The idea that the sage and the sage-monarch can “embody the Way” 體道 was already well developed before the Qin unification. Before unification, however, thinkers normally argued merely that the former sage-kings “embodied the Way”; it was only after the First Emperor that the Way became associated with the reigning monarch. The First Emperor presented his victory as the result of his “tracing the origin of the most shining Way” 原道至明, “embodying the Way and implementing virtue” 體道行德, and “punishing and beheading

41 42

43

伏望恕臣愚陋僻蠢之罪。 (“Memorial on the Need to Reward Those Who Captured the Bandits” [“Lun bu zei xingshang biao” 論捕賊行賞表], in Han Changli wenji 8: 612). 臣等得生邦甸 ， 幸遇盛明。身體髮膚 ， 盡歸於聖育；衣服飲食， 悉自於皇 恩。 (“Me­morial Requesting to Restore Honorific Titles for the Elderly” [“Wei qilao deng qing fu zunhao biao” 為耆老等請復尊號表], in Liu Hedong ji 37: 385). Note that Liu Zongyuan’s statement echoes the opening chapter (“Kaizong mingyi” 開宗明義) of the Canon of Filiality (Xiao jing 孝經 1: 1). This implies a strong parallel between the monarch and the father, a topic that requires further discussion. (Translator; the translator is grateful to the anonymous reviewer for making this point.) 然皆以選擇得備學生，讀六藝之文，脩先王之道，粗有知識，皆由上恩。 (“Memorial Requesting an Honorific Title” [“Qing shang zunhao biao” 請上尊號表], in Han Changli wenji 8: 629).

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

284

Liu Zehua

those who lack the Way” 誅戮無道.44 Since the sage is the personification of the Way, it was only logical that the First Emperor, who “embodied the Way,” should designate himself “a sage.” Indeed, he called himself “great sage” 大聖, “Qin sage” 秦聖,45 “embodiment of sagehood” 躬聖, “sage, wise, benevolent, and righteous” 聖智仁義; his laws were “sage laws” 聖法; his intent was “sage intent” 聖意, and his rule was “sage rule” 聖治; and he spread over the people his “sage grace” 聖恩.46 Thenceforth, reigning emperors were conceived as sages and as the embodiment of the Way. The rule of the Qin dynasty was short, but the idea that the emperors are the sages who embody the Way was transmitted unfailingly for generations to come. The most succinct theory of the integration of the Monarch and the Way was presented in the chapter “The Way of the Monarch Pervades the Three” (王道通三) of The Luxurious Dew of the Springs-and-Autumns Annals (Chunqiu fanlu 春秋繁露), traditionally attributed to Dong Zhongshu 董仲舒 (ca. 195–115 bce). This chapter contains a very famous statement: 古之造文者，三書而連其中，謂之王。三書者，天地與人也， 而連其中者，通其道也。取天地與人之中以為貫而參通之，非 王者孰能當是？ In the past, when characters were created, the three horizontal lines linked at the middle were called “monarch” 王. The three lines are Heaven, Earth, and man; while the one that connects them at the middle is he who pervades their Way. To take the middle of Heaven, Earth, and men, to link them together and pervade the three of them: who would be able to attain this, if not the Monarch? (Chunqiu fanlu XLIV: 328–329) The Chunqiu fanlu integrates the Monarch, the Way of the Monarch, the Way of Heaven, the Way of Earth, and the Way of humans and places the monarch at the pivotal position. It emphasizes: “The Way is the Way of the Monarch. The Monarch is the beginning of human beings.”47 The “Biographies of Confucian Scholars” (“Rulin zhuan” 儒林傳) chapter of the History of the Former Han 44

45 46 47

Cited respectively from the Zhifu 之罘 Eastern Vista inscription (218 bce; Kern 2000a: 38), from the addendum to the Langye 瑯邪 inscription (219 bce; Shiji 6: 247), and from the Jieshi 碣石 inscription (215 bce; modified from Kern 2000a: 41). (Translator) It is possible that the word “Qin” 秦 as a modifier of the sage is a mistake for tai 泰 (“great”); see Kern 2000a: 45n136. (Translator) Referring to the First Emperor’s self-designation in his stele inscriptions and in the records from the “Basic Annals of the First Emperor of Qin” in Shiji. (Translator) 道，王道也。王者，人之始也。 (Chunqiu fanlu VI: 101 [“Wang Dao” 王道]).

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

The Concept of the “Sage-Monarch” and Its Modern Fate

285

Dynasty (Hanshu 漢書) furthermore explains: “The Six Arts are the fundamental records of the Monarch’s teaching. This is how the former sages clarified the Way of Heaven, corrected human relations, and brought about complete methods of perfect and orderly rule.”48 Thus, the “Six Arts” of the Ru are originally “the Monarch’s teaching.” The prevalent ideology of magnifying monarchic rule meant extolling the integration of the Monarch and the Way. For instance, in manifold memorials submitted by Han Yu and Liu Zongyuan, there is incessant praise of the monarch’s merits and virtue; for the sake of concision, I shall list just the terms and compounds that are used to eulogize the emperor. These are “divine transformation” 神化, “divine merit” 神功, “great transformation” 大化, “virtue that unifies with that of Heaven” 與天合德, “modeling himself after Heaven and unifying virtue with it” 法天合德, “comprehensively stimulating Heaven and Earth” 感通天地, “standing in a trinity with Heaven [and Earth] and being Earth’s double” 参天两地, “merits participating in creative transformation” 功 参造化, “putting in order creative transformation” 整齊造化, “the government’s body is Heaven and Earth” 政體乾坤, “moving creative transformation” 移造化, “altering yin and yang” 革陰陽, “benevolent transformation” 仁 化, “virtuous transformation” 德化, “uniformly harmonizing Heaven and men” 統和天人, “following the seasons, maintaining the ridgepole [of the Way],” 順 時御極 and so on. All these demonstrate integration of the sacral, the natural, and imperial power. Among the rulers’ posthumous names, the primary emphasis was on their connection to Heaven; these were usually followed by designations that emphasized their connection to the Way: “responding to the Way” 應道, “modeling himself after the Way” 法道, “continuing the Way” 繼道, “unifying with the Way” 合道, “being equal with the Way” 同道, “following the Way” 循道, “abounding in the Way” 備道, and so on. These all demonstrate the same point: emperors personify the Way. Monarchs always claimed that they resided in the Way, and this claim was supported by manifold theoretical elaborations. Hence, in our traditional society, the Way and its “principle/pattern” (li 理) were primarily the servants of imperial power.49

48 49

《六藝》者，王教之典籍，先聖所以明天道，正人倫，致至治之成法也。 (Hanshu 88: 3589). A pun: the combination of “the Way” and “principle” (daoli 道理) in modern Chinese stands for “reason” and “truth.” (Translator)

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

286

Liu Zehua

The Emperors’ Political Control of the Doctrines They Employed The “Six Arts” endorsed by the Ru originated with the former kings. Zhuangzi 莊子 cites Laozi 老子 as saying: “The Six Arts are the relics of the former kings.”50 The Ru doctrine, which was promulgated under the banner of the former kings, was from its inception the doctrine that protected monarchic rule. Indeed, Confucius taught respect for monarchs and engaged in conversations with power holders. Although he failed to receive adequate employment, he succeeded in winning respect from the rulers; hence, when he died, Lord Ai of Lu 魯哀公 (r. 494–468 bce) respectfully referred to him as “Father Ni” 尼父.51 Later, regional lords and kings bestowed favorable treatment on the Ru. Han Fei 韓非 (d. 233 bce) calls the ideas of the Ru and the Mohists “eminent doctrines,” the adherents of which were entrusted with important positions by the rulers of the six eastern states.52 The Springs-and-Autumns of Sire Lü (Lüshi chunqiu 呂氏春秋) mentions that the words of the Ru “filled All-under-Heaven,” which shows that the Ru prospered at courts.53 The reason that the Han founder, Liu Bang 劉邦 (d. 195 bce), became the first ruler to sacrifice to Confucius was that a famous Ru at his court, Shusun Tong 叔孫通 (fl. 210–190 bce), elaborated the ritual system for him; this convinced Liu Bang of how useful the Ru could be.54 Elevation of the Ru accelerated in the aftermath of the reforms adopted under Emperor Wu of the Han 漢武帝 (r. 141–87 bce), who promulgated a policy of exclusive respect for the Ru. Eventually, the Ru doctrine was elevated to the status of official ideology, and by the end of the Former Han, Confucius was venerated as the great sage, the counterpart of the dynastic founders of the past and not just a mere thinker.55 Ru scholars in turn reciprocated by creating a theory of Confucius as the founder of the Han political system, namely, that whatever Confucius debated and discussed was just preparation for the Han ruling house. Apocryphal (chen wei 讖緯) texts that attained a quasi-canonical status at the time of the Han repeatedly promulgated myths such as “Inky Con50 51 52

53 54 55

六經，先王之陳跡也。 (Zhuangzi 13: 389 [“Tian yun” 天運]). Ni is Confucius’s appellative 字; it is usually combined with his seniority designation Zhong 仲 (second-born) to form the more familiar Zhongni 仲尼. (Translator) Han Feizi XIX.50: 456 (“Xian xue” 顯學). The six eastern states are the major Warring States period polities to the east of Qin: Wei 魏, Han 韓, Zhao 趙, Yan 燕, Qi 齊, and Chu 楚. (Translator) Lüshi chunqiu 2.4: 98 (“Dang ran” 當染); 25.3: 1660 (“You du” 有度). (Translator) See details in Shiji 99: 2722. (Translator) For the process of Confucius’s elevation from the position of a venerated sage to that of a counterpart of the former dynastic founders, see Li Jixiang 2013. (Translator)

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

The Concept of the “Sage-Monarch” and Its Modern Fate

287

fucius was born to prepare the scarlet regime.”56 Confucius’s mother allegedly had intercourse with a black dragon and gave birth to Confucius; “black” is synonymous with “inky” 墨 or “dark” 玄; hence, Confucius was named “inky” or “dark” Confucius. According to the yin-yang and Five Phases system, the Han dynasty was assumed to belong to Fire; fire is “scarlet”; hence, “the scarlet regime” means “the Han regime.”57 Generations of emperors respected Confucius primarily because his theory served as a kind of protective amulet for them. Emperor Chengzong of the Yuan dynasty 元成宗 (r. 1294–1307) said: “The Way of Confucius is the lasting guide for the myriad generations; it should be adored by everyone who owns the state or a family.”58 Zhu Yuanzhang proclaimed even more clearly: “Confucius elucidated the Way of Thearchs and Monarchs to teach subsequent generations; he caused rulers to behave as rulers, subjects as subjects, fathers as fathers, sons as sons. The [Three] Bonds and [Five] Constants are thereby rectified; cardinal human relationships are forever ordered; his merits equal those of Heaven and Earth.”59 The Yongzheng 雍正 Emperor (r. 1723–1735) said that the Way of Confucius “is exceptionally beneficent for the ruler above.”60 The ideology endorsed by rulers will naturally become part of the political structure, and as such will be subjected to control by the imperial authority. Let us ask: What enjoys a larger authority, an ideology itself or the political power that controls the ideology? I think the answer is self-evident and does not require further discussion. Neither the eminence of the Ru and Confucius nor their exclusive powers were the result of the inherent attractiveness of their doctrine. While not a few literati were genuinely attracted by the Confucian teaching, and while they maintained this adherence even in an adverse political climate, they were a notable minority. The success of Confucianism in the society as a whole was intrinsically linked to the support granted by the emperors and ruling elites. Even when the ruler endorsed the exclusive position of the Ru, this did not mean that every doctrine belonging to the Ru framework would be similarly 56

57 58 59 60

墨孔生，為赤制. See Chunqiu ganjing fu 春秋感精符, cited from Li Xian’s 李賢 (654– 684) gloss on Hou Hanshu 29: 1025n4. For the idea of Confucius as the prophet who predicted the rise of the Han and who prepared in advance the guidelines for the Han dynastic system, see also He Xiu’s 何休 (129–182) commentaries on the Gongyang zhuan 公羊傳 in Gongyang zhuan 28: 2353–2354 (Ai 14). (Translator) For more on Han apocrypha, see, e.g., Dull 1966; Yasui Kōzan 1984. (Translator) 孔子之道，垂憲萬世。有國有家者所當崇奉。 (cited from Yuan wen lei 19.4). 孔子明帝王之道以教後世，使君君臣臣父父子子，綱常以正，彝倫攸序，其 功參於天地。 (cited from Libu zhi gao 1: 5). 在君上尤受其益。 (Cited from Qingding guozijian zhi 1: 14).

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

288

Liu Zehua

respected. There were many intellectual currents among the Ru, and only those that fitted the rulers’ needs received special endorsement. The internal composition of the Han Ru was very complex; they were divided among dozens of different “teachings,” “currents,” “schools,” etc. The officially established Erudites were just representatives of one or some of these “schools,” and it is this school (or schools) that received exclusive recognition, not the entire Ru doctrine. At famous scholarly meetings in the Stone Canal Pavilion 石渠閣 (51 bce) and White Tiger Hall 白虎觀 (79 ce) the differences among the “Five Classics” were discussed, with the goal to “order and unify” the commentaries on the Five Classics and turn the classics into “an eternal model for future generations.”61 In both cases the meetings were supervised by the emperor, who had the final say. This reflects the fundamental superiority of the emperor in intellectual life. Although in practice only a few emperors actively intervened in doctrinal matters, and although many—if not most—were influenced by their advisers and even treated some of the courtiers as their teachers, they still preserved, even if nominally, the right of the final say in ideological debates. Whenever they were inclined to do so, Han—and later—rulers could utilize administrative means to politicize, standardize, unify, and fix intellectual matters; there were no institutional restrictions on their intervention in matters of thought. And insofar as the final decision was made by the emperor, this clearly indicates the ideology’s subordination to monarchic power. Zhu Xi is the great Master of the (“Neo-Confucian”) “doctrine of principle” (li xue 理學); yet during the time of Song Ningzong 宋寧宗 (r. 1194–1224), his doctrine was for a while designated a “heresy” and was attacked.62 Later, under Song Lizong 宋理宗 (r. 1224–1264), it was rehabilitated, but it still did not attain the status of official ideology; this elevation happened only under Yuan Renzong 元仁宗 (r. 1312–1320). Ming and Qing rulers were even more respectful of Zhu Xi’s doctrine of principle. Zhu Yuanzhang ordered examiners strictly to employ the doctrine of principle as the selection criterion and “uniformly to use the classics fixed by Confucius as the [standard] teaching.”63 He organized Confucian scholars to compile Precious Instructions of August Ming 皇明寳訓 and The Great Ming Compendium of Rites 大明集禮, turning them into the foundational texts of his dynasty’s legal system. Zhu Yuanzhang’s son Zhu Di 朱棣 (Ming Chengzu 明成祖, the Yongle 永樂 Emperor, r. 1402–1424) ordered 61 62 63

For the first of these meetings, see Cai Liang 2014: 178–179; for the second, see Tjan 1949– 1952. (Translator) For this event, see Schirokauer 1975. (Translator) 一以孔子所定經書為教。 (Mingshi 137: 3955).

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

The Concept of the “Sage-Monarch” and Its Modern Fate

289

the compilation of the Great Collection of Works on the Five Classics 五經大全, Great Collection of Works on the Four Books 四書大全, and Great Collection of Works on Innate Nature and Principle 性理大全, and he also established norms for the examinations, including the eight-legged essay form, from which one was not allowed to deviate.64 So dogmatic was the resultant turn that Gu Yanwu 顧炎武 (1613–1682) criticized it: “When the eight-legged essay was adopted, ancient learning was discarded; when the Great Collection was published, classical studies were lost.”65 In addition, emperors possessed the right to emend Confucian classics. Thus, Zhu Yuanzhang ordered the excision of sections from the Mengzi and compilation of an Abridged Mengzi 孟子節文; in 1372 this version was issued to schools at every level, becoming an imperially approved textbook.66 For a while, Zhu Yuanzhang even contemplated removing Mengzi’s commemorative tablet from Confucius’s temple. Confucius was respected for generations as “the supremely sagacious former teacher” 至聖先師, “the teacher of emperors and monarchs” 帝王之師, and so on; does this mean that, as a teacher, he possessed supreme authority? To a certain extent this view is fully justified. Yet when we speak in broader terms, the position and intellectual authority of the “teacher” are still secondary to those of the ruler. First, the teacher is just a certain grade in the social hierarchy; at the apex of this hierarchy were the Former Monarchs 先王, the founders of the Way, such as the “sage-monarchs” of the past, the Three August and Five Thearchs 三皇 五帝, and the like. All these combined the position of the teacher with that of the thearch; hence, they were called “thearch-teachers” (di shi 帝師). This is what is implied in the saying “in the past, the governance and the doctrine had a common source.”67 The ruling emperor could also pose as a “thearch-teacher,” as did the Kangxi 康熙 Emperor (r. 1661–1722) and some others.68 Zhu Yuan­­zhang once said: “From ancient times, thearchs and monarchs combined the function of ruler and teacher.”69 In contrast, Confucius was just a teacher; 64 65 66 67 68 69

For these activities of Zhu Di, see Elman 2000: 105–119. Note that Elman dates the eightlegged essay to the period after the Yongle reign. (Translator) 八股行而古學棄，《大全》出而經學亡。 (Rizhilu 18: 651–652 [“Shu chuan huixuan” 書傳會選]). See Elman 2000: 78–88. (Translator) 古之政學出於一。 (Hu Song 胡松 [jinshi 1529], Hu Zhuangsu gong wenji 1: 26 [“Zhouli shuo xu” 周禮說序]). For Kangxi’s self-image, see Spence 1974. (Translator) 自古帝王皆兼君師之任 。 (Hongwu yuzhi quanshu, p. 468).

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

290

Liu Zehua

even if he was called the sage teacher, he still belonged to a lower level and never became a monarch. Second, Confucius was a subject, which means that his position was subordinate to that of the ruler, and this point was absolutely inviolable. Although Confucius was posthumously enfeoffed as “The Prince Who Propagates Refinement” 文宣王, this position of “prince” (wang 王) was below that of the imperial monarch (diwang 帝王).70 The Ming Jiajing 嘉靖 Emperor (r. 1521–1567), in order to restrain Confucius somewhat, decided to abolish his princely title, so that he would not resemble emperors and monarchs by virtue of his designation. Third, while the ruler could be simultaneously a teacher, Confucius could never become a ruler. There were some Ru scholars, like the aforementioned Zeng Jing, who cherished the wishful thought that Confucius, Mengzi, and others should have been appointed rulers; yet the Yongzheng Emperor considered this “a great insubordination and going against the Way” 大逆不道, and the matter aroused a literary inquisition. According to the Yongzheng Emperor, even should they be reborn, Confucius and Mengzi could implement no more than the Way of the subject and the son; how could they become emperors!?71 Moreover, in the Chinese tradition, an official’s position could subsume that of a teacher. This is what is meant by the sayings “the county magistrate is the people’s teacher”72 and “the governor and the magistrate are the teachers of the elite and the commoners.”73 The officials’ position is above that of a teacher, or at least, it precedes that of a teacher. Confucius was granted many honorific designations, but all were bestowed on him by the emperors. For manifold reasons, the emperors could enhance or decrease these honorifics, and they could determine the accompanying degrees of sacrifices due to Confucius; all these were just tools employed by the emperors. 70

71 72 73

The term wang 王 has two distinct meanings in Chinese. In the Zhou period it served as a designation of the supreme ruler, the Zhou king; echoing this usage, in the texts of the Warring States period it was often employed to refer to the supreme monarch, the exclusive ruler of All-under-Heaven. The term could also denote a regional prince with or without executive powers; in many dynasties, the wang title was routinely bestowed on the emperor’s sons or on local potentates who were invariably considered inferior to the emperor. Confucius’s princely title belongs to the second category. (Translator) See more in Spence 2001. (Translator) 縣令民之師。 (Li Guangyuan 李光元 [jinshi 1607], Shi Nanzi 7: 115 [“Ke xiangyue xu” 刻 鄉約序]). 　 守令者，士民之師帅也。 (Wang Ji 王畿 [1498–1583], Muliao Wang xiansheng Shu quanji 2: 132 [“Liang Zhe xuezheng shiliu tiao” 两浙學政十六條]).

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

The Concept of the “Sage-Monarch” and Its Modern Fate

291

The exclusive position of the Ru and of Confucius was determined and granted by the emperors. Had there been free competition for the people’s support, it is very doubtful that Confucianism would have attained a similar degree of authority. Mengzi lamented that the Way of Confucius did not prosper: this is indicative of the difficulties that this ideology faced before its endorsement by rulers. Even during the imperial period, whenever the court’s support for Confucianism weakened, the appeal of this doctrine among members of the educated elite declined as well, even though it never disappeared. For instance, during the period of the Wei, Jin, and Northern and Southern Dynasties 魏晉南北朝 (220–589), the rise of Buddhism and Daoism overshadowed the Confucian doctrine and weakened its impact. During the Tang period (618– 907), the dynasty endorsed not just Confucianism but also Buddhism and Daoism, and the latter partly eclipsed Confucian influence. If the matter had been decided in a free competition, the Ru would not necessarily have gained the upper hand. Besides, Chinese thought is diverse. Each of the multiple currents has its founders or its sages; yet these sages retain their authority only among the adherents of a specific intellectual current and are not necessarily revered outside it. For instance, for the Ru, Confucius is a sage, while for some contributors to the Zhuangzi, he is considered the main culprit. For some of the Legalists, Confucians equaled parasites, vermin, and other similarly filthy things.74 Nowadays, some people make a fuss about turning Confucius into the ultimate sage of Chinese culture; this is a clear example of biased judgment. The Ruler is above the Way The Way is the most potent ideological construct, and it was routinely employed by courtiers and by the literati in general to restrict the ruler’s whims. At times, appeals to the Way could be successful; yet whenever the emperor— or the person who acted on his behalf, such as an empress, a powerful minister, or a eunuch—was determined to pursue his course, the literati were powerless. Insofar as the final say on every matter belonged to the emperor alone, the literati could protest, remonstrate, and even brave death to criticize the ruler; yet their appeals to the “Way” might be to no avail: a determined emperor

74

For the Zhuangzi’s assault on Confucius, see, e.g., the “Robber Zhi” chapter in Zhuangzi 29: 776–780. The Legalists’ terminology is borrowed from the Book of Lord Shang (Shang jun shu 商君書) III.13: 80 (“Jin ling” 靳令), in which Confucian classics and values are derided as “parasites” 蝨; and from Han Feizi XIX.49: 455–456 (“Wu du” 五蠹), which refers to the Ru as “vermin” 蠹. (Translator)

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

292

Liu Zehua

could overpower their opposition. The “Way” paled before the ruler, and the majority of literati could do nothing but sigh in despair. I shall illustrate this point with two examples. When Wu Zetian 武則天 (d. 705) declared herself emperor (in 684), this was not in accord with “the Way” of Confucians, yet relying on her power, she proclaimed herself “a sacred emperor.” Luo Binwang’s 駱賓王 (640–684) declaration of a punitive expedition against the Wu family was full of Confucian argumentation, but what could he do against Wu Zetian?75 Rather, Wu Zetian was able to overpower the opposition. Among other things she employed the Buddhist “Great Clouds Sutra,” which proclaimed the coming of a female ruler in the east, to boost her position. At that time, the “Way” was changing according to one’s power; actually, at that time “power” 勢 was the Way. The “Great Rites Controversy” of the Ming period is yet another classic example.76 Ming Shizong 明世宗, the Jiajing 嘉靖 Emperor (1521–1567), ascended the throne from the position of a feudatory prince; upon ascendancy he ignored the ritual regulations and elevated his deceased father, the Xingxian Prince 興獻王, to the position of emperor, with the temple name of Ruizong 睿宗. This gave rise to the Great Rites Controversy. Grand Secretary Yang Tinghe 楊廷和 (1459–1529) and others considered the emperor’s father ineligible for posthumous imperial status, while other courtiers responded positively to Shizong’s intent and presented memorials that it was appropriate to elevate the Xingxian Prince. The two sides became embroiled in a bitter controversy. When over two hundred courtiers knelt in protest near the Zuoshun 左順 Gate of the Imperial Palace, the Jiajing Emperor became enraged and ordered the imprisonment of 134 officials; 17 were flogged to death in court. It may be said that the Jiajing Emperor violated the “Way” advocated by the Ru; yet it was he who published the Great Compendium Clarifying Ethical Norms 明 倫大典, who declared that “none but the Son of Heaven has the right to discuss the rites,”77 and who pointed out that his decrees are “ritual”—they are “the Way.” Zhang Cong 張璁 (1475–1539) summarized the Great Rites Controversy as follows: “To measure it according to Heavenly Principle and human heart, to fix it according to fairness, correctness, benevolence, and righteousness: this can be done exclusively by the emperor!”78 He was absolutely 75 76 77 78

For Luo Binwang’s participation in the rebellion against Wu Zetian, see Guisso 1978: 57–59. (Translator) See Fisher 1990; cf. Geiss 1988: 443–450. (Translator) A reference to Zhong yong 中庸 28 (Si shu zhangju, p. 36). (Translator) 揆之以天理人心，定之以中正仁義，皇上一人而已。 (Taishi Zhang Wenzhong Gong jiwen gao 1: 253 [“Fengchi zuan Minglun dadian houxu” 奉敕撰明倫大典後序]).

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

The Concept of the “Sage-Monarch” and Its Modern Fate

293

straightforward: it is the emperor who has the supreme authority to determine the nature of Heavenly Principle, the human heart, centrality, correctness, benevolence, and righteousness! There are many stories like this proving that whatever the supreme power decides has supreme ideological authority. The Supreme Position of the Ancestral Model Chinese society has one important characteristic: the unity of the family and the state—or, as it is called, “treating All-under-Heaven as family” 家天下. The Han people, “whenever they referred to the Son of Heaven, spoke of the family and the state”:79 this is because there was no separation in principle between family rules and state law, and often both were mixed. Chinese society is based on a kinship system: respect for the lineage head and for the head of the family are fundamental rules. Respecting the ancestors becomes an important foundation of the legitimacy of heirs. Hence, the rulers who succeeded to the throne treated their dynasty-founding ancestors as sacrosanct, elevating the ancestors’ deeds and pronouncements to the position of “law,” “regulation,” “instruction,” and “the Way.” From the earliest recorded history, this concept is already visible: thus, the Shang 商 (ca. 1600–1046 bce) kings made “former kings” their banner, while the Zhou 周 had “the model of King Wen.” The Classic of Poems (Shijing 詩經) says: “Erring in nothing, forgetful of nothing, / observe and follow old statutes.”80 Later, the First Emperor of Qin claimed that he established the rules for “myriad generations” 萬世 (Shiji 6: 236). The Han court often referred to the “precedents of the house of Han” 漢家故事, “dynastic precedents” 國家故事, “things from the Han past” 漢家舊典, and “things from the past of our ancestors” 祖宗舊事. All these were considered the “dynasty’s essence” 國體. Similar concepts permeate most dynastic histories. The Song 宋 dynasty (960–1279), for instance, emphasized even more “the ancestral laws” 祖宗之法, “ancestral family rules” 祖宗家法, “ancestral rules” 祖宗 之制, “ancestral regulations” 祖宗法度, “ancestral norms” 祖宗典制, and so on. This entailed the systematization and divinization of ancestral rules. As discussed by Deng Xiaonan 鄧小南 (2006: 1): “All these statements have one thing in common: namely, adoration of the all-pervading spirit of the laws and regulations established by dynastic founders. … Speaking simply, this means:

79 80

每稱天子為國家。 Ying Shao’s 應劭 (140–206) statement is cited in Hong Mai’s 洪邁 (1123–1202) Rongzhai suibi 11: 4 (“Han fengshan ji” 漢封禪記). (Translator) 不愆不忘，率由舊章 (Shijing, “Jia le” 假樂 [Mao 249]; Mao shi zhengyi 17: 540c).

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

294

Liu Zehua

‘we should implement whatever was decided by our ancestors.’”81 The ancestral laws not only had systemic power but also enjoyed intellectual authority. To offer another example, when Empress Dowager Cixi 慈禧太后 (1835– 1908) “rectified” (i.e., curtailed) the reforms of the Guangxu 光緒 Emperor (r. 1875–1908), she did so under the banner of ancestral laws. Cixi proclaimed: 天下者，祖宗之天下也，汝何敢任意妄為！諸臣者，皆我多年 曆選，留以輔任，汝何敢任意不用！乃意敢聽信叛逆蠱惑，變 亂典刑。何物康有為，能勝我選用之人？康有為之法，能勝祖 宗所立之法？汝何昏憒，不肖乃爾！… 變亂祖法，臣下犯者， 汝知何罪？試問汝祖宗重，康有為重？背祖宗而行康法，何昏 憒至此？ All-under-Heaven is that of our ancestors; how dare you act recklessly? The ministers have all been selected by me for years, to be left to assist you: how dare you willfully dismiss them? And then, you dare to heed demagogic and rebellious words, to change and wreak havoc upon our fundamental model. How can Kang Youwei be superior to the ministers whom I have selected? How can the laws of Kang Youwei be superior to those of our ancestors? You, worthless one, how can you be so stupid and benighted? … Changing and wreaking havoc upon ancestral laws, and letting subjects violate them—do you know what crime this is? Let me ask you: who is more important—your ancestors or Kang Youwei? What can be more stupid and benighted than turning your back on your ancestors and implementing Kang’s laws? (Qinghua daxue 1998: 1049) In the face of the ancestral laws, the Guangxu Emperor trembled with fear and dared not respond. Clearly, this was the supreme authority, which Cixi skillfully employed.82 The Supreme Authority of the “Sage’s Edicts” The Sage’s Edicts (or “sacred edicts,” sheng yu 聖諭) were the orders or pronouncements through which the emperor instructed his subjects; using mod-

81

82

Deng Xiaonan hints at the so-called “whateverist faction” in the leadership of the Communist Party of China, which, after the death of Mao Zedong 毛澤東 (1893–1976), urged the leaders to “implement whatever had been decided upon” by Mao. For “whateverists,” see MacFarquhar 1993: 311–325. (Translator) For the 1898 reforms, see Kwong 1994; Zarrow 2012: 24-88. (Translator)

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

The Concept of the “Sage-Monarch” and Its Modern Fate

295

ern parlance, they can be called the “supreme directives,” resembling the dominant position of a certain “thought” and “theory.”83 Chinese emperors paid great attention to disseminating their proclamations and announcements in the name of supreme authority; thus, the stele inscriptions erected by the First Emperor of Qin in manifold places are his supreme instructions.84 Almost every subsequent dynasty followed his model, and the practice became particularly important during the Ming 明 dynasty (1368–1644). Zhu Yuanzhang (Ming Taizu) promulgated the Sage’s Edict in Six Injunctions 聖諭六訓 and his Great Announcement (Da gao 大誥) in four chapters.85 Zhu Yuanzhang also issued an order that “every subject who violates my Announcement should be considered a criminal” (違《誥》者罪之). At this time, the Great Announcement enjoyed higher authority than normal laws and edicts. By Qing times, the Shunzhi 順治 Emperor (1644-1661) promulgated the Sixfold Edict 六諭; this was improved by the Kangxi Emperor, who modified it into the Sage’s Edict in Sixteen Points 聖諭十六條, which concern manifold aspects of governing the state and the family.86 The Yongzheng Emperor promulgated the Sage’s Edict and Broad Instructions 聖諭廣訓. On the first and fifteenth day of every lunar month, these were announced, and everybody had to listen to this indoctrination, which was also added to the civilservice examinations. The Sage’s Edict was considered sacrosanct, and special “kiosks of promulgating clarity” 申明亭 were established to disseminate and revere it. These edicts enjoyed an intellectual authority that had a clearly sacral flavor. Literary Inquisitions “Literary inquisitions” are surely an even harsher symbol of ideological authority. There were countless literary inquisitions in Chinese history, and while they were of different kinds, they can fundamentally be summarized as the suppression of ideological “subversion” (such as using “disrespectful” words with regard to the emperors) or of “heresy” (meaning deviation from what is stipulated by the commonly held ideology; or, in a traditional definition, “disapproving of the sages and behaving lawlessly” 非聖無法).87 For instance, in 83 84 85 86 87

“A certain thought and theory” refers to “Mao Zedong’s thought” and Marxist theory and their dominant position in the People’s Republic of China. (Translator) For Qin steles, see Kern 2000a. (Translator) See Farmer 1995 for the content of the Grand Announcement, and see Schneewind 2001 for its dissemination in rural communities. (Translator) For Qing “sacred edicts,” see Mair 1985. “Disapproving of the sages and behaving lawlessly” was, for instance, a definition used by the authors of the Essentials of the Imperial Catalog of the [Books] in the Four Treasuries

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

296

Liu Zehua

the early years of the Qing Kangxi Emperor (r. 1661–1722), there was the famous case of Zhuang Tinglong 莊廷鑨 (d. 1655) and the Book of Ming 明書. Since the book contained records disrespectful of the Manchu Qing history, it was denounced, and the people involved in its preparation were persecuted. Zhuang Tinglong was already dead by then, but his body was disinterred and burned; and seventy-two people were condemned to death, including those who had written the introduction to the book, proofread it, prepared the wooden blocks, printed it, and read it, as well as local officials who were deemed responsible. Hundreds were exiled to the border regions; the entire Zhuang family was enslaved and sent to the border regions.88 There were hundreds of cases of literary inquisitions under the Qing dynasty alone; and they had an overall restrictive impact on intellectual life. The rise of philological studies in the Qing dynasty and the parallel weakening of Qing intellectual life in terms of the thinkers’ ideas are definitely related to these inquisitions.89

The “Sagacious Heavenly Monarch” in the Age of the Extreme Personality Cult

The concept of Sagacious Heavenly Monarch remained indestructible throughout our lengthy history; it even outlived the imperial system itself. During the age of the extreme personality cult,90 its old aspects were merged with new ones, so that it attained its most extravagant form. The idea of Sagacious Heavenly Monarch during that period was manifested primarily as follows. First, regulations were issued by the leader. In the age of advanced science, regulations should be based on science; but in our life all regulations were issued and promulgated by the leader.91 In my understanding, “social

88 89

90 91

(Siku quanshu zongmu tiyao 四庫全書總目提要) with regard to the controversial thinker Li Zhi 李贄 (1527–1602). For the latter, see Ray Huang 1981: 189–222. (Translator) For details of this case, see Oxnam 1975: 108–112. (Translator) A classic, if outdated, study of a literary inquisition under the Qianlong 乾隆 Emperor (r. 1736–1795) is Goodrich 1966. For an earlier case under the Yongzheng Emperor (r. 1723– 1735), see Spence 2001. The view of Qing intellectual life as weak in terms of its ideas (si­xiangxing 思想性) is shared by many scholars in China, but not necessarily in the West. For a different approach toward the Qing’s philological turn, see, e.g., Elman 2001. (Translator) Referring primarily to the Cultural Revolution period, 1966–1976. (Translator) A reminder: “regulations” (guilü 規律) were—and to a certain extent remain—a substitute for law; in Mao’s era they pervasively influenced every aspect of social life. Speaking

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

The Concept of the “Sage-Monarch” and Its Modern Fate

297

regulations” that deserve being imposed should be very limited; but we have experienced a period of all-pervading regulations; even that the peasants should eat from the “Big Rice Pot”—all this became a regulation!92 Facing the regulations, nobody had any choice but to submit and follow, just as if it were Heaven’s Mandate. Blind faith in regulations and the cult of the leader are the deepest experiences of the people of my generation. Second, every sentence of “the supreme one” (Mao) was absolute truth. At the start of the Cultural Revolution, one prominent personality (Peng Zhen 彭 真 [1902–1997]) proclaimed that “in the face of truth, all men are equal,” which is indeed correct. Yet after “the supreme one” finalized the text of the “May 16” (1966) communiqué, this statement was turned into a “capitalist slogan,” and the man who argued that “in the face of truth, all men are equal” was smashed and crushed:93 this is also a part of our historical experience! Third were the supreme directives. How many directives were issued by our leaders! Yet the moment “the supreme directive” was issued, all those issued by the lower degrees paled and were cast away. The supreme directive turned into a force to suppress everything. Whenever it was publicized—in the evening or even at night—we were immediately on the streets to offer congratulations. Fourth was the all-pervading correctness. One who monopolizes correctness has the power to turn everybody else into transmitters of mistakes. At those times, almost daily, we were taught about the struggle between the two lines, and “the most supreme” was the incarnation of absolute correctness.94

92

93

94

of science, Liu Zehua hints, in particular, at economy and ecology, which were disregarded by Mao, with disastrous consequences. (Translator) The “Big Rice Pot” was an ideal of communal eating encouraged during the disastrous Great Leap Forward (1958–1960) and remained the symbol of peasant equality until Mao’s death. (Translator) In 1965–1966, Peng Zhen, the mayor of Beijing and a member of the powerful Secretariat and Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China, tried to protect his vice-mayor, the playwright Wu Han 吴晗 (1909–1969), from attacks by radical leftists on the eve of the Cultural Revolution. His statement “in the face of truth, all men are equal” was an attempt to prevent the politicization of Wu Han’s case. Eventually, it caused Peng’s downfall during the infamous Political Bureau meeting of May 16, 1966, which marked the start of the radical stage of the Cultural Revolution. During the subsequent “mass campaigns,” Peng was severely humiliated and physically abused. See more in MacFarquhar and Schoenhals 2006: 14–44. (Translator) Maoist historiography interpreted the history of the Communist Party of China as an eternal struggle between the correct line of Chairman Mao and that of his opponents, identified as either “leftist” or “rightist” deviations. The “struggle between the two lines” became an essential approach to history in general and even was briefly imposed on the intellectual cleavages of the Warring States period. (Translator)

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

298

Liu Zehua

Fifth, public opinion was uniform. Public opinion refers to the views or expressions of the masses. The diversity in human perceptions of objective reality determines the diversity of opinions in society. It is impossible to unify society’s opinions completely. Of course, leaders are willing to create a certain public opinion or to direct it in a certain way, which is normal; but to enforce absolute uniformity of public opinion is to deviate from the objective fact of its intrinsic diversity. This means clamping down on the public’s expression, making All-under-Heaven dumb. We experienced a period during which the entire public media spoke in a single voice, and when listening to foreign broadcasts was illegal and could result in severe punishment. Unifying thought in a certain framework may be a necessity, but demanding that the entire society unify behind a certain ideology is impossible and is fundamentally unattainable. When one insists on “unity,” it cannot be achieved through relying on “the weapon of criticism” alone; hence, it turns into “criticizing through weapons.”95 Then, inevitably, literary inquisitions follow each other, and victims fill the universe. Sixth, you should implement whatever you understand, and also implement whatever you do not understand; your understanding will derive from practice. In administrative life, this demand has some reasonable aspects, but even there it is not fully reasonable. Yet when one demands that the entire society behave in such a way, this means turning the people into obedient tools. Seventh was comprehensive ideological dictatorship: this was the dictatorship exercised by Mao Zedong. It is very frightening; terror envelops the entire society, suffocating the entire nation’s ability to think. I have exposed these seven items in order to show that the “genial, correct, and great” leader Mao Zedong96 did not differ from the “Sagacious Heavenly Monarchs” of the past; actually he surpassed all of them in combining intellectual and political authority. Mao called himself “Marx plus the First Emperor”; this self-appellation has many implications, but the most direct is the claim that Mao viewed himself both as a paradigmatic intellectual and as a man who is superior to even the most powerful of the past emperors. Mao Zedong’s thought was elevated to the position of supreme authority; everybody else could do no more than prostrate himself at the leader’s feet and accept his instructions, with no choice but to remold himself and become an obedient subject. Everyone who dared to disagree with Mao Zedong or oppose him was 95 96

Referring to the slogans of the Cultural Revolution. (Translator) Proclaiming Mao a “genius” was one of the most important steps toward intensifying his personality cult at the start of the Cultural Revolution. See more in MacFarquhar and Schoenhals 2006. (Translator)

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

The Concept of the “Sage-Monarch” and Its Modern Fate

299

almost inevitably subjected to a certain degree of suppression; some were even killed. Only in the early 1980s, under the leadership of Hu Yaobang 胡燿邦 (1915–1989),97 were Mao’s victims rehabilitated. Some people believe that Mao opposed China’s cultural tradition and that he was anti-Confucian; yet this view reflects a certain misunderstanding. The question of Chinese cultural tradition and its relationship to Mao Zedong is too complicated to be dealt with adequately here, so I shall confine myself to a single point. Confucianism is an immensely complex intellectual phenomenon, and opposition to some of its concepts and views does not make one squarely anti-Confucian or anti-Traditionalist. China’s cultural tradition is also an immensely complex phenomenon, but I believe that the idea of the “sagemonarch” or “Sagacious Heavenly Monarch” is the core issue at the heart of it. Aside from a few dissenting voices, such as that of Zhuangzi, members of every intellectual current—call them “Confucians,” “Legalists,” “Daoists,” or “Mohists,” etc.—advocated the rule of the sage-monarch. More essentially, the common people pinned their hopes on a “good emperor.” It was commonly believed that if the ruler were truly wise and sagacious, there would be huge political benefits. It is against this backdrop that we should understand the phenomenon of Mao. This Sagacious Heavenly Monarch did indeed bring about magnificent results, and his utopian fantasies were hugely popular among the lower strata who had suffered severe hardships in the past. Given the historical circumstances at the time of his ascendancy—after a century of “national humiliation” and severe malfunctioning of both traditional and modern state structures—the adoration of Mao is fully understandable. Yet the idea of the “Sagacious Heavenly Monarch” means not just adoration of a person on command but also the creation of an excessively powerful political structure. Its natural outcome is the dictatorship of a single man; and in Mao’s case, the attempt to create utopia on earth by utilizing these dictatorial powers brought about disastrous consequences. The concept of the “Sagacious Heavenly Monarch” is a reflection of both a certain intellectual mind-set and a certain type of political structure—namely, the monarchic structure. To transform this structure and this mind-set is an 97

Hu Yaobang acted as the chairman and then the general secretary of the Communist Party of China from 1981 until 1987 (nominally the supreme position in the Party hierarchy but in practical terms subordinate to that of the paramount leader, Deng Xiaoping 鄧小 平 [1904–1997]). Hu Yaobang was identified in Chinese intellectual circles as a liberal leader under whose aegis a much-needed relaxation in the intellectual atmosphere occurred. For more about Hu’s career, see, e.g., Baum 1997. (Translator).

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

300

Liu Zehua

arduous task that cannot be fulfilled instantly; rather it is a lengthy and potentially painful process. To accomplish this process, China must develop full selfawareness with regard to its history. What we need now is not blind adoration and beatification of the past but deeper awareness of its immense complexity, of both its positive and its negative features. Only then will we be able to liberate ourselves from the habit of adoring the sages, and especially the habit of adoring sage-monarchs.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

Bibliography Bibliography

301

Bibliography Alitto, Guy. 1986. The Last Confucian: Liang Shu-ming and the Chinese Dilemma of Modernity. 2nd ed. Berkeley: University of California Press. Allan, Sarah. 1981. The Heir and the Sage: Dynastic Legend in Early China. San Francisco: Chinese Materials Center. ———. 1991. The Shape of the Turtle: Myth, Art, and Cosmos in Early China. Albany: State University of New York Press. ———. 2006. “The Way of Tang Yao and Yu Shun.” In Rethinking Confucianism: Selected Papers from the Third International Conference on Excavated Chinese Manuscripts, Mount Holyoke College, April 2004, ed. Xing Wen, 22–46. San Antonio, TX: Trinity University. ———. 2009. “Not the Lun yu: The Chu Script Bamboo Slip Manuscript, Zigao, and the Nature of Early Confucianism.” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 72.1: 115–151. ———. 2010. “He Flies like a Bird; He Dives like a Dragon; Who Is That Man in the Tiger Mouth? Shamanic Images in Shang and Early Western Zhou Art.” Orientations 41.3: 45–51. An Zuozhang 安作璋 and Meng Xiangcai 孟祥才. 2005. Qin Shihuangdi dazhuan 秦 始皇帝大傳. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju. Arbuckle, Gary. 1987. “Former Han Legal Philosophy and the Gongyang zhuan.” bc. Asian Review 1: 1–25. ———. 1993. “Restoring Dong Zhongshu (bce 195–115): An Experi­ment in Historical and Philosophical Reconstruction.” PhD diss., University of British Columbia. Ann Arbor: UMI. ———. 1995. “Inevitable Treason: Dong Zhongshu’s Theory of Historical Cycles and Early Attempts to Invalidate the Han Mandate.” Journal of the American Oriental Society 115.4: 585–597. ———. 2004. “The Works of Dong Zhongshu and the Text Traditionally and Incorrectly Titled Luxuriant Dew of the Annals (Chunqiu fanlu), with Particular Attention to Section A (Chapters 1–17) of the Luxuriant Dew of the Annals.” Last revised September 2004; accessed February 22, 2008. http://www.sagesource.net/dong/works_part_A. html. Arnason, Johann P., Shmuel N. Eisenstadt, and Björn Wittrock, eds. 2005. Axial Civilization and World History. Leiden: Brill. Bagley, Robert W. 1980. “The High Yinxu Phase (Anyang Period).” In The Great Bronze Age of China: An Exhibition from the People’s Republic of China, edited by Wen Fong, 177–189. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004299337_012 Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

302

Bibliography

———. 1999. “Shang Archaeology.” In The Cambridge History of Ancient China: From the Origins of Civilization to 221 bc, ed. Michael Loewe and Edward L. Shaughnessy, 124– 231. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2004. “Anyang Writing and the Origin of the Chinese Writing System.” In The First Writing: Script Invention as History and Process, ed. Stephen D. Houston, 190–249. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bai Tongdong. 2012. China: The Political Philosophy of the Middle Kingdom. New York: Zed Books. Baihu tong shuzheng 白虎通疏證. 1997. Composed by Chen Li 陳立, collated by Wu Zeyu 吳則虞. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju. Baoshan Chu jian 包山楚簡. 1991. Published by Hubei Sheng Jing-Sha Tielu Kaogudui 湖北省荆沙鐵路考古隊. Beijing: Wenwu chubanshe. Baum, Richard. 1997. “The Road to Tiananmen: Chinese Politics in the 1980s.” In The Politics of China: The Eras of Mao and Deng, 2nd ed., ed. Roderick MacFarquhar, 340–471. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bealey, Frank. 2003. The Blackwell Dictionary of Political Science. Oxford: Blackwell. Behr, Wolfgang, and Joachim Gentz, eds. 2005. Komposition und Konnotation—Figuren der Kunstprosa im Alten China. Bochumer Jahrbuch für ostasiatische Forschung 29. Munich: Iudicium. Bell, Daniel A. 2008. China’s New Confucianism: ‎ Politics and Everyday Life in a Changing Society. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ———. 2015. The China Model: Political Meritocracy and the Limits of Democracy. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Bell, Daniel A., and Li Chenyang, eds. 2013. The Idea of Political Meritocracy: Confucian Politics in Contemporary Context. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bevir, Mark. 2010. Encyclopedia of Political Theory. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Bielenstein, Hans. 1980. The Bureaucracy of Han Times. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Billioud, Sébastien. 2010. “Carrying the Confucian Torch to the Masses: The Challenge of Structuring the Confucian Revival in the People’s Republic of China.” Oriens Extremus 49: 201–224. Bilsky, Lester James. 1975. The State Religion of Ancient China. Taibei: Chinese Association for Folklore. Black, Anthony. 2009. A World History of Ancient Political Thought. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Blackwell Encyclopedia of Political Thought. 1986. Edited by David Miller. Oxford: Blackwell. Bodde, Derk. 1938. China’s First Unifier: A Study of the Ch’in Dynasty as Seen in the Life of Li Ssŭ 李斯, 280?–208 bc. Leiden: Brill.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

Bibliography

303

———. 1981. “Harmony and Conflict in Chinese Philosophy.” Reprinted in Essays on Chinese Civilization, ed. Derk Bodde and Charles Le Blanc, 237–298. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ———. 1991. Chinese Thought, Society, and Science. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Boltz, William G. 1981. “Kung kung and the Flood: Reverse Euhemerism in the ‘Yao tien.’” T’oung Pao 67: 141–153. Bray, Francesca. 1984. Science and Civilisation in China. Vol. 6, pt. 2 “Agriculture.” Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Buckley, Chris. 2014. “Leader Taps into Chinese Classics in Seeking to Cement Power.” New York Times, October 11. Accessed November 18, 2014. http://www.nytimes. com/2014/10/12/world/leader-taps-into-chinese-classics-in-seeking-to-cement-power.html?_r=0. Bujard, Marianne. 2000. Le sacrifice au Ciel dans la Chine ancienne: Théorie et pratique sous les Han occidentaux. Paris: École française d’Extrême-Orient. Cai, Liang. 2011. “Excavating the Geneaology of Classical Studies in the Western Han Dynasty (206 bce–8 ce).” Journal of the American Oriental Society 131: 371–394. ———. 2014. Witchcraft and the Rise of the First Confucian Empire. Albany: State University of New York Press. Cai Wanjin 蔡萬進. 2007. “Liye Qin jian yandu santi” 里耶秦簡研讀三題. Hunan daxue xuebao (shehui kexue ban) 湖南大學學報(社會科學版) 21.1: 31–35. Cao Deben 曹德本, ed. 2006. Zhongguo chuantong zhengzhi wenhua de xiandai jiazhi 中國傳統政治文化的現代價值. Beijing: Qinghua daxue chubanshe. Cao Lüning 曹旅寧. 2006. “Zhangjiashan Han lü shuxing kaobian” 張家山漢律贖刑 考辨. Nanhua shifan daxue xuebao (shehui kexueban) 華南師範大學學報 (社會 科學版) 2006.1: 90–102. Cao Shujie 曹书杰. 2006. Hou Ji chuanshuo yu Ji si wenhua 后稷傳說與稷祀文化. Beijing: Shehui kexue wenxian chubanshe. Cao Yuying 曹毓英. 2005. Jing tian zhi yanjiu 井田制研究. Wuhan: Huazhong shifan daxue chubanshe. Chaffin, Cortney E. 2007. “Strange Creatures of Chu: Antlered Tomb Sculptures of the Spring and Autumn and Warring States Periods.” PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania. Chan, Hok-lam. 1984. Legitimation in Imperial China: Discussions under the Jurchen-Chin Dynasty (1115–1234). Seattle: University of Washington Press. Chan Hung Kan 陳雄根 and Ho Che Wah 何志華. 2003. Citations from the “Shangshu” to Be Found in Pre-Han and Han Texts (Xian-Qin liang Han dianji yin “Shangshu” ziliao huibian 先秦兩漢典籍引《尚書》資料彙編). Hong Kong: Chinese University. Chang, Kwang-chih. 1983. Art, Myth, and Ritual: The Path to Political Authority in Ancient China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

304

Bibliography

———. 2005. “The Rise of Kings and the Formation of City-States.” In The Formation of Chinese Civilization: An Archaeological Perspective, edited by Sarah Allan, 125–139. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Changshashi wenwu kaogu yanjiusuo 長沙市文物考古研究所, Zhongguo wenwu yanjiusuo 中國文物研究所, and Beijing daxue lishixuexi Zoumalou jiandu zhenglizu 北京大學歷史學系走馬樓簡牘整理組, eds. 2003. Changsha Zoumalou Sanguo Wu jian. Zhujian 長沙走馬樓三國吳簡·竹簡. Vol. 3. Beijing: Wenwu chubanshe. Chao Fulin 晁福林. 1995. “Chunqiu shiqi de guishen guannian jiqi shehui yingxiang” 春秋時期的鬼神觀念及其社會影響. Lishi yanjiu 5: 20–35. ———. 2002. “Guodian chujian ‘Ziyi’ yu Shangshu ‘Lüxing’” 郭店楚簡〈緇衣〉 與 《尚書· 呂刑 》. Shixueshi yanjiu 史學史研究2: 25–29. ———. 2003. Xian Qin shehui xingtai yanjiu 先秦社會形态研究. Beijing: Beijing shifan daxue chubanshe. Chen Dengwu 陳登武. 2003. “Fuchou xinshi—cong huangquan de jiaodu zai lun Tang Song fuchou ge an” 復讎新釋— 從皇權的角度再論唐宋復讎個案. Taiwan shida lishi xuebao 臺灣師大歷史學報 31: 1–36. Chen Jie 陳絜. 2009. “Liye ‘Huji jian’ yu Zhanguo moqi de jiceng shehui” 里耶“戶籍 簡”與戰國末期的基層社會. Lishi yanjiu 歷史研究 5: 23–40. Chen Mengjia 陳夢家. 1985. Shangshu tonglun 尚書通論. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju. Chen Peifen 陳佩芬. 2007. “Hu you” 虎卣. In Hunan chutu Yin-Shang Xi-Zhou qingtongqi 湖南出土殷商西周青銅器, edited by Hunan Sheng Bowuguan 湖南省博物馆, 508–513. Changsha: Yuelu shushe. Chen Qitai 陳其泰. 1997. Qingdai Gongyangxue 清代公羊學. Beijing: Dongfang chubanshe. Chen Qiyou 陳奇猷. 1958. Han Feizi jishi 韓非子集釋. Shanghai: Zhonghua shuju. Chen Wei 陳偉. 1998. “Guodian Chujian bieshi” 郭店楚簡別釋. Jiang-Han kaogu 江 漢考古 4: 67–72. ———, ed. 2012. Liye Qin jiandu jiao shi (di yi juan) 里耶秦簡牘校釋(第一卷). Wuhan: Wuhan daxue chubanshe. Chen Ying 陳英. 2010. Handai pin fu chaju yu zhengfu kongzhi yanjiu 漢代貧富差距與 政府控制研究. Beijing: Zhongguo shehui kexue chubanshe. Chen Zhiguo 陳治國. 2006. “Liye Qin jian ‘shou’ he ‘shoucheng’ shiyi ji qita” 里耶秦簡 “守”和“守丞”釋義及其他. Zhongguo lishi wenwu 中國歷史文物 3: 55–60. ———. 2007. “Cong Liye Qin jian kan Qin de gongwen zhidu” 從里耶秦簡看秦的公 文制度. Zhongguo lishi wenwu 1: 61–69. Cheng, Anne. 1985. Étude sur le Confucianisme Han: L’élaboration d’une tradition exégétique sur les classiques. Paris: Collège de France, Institut des hautes études chinoises. Cheng Shude 程樹德 (1877–1944). (1919) 1988. Hanlü kao 漢律考. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

Bibliography

305

Chuan jia ji 傳家集. By Sima Guang 司馬光 (1019–1086). E-Siku quanshu edition. Chunqiu fanlu yizheng 春秋繁露義證. 1992. Composed by Su Yu 蘇輿. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju. Chunqiu Gongyang zhuan zhushu 春秋公羊傳注疏. (1815) 1991. Annotated by He Xiu 何休 (129-182) and Xu Yan 徐彥 (fl. 800-820). In Shisan jing zhushu fu jiaokanji 十三 經注疏附校勘記, compiled by Ruan Yuan 阮元 (1764–1849), vol. 2, 2189–2355. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju. Chunqiu Zuozhuan zhengyi 春秋左傳正義. (1815) 1991. Annotated by Du Yu 杜預 (222285) and Kong Yingda 孔穎達 (574-648). In Shisan jing zhushu fu jiaokanji 十三經 注疏附校勘記, compiled by Ruan Yuan 阮元 (1764–1849), vol. 2, 1697–2188. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju. Chunqiu Zuozhuan zhu 春秋左傳注. 1990. Annotated by Yang Bojun 楊伯峻. Rev. ed. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju. Cook, Scott [see also Gu Shikao]. 2012. The Bamboo Texts of Guodian: A Study and Complete Translation.Vols. 1–2. Ithaca, NY: Cornell East Asia Series. Creel, Herrlee G. 1970. The Origins of Statecraft in China. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1974. Shen Pu-hai: A Chinese Political Philosopher of the Fourth Century bc. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Cua, Antonio S. 2005. Human Nature, Ritual, and History: Studies in Xunzi and Chinese Philosophy. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press. Cui Shi 崔適. 1918. Chunqiu fushi 春秋復始. Beijing: Beijing daxue chuban bu. Da Dai liji jiegu 大戴禮記解詁. 1983. Annotated by Wang Pinzhen 王聘珍 (fl. 1789). Edited by Wang Wenjin 王文錦. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju. Dai Shijun 戴世君. 2010. “Qin sifa wenshu ‘dang teng teng’ yongyu shiyi” 秦司法文書 “ 當騰騰” 用語釋義. Zhejiang shehui kexue 浙江社會科學 2: 99–103. ———. 2011. “Liye Qin jian bianzheng” 里耶秦簡辨正. Accessed September 27, 2011. www.bsm.org.cn/show_article.php?id=1485. Dawson, Raymond, tr. 1994. Sima Qian: Historical Records. Oxford: Oxford University Press. de Grazia, Sebastian, ed. 1973. Masters of Chinese Political Thought. New York: Viking. Defoort, Carine. 2001. “Is There Such a Thing as Chinese Philosophy? Arguments of an Implicit Debate.” Philosophy East and West 51.3: 393–413. Delaney, John J. 1980. Dictionary of Saints. Westminster: Doubleday. Deng Peiling 鄧佩玲. 2011. Tianming, guishen yu zhudao: Dong-Zhou jinwen guci tanlun 天命、鬼神與祝禱：東周金文嘏辭探論. Taibei: Yiwen yinshuaguan. Deng Xiaonan 鄧小南. 2006. Zuzong zhi fa—Bei Song qianqi zhengzhi shulue 祖宗之 法— 北宋前期政治疏略. Beijing: Sanlian. Denzau, Arthur T., and Douglass C. North. 1994. “Shared Mental Models: Ideologies and Institutions.” Kyklos 47: 3–31.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

306

Bibliography

Di fan 帝範. By Li Shimin 李世民 (aka Tang Taizong 唐太宗, 598–649). E-Siku quanshu edition. Ding Ya 丁亞傑. 2002. Qingmo Minchu Gongyangxue yanjiu—Pi Xirui, Liao Ping, Kang Youwei 清末民初公羊學研究— 皮錫瑞、廖平、康有為. Taibei: Wanjuanlou. Dorofeeva-Lichtmann, Vera. 2009. “Ritual Practices for Constructing Terrestrial Space (Warring States–Early Han).” In Early Chinese Religion, pt. 1, Shang through Han (1250 bc–220 ad), edited by John Lagerwey and Marc Kalinowski, vol. 1, 595–644. Leiden: Brill. Du Qingyu 杜慶余. 2010. Handai tian zhuang yanjiu 漢代田莊研究. Jinan: Shandong daxue chubanshe. Du Zhengsheng 杜正勝. 1990. Bianhu qimin: chuantong zhengzhi shehui jiegou zhi xingcheng 編戶齊民：傳統政治社會結構之形成. Taibei: Lianjing. Duan Xizhong 段熙仲. 2002. Chunqiu Gongyangxue jiangshu 春秋公羊學講疏. Nanjing: Nanjing Shifan Daxue chubanshe. Duan Yucai 段玉裁 (1735–1815). 1988. Shuowen jiezi zhu 說文解字注. Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe. Dull, Jack L. 1966. “A Historical Introduction to the Apocryphal (Ch’an-wei) Texts of the Han Dynasty.” Ph.D. diss., University of Washington. Durrant, Stephen W. 1995. The Cloudy Mirror: Tension and Conflict in the Writings of Sima Qian. Albany: State University of New York Press. Duyvendak, Jan J. L. 1963. The Book of Lord Shang: A Classic of the Chinese School of Law. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Eberhard, Wolfram. (1948) 1977. A History of China. Repr., Berkeley: University of California Press. Eisenstadt, Shmuel Noah. 1986. “Introduction: The Axial Age Breakthrough in India and China.” In The Origins and Diversity of Axial Age Civilizations, edited by S.N. Eisenstadt, 291–305. Albany: State University of New York Press. Elman, Benjamin A.1990. Classicism, Politics, and Kinship. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 2000. A Cultural History of Civil Examinations in Late Imperial China. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 2001. From Philosophy to Philology: Intellectual and Social Aspects of Change in Late Imperial China. 2nd, rev. ed. Los Angeles: UCLA Asian Pacific Monograph Series. Van Els, Paul. 2013. “How to End Wars with Words: Three Argumentative Strategies by Mozi and His Followers.” In The Mozi as an Evolving Text, ed. Carine Defoort and Nicholas Standaert, 69–94. Leiden: Brill. Ernian lüling yu zou yan shu: Zhangjiashan ersiqihao Han mu chutu falü wenxian shidu 二年律令與奏讞書: 張家山二四七號漢墓出土法律文獻釋讀. 2007. Edited by Peng Hao 彭浩, Chen Wei 陳偉, and Kudō Mutoo 工藤元男. Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

Bibliography

307

Van Ess, Hans. 1993. “Die geheimen Worte des Ssu-ma Ch’ien.” Oriens Extremus 36.1: 1–28. ———. 2014. “Emperor Wu of the Han and the First August Emperor of Qin in Sima Qian’s Shiji.” In: Birth of an Empire: The State of Qin Revisited. Ed. Yuri Pines, Lothar von Falkenhausen, Gideon Shelach and Robin D.S. Yates, 239–257. Berkeley: University of California Press. Falkenhausen, Lothar von. 2006. Chinese Society in the Age of Confucius (1000–250 bc): The Archaeological Evidence. Los Angeles: Cotsen Institute of Archaeology, UCLA. ———. 2008. “Stages in the Development of ‘Cities’ in Pre-Imperial China.” In The Ancient City: New Perspectives on Urbanism in the Old and New World, edited by Joyce Marcus and Jeremy A. Sabloff, 209–228. Santa Fe, NM: School for Advanced Research. Fan Wenlan 范文瀾 (1893–1969). 1956. Zhongguo tongshi jianbian 中國通史簡編. Rev. ed. 2 vols. Beijing: Renmin chubanshe. Farmer, Edward L. 1995. Zhu Yuanzhang and Early Ming Legislation: The Reordering of Chinese Society Following the Era of Mongol Rule. Leiden: Brill. Fayan zhu 法言注. 1992. By Yang Xiong 楊雄 (53 bce–18 ce). Annotated by Han Jing 韓敬. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju. Fen shu 焚書. 1975. By Li Zhi 李贄 (1527–1602). Beijing: Zhonghua shuju. Feng Qiyong 馮其庸 and Deng Ansheng 鄧安生. 2006. Tongjiazi huishi 通假字彙釋. Beijing: Beijing daxue chubanshe. Feng Youlan. 1952. History of Chinese Philosophy. Translated by Derk Bodde. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Fisher, Carney T. 1990. The Chosen One: Succession and Adoption in the Court of Ming Shizong. Boston: Allen and Unwin. Flad, Rowan K., and Pochan Chen. 2013. Ancient Central China: Centers and Peripheries along the Yangzi River. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Foucault, Michel. 1981a. “Omnes et Singulatim: Towards a Critique of ‘Political Reason.’” In The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, edited by S. McMurrin, vol. 2, 223–254. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1981b. “The Order of Discourse.” In Untying the Text: A Post-structuralist Reader, edited by R. Young, 48–78. Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Originally published as “L’ordre du discours” (1970). ———. 2007. Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the College de France, 1977–78. Translated by Graham Burchell. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Furniss, Ingrid. 2008. Music in Ancient China: An Archaeological and Art Historical Study of Strings, Winds, and Drums during the Eastern Zhou and Han Periods (770 bce–220 ce). Amherst, NY: Cambria. Galambos, Imre. 2006. Orthography of Early Chinese Writing: Evidence from Newly Excavated Manuscripts. Budapest: Department of East Asian Studies, Eötvös Loránd University.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

308

Bibliography

Gao Min 高敏. 1987. “Qin Han de huji zhidu” 秦漢的戶籍制度. Qiu suo 求索 1: 72–81. ———. 2000. “Guanyu Qin shi fuyizhe nianling wenti de tantao: Du ‘Shuihudi Qin jian’ zhaji” 關於秦時服役者年齡問題的探討: 讀“ 睡虎地秦簡” 札記. Reprinted in Gao Min, Shuihudi Qin jian chu tan 睡虎地秦簡初探, 7–14. Taibei: Wanjuanlou. Ge Quan 葛荃. 2003. Quanli zaizhi lixing: Shiren, chuantong zhengzhi wenhua yu Zhongguo shehui 權力宰制理性— 士人、傳統政治文化與中國社會. Tianjin: Nankai daxue chubanshe. Geiss, James. 1988. “The Chia-ching Reign, 1522–1566.” In The Cambridge History of China, vol. 7, The Ming Dynasty, 1368–1644, Part 1, edited by Frederick W. Mote and Denis Twitchett, 440–510. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gentz, Joachim. 2001. Das Gongyang zhuan: Auslegung und Kanonisierung der Frühlings und Herbstannalen (Chunqiu). Opera Sinologica 12. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag. ———. 2005. “The Ritual Meaning of Textual Form: Evidence from Early Commentaries of the Historiographic and Ritual Traditions.” In Text and Ritual in Early China, edited by Martin Kern, 124–148. Seattle: University of Washington Press. ———. 2009a. “Language of Heaven, Exegetical Skepticism and the Reinsertion of Religious Concepts in the Gongyang Tradition.” In Early Chinese Religion, pt. 1, Shang through Han (1250 bc–220 ad), edited by John Lagerwey and Marc Kalinowski, 813– 838. Leiden: Brill. ———. 2009b. “Mohist Traces in the Early Chunqiu fanlu Chapters.” Oriens Extremus 48: 55–70. ———. 2010. “‘Living in the Same House’: Ritual Principles in Early Chinese Reflections on Mourning Garments.” In Ritual Dynamics and the Science of Ritual, edited by Axel Michaels, vol. 1, section 2, “Ritual Discourse, Ritual Performance in China and Japan,” edited by Gil Raz, Katja Triplett, and Lucia Dolce, 371–396. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz. ———. 2012. “Confucius Confronting Contingency in the Lunyu and the Gongyang zhuan.” Journal of Chinese Philosophy 39.1: 60–70. ———. Forthcoming. “Defining Boundaries and Relations between Textual Units: Examples from the Literary Tool-Kit of Early Chinese Argumentation.” In Literary Forms of Argument in Early China, edited by Joachim Gentz and Dirk Meyer. Leiden: Brill. Gentz, Joachim, and Dirk Meyer, eds. Forthcoming. Literary Forms of Argument in Early China. Leiden: Brill. Gerring, John. 1997. “Ideology: A Definitional Analysis.” Political Research Quarterly 50.4: 957–994. Giele, Enno. 2005. “Signatures of ‘Scribes’ in Early Imperial China.” Asiatische Studien 59.1: 353–387. Goldin, Paul R. 1999. Rituals of the Way: The Philosophy of Xunzi. Chicago: Open Court. ———. 2002. The Culture of Sex in Ancient China. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

Bibliography

309

———. 2005a. After Confucius: Studies in Early Chinese Philosophy. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. ———. 2005b. “The Theme of the Primacy of the Situation in Classical Chinese Philosophy and Rhetoric.” Asia Major, 3rd ser., 18.2: 1–25. ———. 2008. “When Zhong Does Not Mean ‘Loyalty.’” Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy 7: 165–174. ———. 2010. “The Hermeneutics of Emmentaler.” Warring States Papers 1: 75–78. ———. 2011a. “Persistent Misconceptions about Chinese ‘Legalism.’” Journal of Chinese Philosophy 38.1: 64–80. ———. 2011b. “Why Mozi Is Included in the Daoist Canon—Or, Why There Is More to Mohism than Utilitarian Ethics.” In How Should One Live? Comparing Ethics in Ancient China and Greco-Roman Antiquity, edited by R.A.H. King and Dennis Schilling, 63–91. Berlin: De Gruyter. ———. 2011c. “Steppe Nomads as a Philosophical Problem in Classical China.” In Mapping Mongolia: Situating Mongolia in the World from Geologic Time to the Present, edited by Paula L.W. Sabloff, 220–246. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. ———. 2012. “Han Law and the Regulation of Interpersonal Relations: ‘The Confucianization of the Law’ Revisited.” Asia Major, 3rd. ser., 25.1: 1–31. ———. 2013a. “Introduction: Han Fei and the Han Feizi.” In Dao Companion to the Philosophy of Han Fei, edited by Paul R. Goldin, 1–21. Dordrecht: Springer. ———. 2013b. “Non-deductive Argumentation in Classical Chinese Philosophy.” Paper presented at the Leiden University Anecdotes Workshop, May 31–June 2. ———, comp. 2014. “Ancient Chinese Civilization: Bibliography of Materials in Western Languages.” http://www.sas.upenn.edu/ealc/paul-r-goldin. Gong Xian 龔賢. 2010. Qin Han guanli sixiang 秦漢管理思想. Beijing: Jingji guanli chubanshe. Goodrich, Luther C. 1966. The Literary Inquisition of Ch’ien-Lung. 2nd ed. New York: Paragon Book Reprint Corp. Graham, Angus C. 1979. “The Nung-chia ‘School of Tillers’ and the Origins of Peasant Utopianism in China.” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 42.1: 66–100. ———. 1989. Disputers of the Tao: Philosophical Argument in Ancient China. La Salle, IL: Open Court. Granet, Marcel (1884–1940). 1952. La féodalité chinoise. Oslo: H. Aschehoug. ———. 1957. Chinese Civilization. New York: Barnes and Noble. Graziani, Romain. 2011. Les corps dans le taoïsme ancien: L’infirme, l’informe, l’infâme. Collection Realia. Paris: Belles Lettres.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

310

Bibliography

———. 2012. “Rhetoric That Heals, Rhetoric That Kills.” In “Political Rhetoric in Early China,” edited by Paul van Els, Romain Graziani, Yuri Pines, and Elisa Sabatini, special issue, Extrême-Orient Extrême-Occident 34: 41–78. Gu Derong 顧德融 and Zhu Shunlao 朱順老. 2001. Chunqiu shi 春秋史. Shanghai: Shanghai renmin chubanshe. Gu Jiegang 顧頡剛 (1893–1980). (1926) 1988. “Gu shi bian di yi ce zi xu” 古史辨第一冊 自序. Reprinted in Gu Jiegang gu shi lunwenji 顧頡剛古史論文集, edited by Pian Yuqian 駢宇騫, vol. 1, 1–100. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju. ———. 1932. Shangshu yanjiu jiangyi 尚書研究講義. N.p.: n.p. ———. 1979. “‘Zhou gong zhi li’ de chuanshuo he ‘Zhou guan’ yi shu de chuxian” ‘ 周 公制禮’ 的傳說和‘ 周官’ 一書的出現. Wen shi 文史6: 1–40. Gu Jiegang 顧頡剛 (1893–1980) and Liu Qiyu 劉起釪 (1917–2012). 2005. Shangshu jiaoshi yilun 尚書校釋譯論. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju. Gu lienü zhuan 古列女傳. Composed by Liu Xiang 劉向 (79–8 bce). E-Siku quanshu edition. Gu Shikao 顧史考 [see also Cook, Scott]. 2008. “Chuwen ‘hu’ zi zhi shuangchong yongfa: shuo ‘Jing Gong “gu”’ ji Miaomin ‘wu “hao” zhi xing’” 楚文「唬」字之雙重用法： 說「競公『痼』」及苗民「五『號』之刑」. Guwenzi yanjiu 古文字研究 27: 387–393. ———. 2012. “Cong chutu wenxian kan xian-Qin banben jian de guanxi: Yi Qi Jing Gong bing jiu de gushi wei li” 從出土文獻看先秦版本間的關係：以齊景公病久的 故事為例. Paper presented at the “‘Jianbo wenxian sixiangshi yanjiu de fangfalun qishi’ gongzuofang” 「簡帛文獻對思想史研究的方法論啓示」工作坊, Re­ search Centre for Chinese Philosophy and Culture, Department of Philosophy, The Chinese University of Hong Kong. Guanzi jiaozhu 管子校注. 2004. Compiled by Li Xiangfeng 黎翔鳳. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju. Guisso, R. W. L. 1978. Wu Tse-tien and the Politics of Legitimation in Tang China. Bellingham: Western Washington University Press. Guo Moruo 郭沫若 (1892–1978). 1954. Jinwen congkao 金文叢考. Beijing: Renmin chubanshe. Guodian Chu mu zhujian 郭店楚墓竹簡. 1998. Edited by Jingmenshi bowuguan 荊門 市博物館. Beijing: Wenwu chubanshe. Guoyu jijie 國語集解. 2002. Compiled by Xu Yuangao 徐元誥 (1876-1955). Collated by Wang Shumin 王樹民 and Shen Changyun 沈長雲. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju. Hama Hisao 濱久雄. 1987. “Shunjū no seisaku to Kuyō den no seiritsu” 春秋の制作と 公羊傳の成立. Daitō bunka Daigaku kiyō ( jimbun kagaku) 大東文化大學紀要( 人文科學) 25: 61–81. ———. 1992. Kuyōgaku no seiritsu to sono tenkai 公羊學の成立とその展開. Tokyo: Kokusho kankōkai.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

Bibliography

311

Han Changli wenji jiaozhu 韓昌黎文集校注. 1988. By Han Yu 韓愈 (768–824). Annotated and edited by Ma Qichang 馬其昶 and Ma Maoyuan 馬茂元. Shanghai: Guji chubanshe. Han Feizi jijie 韩非子集解. 1998. Compiled by Wang Xianshen 王先慎 (1859-1922). Beijing: Zhonghua shuju. Han shi waizhuan jishi 韓詩外傳集釋. 2009. Attributed to Han Ying 韓嬰 (fl. 150 bce). Annotated by Xu Weiyu 許維遹. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju. Han Wei 韓偉. 2001. Moyan shugao—Han Wei kaogu wenji 磨硯書稿— 韓偉考古文 集. Beijing: Kexue chubanshe. Hanshu 漢書. 1997. By Ban Gu 班固 (32-92) et al. Annotated by Yan Shigu 顏師古 (581645). Beijing: Zhonghua shuju. Hanyu dazidian 漢語大字典. 1986. Chengdu: Sichuan cishu chubanshe. Hara Motoko 原宗子. 2005. “Nōhon” shugi to “ōdō” no hassei: Kodai Chūgoku no haikatsu to kankyō 2 “農本”主義と“黃土”の发生——古代中国の開发と環境 2. Tokyo: Genbun shuppan. He Shuangquan 何雙全 and Chen Songmei 陳松梅. 2009. “Qinlü zhi zixing yu shuxing qianlun—du Liye Qin du wenshu” 秦律貲刑與贖刑淺論— 讀里耶秦牘文書. In Liye gucheng: Qin jian yu Qin wenhua yanjiu 里耶古城: 秦簡與秦文化研究, edited by Zhongguo shehui kexue kaogu yanjiusuo, 127–140. Beijing: Kexue chubanshe. He Xichun 何希淳. 1966. Liji zhengyi yin yishu kao 禮記正義引佚書考. Taibei: Jiaxin shuini gongsi wenhua jijinhui. He Ziquan 何玆全. 2001. Zhongguo gudai shehui 中國古代社會. Beijing: Beijing Shifan Daxue chubanshe. Hegel, Georg W. F. 2009. Lectures on the History of Philosophy, 1825–6. Vol. 1, Introduction and Oriental Philosophy. Edited by Robert F. Brown. Translated by Robert F. Brown and J.M. Stewart with the assistance of H.S. Harris. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Hihara Toshikuni 日原利國. 1976. Shunjū Kuyō den no kenkyū 春秋公羊傳の研究. Tokyo: Sōbunsha. Hiraoka Takeo 平岡武夫. (1946) 1983. Keisho no seiritsu: tenkateki sekaikan 經書の成 立: 天下的世界觀. Repr., Tokyo: Sōbunsha. Holladay, Edmund Burke. 1967. “State Sacrifices in the Former Han Dynasty according to the Official Histories.” PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley. Hong Mai 洪邁 (1123–1202). Rongzhai suibi 容齋隨筆. E-Siku quanshu edition. Hongwu yuzhi quanshu 洪武禦制全書. 1995. By Zhu Yuanzhang 朱元璋 (aka Ming Taizu 明太祖, 1328–1398). Edited by Zhang Dexin 張德信 and Mao Fengqi 毛佩琦. Hefei: Huangshan shushe. Hou Hanshu 後漢書. 1997. By Fan Ye 范曄 (398–445) et al. Annotated by Li Xian 李賢 (653–684) et al. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

312

Bibliography

Hsiao Kung-Chuan [Xiao Gongquan 蕭公權]. 1979. A History of Chinese Political Thought. Vol. 1, From the Beginnings to the Sixth Century ad. Translated by Frederick W. Mote. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Hsing I-t’ien 邢義田. 2006. “Hunan Longshan Liye J1(8)157 he J1(9)1-12 hao Qin du de wenshu goucheng, biji he yuandang cunfang xingshi” 湖南龍山里耶J1(8)157 和 J1(9)1-12 號秦牘的文書購成, 筆跡和原檔存放形式. Jianbo 簡帛 1: 275–296. ———. 2007. “Longshan Liye Qin Qianling xiancheng yizhi chutu mouxiang Nanyangli hujijian shitan” 龍山里耶秦遷陵縣城遺址出土某鄉南陽里戶籍簡試探. Accessed September 22, 2011.www.bsm.org.cn/show_article.php?id=744. ———. 2014. “Qin-Han Census and Tax and Corvée Administration: Notes on Newly Discovered Materials.” In Birth of an Empire: The State of Qin Revisited, edited by Yuri Pines, Lothar von Falkenhausen, Gideon Shelach, and Robin D.S. Yates, 155–186. Berkeley: University of California Press. Hsu Cho-yun. 1980. Han Agriculture: The Formation of Early Chinese Agrarian Economy (206 bc–ad 220). Seattle: University of Washington Press. Hsu, Cho-yun, and Katheryn M. Linduff. 1988. Western Chou Civilization. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Hu Jiacong 胡家聰. 2003. Guanzi xin tan 管子新探. Beijing: Zhongguo shehui kexue chubanshe. Hu Jichuang 胡寄窗. 1981. Zhongguo jingji sixiang shi jianbian 中國經濟思想史簡编. Beijing: Zhongguo shehui kexue chubanshe. Hu Zhuangsu gong wenji 胡壯肅公文集. 1995–1997. By Hu Song 胡松 (jinshi 1529). Reprinted in Siku quanshu cunmu congshu 四庫全書存目叢書, Jibu 集部, vol. 911. Jinan: Qi-Lu shushe chubanshe. Huainanzi honglie jijie 淮南子鴻烈集解. 1992. Edited by Liu Wendian 劉文典. Taibei: Wenshizhe. Huang Di shu. See Mawangdui Han mu boshu “Huang Di shu” jianzheng 2004. Huang Huaixin 黃懷信. 2006. Yi Zhou shu jiaobu zhuyi 逸周書校補注譯. Xi’an: Sanqin. Huang Junliang 黃君良. 2003. “‘Zhongxin zhi dao’ yu Zhanguo shiqi de zhongxin sichao” 《忠信之道》與戰國時期的忠信思潮. Guanzi xuekan 管子學刊 3: 35–41. Huang Kaiguo 黃開國. 2013. Gongyangxue fazhan shi 公羊學發展史. Beijing: Renmin chubanshe. Huang, Ray. 1981. 1587, a Year of No Significance: The Ming Dynasty in Decline. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Huang Zhanyue 黃展岳. 2009. “Liye Qin jian ‘chuansong weishu’ zhe de shenfen” 里 耶秦簡“傳送委輸”者的身份. In Liye gucheng: Qin jian yu Qin wenhua yanjiu 里耶古城: 秦簡與秦文化研究, edited by Zhongguo shehui kexue kaogu yanjiusuo 中國社會科學院考古研究所 et al., 114–121. Beijing: Kexue chubanshe. Hui Fuping 惠富平. 2000. Shiji yu Zhongguo nongye 史記與中國農業. Xian: Shaanxi renmin chubanshe.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

Bibliography

313

Hulsewé, A. F. P. 1985. Remnants of Ch’in Law: An Annotated Translation of the Ch’in Legal and Administrative Rules of the 3rd Century bc. Discovered in Yün-meng Prefecture, Hu-pei Province, in 1975. Leiden: Brill. Hunansheng wenwu kaogu yanjiusuo 湖南省文物考古研究所. 2007. Liye fajue baogao 里耶發掘報告. Changsha: Yuelu shushe. Hunansheng wenwu kaogu yanjiusuo 湖南省文物考古研究所 et al. 2003a. “Hunan Longshan Liye Zhanguo—Qindai gucheng yihaojing fajue jianbao” 湖南省龍山里 耶戰國 – 秦代古城一號井發掘簡報. Wenwu 1: 4–35. ———. 2003b. “Xiangxi Liye Qindai jiandu xuanshi” 湘西里耶秦代簡牘選釋. Zhongguo lishi wenwu 中國歷史文物 1: 8–25. Hunter, Michael. 2013. “The Difficulty with ‘The Difficulties of Persuasion’ (‘Shuinan’ 說 難).” In Dao Companion to the Philosophy of Han Fei, edited by Paul R. Goldin, 169–196. Dordrecht: Springer. Ikeda On 池田温. 1979. Chūgoku kodai sekichō kenkyū: Gaikan, rokubun 中國古代籍 帳研究— 概觀, 錄文. Tokyo: Tōkyō Daigaku Shuppansha. Jaspers, Karl. 1965. The Origin and Goal of History. Translated by Michael Bullock. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Ji Kang ji 嵇康集. 1970. By Ji Kang 嵇康 (223–262). Compiled by Lu Xun 魯迅. Hong Kong: Xinyi chubanshe. Jiang Jianping 蔣建平 et al. 1990. Zhongguo shangye jingji sixiang shi 中國商業經濟 思想史. Beijing: Zhongguo caizheng jingji chubanshe. Jiang Qing 蔣慶. 2013. A Confucian Constitutional Order: How China’s Ancient Past Can Shape Its Political Future. Translated by Edmund Ryden. Edited by Daniel A. Bell and Ruiping Fan. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Jiang Shanguo 蔣善國. 1988. Shangshu zongshu 尚書綜述. Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe. Jiang Yougao 江有誥. See Yunxue shishu 1993. Jiang Youyu 江右瑜. 2005. “Fansheng yu zhongjian ‘Chunqiu Gongyang shu’ de jiejing taidu yu licheng” 反省與重建《春秋公羊疏》的解經態度與立場. Fengjia renwen shehui xuebao 逢甲人文社會學報 11: 109–139. Jin Chunfeng 金春風. 1993. Zhouguan zhi chengshu jiqi fanying de wenhua yu shidai xinkao 周官之成書及其反映的文化與時代新考. Taibei: Dongda tushu gongsi. Jinshu 晉書 1997. By Fang Xuanling 房玄齡 (578–648) et al. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju. Jost, John T., Christopher M. Federico, and Jaime Napier. 2009. “Political Ideology: Its Structure, Functions, and Elective Affinities.” Annual Review of Psychology 60: 307–337. Kanaya Osamu 金谷治. 1992. Shin Kan shisōshi kenkyū 秦漢思想史研究. Kyoto: Heirakuji shoten.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

314

Bibliography

Kane, Virginia. 1974–1975. “The Independent Bronze Industries in the South of China Contemporary with the Shang and Western Zhou Dynasties.” Archives of Asian Art 28: 77–107. Kantorowicz, Ernst H. 1957. The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Karlgren, Bernhard. 1946. “Legends and Cults in Ancient China.” Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities 18: 199–365. ———. 1950. The Book of Documents. Göteborg: Elanders Boktryckeri Aktiebolag, 1950. ———. 1964. Glosses on the “Book of Odes.” Göteborg: Elanders Boktryckeri Aktiebolag. ———. 1970. Glosses on the “Book of Documents.” Göteborg: Elanders Boktryckeri Aktiebolag. Kern, Martin. 1997. Die Hymnen der chinesischen Staatsopfer: Literatur und Ritual in der politischen Repräsentation von der Han-Zeit bis zu den Sechs Dynastien. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag. ———. 2000a. The Stele Inscriptions of Ch’in Shih-huang: Text and Ritual in Early Chinese Imperial Representation. New Haven, CT: American Oriental Society. ———. 2000b. “Religious Anxiety and Political Interest in Western Han Omen Interpretation: The Case of the Han Wudi Period (141–87 bc).” Studies in Chinese History 10: 1–31. ———. 2000c. “Shi jing Songs as Performance Texts: A Case Study of ‘Chu ci’ (‘Thorny Caltrop’).” Early China 25: 49–111. ———. ­­­2002. “Methodological Reflections on the Analysis of Textual Variants and the Modes of Manuscript Production in Early China.” Journal of East Asian Archaeology 4.1–4: 143–181. ———. 2003. “Western Han Aesthetics and the Genesis of the Fu.” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 63.2: 383–437. ———. 2004. “The Poetry of Han Historiography.” Early Medieval China 10–11.1: 23–65. ———. 2005. “The Odes in Excavated Manuscripts.” In Text and Ritual in Early China, edited by Martin Kern, 149–193. Seattle: University of Washington Press. ———. 2009. “Bronze Inscriptions, the Shijing and the Shangshu: The Evolution of the Ancestral Sacrifice during the Western Zhou.” In Early Chinese Religion,pt. 1, Shang through Han (1250 bc–220 ad), edited by John Lagerwey and Marc Kalinowski, 143– 200. Leiden: Brill. ———. Forthcoming-a. “Early Chinese Divination and its Rhetoric.” ———. Forthcoming-b. “Style and Poetic Diction in the Xunzi.” In Dao Companion to Xunzi, edited by Eric Hutton. Dordrecht: Springer. Kleingärtner, Sunhild. 2014. “Reuse of Foreign Objects.” In Vikings: Life and Legend, edited by Gareth Williams et al., 74–75. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Kline, T. C., III, and Philip J. Ivanhoe, eds. 2000. Virtue, Nature, and Moral Agency in the “Xunzi.” Indianapolis: Hackett.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

Bibliography

315

Knoblock, John, tr. 1988–1994. Xunzi: A Translation and Study of the Complete Works. 3 vols. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Kominami Ichirō 小南一郎. 1992. “Temmei to toku” 天命と德. Tōhō gakuhō 64: 1–59. Korolkov, Maxim. 2010. “Zemel’noe zakonodatel’stvo i kontrol’ gosudarstva nad zemlej v epokhu Chzhan’go i v nachale ranneimperskoj epokhi (po dannym vnov’ obnaruzhennykh zakonodatel’nykh tekstov.” PhD diss., Russian Academy of Sciences, Institute of Oriental Studies. Kwong, Luke S.K. 1984. A Mosaic of the Hundred Days: Personalities, Politics, and Ideas of 1898. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lau, Ulrich. 2005. “The Scope of Private Jurisdiction in Early Imperial China.” Asiatische Studien: Zeitschrift der Schweizerischen Gesellschaft für Asienkunde 1: 333–352. Lawton, Thomas. 1982. Chinese Art of the Warring States Period: Change and Continuity, 480–222 bc. Washington, DC: Freer Gallery of Art. Le Aiguo 樂爱國. 2004. Guanzi de keji sixiang 管子的科技思想. Beijing: Kexue chubanshe. Legge, James (1815–1897). (1885) 1976. The Li Chi. Vol. 27 of The Sacred Books of the East, Sacred Books of China, the Texts of Confucianism, edited by Max Müller. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass. ———. 1893–1895. The Chinese Classics. 2nd ed. 5 vols. Oxford: Clarendon. ———. (1893–1895) 1991. The Chinese Classics. Vol. 3, The Shoo King. Taibei: SMC Publishing. ———. 2000a. The Shu King or Book of Historical Documents. Repr., Taibei: SMC Publishing. ———. 2000b. The Book of Poetry. Repr., Taibei: SMC Publishing. Lei Jiaji 雷家驥. 1990. Zhonggu shixue guannian shi 中古史學觀念史. Taibei: Xuesheng shuju. Levi, Jean. 2010. La dispute sur le sel et le fer. Paris: Les Belles Lettres. Lewis, Mark Edward. 1990. Sanctioned Violence in Early China. Albany: State University of New York Press. ———. 1999a. “Warring States: Political History.” In The Cambridge History of Ancient China: From the Origins of Civilization to 221 bc, edited by Michael Loewe and Edward L. Shaughnessy, 587–650. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1999b. Writing and Authority in Early China. Albany: State University of New York Press. ———. 2006. The Construction of Space in Early China. Albany: State University of New York Press. ———. 2007. The Early Chinese Empires. Cambridge, MA: Belknap. Li Feng. 1997. “Ancient Reproductions and Calligraphic Variations: Studies of Western Zhou Bronzes with ‘Identical’ Inscriptions.” Early China 22: 1–41.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

316

Bibliography

———. 2003. “‘Feudalism’ in Western Zhou China: A Criticism.” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 63.1: 115–144. ———. 2006. Landscape and Power in Early China: The Crisis and Fall of the Western Zhou, 1045–771 bc. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2008. Bureaucracy and the State in Early China: Governing the Western Zhou. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2011. “Literacy and the Social Contexts of Writing in the Western Zhou.” In Writing and Literacy in Early China: Studies from the Columbia Early China Seminar, edited by Li Feng and David Prager Branner, 271–301. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Li Genpan 李根蟠. 1997. Zhongguo nongye shi 中國農業史. Taibei: Wenjin. Li Jianjun 李建軍. 2008. Song dai “Chunqiu” xue yu Songxing wenhua 宋代《春秋》 學與宋型文化. Beijing: Zhongguo shehuikexue chubanshe. Li Jixiang 李紀祥. 2013. “Xi Han fengjue Kongzi de liang zhong zouxiang: Xueyuanxing yu fei xueyuanxing” 西漢封爵孔子的兩种走向：血緣性與非血緣性. Wen shi zhe 文史哲 4: 70–80. Li Ling 李零. 2004. Rushan yu chusai 入山與出塞. Beijing: Wenwu chubanshe. ———. 2007. Sang jia gou: Wo du Lunyu 喪家狗：我讀論語. Taiyuan: Shanxi chubanshe. Li Longxian 李隆獻. 2012. Fuchouguan de shengcha yi quanshi: Xianqin Lianghan Weijin Nanbeichao bian 復仇觀的省察與詮釋：先秦兩漢魏晉南北朝隋唐編. Taibei: Guoli Taiwan Daxue chuban zhongxin. Li Mingzhao 黎明釗. 2009. “Liye Qin jian: Huji dang’an de tantao” 里耶秦簡: 戶籍檔 案的探討. Zhongguoshi yanjiu 中國史研究 2: 5–23. Li Shisheng 黎石生. 2009. “Liye Qin jian zhong de liangge xiao wenti” 里耶秦簡中的 兩個小問題. In Liye gucheng—Qin jian yu Qin wenhua yanjiu 里耶古城 – 秦簡與 秦文化研究, edited by Zhongguo shehui kexue kaogu yanjiusuo et al., 181–187. Beijing: Kexue chubanshe. Li, Wai-yee. 2007. The Readability of the Past in Early Chinese Historiography. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center. Li Xueqin 李學勤. 1997. Zouchu yigu shidai 走出疑古時代. Rev. ed. Shenyang: Liaoning Daxue chubanshe. ———. 2003. “Chudu Liye Qin jian” 初讀里耶秦簡. Wenwu 文物 1: 73–81. ———, ed. 2010. Qinghua daxue cang zhanguo zhujian 清華大學藏戰國竹簡. Vol. 1. Shanghai: Shanghai Zhongxi. Li Yaguang 李亞光. 2009. Zhanguo nongye shigang 戰國農業史綱. Changchun: Jilin daxue. Li Yujie 李玉潔. 2001. Chuguo shi 楚國史. Kaifeng: Henan Daxue chubanshe. Li Yu-ning, ed. 1977. Shang Yang’s Reforms and State Control in China. White Plains, NY: M.E. Sharpe.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

Bibliography

317

Liang Jiamian 梁家勉. 2002. “Shijing zhi nongye ji nong zhiwu yanjiu” 詩經之農業及 農植物研究. In Liang Jiamian nongshi wenji 梁家勉農史文集, edited by Ni Genjin 倪根金, 298–322. Beijing: Zhongguo nongye chubanshe. Liang Qichao 梁啟超 (1873–1929). (1920) 1991. “Ouyou xinying lu jielu” 歐游心影錄節 錄. Reprinted in Liang Qichao, Yinbingshi wenji dianjiao 飲冰室文集點校, edited by Wu Song 吳松 et al., 3474–3504. Kunming: Yunnan jiaoyu chubanshe. ———. 1936. “Yaoji jieti ji qi dufa” 要籍解題及其讀法. Reprinted in Liang Qichao, Yinbingshi heji 飲冰室合集, vol. 15. Shanghai: Zhonghua shuju. Liang Tao 梁濤. 2008. Guodian zhujian yu Si-Meng xuepai 郭店竹簡與思孟學派. Beijing: Zhongguo renmin daxue chubanshe. Libu zhi gao 禮部志稿. Compiled by Yu Ruji 俞汝楫 (fl. 1620). E-Siku quanshu edition. Liezi jishi 列子集釋. 1991. Compiled by Yang Bojun 楊伯峻. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju. Liji jijie 禮記集解. 1995. Compiled by Sun Xidan 孫希旦. Edited by Shen Xiaohuan 沈 嘯寰 and Wang Xingxian 王星賢. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju. Liji zhengyi 禮記正義. (1815) 1991. Annotated by Kong Yingda 孔穎達 (574-648) and Lu Deming 陸德明 (ca. 550-630). In Shisan jing zhushu fu jiaokanji 十三經注疏附校 勘記, compiled by Ruan Yuan 阮元 (1764–1849), vols. 1–2, 1221–1696. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju. Liu Hedong ji 柳河東集. 1962. By Liu Zongyuan 柳宗元 (773–819). Annotated by Jiang Zhiqiao 蔣之翹. Taibei: Shijie shuju. Liu Jiahe 劉家和. 1995. “Zuo zhuan zhong de renben sixiang yu minben sixiang” 左傳 中的人本思想與民本思想. Lishi yanjiu 歷史研究 6: 3–13. Liu Jiapeng 劉甲朋. 2010. Zhongguo gudai liangshi chubei tiaojie zhidu sixiang yanjiu 中國古代粮食儲備調節制度思想演進. Beijing: Zhongguo jingji chubanshe. Liu Min 劉敏. 2008. “Guanyu Liye Qin ‘huji’ dang’an jian de jidian yice” 關於里耶秦 “ 戶籍” 檔案簡的幾點臆測. Lishi dang’an 歷史檔案 4: 32–40. Liu Qiyu 劉起釪. 2007. Shangshu yanjiu yaolun 尚書研究要論. Jinan: Qi Lu shushe. Liu Shangci 劉尚慈. 2011. Chunqiu Gongyang zhuan yizhu 春秋公羊傳譯注. Beijing: Zhonghua. Liu Weihua 劉蔚華 and Miao Runtian 苗潤田, eds. 1992. Jixia xueshi 稷下學史. Beijing: Zhongguo guangbo dianshi chubanshe. Liu Zehua 劉澤華. 2000. Zhongguo de Wangquanzhuyi 中國的王權主義. Shanghai: Renmin chubanshe. ———. 2004. Xian Qin shi ren yu shehui 先秦士人與社會. Rev. ed. Tianjin: Tianjin renmin chubanshe. ———. 2006. “Chuantong zhengzhi siwei de yinyang zuhe jiegou” 傳統政治思維的 陰陽組合結構. Nankai daxue xuebao [zhexue, shehui kexue ban] 南開大學學報 （哲學社會科學版）5: 33–35. Translated as “The Yin-Yang Structure of Traditional Chinese Political Thought,” Contemporary Chinese Thought 45.2–3 (2014): 117–127.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

318

Bibliography

———. 2012. “‘Wenge’ zhong de jingen, cuowei yu zizhu yishi de mengsheng—yantao lishi de sixiang zishu zhi er” “文革”中的緊跟、錯位與自主意識的萌生— 研 討历史的思想自述之二. Shixue yuekan 史學月刊11: 97–101. ———. 2014. “Unity of Heaven and Men, and China’s Monarchism.” Translated by Yuri Pines. Contemporary Chinese Thought 45.2–3: 89–116. Liye Qin jian (yi) 里耶秦簡(壹). 2012. Published by Hunan sheng wenwu kaogu yanjiusuo 湖南省文物考古研究所. Beijing: Wenwu chubanshe. Lloyd, Geoffrey, and Nathan Sivin. 2002. The Way and the Word: Science and Medicine in Early China and Greece. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Loewe, Michael. 1968. Everyday Life in Early Imperial China. London: Jarrod and Sons. ———. 1974. Crisis and Conflict in Han China. Chatham: W. and J. Mackay. ———. 1986. “The Former Han Dynasty.” In The Cambridge History of China, vol. 1, The Ch’in and Han Empires, 221 bc–ad 220, edited by Denis C. Twitchett and John K. Fairbank, 103–222. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1994. “Wang Mang and His Forebears: The Making of Myth.” T’oung Pao 80.4–5: 197–222. ———. 1996. Divination, Mythology and Monarchy in Han China. Taibei: SMC Publishing. ———. 2004. The Men Who Governed Han China: Companion to “A Biographical Dictionary of the Qin, Former Han and Xin Periods.” Leiden: Brill. ———. 2006. The Government of the Qin and Han Empires, 221 bce–220 ce. Indianapolis: Hackett. ———. 2011. Dong Zhongshu, a “Confucian” Heritage and the “Chunqiu fanlu.” Leiden: Brill. Long Yuchun 龍宇純. 1962–1963. “Xian-Qin sanwen zhong de yunwen” 先秦散文中的 韻文. Chongji xuebao 崇基學報 2.2 and 3.1. ———. 2009. Sizhu xuan xiaoxue lunji 絲竹軒小學論集. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju. Louie, Kam. 1980. Critiques of Confucius in Contemporary China. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Lu Baoli 路寳利. 2011. Zhongguo gudai zhiye jiaoyu shi 中國古代職業教育史. Beijing: Jingji kexue chubanshe. Lundahl, Bertil. 1992. Han Fei Zi: The Man and the Work. Stockholm East Asian Monographs 4. Stockholm: Institute of Oriental Languages, Stockholm University. Lunheng jiaoshi 論衡校釋. 1990. Edited by Huang Hui 黃暉. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju. Lunyu yizhu 論語譯注. 1992. Annotated by Yang Bojun 杨伯峻. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju. Luo Jiaxiang 羅家湘. 2006. Yi Zhou shu yanjiu 逸周書研究. Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe. Luo Xinhui 羅新慧. 2012. “Zhoudai tianming guannian de fazhan yu shanbian” 周代 天命觀念的發展與嬗變. Lishi yanjiu 歷史研究 5: 4–18.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

Bibliography

319

Lü Simian 呂思勉. 1982. Lü Simian du shi zha ji 呂思勉讀史札記. Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe. Lüshi chunqiu xinjiaoshi 呂氏春秋新校釋. 2002. Compiled and annotated by Chen Qiyou 陳奇猷. Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe. Ma Chengyuan 馬承源, ed. 2007. Shanghai bowuguan cang Zhanguo Chu zhushu, v. 6 上海博物館藏戰國楚竹書（六）. Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe. Ma Guohan 馬國翰. 1990. Yuhan shanfang jiyi shu 玉函山房輯佚書. 8 vols. Yangzhou: Jiangsu Guangling guji keyingshe. Ma Yi 馬怡. 2007. “Liye Qin jian xuanjiao” 里耶秦簡選校. Zhongguo shehui kexueyuan lishi yanjiusuo xuekan 中國社會科學院歷史研究所學刊 4: 133–186. MacFarquhar, Roderick. 1993. “The Succession to Mao and the End of Maoism, 1969–82.” In The Politics of China, 1949–1989, edited by Roderick MacFarquhar, 248–339. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. MacFarquhar, Roderick, and Michael Schoenhals. 2006. Mao’s Last Revolution. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Machle, Edward J. 1993. Nature and Heaven in the Xunzi: A Study of the Tian lun. Albany: State University of New York Press. Mair, Victor H. 1985. “Language and Ideology in the Written Popularisations of the Sacred Edict.” In Popular Culture in Late Imperial China, edited by David Johnson, Andrew J. Nathan, and Evelyn S. Rawski, 325–359. Berkeley: University of California Press. Makeham, John. 1990–1991. “The Legalist Concept of Hsing-ming: An Example of the Contribution of Archaeological Evidence to the Re-interpretation of Transmitted Texts.” Monumenta Serica 39: 87–114. ———. 1994. Name and Actuality in Early Chinese Thought. Albany: State University of New York Press. Mao shi zhengyi 毛詩正義. (1815) 1991. Annotated by Zheng Xuan 鄭玄 (127-200) and Kong Yingda 孔穎達 (574-648). In Shisan jing zhushu fu jiaokanji 十三經注疏附校 勘記, compiled by Ruan Yuan 阮元 (1764–1849), vol. 1, 259–629. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju. Mao Zedong 毛澤東 [Mao Tse-tung]. 1975. Selected Works of Mao Tse-Tung. 4 vols. Beijing: Foreign Languages Press. Marks, Robert B. 2012. China: Its Environment and History. Plymouth: Rowman and Littlefield. Marx, Karl, and Frederick [Friedrich] Engels. 1976. Collected Works, vol. 5. New York: International Publishers. Maspero, Henri. 1924. “Légendes mythologiques dans le Chou King.” Journal Asiatique 204: 1–100. ———. (1927) 1978. China in Antiquity. Repr., Boston: MIT Press.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

320

Bibliography

Mattos, Gilbert L. 1997. “Eastern Zhou Bronze Inscriptions.” In New Sources of Early Chinese History: An Introduction to the Reading of Inscriptions and Manuscripts, edited by Edward L. Shaughnessy, 85–123. Berkeley: Society for the Study of Early China. Mawangdui Han mu boshu “Huang Di shu” jianzheng 馬王堆漢墓帛書《黃帝書》箋 證. 2004. Compiled, transcribed, and annotated by Wei Qipeng 魏啓鵬. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju. McNeal, Robin. 2012. Conquer and Govern: Early Chinese Military Texts from the Yi Zhou shu. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Meng Xiangcai 孟祥才. 2001. Xian-Qin Qin Han shilun 先秦秦漢史論. Ji’nan: Shandong Daxue chubanshe. Meng Zhaohua 孟昭華. 1999. Zhongguo zaihuang shi ji 中國災荒史記. Beijing: Zhongguo shehui chubanshe. Mengzi yizhu 孟子譯注. 1992. Annotated by Yang Bojun 楊伯峻. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju. Meyer, Andrew. 2010–2011. “The Altars of the Soil and Grain Are Closer than Kin 社稷 戚於親: The Qi 齊 Model of Intellectual Participation and the Jixia 稷下 Patronage Community.” Early China 33–34: 37–99. Meyer, Dirk. 2005/2006. “A Device for Conveying Meaning: The Structure of the Guodian Tomb One Manuscript ‘Zhong xin zhi dao.’” Bochumer Jahrbuch zur Ostasienforschung 29: 57–78. ———. 2012. Philosophy on Bamboo: Text and the Production of Meaning in Early China. Leiden: Brill. Ming Taizu shilu 明太祖實錄. 2005. Reprinted in Chaoben Ming shilu 鈔本明實錄, vols. 1–2. Beijing: Xianzhuang shuju. Mingshi 明史. 1997. By Zhang Tingyu 張廷玉 (1672–1755) et al. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju. Mozi jiaozhu 墨子校注. 1994. Compiled and annotated by Wu Yujiang 吳毓江 (1898– 1977). Beijing: Zhonghua shuju. Muliao Wang xiansheng Shu quanji 慕蓼王先生樗全集. 1995–1997. By Wang Ji 王畿 (1498–1583). Reprinted in Siku quanshu cunmu congshu 四庫全書存目叢書, Jibu 集部, vol. 178. Jinan: Qi-Lu shushe chubanshe. Musha Akira 武者章. 1980. “Sei Shū sakumei kimbun bunrui no kokoromi” 西周冊命 金文分類の試み. In Sei Shū seidōki to sono kokka 西周青銅器とその國家, edited by Matsumaru Michio 松丸道雄, 241–324. Tokyo: Tōkyō Daigaku. Nienhauser, William H., Jr., ed. 1994–. The Grand Scribe’s Records. 9 vols. projected. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Nivison, David S. 1999. “The Classical Philosophical Writings.” In The Cambridge History of Ancient China: From the Origins of Civilization to 221 bc, edited by Michael Loewe and Edward L. Shaughnessy, 745–812. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2009. The Riddle of the Bamboo Annals. Taibei: Airiti.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

Bibliography

321

Noma Fumichika 野間文史. 1996. “Shunjū sanden nyūmon kōsa: Dai-sanshō: Kuyō den no seiritsu to sono dembun kōsō” 春秋三傳入門講座: 第三章: 公羊傳の成立と その傳文構造. Tōyō kotengaku kenkyū 東洋古典學研究2: 88–111. North, Douglass C. 1990. Institutions, Institutional Change, and Economic Performance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nuyen, A. T. 2000. “Confucianism, the Idea of Min-pen, and Democracy.” Copenhagen Journal of Asian Studies 14: 130–151. Ojima Sukema 小島祐馬. (1931) 1990. “Gongyang sanke jiuzhi shuo kao” (Kuyō sanka kiushi setsu kō) 公羊三科九指考. In Xian-Qin jingji kao 先秦經籍考, edited and translated by Jiang Xia’an 江俠菴. Repr., Shanghai: Shanghai wenyi chubanshe. Olivelle, Patrick. 2012. King, Governance, and Law in Ancient India: Kautilya’s Arthaśāstra. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Onozawa Seiichi 小野沢精一. 1974. “Shunjū kōki kenjin setsuwa no shisōshi teki kōsatsu josetsu” 春秋後期賢人說話の思想史考察序說. Chūtetsubun gakkaihō 中哲文學會報 1: 70–99. Ouyang Fenglian 歐陽鳳蓮. 2009. “Shangjun shu huji guanli sixiang yu Qin guo huji guanli zhidu” 《商君書》 戶籍管理思想與秦國戶籍管理制度. Gudai wenming 古代文明 3.2: 57–63. Owen, Stephen. 1986. Remembrances: The Experience of the Past in Classical Chinese Literature. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 2001. “Reproduction in the Shijing (Classic of Poetry).” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 61.2: 287–315. Oxnam, Robert. 1975. Ruling from Horseback: Manchu Politics in the Oboi Regency, 1661– 1669. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Pan Chonggui 潘重規. 1966. “Han Fei zhushu kao” 韓非著述考. Xianggang daxue wushi zhounian jinian lunwenji 香港大學周年紀念論文集 2: 85–106. Pankenier, David W. 1999. “Applied Field-Allocation Astrology in Zhou China: Duke Wen of Jin and the Battle of Chengpu (632 bc).” Journal of the American Oriental Society 119.2: 261–279. Perelomov, Leonard S. 1993. Konfutsij: Zhizn’, Ucheniie, Sud’ba. Moscow: Nauka. Petersen, Jens Østergård. 1995. “Which Books Did the First Emperor of Ch’in Burn? On the Meaning of Pai Chia in Early Chinese Sources.” Monumenta Serica 43: 1–52. Pi Xirui 皮錫瑞. 2004. Jinwen Shangshu kaozheng 今文尚書考證. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju. Pian Yuqian 駢宇騫. 2000. Yinqueshan zhujian Yanzi chunqiu jiaoshi 銀雀山竹 簡《晏子春秋》校釋. Taiwan rev. ed. Taibei: Wanjuanlou. Pines, Yuri. 2000a. “‘The One That Pervades the All’ in Ancient Chinese Political Thought: The Origins of ‘The Great Unity’ Paradigm.” T’oung Pao 86.4–5: 280–324. ———. 2000b. “Disputers of the Li: Breakthroughs in the Concept of Ritual in Pre- imperial China.” Asia Major 3rd ser., 13.1: 1–41.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

322

Bibliography

———. 2002a. Foundations of Confucian Thought: Intellectual Life in the Chunqiu Period, 722–453 bce Honolulu: University of Hawaiʼi Press. ———. 2002b. “Friends or Foes: Changing Concepts of Ruler-Minister Relations and the Notion of Loyalty in Pre-imperial China.” Monumenta Serica 50: 35–74. ———. 2005a. “Disputers of Abdication: Zhanguo Egalitarianism and the Sovereign’s Power.” T’oung Pao 91.4–5: 243–300. ———. 2005b. “Beasts or Humans: Pre-imperial Origins of Sino-Barbarian Dichotomy.” In Mongols, Turks, and Others: Eurasian Nomads and the Sedentary World, edited by Reuven Amitai and Michal Biran, 59–102. Leiden: Brill. ———. 2005c. “Speeches and the Question of Authenticity in Ancient Chinese Historical Records.” In Historical Truth, Historical Criticism and Ideology: Chinese Historiography and Historical Culture from a New Comparative Perspective, edited by Helwig SchmidtGlintzer, Achim Mittag, and Jörn Rüsen, 195–224. Leiden: Brill. ———. 2005–2006a. “Subversion Unearthed: Criticism of Hereditary Succession in the Newly Discovered Manuscripts.” Oriens Extremus 45: 159–178. ———. 2005–2006b. “Bodies, Cities, Lineages, and Regions: A Review of Mark Edward Lewis’ The Construction of Space in Early China.” Early China 30: 155–188. ———. 2008. “To Rebel Is Justified? The Image of Zhouxin and Legitimacy of Rebellion in Chinese Political Tradition.” Oriens Extremus 47: 1–24. ———. 2009. Envisioning Eternal Empire: Chinese Political Thought of the Warring States Era. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. ———. 2010. “Political Mythology and Dynastic Legitimacy in the Rong Cheng shi Manuscript.” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 73.3: 503–529. ———. 2012. The Everlasting Empire: Traditional Chinese Political Culture and Its Enduring Legacy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ———. 2013a. “Submerged by Absolute Power: The Ruler’s Predicament in the Han Feizi.” In Dao Companion to the Philosophy of Han Fei, edited by Paul R. Goldin, 67–86. Dordrecht: Springer. ———. 2013b. “From Historical Evolution to the End of History: Past, Present, and Future from Shang Yang to the First Emperor.” In Dao Companion to the Philosophy of Han Fei, edited by Paul R. Goldin, 25–46. Dordrecht: Springer. ———. 2013c. “From Teachers to Subjects: Ministers Speaking to the Rulers from Yan Ying 晏嬰 to Li Si 李斯.” In Facing the Monarch: Modes of Advice in the Early Chinese Court, edited by Garet Olberding, 69–99. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 2014. “Legalism in Chinese Philosophy.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Accessed December 15, 2014. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/chinese-legalism/. Pines, Yuri, with Lothar von Falkenhausen, Gideon Shelach, and Robin D.S. Yates. 2014. “General Introduction: Qin History Revisited.” In Birth of an Empire: The State of Qin Revisited, edited by Yuri Pines, Lothar von Falkenhausen, Gideon Shelach and Robin D.S. Yates, 1–36. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

Bibliography

323

Pokora, Timoteus. 1975. Hsin-lun (New Treatise) and Other Writings by Huan T’an (43 bc–28 ad). Ann Arbor: Center for Chinese Studies, University of Michigan. Poo Mu-chou. 1993. In Search of Personal Welfare: A View of Ancient Chinese Religion. Albany: State University of New York Press. Pu Weizhong 浦偉忠. 1992. “Chunqiu sanzhuan de chayi jiqi yingxiang” 春秋三傳的 差異及其影響. PhD thesis. Abstract in Wenxian jikan 文獻季刊 52.2: 141–152. Qi Sihe 齊思和. 1940. “Yan Wu fei Zhou fengguo shuo” 燕吳非周封國說. Yanjing xuebao 燕京學報 28: 175–196. Qian Mu 錢穆. 1985. XianQin zhuzi xinian 先秦諸子繫年. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju. ———. 2001. Lianghan jingxue jinguwen pingyi 兩漢經學今古文平議. Beijing: Shangwu chubanshe. Qianfu lun jian jiaozheng 潛夫論箋校正. 1979. Composed by Wang Fu 王符 (ca. 85– 163). Annotated by Wang Jipei 汪繼培. Collated by Peng Duo 彭鐸. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju. Qing shilu 清實錄. 1985. Repr., Beijing: Zhonghua shuju. Qingding guozijian zhi 欽定國子監志. Compiled by Liang Guozhi 梁國治 (1723–1786). E-Siku quanshu edition. Qinghua daxue lishixi 清華大學歷史係, ed. 1998. Wuxu bianfa wenxian ziliao xiri 戊 戌變法文獻資料係日. Shanghai: Shanghai shudian chubanshe. Qiu Guangming 丘光明. 2008. Zhongguo gudai duliangheng 中國古代度量衡. Beijing: Shangwu yinshuaguan. Qu Wanli 屈萬里. 1977. Shangshu jinzhu jinyi 尚書今註今譯. Taibei: Taiwan Shangwu yinshuguan. Queen, Sarah A. 1996. From Chronicle to Canon: The Hermeneutics of the “Spring and Autumn,” according to Tung Chung-shu. New York: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2000. “The Way of the Unadorned King: The Politics of Tung Chung-shu’s Hermeneutics.” Classics and Interpretations: The Hermeneutic Traditions in Chinese Culture, edited by Tu Ching-i, 173–193. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers. ———. 2013a. “Han Feizi and the Old Master: A Comparative Analysis and Translation of Han Feizi Chapter 20, ‘Jie Lao,’ and Chapter 21, ‘Yu Lao.’” In Dao Companion to the Philosophy of Han Fei, edited by Paul R. Goldin, 197–256. Dordrecht: Springer. ———. 2013b. “The Limits of Praise and Blame: The Rhetorical Uses of Anecdotes in the Gongyang Commentary.” Paper presented at the Leiden University Anecdotes Workshop, May 31–June 2. Rawson, Jessica. 1999. “Western Zhou Archaeology.” In The Cambridge History of Ancient China: From the Origins of Civilization to 221 bc, edited by Michael Loewe and Edward L. Shaughnessy, 352–449. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Richter, Matthias L. 2013. The Embodied Text: Establishing Textual Identity in Early Chinese Manuscripts. Leiden: Brill.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

324

Bibliography

Rickett, W. Allyn, tr. 1998. Guanzi: Political, Economic, and Philosophical Essays from Early China. Vol. 2. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ———. 2001. Guanzi: Political, Economic, and Philosophical Essays from Early China. Vol. 1. Rev. ed. Boston: Cheng and Tsui. Riya Shin kan kōdokukai 里耶秦簡講讀會. 2004. “Riya Shin kan yakuchū” 里耶秦簡 譯註. Chūgoku shutsudo shiryō kenkyū 中國出土資料研究 8: 88–137. Rizhilu jishi 日知錄集釋. 1994. By Gu Yanwu 顧炎武 (1613–1682). Annotated by Huang Rucheng 黃如成. Collated by Qin Kecheng 秦克誠. Changsha: Yuelu shushe. Roberts, J. A. G. 1999. A History of China. London: Macmillan. Rong Zhaozu 容肇祖. 1936. Han Feizi kaozheng 韓非子考證. Shanghai: Shangwu yinshuguan. ———. 1982. “Han Feizi zhuzuo kao” 韓非子著作考. In Gushi bian 古史辨, edited by Gu Jiegang 顧頡剛 et al., vol. 4, 653–674. Repr., Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe. Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy. http://www.rep.routledge.com. Rubin, Vitaly A. 1976. Individual and State in Ancient China: Essays on Four Chinese Philosophers. Translated by Steven I. Levine. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 1999. Lichnost’ i vlast’ v drevnem Kitae: Sobranie Trudov. Moscow: “Vostochnaia literatura” RAN. Sabattini, Elisa. 2012. “‘People as Root’ (min ben) Rhetoric in the New Writings by Jia Yi (200–168).” Extrême-Orient, Extrême-Occident 34: 167–193. Sagart, Laurent. 2011. “How Many Independent Rice Vocabularies in Asia?” Rice 4: 121–133. Sagawa Osamu 佐川修. 1960. “Shunjū Kuyō den genryū kō” 春秋公羊傳源流考. Bunka kiyō 文科紀要 6: 48–57. San de 三德. 2005. Annotated by Li Ling 李零. In Shanghai bowuguan cang Zhanguo Chu zhushu 上海博物館藏戰國楚竹書, edited by Ma Chengyuan 馬承源, vol. 5, 285–303. Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe. Sanft, Charles. 2010–2011. “Dong Zhongshu’s Chunqiu jueyu Reconsidered: On the Legal Interest in Subjective States and the Privilege of Hiding Family Members’ Crimes as Developments from Earlier Practice.” Early China 33–34: 141–169. ———. 2014a. Communication and Cooperation in Early Imperial China. Albany: State University of New York Press. ———. 2014b. “Shang Yang Was a Cooperator: Applying Axelrod’s Analysis of Cooperation in Early China.” Philosophy East and West 64.1: 174–191. Satake Yasuhiko 佐竹靖彦. 2006. Chūgoku kodai no densei to yūsei 中国古代の田制 と邑制. Tokyo: Iwanami shoten. Sato, Masayuki. 2003. The Confucian Quest for Order: The Origin and Formation of the Political Thought of Xun Zi. Leiden: Brill.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

Bibliography

325

Satō Masayuki 佐藤將之. 2007. “Guojia sheji cunwang zhi daode: Chunqiu, Zhanguo zaoqi ‘zhong’ he ‘zhong xin’ gainian zhi yiyi” 國家社稷存亡之道德：春秋、戰國 早期「忠」和「忠信」概念之意義. Qinghua xuebao 清華學報 (Taiwan Guoli Qinghua daxue), n.s., 37.1: 1–33. ———. 2010. Zhongguo gudai de “zhong” lun yanjiu 中國古代的「忠」論研究. Taibei: Taida chuban zhongxin. Sawyer, Ralph D., tr. 1993. The Seven Military Classics of Ancient China. Boulder, CO: Westview. Schaberg, David C. 1996. “Foundations of Chinese Historiography: Literary Representation in Zuo zhuan and Guoyu.” PhD diss., Harvard University. ———. 2001. A Patterned Past: Form and Thought in Early Chinese Historiography. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center. ———. 2010. “The Zhouli as Constitutional Text.” In Statecraft and Classical Learning: The “Rituals of Zhou” in East Asian History, edited by Benjamin Elman and Martin Kern, 33–63. Leiden: Brill. ———. 2011. “Chinese History and Philosophy.” In The Oxford History of Historical Writing, vol. 1, Beginnings to ad 600, edited by Andrew Feldherr and Grant Hardy, 394–414. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Schirokauer, Conrad. 1975. “Neo-Confucians under Attack: The Condemnation of Weihsueh.” In Crisis and Prosperity in Sung China, edited by John W. Haeger, 163–198. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Schmitt, Carl. 1933. Der Begriff des Politischen. Hamburg: Hanseatische Verl.-Anst. Schneewind, Sarah. 2001. “Visions and Revisions: Village Policies of the Ming Founder in Seven Phases.” T’oung Pao 87: 317–359. Schram, Stuart. 1989. The Thought of Mao Tse-Tung. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schrecker, John. 1974. Review of Masters of Chinese Political Thought, edited by Sebastian de Grazia. Political Theory 2.4: 462–465. Schwartz, Benjamin. 1985. The World of Thought in Ancient China. Cambridge, MA: Belknap. Sekiguchi Jun 關口順. 1976. “Keigaku teki shi-i kōsō no bunseki: Shunjū Kuyō den ni sokushite” 經學的思惟構造の分析: 春秋公羊傳に即して. Tōhōgaku 51: 14–27. Shaanxi Sheng Kaogu Yanjiusuo 陝西省考古研究所, Baoji Shi Kaogu Gongzuodui 寶 雞市考古工作隊, and Meixian Wenhuaguan Lianhe Kaogudui 眉縣文化館聯合 考古隊. 2003. “Shaanxi Meixian Yangjiacun Xizhou qingtonqi jiaocang” 陝西眉縣 楊家村西周青銅器窖藏. Kaogu yu wenwu 考古與文物 3: 3–12. Shadwick, Robert E., et al. 1992. “The Structure and Mechanical Design of Rhinoceros Dermal Armour.” Philosophical Transactions: Biological Sciences 337.1282: 419–428.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

326

Bibliography

Shang shu zhengyi 尚書正義. (1815) 1991. Annotated by Kong Yingda 孔穎達 (574-648). In Shisan jing zhushu fu jiaokanji 十三經注疏附校勘記, compiled by Ruan Yuan 阮元 (1764–1849), vol. 1, 109–258. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju. Shangjun shu zhui zhi 商君書錐指. 1996. Annotated by Jiang Lihong 蔣禮鴻. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju. Shao Yiping 邵毅平. 2005. Zhongguo wenxue zhong de shangren shijie 中國文學中的 商人世界. Shanghai: Fudan daxue chubanshe. Shaughnessy, Edward L. 1991. Sources of Western Zhou History: Inscribed Bronze Vessels. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 1993a. “The Duke of Zhou’s Retirement in the East and the Beginnings of the Minister-Monarch Debate in Chinese Political Philosophy.” Early China 18: 41–72. ———. 1993b. “Shang shu 尚書 (Shu jing 書經).” In Early Chinese Texts: A Bibliographical Guide, edited by Michael Loewe, 376–389. Berkeley: Society for the Study of Early China and Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California. ———. 1999. “Western Zhou History.” In The Cambridge History of Ancient China: From the Origins of Civilization to 221 bc, edited by Michael Loewe and Edward L. Shaughnessy, 292–351. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2006. Rewriting Early Chinese Texts. Albany: State University of New York Press. Shelach, Gideon, and Yuri Pines. 2006. “Secondary State Formation and the Development of Local Identity: Change and Continuity in the State of Qin (770–221 bc).” In Archaeology of Asia, edited by Miriam T. Stark, 202–230. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Shenzi jijiao jizhu 慎子集校集注. 2013. Collated by Xu Fuhong 許富宏. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju. Shi Nanzi 市南子. 2000. By Li Guangyuan 李光元 (jinshi 1607). In Siku jinhui shu cong­ kan 四庫禁毁書叢刊, edited by Wang Zhonghan 王鐘翰. Beijing: Beijing chubanshe. Shiga Shuzo 滋賀秀三. 2003. Chūgoku hōseishi ronshū: hōten to keibatsu 中國法制史 論集: 法典と刑罰. Tokyo: Sobunsha. Shiji 史記. 1997. By Sima Qian 司馬遷 (ca. 145–ca. 85 bce) et al. Annotated by Zhang Shoujie 張守節, Sima Zhen 司馬貞, and Pei Yin 裴駰. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju. Shijing. See Mao shi zhengyi 1991. Shiki kaichū kōshō 史記會注考證. 1932–1934. Edited by Takigawa Kametarō 瀧川龜太 郎. Tokyo: Tōhō bunka gakuin. Shisan jing zhushu fu jiaokanji 十三經注疏附校勘記. (1815) 1991. Compiled by Ruan Yuan 阮元 (1764–1849). Beijing: Zhonghua shuju. Shuihudi Qinmu zhujian 睡虎地秦墓竹簡. (1990) 2001. Edited by Shuihudi Qinmu zhujian zhengli xiaozu 睡虎地秦墓竹簡整理小組. Beijing: Wenwu chubanshe. Shuowen jiezi 說文解字. 1963. By Xu Shen 許慎 (d. ca. 120). Beijing: Zhonghua shuju.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

Bibliography

327

Sichuan Sheng Bowuguan and Qingchuan Xian Wenhuaguan 四川省博物館，青川 縣文化館. 1982. “Qingchuan xian chutu Qin gengxiu tianlü mudu” 青川縣出土秦 更修田律木牘, Wenwu 1: 1–21. Sickman, Laurence, and Alexander Soper. 1971. The Art and Architecture of China. “First integrated edition.” Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin. Sishu zhangju ji zhu 四書章句集注. 2001. Annotated by Zhu Xi 朱熹 (1130-1200). Beijing: Zhonghua shuju. Sivin, Nathan. 1995. “The Myth of the Naturalists.” In Nathan Sivin, Medicine, Philosophy and Religion in Ancient China: Researches and Reflections, 1-33. Aldershot, UK: Variorum. Skinner, Quentin. 1992. The Foundations of Modern Political Thought. Vol. 1, The Renaissance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2002. Visions of Politics. 3 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. So, Jenny F. 1983. “Hu Vessels from Xinzheng: Toward a Definition of Chu Style.” In The Great Bronze Age of China: A Symposium, edited by George Kuwayama, 64–71. Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Song Hongbing 宋洪兵. 2010. Han Feizi zhengzhi sixiang zai yanjiu 韓非子政治思想 再研究. Beijing: Zhongguo renmin daxue chubanshe. Spence, Jonathan D. 1974. Emperor of China: Self-Portrait of K’ang-Hsi. New York: Knopf. ———. 1996. God’s Chinese Son: The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom of Hong Xiuquan. New York: Norton. ———. 2001. Treason by the Book. New York: Viking. SSJZS. See Shisan jing zhushu fu jiaokanji. Standaert, Nicholas. 2013. “Heaven as a Standard.” In The Mozi as Evolving Text: Different Voices in Early Chinese Thought, edited by Carine Defoort and Nicholas Standaert, 237–270. Leiden: Brill. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. http://plato.stanford.edu/. Sterckx, Roel. 2002. The Animal and the Daemon in Early China. Albany: State University of New York Press. ———. 2011. Food, Sacrifice, and Sagehood in Early China. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Strauss, Leo. 1952. Persecution and the Art of Writing. Glencoe, IL: Free Press. Sueyasu Ando 陶安あんど [Arnd Helmut Hafner]. 2009. Shin Kan keibatsu taikei no kenkyū 秦漢刑法體系の研究. Tokyo: Research Institute for Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa, Tokyo University of Foreign Studies. Suishu 隨書. 1997. By Wei Zheng 魏徵 (580–643) et al. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju. Sukhu, Gopal. 2005–2006. “Yao, Shun, and Prefiguration: The Origins and Ideology of the Han Imperial Ideology.” Early China 30: 91–153. Sun Chunzai 孫春在. 1985. Qingmo de Gongyang sixiang 清末的公羊思想. Taibei: Shangwu yinshuguan.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

328

Bibliography

Sun Wenbo 孫聞博. 2012. “Liye Qin jian ‘shou,’ ‘shoucheng’ xin kao—jian tan Qin-Han de shouguan zhidu” 里耶秦簡 “ 守” 、 “ 守丞” 新考—兼談秦漢的守官制度. In Jiandu yanjiu 2010 簡牘研究2010, edited by Bu Xianqun 卜憲群 and Yang Zhenhong 楊振紅, 66–75. Guilin: Guangxi shifan daxue chubanshe. Sun Xingyan 孫星衍 (1753–1818). 1986. Shangshu jinguwen zhushu 尚書今古文注疏. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju. Sun Zuoyun 孫作雲. 2007. “Shuo Shangdai ‘Renmian fangding’ ji taotie wen ding” 說 商代“人面方鼎”即饕餮紋鼎. In Hunan chutu Yin-Shang Xi-Zhou qingtongqi 湖 南出土殷商西周青銅器, edited by Hunan Sheng Bowuguan 湖南省博物馆, 385–389. Changsha: Yuelu shushe. Sunzi. See Yang Bing’an 1999. Suzuki Naomi 鈴木直美. 2008. “Riya Shin kan ni miru Shin no k­o­kō haaku—dōkyo, shitsujin saikō” 里耶秦簡にみる秦の戸口把握—同居, 室人再考. Tōyō gakuhō 東洋学報 89.4: 1–31. Swann, Nancy L. 1950. Food and Money in Ancient China: The Earliest Economic History of China to ad 25. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Taiping yulan 太平禦覽. 1988. Compiled by Li Fang 李昉 (925–996) et al. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju. Taishi Zhang Wenzhong Gong jiwen gao 太師張文忠公集文稿. 1995–1997. By Zhang Cong 張璁 (1475–1539). Reprinted in Siku quanshu cunmu congshu 四庫全書存目 叢書, Jibu 集部, vol. 77. Jinan: Qi-Lu shushe chubanshe. Tan Jiajian 譚家健. 1995. “Xian-Qin yunwen chutan” 先秦韻文初探. Wenxue yichan 文學遺產1: 12–19. Tan, Sor-hoon. 2003. Confucian Democracy: A Deweyan Reconstruction. Albany: State University of New York Press. Tanaka Masami 田中麻紗巳. 1994. “Kansho no Shunjū no gi ni tsuite” 漢書の春秋の 義について. Tōhōgaku 東方學88: 54–68. Taniguchi Takehaya 谷口竹速. 2007. “Chikukan no ookisa ni tsuite” 竹簡の大きさに ついて. In Ch­ōsa Sōmarō shutsudo Gokan ni kan suru hikaku shiryōteki kenkyū to sono dētabēsuka 長沙走馬楼出土吴簡に関する比較史料的研究とそのデー タベース化, edited by Sekio Shirō 関尾史朗, 23–31. Niigata: Niigata University. Teng Mingyu 滕銘予. 2003. Qin wenhua: Cong fengguo dao diguo de kaoguxue guancha 秦文化：從封國到帝國的考古學觀察. Beijing: Xueyuan. Terrell, John Edward. 2001. “Ethnolinguistic Groups, Language Boundaries, and Culture History: A Sociolinguistic Model.” In Archaeology, Language, and History: Essays on Culture and Ethnicity, edited by John Edward Terrell, 199–221. Westport, CT: Bergin and Garvey. Thote, Alain. 2004. “Burial Practices as Seen in Rulers’ Tombs of the Eastern Zhou Period: Patterns and Regional Traditions.” In Religion and Chinese Society, edited by John Lagerwey, vol. 1, 65–107. Hong Kong: Chinese University Press.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

Bibliography

329

Tianchangshi wenwu guanlisuo 天長市文物管理所 et al. 2006. “Anhui Tianchang Xihan mu fajue jianbao” 安徽天長西漢墓發掘簡報. Wenwu 11: 5–21. Tjan Tjoe Som, tr. 1949–1952. Po Hu T’ung: The Comprehensive Discussions in the White Tiger Hall. 2 vols. Leiden: Brill. Tomita Michie 富田美智江. 2010. “Sengoku jidai no Kōshoku zō—ken ron Shōhaku So kan Kōshoku” 戰國時代の后稷像— 兼論上博楚簡后稷. Chūgoku shutsudo shiryō kenkyū 中國出土資料研究 14: 34–58. Tomiya Itaru 冨谷至, ed. 2006. K­ōryo Chōkasan nihyakuyonjūnana gōbo shutsudo Kan ritsuryō no kenkyū 江陵張家山二四七號墓出土漢律令の研究. Translation and annotation volume. Kyoto: Hōyū Shoten. Tong Weimin 仝衛敏. 2013. Chutu wenxian yu ian yu jun shushzonghe yanjiu 出土文獻 與《商君書》綜合研究. Vols. 16–17 of Gudian wenxian yanjiu jikan 古典文獻研 究輯刊, edited by Pan Meiyue 潘美月 and Du Jiexiang 杜潔祥. Taibei: Hua Mulan chubanshe. Tu Wei-ming. 2010. “Confucian Encounter with the Enlightenment Mentality of the Modern West.” Oriens Extremus 49: 249–308. Turney-High, Harry Holbert (1899–1982). 1971. Primitive War: Its Practices and Concepts. 2nd ed. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. Valenstein, Suzanne G. 2007. Cultural Convergence in the Northern Qi Period: A Flamboyant Chinese Ceramic Container; A Research Monograph. New York: Department of Asian Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art. Van Auken, Newell Ann. 2007. “Could ‘Subtle Words’ Have Conveyed ‘Praise and Blame’? The Implications of Formal Regularity and Variation in Spring and Autumn (Chūn qiū) Records.” Early China 31: 47–111. ———. 2011. “Who Is a rén 人? The Use of rén in Spring and Autumn Records and Its Interpretation in the Zuǒ, Gōngyáng, and Gǔliáng Commentaries.” Journal of the American Oriental Society 131.4: 555–590. Van Norden, Bryan W. 1996. “What Should Western Philosophy Learn from Chinese Philosophy?” In Chinese Language, Thought, and Culture: Nivison and His Critics, edited by Philip J. Ivanhoe, 224–249. Chicago: Open Court. Vankeerberghen, Griet. 2001. The Huainanzi and Liu An’s Claim to Moral Authority. Albany: State University of New York Press. ———. 2005–2006. “Choosing Balance: Weighing (quan 權) as a Metaphor for Action in Early Chinese Texts.” Early China 30: 47–89. Venture, Olivier. 2011. “Caractères interdits et vocabulaire officiel sous les Qin: L’apport des documents administratifs de Liye.” Études chinoises 30: 73–98. Vogelsang, Kai. 2002. “Inscriptions and Proclamations: On the Authenticity of the ‘gao’ Chapters in the Book of Documents.” Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities 74: 138–209.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

330

Bibliography

Vogt, Paul Nicholas. 2012. “Between Kin and King: Social Aspects of Western Zhou Ritual.” PhD diss., Columbia University. Wagner, Andreas. 2007. “Der Parallelismus membrorum zwischen poetischer Form und Denkfigur.” In Parallelismus membrorum, edited by Andreas Wagner, 1–26. Fribourg: Academic Press; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht. Wagner, Donald B. 1993. Iron and Steel in Ancient China. Leiden: Brill. Wagner, Rudolf G. 2000. The Craft of a Chinese Commentator: Wang Bi on the Laozi. Albany: State University of New York Press. Wallacker, Benjamin E. 1985. “The Spring and Autumn Annals as a Source of Law in Han China.” Journal of Chinese Studies 2.1: 59–72. Wang Baoxuan 王葆玹. 1994. Xi Han jingxue yuanliu 西漢經學源流. Taibei: Dongda tushu gongsi. Wang Daqing 王大慶. 2006. Ben yu mo: Gudai Zhongguo yu gudai Xila jingji sixiang bijiao yanjiu 本與末：古代中國與古代希臘經濟思想比較研究. Beijing: Shangwu yinshuguan. Wang, Eugene Yuejin. 1994. “Mirror, Death and Rhetoric: Reading Later Han Chinese Bronze Artifacts.” Art Bulletin 76.3: 511–534. Wang Huanlin 王煥林. 2007. Liye Qin jian jiaogu 里耶秦簡校詁. Beijing: Zhongguo wenlian chubanshe. Wang Jian 王建. 2004. Xi-Zhou zhengzhi dili jiegou yanjiu 西周政治地理結構研究. Zhengzhou: Zhongzhou guji chubanshe. Wang Liqi 王利器. 1989. Xiao Chuan shuzhai wenshi lunji 曉傳書齋文史論集. Hongkong: Zhongwen daxue chubanshe, 1989. Wang Qizhu 王啟柱. 1994. Zhongguo nongye qiyuan yu fazhan: Zhongguo nongye shi chutan 中國農業起源與發展: 中國農業初探. Taibei: Bohaitang. Wang Shuanghuai  王雙懷 et al. 2006. Zhonghua rili tongdian  中華日曆通典. Changchun: Jilin wenshi chubanshe. Wang Xianqian 王先謙. 1987. Zhuangzi jijie 莊子集解. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju. Wang Xueli 王學理. 1985. Qin du Xianyang 秦都咸陽. Xi’an: Shaanxi renmin chubanshe. Wang Zhangmin 王長民. 2009. “Kongzi heyi fandui ‘Fan Chi xue jia’” 孔子何以反對‘ 樊遲學稼.’ Beijing daxue Zhongguo gu wenxian yanjiu zhongxin jikan 北京大學中 國古文獻研究中心集刊8: 233–241. Watson, Burton. 1958. Ssu-Ma Chien, Grand Historian of China. New York: Columbia University Press. ———, tr. 1989. The Tso Chuan: Selections from China’s Oldest Narrative History. New York: Columbia University Press. ———, tr. 1993. Records of the Grand Historian: Qin Dynasty. New York: Columbia University Press.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

Bibliography

331

Wechsler, Howard J. 1985. Offerings of Jade and Silk: Ritual and Symbol in the Legitimation of the T’ang Dynasty. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Welsch, Robert L., et al. 1992. “Language and Culture on the North Coast of New Guinea.” American Anthropologist 94.3: 568–600. Willetts, William Y. 1958. Chinese Art. 2 vols. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin. Williams, Bernard. 1985. Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Wittfogel, Karl A. 1957. Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Wu Cunhao 吴存浩. 1996. Zhongguo nongye shi 中國農業史. Beijing: Jingguan jiaoyu chubanshe. Wu Song 吴松. 2000. Zhongguo nong shang guanxi sixiang shigang 中國農商關係思 想史綱. Kunming: Yunnan daxue chubanshe. Wu Yucheng 吴裕成. 2010. Zhongguo de jing wenhua 中國的井文化. Beijing: Zhongguo guoji guangbo chubanshe. Wu Zeyu 吳則虞. 1977. Yanzi chunqiu jishi 晏子春秋集釋. Zhongguo xueshu leibian 中國學術類編 edition, edited by Yang Jialuo 楊家駱. 2nd ed. Taibei: Dingwen shuju. Wu Zhenyu 武振玉. 2010. Liang Zhou jinwen xuci yanjiu 兩周金文虛詞研究. Beijing: Xianzhuang shuju. Wuzi 吳子. 1954. Edited by Sun Xingyan 孫星衍 (1753–1818). Zhuzi jicheng. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju. Xi Panlin 席盤林. 2000. “Lun Lu Mu Gong bianfa zhong de Zisi: Guodian Chujian ‘Lu Mu Gong wen Zisi’ ji xiangguan wenti yanjiu” 論魯穆公變法中的子思：郭店楚 簡《魯穆公問子思》及相關問題研究. In Jianbo “Wu xing” jianshi 簡帛《五 行》箋釋, edited by Wei Qipeng 魏啟鵬, 179–222. Taibei: Wanjuanlou tushu youxian gongsi. Xiao Gan 蕭甘 [aka Ba Jin 巴金, 1904–2005]. 1974. Kong Laoer zuie de yisheng 孔老二 罪惡的一生. Shanghai: Shanghai renmin chubanshe. Xiaojing yizhu 孝經譯注. 1996. Annotated by Hu Pingsheng 胡平生. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju. Xin jiben Huan Tan Xin lun 新輯本桓譚新論. 2011. Composed by Huan Tan 桓譚 (ca. 43 bce–28 ce). Collated by Zhu Qianzhi 朱謙之. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju. Xinshu jiaozhu 新書校注. 2000. Composed by Jia Yi 賈誼 (201–168 bce). Edited by Yan Zhenyi 閻振益and Zhong Xia 鍾夏. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju. Xiong Jianhua 熊建華. 2007. “Renmian wen fangding zhuangshi zhuti de nanfang wenhua yinsu” 人面紋方鼎裝飾主題的南方文化因素. In Hunan chutu Yin-Shang Xi-Zhou qingtongqi 湖南出土殷商西周青銅器, edited by Hunan Sheng Bowuguan 湖南省博物馆, 498–507. Changsha: Yuelu shushe.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

332

Bibliography

Xu Fuguan 徐復觀. 1982. “Dai Hong chuancheng shuo zhi wang” 戴宏傳承說之妄. In Zhongguo jingxueshi de jichu 中國經學史的基礎, edited by Xu Fuguan, 178–180. Taibei: Xuesheng shuju. Xu Shaohua. 1999. “Chu Culture: An Archaeological Overview.” In Defining Chu: Image and Reality in Ancient China, edited by Constance A. Cook and John S. Major, 21–32. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Xunzi jijie 荀子集解. 1992. Annotated by Wang Xianqian 王先謙 (1842–1917). Edited by Shen Xiaohuan 沈嘯寰 and Wang Xingxian 王星賢. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju. Yamada Taku 山田琢. 1957. “Kuyōden no seiritsu” 公羊傳の成立. Kanazawa Daigaku hō-bun gakubu ronshū (tetsugaku shigaku hen) 金澤大學法文學部論集(哲學史 學篇) 5: 157–179. Yan Fu ji 嚴復集. 1986. By Yan Fu 嚴復 (1854–1921). Edited by Wang Shizhu 王栻主. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju. Yan Kejun 嚴可均 (1762–1843), ed. 1999. Quan Han wen 全漢文. Ed. Ren Xuefang 任雪 芳. Beijing: Shangwu yinshuguan. Yan Xuetong. 2011. Ancient Chinese Thought, Modern Chinese Power. Edited by Daniel A. Bell and Sun Zhe. Translated by Edmund Ryden. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Yang Bing’an 楊丙安. 1999. Shiyi jia zhu Sunzi jiaoli 十一家注孫子校理. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju. Yang Bojun 楊伯峻. 1979. “Zuo zhuan chengshu niandai lunshu” 左傳成書年代論述. Wenshi 文史6: 65–75. Yang Guangcheng 楊廣成. 2010. “Liye Qin jian ‘huji jian’ yanjiu zongshu” 里耶秦簡 “ 戶籍簡” 研究綜述. Heilongjiang shi zhi 黑龍江史志 13: 8–9. Yang Jiping 楊際平. 2007. “Qin-Han huji guanli zhidu yanjiu” 秦漢戶籍管理制度研 究. Zhonghua wenshi luncong 中華文史論叢 1: 1–35. Yang Kuan 楊寬. 1998. Zhanguo shi 戰國史. Rev. ed. Shanghai: Renmin chubanshe. Yang Shengnan 楊升南 and Ma Jifan 馬季凡. 2010. Shangdai jingji yu keji 商代經濟 與科技. Beijing: Zhongguo shehui kexue chubanshe. Yang Xiaohua 楊曉華. 2011. “‘Liye jian’ suo fanying de Qin huji xiangguan wenti” ‘ 里耶 簡’ 所反映的秦戶籍相關問題. Bohai daxue xuebao (zhexue shehui kexue ban) 渤 海大學學報(哲學社會科學版) 2: 112–115. Yang Zhimin 楊直民. 2006. Nongxue sixiang shi 農學思想史. Changsha: Hunan jiaoyu chubanshe. Yantie lun jiaozhu 鹽鐵論校注. 1996. Compiled by Huan Kuan 桓寬 (first cent. bce). Annotated by Wang Liqi. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju. Yanzi chunqiu jiaozhu 晏子春秋校注. 2014. Annotated by Zhang Chunyi 張純一. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju. Yasui Kōzan 安井香山. 1984. Shin’i shisō no sōgoteki kenkyū 讖緯思想の綜合的研 究.Tokyo: Kokusho kankōkai.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

Bibliography

333

Yates, Robin D. S. 2002. “Slavery in Early China: A Socio-cultural Approach.” Journal of East Asian Archaeology 3.1–2: 283–331. ———. 2011. “Soldiers, Scribes, and Women: Literacy among the Lower Orders in Early China.” In Writing and Literacy in Early China: Studies from the Columbia Early China Seminar, edited by Li Feng and David Prager Branner, 339–369. Seattle: University of Washington Press. ———. 2012–2013. “The Qin Slips and Boards from Well No. 1, Liye, Hunan: A Brief Introduction to the Qin Qianling County Archives.” Early China 35–36: 291–330. ———. 2014. “The Changing Status of Slaves in the Qin-Han Transition.” In Birth of an Empire: The State of Qin Revisited, edited by Yuri Pines, Lothar von Falkenhausen, Gideon Shelach, and Robin D.S. Yates, 206–223. Berkeley: University of California Press. Yi Sǔng-ryul 李承律. 2001. “The View of Loyal Ministers in the Ch’u Bamboo-Slip Lu Mu-kung wen Tzu-ssu from Kuo-tien.” Acta Asiatica 80: 52–71. ———. 2003. “Kakuten Sokan ‘Ro Boku Kō mon Sisi’ no chūshinkan ni tsuite” 郭店楚 簡『魯穆公問子思』の忠臣觀について. In Kakuten Sokan jukyō kenkyū 郭店 楚簡儒教研究, edited by Ikeda Tomohisa 池田知久, 341–358. Tokyo: Kyūko shoin. Yi Zhou shu huijiao jizhu 逸周書匯校集注. 1995. Compiled by Huang Huaixin 黃懷信 et al. Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe. Yin Qun 印群. 2012. “Lun Yuandingshan Qin zaoqi mudi chema keng zhi Yin wenhua yinsu” 論圓頂山秦早期墓地車馬坑之殷文化因素. Suzhou Daxue xuebao 蘇州 大學學報 2: 167–173. Yin Zhou jinwen jicheng. 2004. Composed by Zhongguo Shehuikexueyuan 中國社會科 學院. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju. Yong Yap and Arthur Cotterell. 1975. The Early Civilization of China. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Yongluo 永珞 (Qing) et al. 1965. Siku quanshu zongmu 四庫全書總目. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju. Yoshikawa Kōjirō 吉川幸次郎. 1966. “Tai Kō Ketsugiron kō” 戴宏解疑論考. In Yoshikawa Kōjirō zenshū 吉川幸次郎全集, 356–378. Kyoto: Chikuma Shobō. Yu Kam-por. 2010. “Confucian Views on War as Seen in the Gongyang Commentary on the Spring and Autumn Annals.” Dao 9.1: 97–111. Yu Yingshi 余英時. 1987. Shi yu Zhongguo wenhua 士與中國文化. Shanghai: Shanghai renmin chubanshe. ———. 2005. Xiandai ruxue de huigu yu zhanwang 現代儒學的回歸與展望. Beijing: Sanlian. Yu Zhenbo 于振波. 2005. “Cong ‘Gongshigao’ yu ‘jiazui’ kan Qin lü de lifa jingshen” 從 “ 公室告” 與 “ 家罪” 看秦律的立法精神. Hunan daxue xuebao (shehui kexue ban) 湖南大學學報 (社會科學版) 19: 39–44.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

334

Bibliography

Yu Zongfa 余宗發. 1992. “Yunmeng Qin jian” zhong sixiang yu zhidu gouzhi 《雲夢秦 簡》中思想與制度鉤摭. Taibei: Wenjin. ———. 1998. Xian-Qin zhuzi xueshuo zai Qindi zhi fazhan 先秦諸子學説在秦地之發 展. Taibei: Wenjin. Yuan Lin 袁林. 1987. “‘Shi qianshou zi shi tian’ xin jie” “使黔首自實田”新解, Tianjin shida xuebao 天津师大学报 5: 55–61. Yuan wen lei 元文類. Composed by Su Tianjue 蘓天爵 (1294–1352). E-Siku quanshu edition. Yuan Yansheng 袁延勝. 2011. “Han du ‘hukou bu’ tanxi” 漢牘 “ 戶口簿” 探析. Ludong daxue xuebao (zhexue shehui kexue ban) 魯東大學學報 (哲學社會科學版) 28.3: 61–66. ———. 2012. “Xuanquan Han jian ‘Hujimin’ tanxi—jian lun Xiyu zhuguo zhi ren de huji wenti” 懸泉漢簡“ 戶籍民” 探析— 兼論西域諸國之人的戶籍問題. In Gan­ susheng dierjie jianduxue guoji xueshu yantaohui lunwenji 甘肅省第二屆簡牘學國 際學術研討會論文集, 201–214. Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe. Yuan Zhongyi 袁仲一. 1987. Qindai taowen 秦代陶文. Xi’an: Sanqin chubanshe. Yuasa Kunihiro 湯淺邦弘. 2001. “Chūshin no shisō: Kakuten Sokan ‘Ro Boku Kō mon Shishi’ ni tsuite” 忠臣の思想：郭店楚簡『魯穆公問子思』について. In Karagokoro to wa nani ka: Ōkubo Takao Kyōju Taikan Kinen Ronshū 漢意とは何か： 大久保隆郎教授退官紀念論集, 45–65. Tokyo: Tōhō shoten. Yunxue shishu 韻學十書. 1993. By Jiang Yougao 江有誥 (d. 1851?). Beijing: Zhonghua shuju. Zarrow, Peter. 2012. After Empire: The Conceptual Transformation of the Chinese State, 1885-1924. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Zeng Xiongsheng 曾雄生. 2008. Zhongguo nongxue shi 中國農學史. Fuzhou: Fujian renmin chubanshe. Zhang Bingnan 張秉楠. 1991. Jixia gouchen 樓下勾沉. Shanghai: Shanghai guji. Zhang Chunlong 張春龍. 2009. “Liye Qin jian suo jian de huji he renkou guanli” 里耶 秦簡所見的戶籍和人口管理. In Liye gucheng: Qin jian yu Qin wenhua yanjiu 里 耶古城: 秦簡與秦文化研究, edited by Zhongguo shehui kexue kaogu yanjiusuo et al., 188–195. Beijing: Kexue chubanshe. Zhang Chunlong 張春龍 and Long Jingsha 龍京沙. 2002. “Xiangxi Liye Qin jian fuhuo Qinguo lishi” 湘西里耶秦簡復活秦國歷史. Zhongguo guojia dili zazhi 中國國家 地里雜誌 9: 42–51. Zhang Chunlong 張春龍 et al., eds. 2010. Hunan Liye Qin jian 湖南里耶秦簡. 4 vols. Chongqing: Chongqing chubanshe. Zhang Fentian 張分田. 2003. Qin Shihuang zhuan 秦始皇傳. Beijing: Renmin chubanshe. ———. 2009. Min ben sixiang yu Zhongguo gudai zhengzhi sixiang 民本思想與中國 古代政治思想. Tianjin: Nankai daxue chubanshe.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

Bibliography

335

Zhang Hong 張弘. 2003. Zhanguo Qin Han shiqi shangren he shangye ziben yanjiu 戰國 秦漢時期商人和商業資本研究. Jinan: Qi Lu shushe. Zhang Jinguang 張金光. 2004. Qin zhi yanjiu 秦制研究. Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe. ———. 2010. “Qin zi, shu zhi fa de qingchang yu jiesuan wenti—Liye Qin jian JI(9)1-12 jian xiaoji” 秦貲、贖之罰的清償與結算問題—里耶秦簡JI(9)1-12 簡小記. Xi’an caijing xueyuan xuebao 西安財經學院學報 23.4: 93–96. ———. 2013. Zhanguo Qin shehui jingji xingtai xintan 戰國秦社會經濟形態新探. Beijing: Shangwu. Zhang Linxiang 张林祥. 2008. Shangjun shu de chengshu yu sixiang yanjiu 商君書的 成書與思想研究. Beijing: Renmin chubanshe, 2008. Zhang Rongqiang 張榮強. 2010. Han-Tang jizhang zhidu yanjiu 漢唐籍帳制度研究. Beijing: Shangwu yinshuguan. Zhang Shoujun 張守軍. 1988. Zhongguo lishi shang de zhong ben yi mo sixiang 中國歷 史上的重本抑末思想. Beijing: Zhongguo shangye chubanshe. Zhang Wenli 張文立 and Song Shangwen 宋尚文. 2003. Qin xueshushi tanze 秦學術 史探賾. Xi’an: Shaanxi renmin chubanshe. Zhang Xincheng 張心澂. (1939) 1999. Weishu tongkao 偽書通考. Repr., Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe. Zhang Xintong 張信通. 2010. “Qin-Han shiqi de bianhu qimin ji” 秦漢時期的編戶齊 民籍. Anshun xueyuan xuebao 安順學院學報 4: 58–61. Zhang Zexian 張澤咸. 2003. Han Jin Tang shiqi de nongye 漢晋唐時期的農業. Beijing: Zhongguo shehuikexue chubanshe. Zhanguo ce jianzheng 戰國策箋證. 2006. Compiled by Liu Xiang 劉向 (79–8 bce). Annotated by Fan Xiangyong 范祥雍. Collated by Fan Bangjin 范邦瑾. Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe. Zhanguo ce zhushi 戰國策注釋. 1991. Annotated by He Jianzhang 何建章. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju. Zhao Boxiong 趙伯雄. 2004. Chunqiu xue shi 春秋學史. Ji’nan: Shandong jiaoyu chubanshe. Zhao Zhiyang 趙制陽. 1985. “Zuozhuan Ji Zha guanyue youguan wenti de taolun” 《左 傳》季札觀樂有關問題的討論. Zhonghua wenhua fuxing yuekan 中華文化复 興月刊 18.3: 9–20. Zheng Liangshu 鄭良樹. 1989a. Shang Yang ji qi xuepai 商鞅及其學派. Shanghai: Guji chubanshe. ———. 1989b. “Han Feizi ‘Shi guo’ pian bianwei” 韓非子十過篇辨偽. Hanxue yanjiu 漢學研究 7.2 : 239–257. ———. 1993. Han Feizi zhushu ji sixiang 韓非子著述及思想. Taibei: Taiwan xuesheng shuju.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

336

Bibliography

———. 2001. “Lun Yanzi chunqiu de bianxie ji chengshu guocheng, shang” 論《晏子 春秋》的編寫及成書過程（上）. Guanzi xuekan 管子學刊1: 25–33. Zhong Xiangcai 鍾祥財. 1997. Zhongguo nongye sixiang shi 中國農業思想史. Shanghai: Shanghai shehui kexueyuan. Zhou Baohong 周寳宏. 2005. Jinchu Xi-Zhou jinwen jishi 近出西周金文集釋. Tianjin: Guji chubanshe. Zhou Guitian 周桂鈿, ed. 2001. Zhongguo zhengzhi zhexue. Shijiazhuang: Hebei renmin chubanshe. Zhou Xunchu 周勳初. 1980. “Han Feizi” zhaji 韓非子札記. Nanjing : Jiangsu renmin chubanshe. Zhouli zhushu 周禮注疏. (1815) 1991. Annotated by Zheng Xuan 鄭玄 (127-200)‫‏‬and Jia Gongyan 賈公彥 (7th century). In Shisan jing zhushu fu jiaokanji 十三經注疏附校 勘記, compiled by Ruan Yuan 阮元 (1764–1849), vol. 1, 631–940. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju. Zhu Fenghan 朱鳳瀚. 1995. Gudai Zhongguo qingtongqi 古代中國青銅器. Tianjin: Nankai Daxue chubanshe. Zhu Honglin 朱紅林. 2007. “Zhujian Qin Han lü zhong de ‘shuzui’ yu ‘shuxing’” 竹簡 秦漢律中的“ 贖罪” 與“ 贖刑.” Shixue yuekan 史學月刊5: 16–20. Zhuangzi jinzhu jinyi 莊子今注今譯. 1994. Annotated by Chen Guying 陳鼓應. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju. Ziju 子居. 2011. Qinghua jian “Cheng wu” jiexi 清華簡程寤解析. http://www.confucius2000.com/admin/list.asp?id=4941. Zizhi tongjian 資治通鑒. 1992. By Sima Guang 司馬光 (1019–1086). Annotated by Hu Sanxing 胡三省 (1230–1302). Beijing: Zhonghua shuju. Zuo zhuan. See Chunqiu Zuozhuan zhu 1990.

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

Index Index

337

Index abdication 20, 145-147, 150-151, 166. See also succession of power age registry (nianji 年籍) 257 agriculture. See agriculturalism, fields, peas­ ants, well-field system. agriculturalism 25, 211-214, 224n43, 225-227, 230-232, 239-240, 245. See also peasants, well-field system “All-under-Heaven” (tianxia 天下) 53, 63n38, 140-141, 179, 213n6, 276-278, 280-281, 286, 293-294, 298; as focus of intellectuals’ concern 2, 4; unity of 2, 15-16, 75, 78, 113, 290n70; See also, unity, political altars of soil and grain (sheji 社稷) 22, 24, 51, 182-184, 200, 203, 278 Analects. See Lunyu ancient script texts. See Classic of Documents, ancient-text version anecdotes 12, 23-24, 159, 167, 185-187, 209210. See also historical argumentation “Anti-Confucian” campaign (1973-1975) 7 apocryphal texts (chen wei 讖緯) 286 archaeology 15, 33, 25, 64, 187, 210, 213, 249, 250-251 argumentation. See historical argumentation aristocracy 2-3, 22, 34, 42, 91, 102, 105, 113, 118, 191n16. See also hierarchy; nobles Aristotle 1 armies 2-3, 39, 41, 72n16, 80-81, 91-92, 215, 242 246n114. See also military thought; warfare Arthashastra 1 artisans 131, 215, 231-233, 238- 239, 243 astrology 16, 43-44, 130, 205 autocracy 23, 151. See also despotism; emperors; monarchism; ruler Axial Age (Achsenzeit) 1 Baili Xi 百里奚 (seventh century bce)  165n21 Bamboo Annals (Zhushu jinian 竹書紀年) 37 Bian Que 扁鵲 (dates unknown) 167 biblioclasm (bibliocaust). See book burning Bigan 比干 (eleventh century bce) 169-170 binomes 120, 121n11

book burning (213 bce) 28, 47, 149n65, 151, 219 Book of Lord Shang (Shangjunshu 商君書)  9n14, 42n27, 259n36, 291n74; on agriculture 217-223, 225, 233-234; and merchants 25, 218, 222, 229-231. See also Shang Yang bronze inscriptions 18, 32-33, 37, 49, 58, 61, 63, 120, 190. See also Da Yu-ding 大盂鼎; Guaibo Guifeng-gui 乖伯歸峰簋; He-zun 何尊; Ke-he 克盉; Ke-lei 克罍; Lai-pan 逨 盘; Mao Gong-ding 毛公鼎; Qin Gong-gui 秦公簋; Qin Gong-zhong 秦公鐘; Shi Qiang-pan 史牆盤; Shi Ke-xu 師克盨; Shi Xun-gui 師詢簋; Xing-zhong 鐘; Xungui 詢簋 bronze vessels 34-36 Buddhism 275, 291-292 bureaucracy 2-3, 20-21, 26, 74, 77n29, 105, 143, 148-149, 155, 161, 191-192, 249-250. 258, 262, 266-268. See also registration calamities and anomalies (zaiyi 災異) 99100 calendar 74-75, 130-131, 226, 257 Central States (Zhongguo 中國) 38-39, 44, 46, 78-81, 101n86, 108, 113, 214, 241 chariots 37, 38n20, 39, 137-138 charisma 21, 132, 135-137, 145, 147, 149, 155 Chen Fengheng 陳逢衡 (1778–1855) 53 Chen Jie 陳絜 256 Cheng Chung-ying 成中英 274-275 Cheng Hao 程顥 (1032–1085) 277 Cheng Tang 成湯 (founder of the Shang dynasty) 173 Cheng Yi 程頤 (1033–1107) 277 Chengwu 程寤 Manuscript 17-18, 49-54, 56-58, 58n23, 64, 67n48, 68 Chongwen zongmu 崇文總目 109n97, 186 Chu 楚, regional state (extinguished in 223 bce) 31, 69n3, 215, 252, 286n52 Chu Ni 鉏麑 191 Chunqiu fanlu 春秋繁露 73, 97n76, 110-113, 284 Chunqiu jueyu 春秋訣獄 (Deciding Cases by the Chunqiu) 109

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004299337_013 Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

338 Chunqiu 春秋 (Spring and Autumn Annals)  19, 37, 69-74, 77-91, 93, 95-99, 102-103, 107117 Classic of Documents (Shujing 書經 or Shang­shu 尚書) 17-18, 20, 42, 56, 66-68, 73n18, 88n54, 104, 119, 124, 126, 138, 148-150, 280n25; ancient-text version 古文尚書 118-119, 121-123, 133-134, 138n46, 145, 150; “Declarations” (gao 誥) chapters 56-57, 61; and kings Wen and Wu 54, 63, 65; and Mandate of Heaven 50, 59n27; moderntext version 今文尚書 118, 121-122, 133,134n37, 138n46, 150. See also “Da Yu mo” 大禹謨; “Gao Yao mo” 皋陶謨; “Jun Shi” 君奭 ; “Kang gao” 康誥; “Shun dian” 舜典; “Tai shi” 泰誓; “Wenhou zhi ming” 文侯之命; “Xia shu” 夏書; “Yu gong” 禹 貢; “Yu shu” 虞書 Classic of Poetry (Shijing 詩經) 17, 62-63, 104, 104n92, 125-126, 214, 217, 293 Classics (jing 經) 1, 110, 117, 288-289, 291. See also Classic of Documents; Classic of Poetry; Five Classics; Springs and Autumns Annals commerce. See merchants Communist Party of China (CPC) 13, 28n33, 294n81, 297n93, 297n94 Confucianism 7, 13, 15, 22, 26, 73-74, 92, 105, 273- 275, 287-292, 299. See also “Confucian revival”; Confucius; Ru (Confucians) “Confucian revival,” 13-14, 26 Confucius (Kongzi 孔子, 551–479 bce) 2, 4, 92, 104, 106n93, 288, 290-291; on agri­ culture, 223-225, 233-234; and Chunqiu 19, 70-72, 81, 95, 103n90, 112-113, 116; denounced 7, 275; extolled 7, 274-277, 287, 289; and the Han dynasty 286-287; Hegel on 9; honorifics of 276, 290; on merchants, 245; as a sage, 273-274, 277, 281, 286, 289; sacrifices to 286. See also Anti-Confucian campaign; Con­fucianism; “Confucian revival”; Lunyu conscription, military 2, 38, 249, 263-266 Cook, Scott 23-24 cosmology 111-112, 130-133, 141, 146, 280; correlative 129-130. See also Five Phases Cui Zhu 崔杼 (d. 546 bce) 182-184 Cultural Revolution. See Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution

Index Da Dai liji 大戴禮記 (compiled 43-33 bce) 56, 75, 120, 121n9, 123n18, 128, 196n28 da yitong 大一統 74, 114. See also unity, political “Da Yu mo” 大禹謨, chapter of the Classic of Documents 121-122 Da Yu-ding 大盂鼎 inscription 59 Dai Hong 戴宏 (fl. ca. 106–125) 70-72, 106, Dao 道 (the Way) 55-56, 63n38, 81n40, 102, 156-157, 164-165 172, 174, 191, 195-196, 202, 223, 273-276, 283-285, 287, 289-293 Daoism 17n24, 291 de 德 (“virtue”) 20, 46, 56, 59-62, 63n38, 65-66, 83, 92n65, 99- 100, 104-105, 110, 115, 119, 122, 124, 142-143, 190-192, 195, 212n3, 283, 285 debt reckoning (jiaoquan 校券) 249, 260268 Deng Xiaonan 鄧小南 293, 294n81 Deng Xiaoping 鄧小平 (1904–1997) 11n19, 299n97 despotism 26, 180, 226. See also Montesquieu; Wittfogel, Karl Ding County 定縣 site (Hebei) 188n9-10 divination 17, 51, 54, 64-68, 82n42, 89 Dong Zhongshu (董仲舒, ca. 195–115 bce) 71, 73, 105, 107-110, 111n101, 112n105, 113, 117, 146, 213n6, 284 du 度 (measures) 77, 137, 147, 241-242 Duke of Zhou 周公 (d. ca. 1035 bce) 56, 61-62, 88, 122, 146, 214n7 Eastern Zhou 東周 period (770–256 bce) 15-16, 35-37, 43, 47, 188 elite, educated 18, 28, 109, 151, 166n22, 233, 290-291. See also intellectuals emperor(s) 21, 27-28, 45, 77, 120, 151; encourage agriculture 212; and Confucians 276-278; and Gongyang zhuan 108-109, 117; and Heaven 279-283, 285; ideological authority of 275-296; individual qualities of 148-150; and Mao Zedong 296-300; power of 179-180, 279-292; sagacity of 276-278; and the Way 283-286. See also honorifics: of the emperors; monarch; ruler; sage; succession of power Emperor Chengzong of Yuan 元成宗 (r. 1294–1307) 287

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

339

Index Emperor Chengzu of Ming 明成祖 (Zhu Di 朱棣, the Yongle 永樂 Emperor, r. 1402– 1424) 288, 289n64 Emperor Gao (Gaozu) of Han 漢高祖 (Liu Bang 劉邦, r. 206/202-195 bce) 146, 149, 286 Emperor Gaozu of Tang 唐高祖 (r. 618– 626) 281 Emperor Guangxu. See Guangxu Emperor Emperor Jing of Han 漢景帝 (r. 157–141 bce) 71, 73, 106-107, 212n3 Emperor Kangxi. See Kangxi Emperor Emperor Lizong of Song 宋理宗 (r. 1224– 1264) 288 Emperor Ningzong of Song 宋寧宗 (r. 1194– 1224) 288 Emperor Qianlong. See Qianlong Emperor Emperor Renzong of Yuan 元仁宗 (r. 1312– 1320) 288 Emperor Shizong of Ming 明世宗 (the Jiajing 嘉靖 Emperor, r. 1521–1567) 290, 292 Emperor Taizong of Qing 清太宗 (Huang Taiji 皇太極, r. 1627–1643) 282 Emperor Taizong of Tang 唐太宗 (r. 626– 649) 281 Emperor Taizu of Ming 明太祖 (Zhu Yuanzhang 朱元璋), (r. 1368–1398) 180, 281, 282n38, 287-289, 295 Emperor Wanli. See Wanli Emperor Emperor Wen of Han 漢文帝 (r. 180-157 bce) 74, 149, 188, 212n4 Emperor Wen of Sui 隋文帝 (r. 581– 604) 281 Emperor Wu of Han (漢武帝, r. 141–87 bce) 19, 119n3, 136, 148-149, 151, 188, 286 Emperor Xuan of Han 漢宣帝 (r. 74–49 bce) 188, 254, 263 Emperor Yongzheng. See Yongzheng Emperor empire, Chinese 1, 10, 12, 22, 25, 76, 78, 140, 147, 156, 164-165, 176, 247, 273; durability of 11; early (Qin-Han period) 75, 114, 133, 136, 146, 151, 249, 263, 267-269 Empress Dowager Cixi 慈禧太后 (1835– 1908) 294 Empress Lü 呂后 of Han (r. 195-180 bce) 73 Erudites (boshi 博士) 18, 21, 107, 110, 133, 149, 234, 288 Van Ess, Hans 28n35, 74

euhemerization 119 expediency. See quan 權 fa 法 (regulations, law, methods, system) 77, 99, 111, 116, 176n44. See also laws Fan Chi 樊遲 (Confucius’s disciple) 223 farmer. See peasant “Fengzhenshi” 封診式 (“Forms for Sealing and Investigating”) 254, 256-258, 268 feudalism, in China 35, 218 “field allocation” (fenye 分野), astrological system 43-44 fields 38, 43, 45, 75, 213, 215-216, 222n39, 225226, 228, 230, 232-234, 236, 243; division of plots 216-217, 220, 244n120, 247. See also well-field system filial piety, filiality (xiao 孝) 20, 93-94, 99100, 102, 105, 115, 283n42 First Emperor of Qin (秦始皇帝, r. as King of Qin 246-221 bce; as Emperor 221–210 bce) 21, 32, 45, 47, 220n29, 247, 293, 295; and agriculturalism 240-242; cultic activities of 47, 136; image of 28n35, 149, 151; Mao compared to 298; mausoleum of 264; as sage 27-28, 276, 283-284; and Shun 141, 147, 148n63; tour of 47, 136. See also book burning; Qin Five Classics 108, 288- 289 Five Phases 129, 287. See also cosmology Foucault, Michel (1926-1984) 269 Fu Sheng 伏生 (Scholar Fu, fl. late third century bce) 149n65, 133, 150 Gao Min 高敏 254, 257 “Gao Yao mo” 皋陶謨, chapter of the Classic of Documents 122, 124, 133, 138, 150 Gao Yao 皋陶 (legendary minister) 122, 143 Gentz, Joachim 19-21 geography 15-16, 40, 43, 48, 76n28, 252 Goldin, Paul R. 16, 161n10, 172n38, 189n11 Gongsun Hong 公孫弘 (200-121 bce) 107109 Gongyang commentary (Gongyang zhuan 公 羊傳) 19-20, 69- 117; absent topics from 98-106; dating of 70-81; exegetical methods of 83-85; ideological outlook of 102-106; in the Han dynasty 73, 106-114; on hierarchy

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

340 Gongyang commentary (Gongyang zhuan 公羊傳) (cont.) 86-90, 98, 102, 105; historical narratives in 94-98; on “interior” and “exterior” 78-82; on ritual 82-83, 86-94; on the ruler 85, 91-97, 114-117; on unity 7482, 114. See also Chunqiu; Dong Zhongshu; Kang Youwei Graham, Angus C. 8, 219 Graziani, Romain 22-23, 202n34 Great Leap Forward (1958–1960) 297n92 Great Peace. See taiping 大平 Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966– 1976) 27, 296-297, 298n95-96 Gu Yanwu 顧炎武 (1613–1682) 289 Guaibo Guifeng-gui 乖伯歸峰簋 inscrip­ tion 60 Guan Longpang 關龍逢 (legendary min­ ister) 170 Guan Tong 管同 (1780—1831) 187n7 Guan Zhong 管仲 (d. 645 bce) 103, 166, 170171, 173, 235, 145, 245n122 Guangxu 光緒 Emperor (r. 1875–1908) 294 Guanzi 管子 (ca. fourth-second centuries bce) 38n20, 40, 76, 100-101, 103, 203n36, 217n19, 221n33, 226n52, 235-240. See also Guan Zhong Gun 鯀 131-132, 140-141 Guodian Manuscripts 郭店楚墓竹簡  92n65, 146n58, 189-190; “Liu de” 六德 92n65, 192n18; “Lu Mu Gong wen Zisi” 魯穆公問子思 192-196, 198n30, 199; “Tang Yu zhi dao” 唐虞之道 146n58; “Yucong” 語叢 192n18; “Zhongxin zhi dao” 忠信之道 189-190 Guoyu 國語 (Speeches of the States, ca. fourththird century bce) 31-32, 54, 63n38, 103, 190, 191n15, 191n17, 215 guwen 古文. See ancient script texts Han (韓), noble lineage and regional state (453-230 bce) 39, 72n16, 286n52 Han dynasty 漢 (206/202 bce-220 ce) 18, 25, 68n51, 117- 119, 146, 187n8, 218, 274, 287 Han Fei (韓非, d. 233 bce) and Han Feizi 韓 非子, 9n14, 69n3, 72, 83, 116, 143, 223n42, 286, 291n74; on agriculture 223, 233-235; execution of 6; and hereditary power transfer 5, 162; historical argumentation in 159, 166-167, 170n34, 171-172, 176, 202n34;

Index and ideological unity 6n7; monarchism of 22-23, 156-165, 170-180; on merchants 231; on ministers 23, 155, 157, 160, 165-179, 192, 195n27; text’s dating and composition 160161nn8-9, 234n86 Han Jiu 韓咎 168n28 Han Yu 韓愈 (768–824) 81n40, 114, 282- 283, 285 Hanshu 漢書 72, 109n97; 123, 142n54, 147n61, 186, 254, 285 Haojiaping 郝家平 site (Sichuan) 243 he 和 (harmony) 38, 55,144, 200, 205, 285 He Xiu 何休 (129-182) 71n11, 105, 112-114 He-zun 何尊 inscription 28 heart (xin 心) 39, 45-46, 56, 83, 93-94, 104106, 115, 292-293 Heaven (tian 天) 5, 9, 21, 35, 40n22, 50, 5253, 55, 60-61, 63, 183, 189, 277; divine nature of 16-18, 64-66; in Gongyang commentary 99-100, 104, 110, 115; and the monarch 279-285; in Mozi 17n24, 65-66; political interpretation of 17-18, 67-68; sacrifice to 89; and Shun 147; and Supreme Thearch 52, 59n27; and Yao 120n8, 124, 130, 132, 136n42, 143. See also Heaven’s Mandate; omens Heaven’s Mandate (tian ming 天命) 15-18, 49-52, 53, 57-65, 67-68, 162, 184, 280-282, 297; terminology related to 58-59 hegemony, political: Springs-and-Autumns period 92, 95, 98, 100, 103n90 hemerology 130 hereditary kingship. See succession of power, hereditary hierarchy, social 5, 12, 76, 144, 233, 267, 289; in Gongyang zhuan 86-90, 98, 102, 105 historical argumentation 12, 20, 24, 9498, 159, 166-167, 170n34, 171-173, 176, 199, 202n34, 204-205n43, 293. See also anecdotes historiography, modern 13-15, 26-27, 31, 226n51, 249, 254, 257-258, 297n94 historiography, traditional 2, 19-20, 34, 37, 47-48, 67, 75, 119, 186n5; and Classic of Documents 123-124; and Gongyang commentary 19, 70, 72-73, 78, 84, 86, 92n66, 94-99, 103; rules of 81n39, 84-85, 114-115, 121n10. See also Chunqiu; Gongyang commentary

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

Index honorifics: of Confucius 276, 290; of the emperors 281, 285 horticulture 223 Houji 后稷 63n38, 127, 214, 225, 228 Hsing I-t’ien 邢義田 251, 255, 266 Hu Shi 胡適 (1891-1962) 216, 217n18 Hu Yaobang 胡燿邦 (1915–1989) 299 Huainanzi 淮南子 (ca. 140 bce) 109, 131n31, 208n47 Huang Zhanyue 黃展岳 264 Huang, Ray (Huang Renyu 黃仁宇, 19182000) 180 Huang-Lao 黃老 74, 99 hukoubu 戶口簿. See records of households Hundred Schools of Thought (baijia 百家) 1 Huwu Zidu 胡毋子都, a.k.a. Master Huwu (Huwu sheng 胡毋生) 71, 73, 105-107, 109-110, 112n105, 117 identity: individual 269-260, 263, 268; regional: 37, 48n34 Ikeda On 池田温 256-257 institutions (zhi 制) 5, 26-27, 76n28, 77, 94, 102, 149, 165, 176-177, 213n6; changes in 110; 112n104; and ideology 267-269; of monarchy 156-158, 161-162, 179, 276, 283, 288 intellectuals 3, 5-6, 12-13, 151, 167, 273, 282. See also literati, shi intelligence: human 22, 24, 103n89, 168n27, 176, 179, 190, 221n33 Jaspers, Karl (1883–1969) 1 Ji Kang 嵇康 (223–262) 275n10 Jiajuhouguan 甲渠侯官 site (Inner Mongolia) 188n9 Jiang Qing 江青 (1914–1991) 7 Jiang Qing 蔣慶 (b. 1952) 19, 117 “Jiashen 甲申Culture Manifesto” (2004) 27n32 Jie 桀 (legendary last ruler of the Xia dynasty) 65, 164, 178, 204 Jieyi lun 解疑論 (Essay on the Explanation of Textual Ambiguities) 71 Jin 晉, regional state (11th century to 453 bce) 37, 69n3, 215, 291 “Jinbu lü” 金布律 (“Statutes on Currency and Commodities”) 265

341 Jinsha 金沙 site (Sichuan) 34n8 jinwen 今文. See modern script texts Jiu Tangshu 舊唐書 186 Jixia 稷下 academy 72, 75-76 “Jun Shi” 君奭 (“Prince Shi”), chapter of the Classic of Documents 62 Juyan 居延 site (Inner Mongolia) 188n9, 258 “Kang gao” 康誥 (“The Announcement to Prince Kang”), chapter of the Classic of Documents 61-62, 65 Kang Youwei 康有爲 (1858–1927) 19, 117, 294 Kangxi Emperor 康熙 (r. 1661–1722) 180, 289, 295-296 Kantorowicz, Ernst H. (1895-1963) 21, 149, 171n36 Kautilya. See Arthashastra Ke-he 克盉 vessel and inscription 33 Ke-lei 克罍 vessel and inscription 32 Kern, Martin 20-21, 31, 47, 54, 60, 64 King Cheng of Zhou 周成王 (r. ca. 1042–1021 bce) 58, 63n38 King Min of Qi 齊閔王 (r. 301–284 bce) 72 King Ping of Zhou 周平王 (r. 770–720 bce) 62 King Wen of Zhou 周文王 (d. c. 1047 bce) 56, 74, 277; attains the Mandate of Heaven 49-53, 57-67; differentiated from King Wu 58-64; instructs the crown prince 54-57, 64; regulations of 77, 82, 86, 92n66, 94-95, 99, 104, 115-116, 293 King Wu of Qin 秦武王 (r. 310–307 bce) 243 King Wu of Zhou 周武王 (d. c. 1043 bce) 18, 49, 53-54, 56-67, 58n24, 162 King Xuan of Qi 齊宣王 (r. 320–301 bce) 72, 75 King Xuan of Zhou 周宣王 (r. 827–782 bce)  215n8, 63 King You of Zhou 周幽王 (r. 781–771 bce)  36-37 kingship. See monarchism Kong Anguo 孔安國 (2nd century bce)  121n9 Kui 夔 (legendary personage) 143-145

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

342 Lai-pan 逨盘 inscription 58n24, 60 landownership 47, 76n28, 212n4, 216-219, 226n52, 235, 242-244. See also fields Laozi 老子 83, 157n2-3, 286 laws 110-111, 116, 139, 157, 159, 162, 165-166, 169n30, 171n35, 175n43, 176-178, 238, 242, 263, 276, 284, 295; ancestral laws 293-294. See also fa 法 Legalism (fa jia 法家) 7, 9n14, 106, 166 legitimacy 14-16, 18, 33, 35, 47, 67, 117, 125, 161, 234, 276, 293; and the Nine Cauldrons 66n41 Lewis, Mark E. 3n3, 4n4, 9, 37-38, 41, 216 Li Mingzhao 李明釗 253-254 Li Si 李斯 (ca. 280–208 bce) 45-47, 231, 242 Li Wai-yee 12n20, 24n30, 196n29 Li Zhi 李贄 (1527–1602) 295n87 Liang Qichao 梁啟超 (1873–1929) 169n31, 187, 274 Liang Shuming 梁漱溟 (1893–1988) 274 Liezi 列子 275n10 Liji 禮記 (Records of the Rites) 40n22, 73n18, 76-77, 82, 87, 97, 99, 131n31, 196n28, 278 literacy 33, 235 “literary inquisition” 290, 295-296, 298 literati 27-28, 47, 209, 282-283, 287, 291-292. See also intellectuals, shi Liu An 劉安 (d. 122 bce) 109-110 Liu Min 劉敏 256 Liu Xiang 劉向 (79–8 bce) 75n24, 186-187, 219 Liu Xin 劉歆 (46 bce–23 ce) 73n19, 77n30, 185 Liu Zehua 劉澤華 4n4, 7n9, 21, 26-27, 155156 Liu Zongyuan 柳宗元 (773–819) 283, 285 Liye 里耶 (site), Hunan 25, 42n25, 218, 241, 243n115, 249-269 Longgang 龍崗 (site), Hubei 243 Lord Ai of Lu 魯哀公 (r. 494–468 bce) 286 Lord Huan of Cai 蔡桓公 (r. 714–695 bce) 167 Lord Huan of Qi 齊桓公 (r. 685–643 bce)  92n66, 100-101, 103, 166n24, 170n33, 173 Lord Jing of Qi 齊景公 (r. 547–490 bce) 170, 183, 186, 197-202, 205-206 Lord Mu of Lu 魯穆公 (r. 407–377 bce) 192194, 198 Lord Wen of Jin 晉文侯 (r. 780–746 bce) 62, 103n90

Index Lord Xiao of Qin 秦孝公 (r. 361–338 bce)  173, 242 Lord Zhuang of Qi 齊莊公 (r. 553–548 bce)  182-184, 199 loyalty (zhong 忠) 4, 20, 24, 181-182, 248; absent from Gongyang commentary 99, 102-103, 105, 115; in Han Feizi 157-159, 162, 165-166, 170-172, 176-177; in Warring States discourse 181-182, 189-196; in Xunzi 208; in Yanzi chunqiu 185, 197-199, 206, 208-210; in Zuo zhuan 182-184, 209. See also altars of soil and grain, ministers, ruler-minister relations Lu 魯, regional state (ca. 1035-256 bce) 19, 37, 70, 74, 84-85, 89-90, 93, 108, 113, 158 Lü Buwei 呂不韋 (d. 235 bce) 245-246 Lü Liuliang 呂留良 (1629–1683) 277-278 Lü Simian 呂思勉 (1884-1957) 258 Lu Wenchao 盧文弨 (1717–1796) 52-53 Lundahl Bertil 150n8, 164n17, 169n31, 170n34 Lunyu 論語 92n65, 104, 223-224. See also Confucius Luo Binwang 駱賓王 (640–684) 292 Luo Xinhui 羅新慧, 16-17 Lüshi chunqiu 呂氏春秋 (composed ca. 240 bce) 67-68, 131n31, 225-227, 286 Ma Rong 馬融 (79-166) 120n8, 123, 129 Mao Gong-ding 毛公鼎 inscription 60 Mao Zedong 毛澤東 (1893-1976) 7, 11, 26-27, 224n43, 294n81, 298-299 Maojiaping 毛家坪 site (Gansu) 35 markets 212n4, 214, 227-231, 235, 237-241, 243 “Masters” (or “Philosophers,” zi 子) 3-6, 8, 12, 72, 227, 235, 278; as bibliographic catergory 1 memory 118n1 Mengzi 孟子 (Mencius, ca. 380-304 bce), and the Mengzi 37, 54, 56, 72, 74n21, 76, 105-106, 141n51, 290; on agriculture and commerce 224, 227-229, 231; censored by Zhu Yuanzhang 289; on Confucius 103n90, 273-274, 291; dating of 127n24; on family obligations 92n65; literary form of 83; on Lord Huan of Qi 100-101; on ministers 194196; on ruler 5; on well-field system 216; self-confidence of 277; on Yao 120; 123n18, 128-129, 133n35

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

343

Index merchants 25, 45, 212, 215, 224n46, 247, 268; anti-merchant mind-set 213-214, 218, 222, 225; careers of 245-247; in Book of Lord Shang 218, 222, 229-230; in Guanzi 236-240; in Han Feizi 234; in Mengzi 227-228; under Qin dynasty 241-244; in Xunzi 225, 231-233 meritocracy 3, 12, 22, 100, 103; and hereditary rulership 133n34, 145-146, 162, 177 Meyer, Andrew 203n36 Mi Zijian 宓子賤 (ca. 521-445 bce) 161n12 Miao. See San Miao military thought 3, 5, 16, 38-40, 97n76, 99, 104 min ben 民本. See “people as a root” ministers 39, 45, 47, 66, 155-156, 181, 187196, 232, 246, 291, 294; of aristocratic age 2, 22, 181-183, 190; importance of 159-160, 165-170; in Gongyang commentary 85, 88, 93n67, 96, 99, 102-103, 115-116; in Han Feizi 23, 157-180, 192; haughtiness of 22, 194-196; subversive 157-158, 160, 162n13, 163, 171-172; in Yanzi Chunqiu 23-24, 184, 196-210 . See also loyalty, remonstrance, ruler-minister relations modern script texts (jinwen 今文, aka New Texts) 114. See also Classic of Documents, modern-text version monarchism: as ideology 3, 5, 10, 12, 20-23, 26, 111, 116, 155-156, 273, 275-296; in Han Feizi 156-165, 168, 171-173, 177-180, 219220n28; under Mao Zedong 296-300. See also True Monarch Montesquieu (1689–1755) 155 Mozi 墨子 (ca. 460–390 bce) and the Mozi 7, 234, 277; on agriculture 224; on Heaven 17n24, 65-67; on ministers 195n27; on Ru 106n93; on ruler 155 music 41n23, 76n28, 106n93, 141, 145, 149, 203-205, 224 mythology 119, 133n34, 140, 148 New Confucians (xin rujia 新儒家) 26 New Guinea 33 New Text school. See modern script texts Nietzsche, Friedrich 204n43 Nine Provinces (jiu zhou 九州) 43-44

Nivison, David S. 9 nobles 2-3, 36, 76n27, 80-81, 87, 91, 93, 99, 102, 108, 125, 137, 141, 245. See also aristocracy nomads 214 non-action. See wuwei North, Douglass C. 267 numerology 144, 147 Onozawa Seiichi 小野沢精一 184n3 omens and portents 17-18, 21, 51n2, 54, 6468, 146, 279; in Gongyang zhuan 99-100, 104, 111; in Lüshi chunqiu 67; in Mozi 65-67. See also calamities and anomalies Pankenier, David W. 43, (118) peasants (farmers) 7, 25, 211-213; 244, 247, 297; as conscripts 2, 38 psychology of; valorization of 213-214, 227; in Book of Lord Shang 217-223, 229; in Guanzi 236-239; in Han Feizi 223, 233-235; in Lunyu 223-224; in Lüshi chunqiu 225-226; in Mengzi 216, 224, 228; under Qin dynasty 242-245; in Xunzi 225-226, 231-233; in Zuo zhuan 215-216 Peng Zhen 彭真 (1902–1997) 297 pentad (wu 伍) 251, 253 people (min 民) 1, 3-4, 39-42, 46, 93-94, 130-132, 155, 200, 206, 237-238, 244, 291, 298; and Heaven 17; caring for 55-56, 61-62, 132, 149, 172, 213n6, 240; and deities 65; in Gongyang commentary 94, 99, 104, 110; loyalty to 182-185, 196, 209-210; instruction of 216, 221n33, 223, 290; management of 213, 220, 222, 225-230, 234-237, 257; and the ruler 189, 191, 234, 280-284. See also “people as a root”; merchants; peasants; population “people as a root” (min ben 民本), ideology 24-25 performative speech 119, 128 performativity 48, 119, 139-140 personal identification, under Qin 259; and track­ing individuals 263 “petty men” (xiao ren 小人) 12 philosophy, Chinese 5-6, 8-14, 17, 21n28, 44, 82, 121n10, 146, 156, 164, 185, 189, 193-197, 202n34, 208, 210, 219, 227, 230. See also political thought

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

344 Pines, Yuri 9n14, 66n44, 69n1, 75, 80n37, 101n86, 102n88, 133n34, 146n58, 160n7, 163, 166n22, 172, 175n43, 177n45, 184n3, 190-192, 196, 219n28, 245n122 Plato 1 Politeia. See Plato political culture, Chinese 8, 12, 15, 21-22, 2627, 155, 179, 279, 282, political thought (political philosophy), Chinese 1-5, 11-12, 15, 17-18, 21-22, 24-26, 119, 146, 210, 227, 258, 282; diversity of 5-6; modern impact of 6, 13-15; studies in the West 6-10, 13-15 Politika. See Aristotle Poo Mu-chou 17 population 5, 15, 25-26, 32, 36, 41-42, 213, 221-222, 225-226, 233, 239, 255-258, 266; political nature of 249, 258-260, 267-269. See also people; registration portents. See omens praxis, political 9-12, 25, 43-44, 109, 162, 179, 202n34, 245-246, 258-260, 288, 298-299 professions 211-213; four categories of (scholars, farmers, craftsmen, merchants) 234-235, 238, 240; separation of 213-215, 221, 227-228, 231-233, 238-239, 242-243, 245. See also root and branch (benmo 本末) occupations punishments and penalties (xing 刑, fa 罰) 6, 24, 39, 56, 61, 74, 76n28, 85, 92, 99, 104, 110, 139-140, 144-145, 147, 157, 171n35, 174, 178n47, 194, 201-202, 206, 219-220, 227228; in Qin dynasty 263-264 qi 氣 99, 111 Qi 齊, regional state (extinguished in 221 bce) 69n3, 72, 286n2 “Qi lüe” 七略 73n19, 77n30, 185 Qianfu lun 潛夫論 (Comments of a Recluse) 52-53 Qianlong Emperor 乾隆 (r. 1736–1795)  296n89 Qin 秦, regional state (ca. 800-221 bce) 3n3, 40-41, 44-46, 72n16, 167, 286n52; agriculture under 216-218, 242-244; bronze vessels of 32n3, 58n24; burial practices 35; in Gongyang zhuan 74, 80n37; historical records of 37n18; surveillance of the popu­

Index lation under 253 Qin 秦 dynasty (221–207 bce) 74-75, 131n31, 283-284; agriculture and commerce under 211n1, 218, 223, 240-245, 247; legal codes of 109-110; surveillance of the population under 25-26, 249-252, 254-269; standardization under 47n33; and “Yao dian” 119, 133-134, 139, 147-150. See also book burning; First Emperor; Liye Qin Gong-gui 秦公簋 inscription 58n24 Qin Gong-zhong 秦公鐘 inscription 58n24 Qing dynasty 清 (1644–1911) 121n11, 277, 288, 295-296 Qing Feng 慶封 183 quan 權 (expediency, moral weighing)  12n20, 20, 83, 95, 97 ranks, social 75, 80, 86, 113, 193, 198, 212n4, 234, 251-254, 256, 259, 261n40, 268 Records of Households (hukoubu 戶口簿)  257-258 reduplicatives 121, 126, 135 regional lords (zhuhou 諸侯) 2-3, 35-37, 42, 74, 76, 81n40, 87-93, 100-102, 137-138, 190, 197, 204, 278, 286 registration 25, 42, 222, 230, 241n112; under Qin 249-260, 263, 267-269 remonstrance 156, 181, 193-197, 202, 205-209, 215n8, 291 revenge (fuchou 復讎) 85, 113 rewards (shang 賞) 24, 39, 99, 157, 174, 178n47, 194, 200-202, 235n89 rhetoric 15, 21, 35, 48, 118-119, 124, 127, 133, 139-140, 143-144, 148-149, 156-157, 161, 170, 175n43, 201, 205n43, 207, 209, 213-214, 226, 241, 244-245 ritual 18, 20-21, 31, 35-37, 41-43, 50-51, 64, 72-73, 75-83, 86-95, 97-99, 102-106, 112, 114-116, 126-127, 136-137, 147, 155, 183-184, 192, 203-204, 223-224, 228-229, 231, 274, 280, 286, 292 Rong 戎, ethnic group (or “belligerents”) 36 root and branch (benmo 本末) occupations  211-212, 236-237. See also professions, separation of Ru 儒 (“Confucians”) 7, 74, 105, 106, 151, 185186, 224, 233, 274-278, 285-292 Rubin, Vitaly (1923-1981) 7

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

Index ruler 1, 3-6, 9, 14-15, 146-147, 232, 235, 239, 275-300; promotes agriculture 211, 213-214, 225, 234; and the army 41-42; capabilities of 20-21, 114-116, 157; charisma of 21, 132, 134-135, 137, 145-149, 155; depersonalization of 21, 115-116, 135, 147-149, 162-165, 170171; divinization of 279-280, 284-286; in Gongyang zhuan 20, 91-97, 105, 113-117; in Han Feizi 155-180; and Heaven 279-283; models of rulership 147-151, 155; morality of 5, 41, 65, 182, 196; and parental authority 92, 113; and the people 25, 65n39, 220221, 223, 225, 227-228, 233, 247; ritual superiority of 81, 85, 91, 93-96; as a sage 47, 279-285; universality of 46, 76. See also abdication; emperor; Mandate of Heaven; monarchism; ruler-minister relations; sage; Shun; Son of Heaven; succession of power; True Monarch; unity, political; Yao ruler-minister relations 1, 4-6, 9, 14, 22-24, 102-103, 283; and friendship 23, 102n88; in Han Feizi 22-23, 155-180; ministerial threat to the ruler 157-159; 171-172, 174-177; in Xunzi 102n88, 194-195, 202, 208; in Yanzi chunqiu 23-24, 181-185, 197-205, 208-210; in Zuo zhuan 23-24. See also loyalty; remonstrance; trustworthiness sage (sheng 聖) 177, 223-224, 229, 231, 233, 275-278, 284-285, 291, 295; Confucius as 70, 275, 277, 281, 286, 290-291, 299; First Emperor as 27-28, 47, 276, 284; former monarchs as 42, 57, 127-128, 131, 135n41, 146, 148, 150-151, 178, 201, 213, 217; ministers as 165n21; monarchs and emperors as 26-27, 157n2, 202n35, 219, 227, 233, 273, 276-278, 283-284, 288-289, 296, 299-300. See also “Sage’s Edicts”; True Monarch Sage’s Edicts (or “sacred edicts,” sheng yu 聖諭) 294-295 San Miao (legendary ethnic group) 140, 141n51 Sandai gaizhi zhiwen 三代改制質文 (“The Three Dynasties’ Alternating Regulations of Substance and Refinement”) 112 Sanft, Charles 25-26, 42n25, 47n33, 243n115 Sang Hongyang 桑弘羊 (152–80 bce) 212, 238

345 Sanke jiuzhi 三科九旨 (“Three Themes, Nine Aspects”) 112 Sanxingdui 三星堆 site (Sichuan) 34n8 Schmitt, Carl (1888-1985) 259 Satō Masayuki 佐藤將之 190, 195n27, 198n30, 199n31 Schaberg, David 12n20, 24n30, 41n23, 121n10, 126, 196n29, 204n43, 258 Schrecker, John 10 Schwartz, Benjamin I. 8, 216 “scribal records” (shiji 史記) 37, 70n5 Shang dynasty 商 (ca. 1600–1046 bce) 34, 35n13, 52, 54-55, 59-63, 65-67, 88, 112, 129, 206, 214n7, 293 Shang Yang 商鞅 (d. 338 bce) 7, 9, 192n20, 268; and agriculture 213n6, 217-223, 225, 228, 233-234, 239-240, 242; and the Book of Lord Shang 218n24; in Han Feizi 166, 170171, 173; on merchants 229-230, 233; and population registration 253, 259, 268. See also: Book of Lord Shang Shangdi 上帝. See Supreme Thearch Shanghai Museum Manuscripts 上海博物館 藏戰國楚竹書 146n58; “Jing Gong nüe” 景公瘧 205; “Rong cheng shi” 榮成氏 146n58; “Zi Gao” 子羔 146n58 Shangshu dazhuan 尚書大傳. See Classic of Documents Shen Buhai 申不害 (d. 337 bce) 143, 158n4, 192n20 Shen Dao 慎到 178, 192n20 Shennong 神農 (Divine Husbandman) 219220, 222 Shenzi 申子. See Shen Buhai Shi Ke-xu 師克盨 inscription 60 Shi Qiang-pan 史牆盤 inscription 59 Shi Xun-gui 師詢簋 inscription 60 shi 勢 (positional power, power of author­ ity) 40, 176n44, 178, 292 shi 士 (intellectuals) 3-4, 76n26, 87, 100, 102n88, 158n4, 191, 238-239, 242n13, 259n36, 273. See also intellectuals, literati, “superior men” Shiji 史記 (Records of the Historian) 72, 74-75, 110, 120-123, 128-129, 134n39, 135n40, 142n54, 185, 208n47, 242, 245-246; on the First Emperor 28n35, 149. See also Sima Qian

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

346 Shiji zhengyi 史記正義 186n5, 252 Shijing 詩經 (Book of Poems) See Classic of Poetry Shujing 書經 . See Canon of Documents Shuanggudui 雙古堆 site (Anhui) 188n9-10 Shuihudi 睡虎地 site (Hubei); 110, 242-243, 247n127, 254, 256, 262n50, 263-266. See also “Fengzhenshi”; “Jinbu lü” Shun 舜 (legendary thearch) 20, 47, 102, 121n9, 135, 148n63, 162, 212n4, 277 “Shun dian” 舜典 (“Canon of Shun”), chapter of the Classic of Documents 47, 118-119, 121-122, 125n20, 133-134, 145, 148, 150 Shuowen jiezi 說文解字 150, 262n51 Shusun Tong 叔孫通 (fl. 210–190 bce) 286 Si of Bao 褒姒, wife of King You of Zhou 37 Siku quanshu zongmu 四庫全書總目, 186n5, 295n87 Sima Guang 司馬光 (1019–1086) 282 Sima Qian 司馬遷 (ca. 145–ca. 85 bce)  37n18, 104, 107, 110, 160n8, 185, 212, 217, 238, 241-242, 246. See also Shiji 史記 Sima Zhen 司馬貞 (eighth century) 121n9, 129 Son of Heaven (tianzi 天子) 43, 80n39, 93, 95, 98, 107, 115-116, 131n31, 277, 293; and emperor’s deification 279-282; losing power 2, 37; ritual superiority of 76-77, 87-90, 108, 292 Song Hongbing 宋洪兵 156n1 Song 宋 dynasty (960–1279) 113, 293 Springs-and-Autumns period (Chunqiu 春秋, 770–453 bce) 2, 17, 22-24, 38n19, 53-54, 62, 101n86, 103, 115, 173, 181, 189-191, 215, 217, 224n43, 235, 245, 257 Sterckx, Roel 25 Stone Canal Pavilion (Shiqu ge 石渠閣) scholarly meeting (51 bce) 288 succession of power 37, 73, 80n39, 179; hereditary 22, 60, 96, 151, 161-162, 166, 178; non-hereditary 5, 132-133, 145-146, 148. See also: abdication Sui Hong 眭弘 (d. 78 bce) 146 Suishu 隋書 186 Sun Fu 孫復 (992–1057) 19n26 Sunzi 孫子 40, 42 “superior man” (or “noble man,” gentleman, junzi 君子) 12, 96, 196n28, 223, 231, 233, 278

Index Supreme Thearch (aka Lord on High, Shangdi 上帝) 50-52, 58-62, 65, 183, 206-207, 279n24 Suzuki Naomi 鈴木直美 256-258 “Tai shi” 泰誓 (“The Great Oath”), chapter of the Classic of Documents 54, 65 Taiping yulan 太平御覽 (984) 52 taiping 太平, Great Peace (or Great Evenness) 113 Taiping Heavenly Kingdom 太平天國 (1850– 1864) 275n10 Taisi 太姒, wife of King Wen of Zhou 50-54, 57, 64-65, 68 Tang 唐 dynasty (618–907) 113, 180, 185, 281 taxation 74, 109, 212n4, 213n6, 225, 227-228, 230, 235-237, 244n121, 249, 268 techniques (shu 術 or shu 數) 99, 105, 116, 159 tetrasyllabic meter 125-126, 144 Three Ages of Chunqiu transmission (sanshi 三世) 113 Tianchang 天長 site (Anhui) 257 tianzi (天子). See Son of Heaven totalitarian regimes 7, 27, 175 tours of inspection 47, 136-137 trade. See merchants treachery 144, 146, 158, 174n42, 177, 180 True Monarch 280, 282. See also First Emperor; monarchism; sage trustworthiness (xin 信) 55, 103, 143-144, 161, 176, 181, 189-191, 223, 239 Tsinghua (Qinghua 清華) University bamboo manuscripts 17, 49, 146n58 “unadorned king” (su wang 素王) 277 unity, political 2, 6, 10, 14-16, 18, 21, 28, 32, 46, 141, 173, 214, 241, 247, 249, 278; in Gongyang zhuan 73-78, 114. See also All-underHeaven; da yitong Van Norden, Bryan 10, 12 violence 104, 149, 157, 179, 200, 202 wang 望 sacrifice 51n4, 136-137 Wang Fu 王符 (ca. 85–163) 52-53 Wang Mang 王莽 (ca. 45 bce–23 ce) 16, 146-147 “Wang zhi” 王制 texts 75, 232

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

Index Wangdu ji 王度記 (Records of the Monarch’s Measurements) 73n18, 75-77, 82 Wanli 萬曆 Emperor (r. 1572-1620) 180 warfare 2, 39, 222, 224, 234-236, 242 Warring States period (Zhanguo 戰國, 453–221 bce) 2-6, 11, 15-18, 20, 22-25, 28, 32, 56-57, 66, 72, 75-76, 80n37, 102n87, 105, 157, 173n39, 181, 189, 191, 209-210, 213, 217, 223, 245-249, 257-258, 273, 286n52, 290n70, 297n94 Wei 衛, regional polity (until 209 bce) 78, 91-92 Wei 魏, noble lineage and regional state (453225 bce) 37, 39, 72n16, 286n52 weights and measures 47, 77, 137, 147, 241 well-field (jing tian 井田) system 212n4, 213n6, 216-217, 221, 227, 229n63 “Wenhou zhi ming” 文侯之命 (“Command to Lord Wen”), chapter of the Classic of Documents 62 Western Zhou 西周 (ca. 1046-771 bce) 16, 18, 36, 53-54, 57-65, 124, 215n8 White Tiger Hall (Baihu guan 白虎觀) scholarly meeting (79 ce) 75, 288 Wittfogel, Karl A. (1896-1988) 26, 226 worthies (xian 賢) 99-100, 103, 110, 224 Wu Dexuan 吳德旋 187n7 Wu Han 吴晗 (1909–1969) 297n93 Wu Qi 吳起 (d. 381 bce) 38, 166. See also Wuzi Wu Zetian 武則天 (d. 705), Empress 292 Wu Zeyu 吳則虞 (1913–1977) 187 wuwei 無為 174 Wuzi 吳子 38, 40, 44. See also Wu Qi

347 on Heaven 67; literary form of 83; on ministers 102n88, 194-195, 202n35, 208; opposes pluralism 6n7; on praxis 11; on ritual 99; on sage monarchs 276, 278; studies of in the West 9; on unity 173n39

Yan 燕, regional state (11th century-222 bce)  32-33, 69, 72n16, 286n52 Yan Fu 嚴復 (1854–1921) 274 Yan Shigu 顏師古(581–645) 123, 219n26 Yan Ying 晏嬰 (aka Yanzi 晏子, ca. 580–500 bce) 23-24, 181-185, 186, 188 Yan Zhuoju 顏涿聚 (sixth century bce) 170 Yang Hu 陽虎 (fl. 500 bce) 158 Yang Tinghe 楊廷和 (1459–1529) 292 Yangshao 仰韶 Culture 33n7 Yanzi chunqiu 晏子春秋 23-24, 181, 184185, 205-210; dating and nature of 185-188, 207-208; on ministers 196-205, 209-210. See also Yan Ying Yao 堯 (legendary thearch) 102, 118-151, 162, 164, 178, 277 “Yao dian” 堯典 (“Canon of Yao”), chapter of the Classic of Documents 20, 118-151 Yi Sǔng-ryul 李承律 195n27 Yi Yin 伊尹 (model minister of early Shang dynasty) 166, 170, 173 Yi Zhou shu 逸周書 (Lost Documents of Zhou) 17, 49-53, 56-58, 67n48, 122-124 yi 義 (propriety, righteousness) 91-93, 102, 192n18, 196 Yi-Di 夷狄 “barbarians” 74, 78-81, 112-113 Yimencun 益門村 site (Shaanxi) 35 Yinqueshan 銀雀山 site (Shandong) 187188 yin-yang 陰陽 21, 99, 285, 287 “Xia shu” 夏書, section of the Classic of Yiwen leiju 藝文類聚 (composed in 624) 52 Documents 138, 149-150 xiao 孝. See filial piety Yongzheng Emperor (雍正, r. 1723– xin 信. See trustworthiness 1735) 180, 287, 290, 295-296 xin 心. See heart You Ruo 有若, Confucius’ disciple 161n12 xing 刑. See punishments Yu 禹 (legendary thearch) 20, 42, 121n9, 122, Xing-zhong 鐘 inscription 59 128, 133, 145, 148, 150, 213n6, 234 “Yu gong” 禹貢, chapter of the Classic of Xu Xing 許行 (fl. 315 bce) 224, 229 Documents 42, 148, 150 Xun-gui 詢簋 inscription 60 Xunzi 荀子 (d. after 238 bce), and the Xunzi  “Yu shu” 虞書, section of the Classic of Documents 150 73n18, 76-77, 105-106; on agri­culture 225, Yu Zongfa 余宗發 251 233; collation of the text 187n8; on com­ Yuasa Kunihiro湯淺邦弘 197 merce 44-45, 231-233; on Confucius 277;

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

348 Zeng Jing 曾静 (1679–1735) 277-278, 290 Zengzi 曾子 (ca. 505-436 bce), Confucius’ disciple 71n13, 105, 196 Zhang Cong 張璁 (1475–1539) 292 Zhang Jinguang 張金光 256, 264 Zhang Rongqiang 張榮強 252, 257 Zhang Shoujie 張守節 (fl. 725–735) 121n9, 186n5, 252 Zhang Tang 張湯 (d. 115 bce) 110 Zhanguo ce 戰國策 (Stratagems of the Warring States) 168n28, 169n29, 207, 245n122, 246 Zhao 趙, noble lineage and regional state (453-222 bce) 39, 72n16, 286n52 Zheng Liangshu 鄭良樹 160n8 Zheng Xuan 鄭玄 (127–200) 63n38, 120n8, 121n9, 123, 129 Zheng Zhong 鄭眾 (d. 83 ce) 257 Zhi Bo Yao 智伯瑤 (d. 453 bce) 169 Zhi Guo 智過 (d. 453 bce) 169 zhi 制. See institutions zhong 忠. See loyalty Zhongshan, Tomb of King 中山王陵 190 Zhòu 紂 (aka Zhouxin 紂辛) (d. ca. 1046 bce), last ruler of the Shang dynasty 59, 65-66, 178, 202n35, 203-204 Zhou dynasty 周 (ca. 1046–256 bce) 2, 50, 66, 68-69, 76, 162, 184, 293 Zhou shi tian fa 周食田法 (Regulations for Zhou Food Fields) 75, 77

Index Zhouli 周禮 43, 76, 257-258 Zhu Di朱棣. See Emperor Chengzu of Ming Zhu Xi 朱熹 (1130–1200) 19n26, 218n21, 277, 288 Zhu Yuanzhang 朱元璋 (1328-1398). See Em­ pe­ror Taizu of Ming zhuan 專 (acting on one’s own authority) 108 Zhuang Tinglong 莊廷鑨 (d. 1655) 296 Zhuangzi 莊子 (ca. third century bce text)  4-5, 172n38, 275n10, 291 Zichan 子產 (d. 522 bce) 184n3, 215-216, 234 Zigong 子貢 (520-466 bce), Confucius’ disciple 245, 273 Zisi 子思 (483–402 bce), Confucius’ grandson 105, 192-196, 198-199 Zixia 子夏 (b. 507 bce) 71 Zuo zhuan 左傳 (Zuo Commentary) (ca. fifth-fourth centuries bce) 54, 101n86, 138; on agriculture 215-216; on Chu 32, 80n37; and the Chunqiu 69; dating and nature of 24n30, 196n29; as historical text 19n26, 23, 73n18; on loyalty 190-191, 208-209; military thought in 40-41; on the nine cauldrons 66n41; on non-Chinese groups 36; omens in 64-65; ritual rules in 83n53, 90, 93n68, 99; on rulers 280n30; Yan Ying in 23-24, 182, 184-185, 194, 197-199, 205-206, 208-210

Yuri Pines, Paul Goldin and Martin Kern - 978-90-04-29933-7 Downloaded from Brill.com04/19/2020 07:15:05AM via The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)