The Poet Shen Yueh (441-513): The Reticent Marquis 9780691606262, 9780691656229, 0691606269

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RICHARD B. MATHER

The Poet Shen Yueh (441-513) The Reticent Marquis

PRINCETON LEGACY LIBRARY

THE POET SHEN YUEH

The officer charged with proposing a posthumous title suggested "Wen" (The Literary), but Emperor Wu said, "Since his real feelings were never fully expressed, he should be called 'Yin' (The Reticent)." --History of the Liang 13.243

Richard B. Mather

THE POET SHEN YUEH (441-513) THE RETICENT MARQUIS

Princeton University Press · Princeton, New Jersey

ISBN: 978-0-691-60626-2

Princeton Legacy Library edition 2019 Paperback ISBN: 978-0-691-60626-2 Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-691-65622-9

For Ginny

CONTENTS Preface

ix

l. Introduction

3

2. The Shen Family of Wu-hsing 3. Shen Yiieh's Early Years 4. The Historian

7

15

26

5. The Flowering of the Yung-ming Style 37 6. The Taoist Recluse

85

7. The Buddhist Layman 8. Death in the Suburbs Bibliography Index

135 175

224

241

LIST OF MAPS

l. Southern Ch'i Western Provinces (after

T'an Ch'i-hsiang, Chung-kuo li-shih ti-t'u chi). 2. Southern Ch'i Eastern Provinces (after T'an Ch'i-hsiang, Chung-kuo li-shih ti-t'u chi). 3. Chien-k'ang.

vii

PREFACE Very early in my study of the influence of Buddhism upon the literati of early medieval China I became aware of the frequency with which the name Shen Yiieh 5!\:.f.iv (441-513) appeared among the authors of essays in two important collections of documents: the Collection on the Propagation of the Light (Hung~ining chi 5t.ll}j ~) by Seng-yu 1'lf;ff; (435-518) and the Expanded Collection on the Propaga~ tion of the Light (Kuang hung~ming chi .!Jf5t.ll})~) by Tao~hsiian ~~ (596-667). 1 At the time I made a mental note that some day I must look into what Shen Yiieh had to say. But it took many years to reach a point where I felt ready to tackle what would obviously become a long~term project. First, it seemed prudent to find out more about the third~through early fifth~century Buddhist literati to whose tradition Shen Yiieh belonged. My attention was thus drawn to the colorful array of characters in Liu I~ch'ing's f'JJ\J:t. (403-444) New Account of Tales of the World (Shih~shuo hsin~yii -l!t-"t)t,1~it ), 2 especially Sun Ch' o 1.% i'.f. (active 330-365)3 and Hsieh Ling~yiin ~ ~:i{ (385-433), 4 who, in their acceptance of Buddhism, represented advancing levels of comprehension of that doctrine. Another subject, Wang Chin .I.. rp (d. 505), author of the "Dhuta Temple Stele Inscription" ("T' ou~t' o ssu pei~wen" .iji ft-t" ~ :X.),S was 1 J. Takakusu ~{,tj11]~PX.~~ and K. Watanabe 5JtJ!)lij,jtl1, editors, Taisho shinshii daizokyo :k.iL'f.JT1i}:k.~#.Ii (The Chinese Buddhist Tripitaka of the Taisho Era), Tokyo, 1922-1936, VoL 52:1-361. 2 Yang Yung ~JIJ, editor, Shih-shuo hsin-yil chiao-chien -t!t--JJI)f.JT"tt:flt1;, Hong Kong, 1969; translated, R. Mather, Shih-shuo hsin-yil: A New Account of Tales of the World, Minneapolis, 1976. 3 R. Mather, "The Mystical Ascent of the T'ien~t'ai Mountains: Sun Ch'o's Yu T'ien-t'ai-shanfu," Monmumenta Serica 20 (1961), 226-245. 4 R. Mather, "The Landscape Buddhism of the Fifth Century Poet Hsieh Lingyiin," Journal of Asian Studies 18 (1958-59), 67-79. 5 Hsiao T'ung -j-i',t (501-531), editor, Wen-hsilan j:i{ (Selections of Refined Literature) 59.1a-14a (Chung-hua shu-chii edition, Peking, 1977); translated, R. Mather, "Wang Chin's Dhiita Temple Stele Inscription," Journal of the American Oriental Society 83.3 (1963), 338-359.

ix

PREFACE

a contemporary of Shen Yiieh. When I finally turned my attention to Shen Yiieh himself around 1967 I was somewhat dismayed to discover that his poems were not easy to read and managed to postpone serious engagement with them until the autumn of 1972, when a single-quarter leave from the University of Minnesota gave me three months of uninterrupted study at the Research Institute of Humanistic Sciences of Kyoto University. The draft translations I had begun at that time were continued in a desultory way until I could once more devote full attention to them during another quarter leave in the fall of 1978 at the University of California in Berkeley. The following spring, in a seminar I was conducting as guest professor in the Department of Oriental Languages, I was at last able to begin organizing the materials that make up the bulk of the present volume. Of considerable assistance in the process were the reports and papers submitted by students in the seminar, in particular, those by Marilyn Saunders, Wendy Larson, and Judith Boltz. Back at the University of Minnesota I received further stimulation from students in another Shcn Yiieh seminar. I should particularly mention the contribution of Richard Jackson, who a few years earlier had also written his master's thesis on Shen Yiieh' s "Poetic Essay on Living in the Suburbs" ("Chiao-chii fu" 3(~,%W\,). I also owe a debt of gratitude to two research assistants in different aspects of this study: To Sharyn Wang (Wang T'ai ..£*) of the University's Wilson Library, who assisted in the transcription of many poems into Middle Chinese reconstructions and gathered a useful body of secondary studies on the Yung-ming writers from Chinese and Japanese scholarly journals, and to Ha Longwen '*'it::t, lately of the Institute of World Religions of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Peking, now completing a degree at the University of Minnesota, who over the past three years has shed a great deal of light on some of Shen Yiieh' s more obscure religious poems. In both cases I am grateful for research grants from the Graduate School of the University of Minnesota which made the assistance possible. After the first draft of the manuscript had been completed I profited greatly from very helpful editorial improvements suggested by Professor Michael True of Assumption College in Worcester, who was teaching American literature at the University of Nanking in the fall of 1984 while I was there working on Six Dynasties local X

PREFACE

history on a grant from the Committee on Scholarly Communication with the People's Republic of China. Very painstaking and constructive criticism was also offered by Alan Berkowitz, a graduate student from the University of Washington in Seattle who was in Nanking doing research on Six Dynasties recluses. I am particularly grateful to three members of the Nanjing University faculty: Professor Jiang Zanchu ~it":fJJ of the Department of Archaeology, Professor Sun Shuqi .:J.% l!.:!:J]- of the Department of History, and Professor Zhong Chongxin 1t*'1t of the Department of Biology, all three of whom showed a lively interest in Shen Yiieh and went far out of their way in helping to locate appropriate landmarks in the Nanking area, to say nothing of books and periodicals in the University library. Professor Zhong, famous in China for introducing spartina grass to stabilize the saline tidelands of the northeast seacoast, took great pains in helping to identify plants and trees mentioned in Shen Yiieh's poems. I should like to acknowledge here my appreciation for a generous grant from the Translations Program of the National Endowment for the Humanities to pursue a parallel project; my work on that anthology of four Yung-ming poets has naturally benefited this study as well. I am especially grateful for the personal encouragement of the Program's former director, Dr. Susan Mango. Closing this very incomplete catalogue of benefactors, I wish to thank my wife, Virginia Temple Mather, whose informed and sensitive understanding of the subject and loyal support over the past forty-eight years have been an unfailing source of strength. It is to her that this book is affectionately dedicated. St. Paul June 1987

xi

THE POET SHEN YUEH

_.,. Vl.

~he

INTRODUCTION

name ofShen Yiieh )t#.-1 (441-513) is not widely known even in China. Though nearly everyone has heard of the great poets of the succeeding age of T'ang (618-906), especially Li Po .:} 8 and TuFu ;f.±.Jl], people know ofShen Yiieh, if at all, only as a propounder of rules for tonal euphony in poetry. If that were Shen' s only claim to fame, it would still be enough to win him a place among China's literary great. But this was perhaps the least of his achievements. In fact, it was no achievement at all, if we listen to the critics of his own generation. Shen Yiieh deserves attention in our day, however, for other reasons. To begin with, like many a propounder of rules before and after him, he transcended his own self-imposed restrictions and left to the world a small but outstanding collection of poems dealing with truly universal themes. Second, he was also one of China's great historians, having edited and contributed to one of the twenty-five standard dynastic histories, the History of the Sung (Sung-shu "t), which covers the years 405-479. Third, he was an articulate defender of the Buddhist faith. Having converted in midlife, he became an ardent advocate of reforms at a time when Buddhism was still being assimilated into Chinese life and culture and was perceived by many to be incompatible with Chinese ideals. Fourth (and this is possibly the most interesting aspect of his life), he held responsible posts under three successive dynasties-the Sung (420-479), the Ch'i (479-502), and the Liang (502-557)-tortured all the while by a desire to give up public life altogether and retire into the mountains as a recluse. He was constantly afflicted by guilt and low self-esteem, a{:utely aware of his inconsistency in continuing to hold office and uncomfortable in his recognition of his own affluence as it contrasted with the poverty he saw all around him. A dedicated vegetarian, he would not knowingly eat or wear anything whose prepara-

*

3

CHAPTER 1

tion required the taking of life, yet it was he who urged the first Liang emperor to kill the last ruler of Ch'i. All these facets of his personality make Shen Yiieh a fascinating subject for study. But in this book I have focused attention on Shen Yiieh for yet another reason. The conflicts and changes taking place in his own life accurately reflect the conflicts within the society of the Southern Dynasties (317-589) as a whole. The ruling elite in the southern capital of Chien-k' ang $l~ (modern Nanking), which is variously described as an "aristocracy" or "oligarchy," 1 was gradually losing power. In Shen Yiieh's day most cabinet posts and important provincial governorships were still nominally controlled by a small circle of northern emigre families whose ancestors had fled south at the beginning of the fourth century to escape the rule of the Hsiung-nu and Hsien-pei conquerors in the north. Slowly they were being forced to yield to the economically more powerful local landholding families and the rising military elite of the south. The northern exiles' nostalgic dream of recovering their lost homeland had faded from the vision of all but a handful of fanatical patriots. The Southern Dynasties were beginning to accept their de facto status as a local regime waiting only to be reincorporated into an eventually unified empire. Traditional historians, with an eye for extracting edifying lessons from the most dismal periods of the past, have generally designated the two hundred and fifty years of the Southern Dynasties as China's "Dark Ages." They are also quick to point to the moral depravity of some of the rulers as the cause of so much bloodshed, chaos, and instability. But a fairer judgment might point toward the spiritual and intellectual ferment of the period, artistically one of the most creative in all the three thousand years of China's recorded history. In literature, for example, a highly sophisticated genre known as parallel prose (p'ien-t'i wen -'1Hit~), in which every statement is balanced by another in carefully wrought cadences, reached the height of its achievement. Later critics could easily fault its preciosity as a manifestation of degeneracy. But in the hands of the masters (including Shen Yiieh) it could be an extremely eloquent and moving 1 See David G. Johnson, The Medieval Chinese Oligarchy, Boulder, 1977, and Patricia Buckley Ebrcy, The Aristocratic Families of Early Imperial China, Cambridge, 1978.

4

INTRODUCTION

medium. Similarly, the simple pentasyllabic lyric verses that first appeared in the Later Han (A.D. 25-220) were undergoing a thorough transformation in this period. Earlier poets had intuitively achieved successful tonal effects in their work, but a small coterie under the patronage of the Southern Ch'i prince, Hsiao Tzu-liang j'-f R. (d. 494), began experimenting with a new set of rules and taboos known as the "four tones and eight maladies" (ssu-sheng pa-ping 1'=1$A*i). Though their principles were not immediately accepted in their own time, the "Yung-ming Style," named after the period in which the rules were devised, became the foundation on which the masters of the high T'ang later built their musically pleasing and universally admired "regulated verses" (lii-shih if:#). Though comparatively few southern examples of sculpture and painting have survived or come to light in archaeological excavations, enough is known for one to regard the period as artistically very refined. For this period Buddhist statues and wall paintings are more fully documented in Tun-huang along the Silk Road in the northwest, or in Yiin-kang, near the earlier T' o-pa Wei capital of P'ing-ch'eng (in Shansi), and in Lung-men, outside their later capital at Lo-yang (in Honan). But some of the great sculptors and painters, such as Tai K'uei ~J!, Ku K'ai-chih .fMt.Z and K'ang Seng-hui J¥ 1'1f~, all of whom were active in fourth-century Chien-k'ang, have left their legacy through good copies of a later date. They provided the intermediate link between the primitive awkwardness of the classical age and the greater maturity and grace of the T'ang artists who followed them. As in the European Middle Ages, the very darkness of some aspects of life in the Southern Dynasties stimulated profound questionings and produced new insights into problems previously neglected through the fundamentally optimistic outlook of China's classical philosophers. Religion~especially the foreign import of Buddhism and the native religious tradition of Taoism~flourished as never before and underwent rapid transformations in this period. During his lifetime Shen Yiieh became deeply involved in controversies over new ideas introduced through fresh translations of Buddhist scriptures from India. Brought up in a devout Taoist family in the Celestial Masters Sect (T'ien-shih tao :k(r.p :i!_), he eventually moved from that rather simple tradition of confession and healing 5

CHAPTER l

inherited from the north toward a more inward and complex form of meditative Taoism. The Mao-shan if~ Sect, which had originated in the south in the fourth century, found a most persuasive advocate in Shen Yiieh's friend and sometime correspondent, T'ao Hungching ft1 5t. -f- (456-536). Shen Yiieh' s serious Buddhist phase began in his thirties during his close association with members of the ardently Buddhist Ch'i royal household. But until his death he never ceased to be a Taoist or to long for Taoist transcendence as a recluse. Shen Yiieh not only experienced the political, social, literary, and religious developments of his time, but also epitomized them in his own person. Although he belonged to a southern military family of relatively low status, by the end of his life he had attained a position of great influence in the Liang court. He not only witnessed the literary developments of the Yung-ming period, but became the leading agent in their promulgation. The shifts in his own religious views and practice both reflected those of his contemporaries and strongly influenced them as well. As a historian he recorded for posterity what had happened immediately before and during his own lifetime. In nearly every sense of the word he was a man of his age. But in order to trace the multicolored strands that formed the tapestry of his life, one must begin the story several generations before he was born.

6

In days gone by, the final years of Western Han, Our family's change of residence began. Eschewing profit and stability in Hai-hun town, They started raising mulberries along the Chiang. -"Poetic Essay on Living in the Suburbs" 21-25

.?•.~2.

~ t~e

THE SHEN FAMILY OF WU-HSING

~

autobiogmphkal final ohaptec ("Po,tface" if) of hi' History of the Sung (Sung-shu :>R"t 100)' Shen Yi.ieh provides a skeleton gen,ealogy of his family. Leaving aside the ritualistic claims of descent from semidivine progenitors in prehistoric times, we may safely accept as authentic the unbroken succession of names with their minimal official titles following the settlement in Chiu-chiang ;IL):r.. (Kiangsi) of Shen Tsun 5t.l! (fl. ca. 150 B.c.), Shen Yi.ieh's twenty-fourth-generation ancestor. This list closely parallels that of a collateral branch of the family that had once appeared on the "Stele Inscription Commemorating the Virtues of the Ancestors of the Shen Clan" ("Shen-shih shu tsu-te pei" 5t.f\:i!.ifl-1.tYf) in the village of Chin-o ~~' very near to Shen Yi.ieh's own home village of Yi.i-pu ~::1- (both in Wu-hsing *.JI!., Commandery, Chekiang); it had been erected by Shen Lin-shih j;t~~±, a close relative and contemporary of Shen Yi.ieh, some time between 448 and 500. 2 The stele evidently became badly eroded over time and was finally vandalized by bandits in 759, so when the famous calligrapher Yen Chen-ch'ing ~.).~ was in the area in 773 he was prevailed upon by members of the Shen family still living there to rewrite it, adding his own colophon. 3 Both genealogies record the migration soon after A.D. 25 of Shen Jung ~and his family down the Yangtze River from Hai-hun 5/J-~ 1 Sung-shu ;R-t (History of the Sung) 100.2443 (Chung-hua shu-chii edition, Peking, 1974); see a!so(Nan-shih r$7 :Jt (History of the Southern Dynasties) 57.1403. Hereafter all references to the standard histories are to the Chung-hua shu-chii edition (Peking, 1972-). 2 Yen K' o-chiin lJ. "f JfJ (1762-1843), editor, Ch'iian shang-ku san-tai Ch'in-Han san-kuo liu-ch'ao wen ~ J:_-{;- ..::..1\ ~)1,_::.. Wj-;'-::; .$}] :;t Complete Prose Writings from High Antiquity through the Six Dynasties 8 vols. (Chung-hua shu-chii reprint, Peking, 1958); Ch'iian Han-wen ~)1, :;t 40.3179-3180. 3 Yen Lu-kung chi $Ji.fl:·A l3.10b (Ssu-pu ts'ung-k'an edition, Shanghai, 1937).

7

CHAPTER 2

Prefecture in Chiu-chiang Commandery, where the Shens had lived since the middle of the second century, to the Wu-hsing region, after Jung had persuaded a recalcitrant local warlord in Chiu-chiang to submit to the authority of Emperor Kuang-wu (r. 25-57) and the new regime of Eastern Han (25-220). For reasons not explained in either text Shen Jung declined the marquisate offered him by the grateful emperor and, "eschewing profit and stability in Hai-hun town," proceeded forthwith to Wu-hsing in the rich agricultural lowlands south of Lake T'ai k~JJ where the family settled and "started raising mulberries." While some remained on the soil as farmers, others pursued careers as minor officials. 4 During the four centuries (fifteen generations) of the Shens' residence in Wu-hsing preceding Shen Yiieh's birth in 441 the family gradually gained recognition as military leaders and organizers of local militia during times of crisis. 5 After the rise of Eastern Chin (317-420), with its capital in Chienk'ang .Jtftt (modern Nanking), the Shens grew wealthy as well. One member of the clan, Shen Ch'ung 5tJL, a lieutenant of the notorious rebel, Wang Tun .£~ (266- 324), ran a private minting enterprise, producing the famous small" coins of Master Shen" (Shen-lang ch'ien 5t ~~il.) which, because of their convenience and scarcity, grew in value far beyond their original denomination. 6 Thereafter the Shens became even more influential as moneylenders, and among the principal surnames of Wu the name of Shen was never omitted. But for all their real power the local southern gentry families could never achieve the political or social status of the northern aristocratic emigres like the Wangs of Lang-yeh (~J$.1..) or the Hsiehs of Ch' enliu (F.f-'fn~), who had fled to Chiang-nan after the fall of north China to non-Chinese invaders between the years 307 and 312. The latter group monopolized all the top ministries in the new capital. The disadvantage was even greater for military families like the Shens because of the low status of soldiers in traditional Chinese society. 4 See Chapter Eight, "The Poetic Essay on Living in the Suburbs" ("Chiao-chii fu"), lines 21-24. 5 See Yoshikawa Tadao -tf Jil ,'t, }(,"Shin Yaku no denki to sono seikatsu" ;t~'\7~ 1Ji-~(. r -'f ~ :'l5f7 (Shen Yiieh's Biography and His Life), Tokai daigaku kiyo, Bungakubu ~b1tk¥U.*, X.¥%F 11 (1968), 32a-33b. 6 Chin-shu % -t (History of the Chin) 26.795; Yoshikawa, "Shin Yaku no denki," 32b.

8

THE SHEN FAMILY OF WU-HSING

For the Shens, great generals that they were, never attained any status as scholars. Some were apparently not even literate. Shen Ch'ing-chih )t,.f~ (386-457), for example, a commander under the Sung (420-479), claimed not to be able to read a single character. When required to produce impromptu verses at banquets and other ceremonial occasions, he would always dictate them for someone else to write down. 7 Illiteracy was not the only disadvantage of the Shen military heritage. There was also the constant peril of fighting on the wrong side. That was what happened to Shen Yiieh's great-grandfather Mu-fu t~:k. (d. 400). Shen Mu-fu had joined the followers of a charismatic spirit medium from nearby Ch'ien-t'ang jlJA:- (modern Hang-chou) named Tu Chiung {±. 9t (fl. ca. 380). Tu healed the sick through Taoist arts (tao-shu 3!..1#) such as confession of wrongdoing, ingestion of macrobiotic drugs, and magic. 8 After Tu's death his mantle fell successively on the shoulders of his disciple Sun T'ai~$ ~ (d. 393), and, later, Sun's nephew Sun En .~ (d. 402). In the year 399 the latter rallied members of the southern landowning families and their retainers, many of whom were descended from impoverished northern refugee families, in defiance of the Chin government's call to recruit them into the central army as a means of checking the size of the private armies. 9 Fighting largely by sea, Sun En's rebels terrorized the land-bound government troops before being put down in 402 by the Chin general Liu Lao-chih f1~~ (d. 402). Shen Mu-fu was Sun En's front division aide (ch'ien-pu ts'an-chiin 1(.r%~ ~Sf:), carrying the awesome title General Brandishing Warlikeness (chen-wu chiang-chiin J.Rli\MSfi), and was given command of the rebel stronghold of Yii-yao ~~t on the estuary of the Che River (Chekiang).10 Naturally, after an initial defeat early in 400, Shen Mu-fu and his brothers were apprehended by Liu Lao-chih and executed. 7 Sung-shu 77.2003. ssee Hisayuki Miyakawa, "Local Cults Around Mt. Lu at the Time of Sun En's Rebellion," in H. Welch and A. Seidel, editors, Facets of Taoism, New Haven, 1979, 83-84. 9Ssu-ma Kuang ii] .~ ;}(. (1019-1086), Tzu-chih t'ung-chien 'If if; i!~ (Comprehensive Mirror in the Aid of Government) 111.3497 (Chung-hua shu-chi.i. edition, Shanghai, 1956); see also Werner Eichhorn (translated, Janet Seligman), Chinese Civilization, New York, 1969, 80. wsung-shu 100.2445.

9

CHAPTER 2

Mu-fu's sons, including Shen Yiieh's grandfather Lin-tzu :ft-t (377422), managed to escape and lived for a while as outlaws. It happened that the rising star in the dark skies of the declining Chin state was Liu Lao-chih's aide, Liu Yii JH~ (356-422), who twenty years later was to found the succeeding dynasty of Sung (420-479). Lin-tzu and his brothers placed themselves in his service against Sun En's successor, Lu Hsiin Jt {Jli, who carried on the struggle from the safe distance of the Kwangtung area in south China until 411. Through almost fanatical loyalty to the central government Lin-tzu sought to erase the blot on the Shen family escutcheon created by his father's involvement in Sun En's rebellion. So successful was he, in fact, that after the new dynasty had been established in 420, Shen Lin-tzu was rewarded with an earldom which he modestly declined. Later he also declined the prestigious title General Aiding in Founding the State (fu-kuo chiang-chiln **I ~;If :f), but remained near the court as a trusted adviser until his death in 422, after which the refused titles were conferred on him posthumously. Lin-tzu's son, Shen Yiieh's father, Shen P'u )t~ (416-453), grew up to be a precocious and extraordinarily circumspect young man. As superintendent of records (chu-pu 3:. ~) for the Prince of Shihhsing, Liu Hsiin J15f-, who was serving as governor of the capital province of Yang (Kiangsu, Anhui, and Chekiang), he came very deeply into the prince's trust and favor. Later P'u proved himself a very capable military commander at the frontier post of Hsii-i BtHil on the Huai River in modern Kiangsu. There he served as grand warden and successfully defended its ramparts against invasion and siege by the T'o-pa Wei forces in 450.11 But three years later, in the first month of 453, the Sung Emperor Wen (Liu I-lung fH~.fL r. 424-453) was murdered by his eldest son, Crown Prince Liu Shao {J}J, who was about to be disinherited for an earlier plot to do the same thing. This nefarious episode involved a Taoist shamaness expert in hex poison (wu-ku .£. i.) who was from Shen Yiieh's home village ofYii-pu ~:1-; certain members of the Shen clan were also implicated. 12 What is worse, Liu Shao proceeded to usurp his father's throne and declared a new reign title. II

10

T'ung-chien 125.2958-2959.

12Yoshikawa, "Shin Yaku no denki," 34b.

THE SHEN FAMILY OF WU-HSING

When word of the parricide reached the usurper's youngest brother, Liu Chiin ~~ third in line for the Sung throne, he retaliated instantly from his scmiexile in Chiang Province (whose administrative seat was Chiu-chiang). Sweeping down the Yangtze in righteous vengeance, he descended on the capital to punish the offenders. Next in line for the throne, however, was not Liu Chiin, but his older brother Hsiin 5tf-, Prince of Shih-hsing, the very person under whose command Shen P'u was serving at the time. Since Hsiin had also been implicated, at least tacitly, in the plot to do away with Emperor Wen, he too was ordered by his younger brother to appear and face his punishment. As a member of his staff, Shen P'u was instantly recalled to Chien-k'ang from his post as grand warden of Huai-nan (in modern Anhui). Liu Hsiin, who was in Ching-k'ou :f.o (modern Chen-chiang) fifty miles downriver from Chien-k'ang, made haste to greet his avenging brother and surrender. Shen P'u, claiming illness over the nasty turn of events, hesitated to move~ a hesitation that cost him his life. When Liu Chiin arrived from Chiang-chou, he ordered Liu Shao, Liu Hsiin, and their aides, including Shen P'u, summarily beheaded. The heads of Shao, Hsiin, and P'u, together with those of their entire families, were then suspended in cages above the south gate of Chien-k'ang, and their bodies exposed in the marketplace. Shen Yiich, who was twelve years old at the time, managed to escape with his mother and go into hiding. Liu Chiin mounted the throne as the new ruler, known to posterity as Emperor Hsiao-wu (r. 453-464). It was only after he had declared a general amnesty on New Year's Day of 454, that the Shens cautiously made a reappearance.l3 Not surprisingly, with his own trauma and the memory of what had befallen his father and great-grandfather branded permanently into his consciousness, Shen Yiieh became even more circumspect in his political career than any member of his family before him had been. Two things now seemed incontrovertibly clear to him: he had to avoid too-intimate alliances with members of the imperial family or other key figures at court and somehow or other break free of the military tradition of his family. Even though he could not avoid some involvement in the unremit-

ntm

1'

Tung-chien 128.4010. 11

CHAPTER 2

ting factionalism of court life to which he seemed irreversibly committed, he learned how to protect himself. Sometimes selfpreservation meant appearing inconspicuous and colorless; at other times it involved periods of temporary reclusion during particularly dangerous purges at court. There were two such occasions during the Ch'i Dynasty (479-502), as we shall see below (Chapter Six). But in 502 it was Shen Yiieh, then President of the Board of Civil Office (li-pu shang-shu ~%~ iJQ""t), who personally urged Hsiao Yen j-.f~r (464-549), a distant relative of the Ch'i imperial family, to mount the throne and proclaim a new dynasty. He even went so far as to persuade Hsiao Yen to kill the deposed last ruler of Ch'i (Emperor Ho, r. 501-502), a mere boy of fourteen years. It was a startlingly uncharacteristic moment of decisive action which he later attempted to deny 14 and for which he paid dearly with a guilty conscience for the rest of his life. In 507, soon after the founding of the new dynasty, heaped with honor and recognition, he slipped away from the court into semiretirement. 15 He was already sixty-six. As a result of this self-protective mask, he created in his own day a reputation for a certain reserve and reticence that has followed him even into modern times. It is true that in public life he never quite revealed all that was in his heart. After his death in 513, when a posthumous title was being selected for him, the same Hsiao Yen, then Emperor Wu of Liang (r. 502-549), insisted it should be Yin-hou f~f~, "The Marquis Who Hid His True Feelings," or "The Reticent Marquis." Modern readers of his writings, vaguely aware of deep emotional undercurrents but frustrated by the veil drawn over his words, not only by fifteen hundred years, but also by his own deliberate ambiguities, are sometimes tempted to agree that the title is just. Like many "just" characterizations, however, it is only half true. As for his second aim of escaping from the stigma of belonging to a military family, there was really only one route open to ambitious young men caught in this predicament-study. Mastery of the cultural milieu in which the aristocratic members of society moved, which was in fact their stock in trade, was the one thing besides wealth that marked them as qualified to assume positions of leader14

12

Liang-shu

~"t

13.243.

lSJbid.

THE SHEN FAMILY OF WU-HSING

ship. Shen Yiieh seems to have developed this ambition very early. Even his mother, who knew better than anyone else the bitter handicap of marriage into a military family, became worried over the amount of time the boy was spending at his books. If we are to give credence to the somewhat stereotyped account in his biography, she reduced his ration of lamp oil in an effort to force him to bed earlier. But the young Shen Yiieh only used the enforced darkness to recite over and over what he had memorized by daylight.16 It was the beginning of a lifelong passion for study and book acquisition-some books even acquired by theft, as he was later to confessY At his death his personal library numbered twenty thousand scrolls, the largest private collection in the capital.I 8 His devotion to learning did indeed accomplish its intended result. By the end of his long life he was the undisputed arbiter of literary taste in Chien-k'ang. Liu Hsieh J1~ (ca. 465-520), author of the classic work on literary criticism, Elaborations on the Essence of Literature (Wen-hsin tiao-lung ~.-::..;~ft), first sought and gained his approval before publishing his work. 19 On the other hand, Chung Jung -Ji.Jf- (468-518), author of another major work of criticism, Gradings of Poets (Shih-p'in #,Po), is said to have approached him for a similar reason and been rebuffed. Thereafter, in a fit of pique, he ranked Shen's poems only in the middle grade. 20 Whatever Chung Jung thought of him, however, most others ranked him among contemporary poets as "combining the poetic skill of Hsieh T'iao ~Uit (464-499) and the prose craftsmanship of Jen Fang f.H1;5 (460-508), while surpassing neither." 2r Such a balanced assessment-generous, since Hsieh and Jen were both highly regarded, but not obsequious-would have pleased Shen Yiieh, who was even more painfully aware of his own inadequacy than his 16 Ibid.,

233.

See Chapter Seven, the "Text of Confession and Repentance" ("Ch'an-hui wen"). 18 Liang-shu (History of the Liang) 13.242. 19 Nan-shih 72.1782. 20Ibid., 1779; see also Helmut Wilhelm, "A Note on Chung Hung and His Shih-p'in," Tse-tsung Chow, editor, Wen-lin: Studies in the Chinese Humanities, Madison, 1968, 113-114. As Wilhelm rightly observes, Chung's opposition to Shen can be justified internally by his differing viewpoint without recourse to such a trivial explanation. 21 Liang-shu 13.242. 17

13

CHAPTER 2

detractors were. Near the end of his life he wrote to a young poet of his acquaintance who had just sent him some of his compositions for appraisal: Long ago, when I was young and in my prime, I was rather fond of this kind of writing. But while I was savoring its pleasures, suddenly I found myself tired and old. Indeed, this is not the only thing in which I am unable to keep up with those who have come after me! 22

To have attained a longevity of seventy-two years when the average age of his contemporary courtiers at death was less than forty and to have acquired such universal acclaim as a writer in an age that produced such brilliant luminaries as the poet Hsieh T'iao and the critic Liu Hsieh were no small achievements for the son of a southern military family. In an effort to understand how he could have done it, let us attempt to reconstruct from fragments preserved in the histories and in his own and others' writings the circuitous progress of his life. 22

"Letter to Wang Yiin (481-549)" ("Yii Wang Yiin shu" ,t.\!.Lm-tJ, Liang-shu

33.485.

14

In my youth, I was left fatherless and destitute and had no close relatives to rely on. I was on the point of falling to earth, toiling painfully and in want from morn till night, hobbling along with meager appointments. -Letter to Hsii Mien

-""~3.

~ven

SHEN YUEH'S EARLY YEARS

allowing for some rhetorical exaggeration in Shen Yiieh's recollection of the lean years following his father's death in the letter quoted above written fifty-six years later, it is certain the young Shen encountered his fair share of hardship on the slow climb up the ladder of official appointments. While he was still in hiding, perhaps in a Buddhist or Taoist temple near Wu-hsing, between his father's execution in the fifth month (May-June) of 453 1 and Emperor Hsiaowu' s declaration of amnesty in the first month of the following year (February 454),2 he was, despite the disclaimer, cared for by relatives in one or another branch of the numerous Shen clan. After the amnesty, he lived for a while still dependent on the largesse of members of the clan. On one occasion, after begging for several hundred bushels (hu iiH·) of rice from an affluent clan member, he was insulted by the donor and forthwith returned the rice, going home empty-handed. His biographer adds, however, that "when he came into honor, he did not hold a grudge but employed him within his commandery administration." 3 There is a period of nearly thirteen years between 454 and 467 for which we have almost no direct information about his activities. We know from what he said later that he conceived the idea of writing a History of the Chin (Chin-shu ~-' covering the period 265-420) sometime around 460 when he was nineteen. This suggests that he was spending much of his time browsing through old books and documents. He was also indulging a lifelong passion for mountain climbing. A set of five poems included in the sixth-century anthology Selections of Refined Literature (Wen-hsiian Xiit) under the title "Poems on Mt. Chung Written in Response to Instructions of the Prince of Hsi-yang" ("Chung-shan shih ying Hsi-yang wang chiao" 1

T'ung-chien 127.4004.

2Ibid., 4010.

3

Liang-shu 13.242.

15

CHAPTER 3

Yangtze

River

CHING-CHOU

YING·CHOU 70

MAP l. Southern Ch' i Western Provinces (after T'an Ch'i-hsiang, Chung-kuo li-shih ti-t 'u chi).

~iJ.J-Jtfl.!.®F-%..£~), 4

must have been composed betwen 456 and 461, the period during which Liu Tzu-shang l'•J-f ilfJ (450- 465) was Prince of Hsi-yang (in modern Hupei). Since the prince was only eleven when his principality was shifted to Yii-chang (in modern Kiangsi) in 461 , 5 it seems most credible to ascribe the poems to the end of that period. Mt. Chung, the mountain on whose slopes Shen later built his own retirement villa, is part of a range to the northeast of Chien-k'ang. The poems have an immediate appeal as natural description, but a deeper layer of historical allusion and religious symbolism enriches their meaning: 1. This magic hill records the virtue of the land, 4

16

Wen-hsiian 22.2lb- 23a.

5 Sung-shu

40.2058.

140

SHEN YUEH'S EARLY YEARS

5

Where sheerness of the land enha'nces magic of the peak. Mt. Southernmost once marked the towers of Ch'in, 6 Mt. Lesser Room lay near the royal fortress. 7 Here flags of halcyon and phoenix soar above the Ch'in-huai and the sea,s While hills and streams like scarves and belts9 wind round the sacred plain. The northern summit-oh, how steep!IO Through forest undergrowth a distant hint of greenish blue. 2. Springing from earth are many wondrous ranges, Mingling with clouds, never the same in shape. Jumbled together they combine to hide the sky; In serried ranks gaze out at one another. Rising sheer, they build their scarlet strata, Layer on layer, raising azure barriers. In bearing lofty as the Mount of Ninefold Doubts, II In spirit mighty as the Triple Isles.l 2

if~mAZ*-~ )'Y~li~ ~ J~.}rJ ;jt){t

Ji:.-¥-11 Jl:-.1~ +l~ {~ 11- .~ ~

1H1!!..~ ~4ii {-1;31~-R

1;-~~~~*­ ~ 1L£. ot~ '7l f}{f:f.lf.f}-~{(

JSee Francis Westbrook, Landscape Description in the Lyric Poetry and "Fuh on Dwelling in the Mountains" of Shieh Ling-yunn, unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Yale University, 1972, 177-337.

35

CHAPTER 4

still unfinished manuscript to Emperor Wu in 488. In his accompanying memorial he had written: The events recorded by my predecessors belonged to their own age and for the most part were not factual accounts. Furthermore, their method of setting up the biographies was biased in what they selected or excluded. They included whatever proceeded from the temper of the times and rejected everything that fell outside the mood of the age. If what they wrote were handed down to future readers without revision, it would have a hard time gaining credibility. Your servant has therefore reconstituted their material and produced an entirely new history, beginning from the I-hsi era (405) and ending with the third year of the Sheng-ming era (479). 26

Whether or not he succeeded in being more credible than Ho Ch' eng-t'ien or Hsii Yiian before him is debatable, especially when his criticisms of their work were precisely the same ones that later critics leveled at him. But for all the controversy he aroused, his own humble protestations notwithstanding, Shen Yiieh deserves an honorable place in China's great historiographic tradition, if for no other reason than his inclusion of so much priceless material otherwise unobtainable for the literary history of China's early middle ages. 26Sung-shu 100.2467.

36

The final years of the Yung-ming era (483-493) were a flourishing time for literature. Shen Yiieh of Wu-hsing, Hsieh T'iao of Ch'en-liu, and Wang lung of Lang-yeh, being of like temperament, all encouraged and promoted each other's work. Chou Yung of Ju-nan was skilled in discerning tones and rhymes. Shen Yiieh and the others all utilized the musical notes kung and shang in their poetry and designated four tones, "level/' "rising/' "departing/' and "entering/' as a means of regulating their rhymes. There were taboos against "flat heads_'' "raised tails_'' "wasp's waists_'' and "crane's knees." In a line of five syllables the initials and finals had all to be unique, and between the two lines of a couplet the notes chiieh and chih had all to be in contrast. No exceptions were permitted. The world called it the "Yung-ming Style." -History of the Southern Dynasties 48.1195

5. THE FLOWERING OF THE YUNG-MING STYLE reader will detect a faint note of amused condescension in this capsule characterization by Li Yen-shou, writing around 629, slightly augmenting a similar description in the History of the Southem Ch'i by Hsiao Tzu-hsien Jt-t ~Jl (489-537) a century earlier, of the prosodic innovations which were being introduced and tested in the literary salon of Hsiao Tzu-liang Jt-f R_, the Southern Ch'i Prince of Ching-ling, by his friends and subordinates. Meeting in the prince's Western Villa (Hsi-ti ® !5.F) on Chi-lung $Jt.fl Mountain just to the northwest of the palace enclosure in Chien-k'ang between the years 487 and 494, the year of the prince's death, these friends, who included Shen Yiieh, Hsieh T'iao ~ Jlll:. 464-499), Wang Jung .£~ (468-494), Fan Yiin ~~1;; (461-503), Jen Fang 1H~ (460-508), and others, had been writing verses for each other, some serious and some frivolous, striving toward maximum euphony in the use of tones and rhymes and maximum sublety in the choice of words. In their own day, and at least for the next hundred years, their theories were never enthusiastically embraced by more than a few eager practitioners, since they were generally looked upon by people of cultivated taste as a terminal symptom of degeneracy following nearly three hundred years of gradual decline after the glory of the classical age, which for them had ended with the "Seven Masters of the Chien-an Era" (A.D. 196-220). In his introduction to Shen Yiieh's poems in the massive anthology, The Collected Poems of One Hundred 37

CHAPTER 5

Three Authors of the Han, Wei, and Six Dynasties (Han- Wei liu-ch'ao pai-san-chia chi Jt~~ -MEf _:=_~:ft.-), the Ming scholar Chang P'u *~Ji­ (1602-1641) summarizes the situation as follows: "Poets of later periods accepted and followed the tonal rules, but they were neither welcomed nor appreciated by the Liang Emperor Wu (r. 502-549), who considered that to be shackled and bound by 'tones and maladies' was definitely not what any virile person would enjoy." 1 Emperor Wu himself had been a member of the Prince of Chingling's salon and certainly knew what the group was attempting to do. But after becoming emperor in 502 he found it politic to distance himself from the others by feigning ignorance. Happening one day upon the courtier Chou She fa] 4%- (469-524), the son of Chou Yung fa] ~TI (d. 488), mentioned in the heading of this chapter as an expert on tones, the emperor quipped, "What are the 'four tones' all about?" Quick as an echo, Chou She responded with four words illustrating each of the four in sequence, "[Your Majesty is] Son of Heaven, sage and wise (t'ien-tzu sheng-che *.. 1- 1l :t'J). There you have it!" The account continues, "Nevertheless, to the end of his life the emperor never followed or made any use of the tonal rules." 2 In that respect he seems to have had the same attitude as most of his subjects. What, in the last analysis, were these infamous rules by which the emperor refused to be "shackled and bound"? Let us hear first from the chief perpetrators-Wang Jung and Shen Yiieh-as their words have been recorded: Wang's, somewhat pejoratively, by Chung Jung in the "Third Preface" of his critical work, Shih-p'in, published after Shen Yiieh's death in 513; and Shen's, more sympathetically, in his own postface to the "Biography of Hsieh Lingyiin fM-:l:il. (385-433)" in the History of the Sung (chiian 67), published in 488. Chung Jung had written: Wang Jung once said to me, "The notes kung 1: and shang il'fj came into existence with the Two Complementary Forces (erh-i _::_1J.; i.e., Heaven and 1 Yin Meng-lun h.Lt 1iif, Han- Wei liu-ch'ao pai-san-chia chi t'i-tz'u chu ~$..~~ -ffl Ef _:: __ :R~:N!i. ~5i. (Commentary on the Introductory Notices of the Collected Poems of

One Hundred Three Authors of the Han, Wei, and Six Dynasties), Peking, 1981, 221- 222. 2

38

Liang-shu 13.243.

THE FLOWERING OF THE YUNG-MING STYLE

Earth). But from antiquity until now poets have all been ignorant of the fact. It's true that Yen Yen-chih ~:ltZ (384-456) once said something about 'the harmony of sounds among the yin and yang pitch pipes (lii-lil yin-t'iao ..ff: g -]}"$)!]),' but in reality what he meant was far off the mark. It was only Fan Yeh ~~* (398-445) and Hsieh Chuang 1M" il± (421-466) who had some recognition of the problem. I have always wanted to present an 'Essay on Understanding the Music [of Poetry]' ('Chih-yin lun' -1u-l}t~} but I have never gotten around to writing it." 3 It is a severe loss for those seeking a balanced view of the problem that neither Wang Jung's "Essay on Understanding the Music" nor Shen Yueh's Register of the Four Tones (Ssu-sheng p'u ~$·tit-), which may only have been a rhyming lexicon tonally arranged, is available for direct reference. Wang's "Essay," as he ruefully.admits, was never written, and Shen' s Register, in one chiian, mentioned in his biography and listed in the "Bibliographical Monograph" ("Chingchi chih" i@.,fi,t.,) of the History of the Sui (Sui-shu ffit" [32.944]) under the title Four Tones (Ssu-sheng), had disappeared by the time the T'ang histories were compiled. To offset this loss, however, we do at least have Shen's postface and the subsequent controversy with Lu Chiieh ftR!t (472-499) which it precipitated. In this document Shen, like Wang Jung, makes his case for the importance of the euphonious alternation of tones and other audible qualities in poetry on the basis of the cosmic alternation of complementary forces such as Heaven and Earth and yin and yang. Having laid the foundation, he proceeds to relate how Chinese literature evolved from the simple airs of the Book of Songs (Shih-ching -tt~&..) toward greater and greater complexity and ornamentation. Along the way were added not only more colorful imagery and diction, but the ability to express inner feelings and to describe realistically the outside world. Through all this wondrous evolution, according to Shen Yiieh, the poets were still unaware of what it was that made some poems sound better than others. According to him, these happy accidents were always "unwitting" (an M) and unplanned. They were never achieved by conscious effort. Since Shen Yiieh's "Postface" is an important literary landmark 3 Chung Jung i:t.lf, (468-518), Shih-p'in "$1" .i'a (Gradings of Poets), "Third Preface," Arai Ken lit .Jt Jt and Kozen Hiroshi .J1!. ~ ;t, editors, Bungaku ronshii :5c. .if" MIJ:tf\. (Discourses on Literature), Chiigoku bunmeisen 13, Tokyo, 1972, Shihin, 7.

39

CHAPTER 5

in its own right, which Crown Prince Chao-ming (Hsiao T'ung -f#C., 501-531) saw fit to incorporate whole in his Wen-hsiian (50.12a-l5a), and since the subsequent debate with Lu Chiieh depends on the whole ofShen Yiieh's argumentation, I shall quote the complete text: People are endowed at birth with the life principle (ling }[) of Heaven and Earth and hold within themselves all the properties (te it) of the Five Constants (wu-ch'ang li.. 'Jt;'; i.e., the five phases of the natural cycle: metal, wood, water, fire, and earth). 4 Their actions are alternately hard or soft and their feelings are divided between joy and anger. When their intention moves inwardly songs and poems are expressed outwardly. This is the foundation on which the Six Tropes (liu-i 7> ~,)' are based and to which the Four Headings (ssu-shih 1!"1M;) [of the Book of Songs] 6 are tied. As for the ascending and descending rhythms of popular work chanteys and ditties (ou-yao ~1£-) and various "decades of airs" (feng-shih J1Ut)/ even if such songs must have existed before the time of the sage kings Shun 'tt (trad. r. 2255-2205 B.c.) and Yii ~ (r. 2205-2197 B.c.), their traces in recorded literature have disappeared. But as far as people being endowed with energy and life is concerned, this principle has never changed. Thus the origin of songs and poems has to have begun with the birth of the human race. After the house of Chou (trad. 1122-241 B.c.) had begun to decline (i.e., after the capital was moved to Lo-yang in 770 B.c.), the current of satire (feng-liu J1bf,L)8 became more and more pronounced. Ch'ii Yuan /ff...!fP, (340- 278 B.C.) and Sung Yii ;.RJi.. (ca. 290-223 B.c.) directed its clear source 4 See Record of Rites (Li-chi {_t-$(.) l9.12a (Ssu-pu ts'ung-k'an edition; James Legge, Li Ki, Oxford, 1885, 2: I 08): "The former kings based their theory of music on human feelings and human nature ... bringing it into harmony with the energy of life and directing it by the activity of the Five Constants (wu-ch'ang)." 'The "Six Tropes" (liu-i;!, ~)are: (1) feng Ji., airs and songs expressing feelings; (2)ju ~.descriptions of the objective world; (3) pi tL similes or overt comparisons; (4) hsing J!., "metaphors" or latent comparisons; (5)ya ~fL court songs; and (6) sung ~jj. hymns. 6 The "Four Beginnings" (ssu-shih v;J-flf;) are the headings of the four sections of the Book of Songs (Shih-ching tf:i',[): Kuo-feng WJ }.fi\. (Airs of the States), Ta-ya *.1ft (Greater Court Songs), Hsiao-ya •l·~ft (Lesser Court Songs), and Sung ~jj (Dynastic Hymns). Texts and translations of the Shih-ching may be found in Legge, Chinese Classics, vol. 4 and Bernhard Karlgren, The Book of Odes, Stockholm, 1950. 7 In the Book of Songs the Airs of the States are normally grouped in sets of ten. 8 The term feng-liu Ji.)ifL is ambiguous. Here feng JR clearly stands for feng 'tll\,, pieces written in oblique criticism of the ruler. By the fourth century A.D. feng-liu was applied to the "fashionable set," persons of high social status who defied ordinary conventions. Perhaps even in this case it still carried the force of criticism-a protest against ritual requirements deemed to be inappropriate.

40

THE FLOWERING OF THE YUNG-MING STYLE

in the early stages, while Chia I f"ti: (201-169 B.c.) and Ssu-ma Hsiang-ju iiJ .~;ffl~o (179-117 B.c.) stirred up its fragrant dust at a later stage. Their heroic phrases glowed like metal or stone and their lofty arguments rose to the cloudy heavens. From this point onwards the expression of feelings and resolve (ch'ing-chih ·It ,t.,) grew more and more widespread. People like Wang Pao ..I..;Jt (d. 61 B.c.), Liu Hsiang J•J 1~ (77-6 B.c.), Yang Hsiung ~tii (53 B.C.-A.D. 18), Pan Ku Jif.III (A.D. 32-92), Ts'ui Yin 4: ~(d. A.D. 92), and Ts'ai Yung ~ ~ (133-192), each by a different route hastened forward together, alternately taking each other as models. Even though clear phrases and elegant airs occasionally leap out from their compositions, there are, alas, also many examples of weed-choked sounds and shackled energies. In the case of Chang Heng' s :f~ (78-139) gorgeous outpourings, his writings changed with his mood. But the lofty range of his incomparable singing was long without any answering echo. Coming to the Chien-an era (196-219), after the Ts'ao f family founded its mandate, the two Ancestors (Ts'ao Ts'ao #, 155-220, and Ts'ao P'ei ;f., r. 220- 226) and the Prince of Ch'en-ssu (Ts'ao Chih f@_, 192-232) all cultivated full-blown and elegant styles. It was the first time anyone had interwoven emotions with the text and clothed plain substance with literary patterning. Thus during the four hundred or so years from Han through the Wei (206 B.C.-A.D. 264), in the works of talented writers the literary style underwent three transformations. In the first, Ssu-ma Hsiang-ju displayed his skill at creating descriptive passages with physical verisimilitude (hsingssu ~1fJ.). In the second, Pan Ku excelled in the expression of emotion (ch'ing-li ·ltJJ[). In the third, Ts'ao Chih and Wang Ts'an .I..#.- (177-217) adopted a vigorous plainness (ch'i-chih ~ )'[) as their style. All of these were of outstanding ability and claimed a virtual monopoly on beautiful writing. At the same time, each in a unique way reflected his own times. For this reason gentlemen throughout the world all emulated them and imitated their example. Going back to the time when their whirling eddy got started, everyone was. unanimous in venerating the Book of Songs (Shih) and the Songs of the South (Ch'u-tz'u) as their sources of inspiration. It was only because each person appreciated or liked different aspects of these sources that their ideas and creations differed from each other. But as we reach the Yiian-k'ang era (291-299), P'an Yiieh 5it-& (247- 300) and Lu Chi (261-303) became especially outstanding. Their musical pitches (lii if) were different from those of Pan Ku and Chia I; their style (t'i ft) had changed from that of Ts'ao Chih and Wang Ts'an. Embroidered ideas shone thick as stars; intricate patterns were woven together like

*-

ft.

41

CHAPTER 5

traceried gauze. They continued the untrammeled echoes of Ssu-ma Hsiangju from the Level Terrace (P'ing-t'ai -'f- .f. )9, and selected from the lofty rhymes of the Seven Masters of the Chien-an era at Nan-p'i rtJ ft.. 10 The spirit bequeathed by them and the ardor they left behind extended even to the exiles who crossed the Yangtze River (with the fall of Lo-yang in 311). After the restoration of the Chin,ll the "vogue of the Mysterious" (hsiian-feng k }§.\.)held the field unopposed. Study was limited to Lao-tzu, the Archivist beneath the Pillar (chu-hsia Ur), 12 and the broad investigation of things stopped with Chuang-tzu's Seven Chapters (ch'i-p'ien -C ~).13 The main idea of all the galloping literary texts produced in this period was concentrated upon these alone. In the nearly one hundred years from the Chien-wu era (317) through the 1-hsi era (405-418), even though joined echoes followed each other like successive waves and linked phrases piled one on another like cumulus clouds, without exception they all sent messages about "superior virtue" (shang-te J:..-f.t) 14 or delivered thoughts on the "dark pearl" (hsuan-chu kJ;f-.). 15 Cogent or elegant (ch'iu-li !tAt) writing was simply unheard of. It was Yin Chung-wen h~1'1' X (d. 407) who began to overturn this vogue of the Mysterious set by Sun Ch'o .:J.%i)~, or the distinction between the notes shang ]!lf and chih {tk_? [That is not the point.] Even though they may have known the differences between the five musical notes, nevertheless, regarding their mutual interactions (ts' en-tz'u ~ lf) and permutations (pien-tung ~ th) within a line or couplet, what they did not clearly understand was indeed considerable, and that is what I meant in my humble opinion that "this secret has never been discovered." Making inference from this, we may be certain that writers of former periods were not yet aware of this point. If we equate the sounds and consonances (yin-yiin) of literary compositions with the musical notes and melodies (sheng-ch'ii $db) of strings and pipes, we could not indiscriminately take what is beautiful or ugly, graceful or clumsy, and make them change places. Take, for example, the songs and airs (ts'ao-ch'ii ~db) of 57 See Chuang-tzu chi-shih 2.40 (Watson, Chuang-tzu, 43). ss See note 29, above. 59 See Yang Hsiung ~tiL Fa-yen )};;1; (Model Sayings) 2.la (Ssu-pu ts'ung-k'an edition): "Someone asked me if my sons liked poetic essays (fu). I replied, 'Yes. Little boys love to carve worms and engrave seals (tiao-ch'ung chuan-k'o JlJ},il'., ,l~•J).' After a moment I added, 'Of course, a grown man doesn't do it'.''

52

THE FLOWERING OF THE YUNG-MING STYLE

P'ei Tzu-yeh f&_ 7" J'f (469-530)6°-could they possibly contain an indiscriminate mixture of undisciplined and dissonant sounds (ch'an-yiian shihtiao M~;}(;\)!])? You yourself compared the "Poetic Essay on the Goddess of the Lo River" with other poetic essays ofTs'ao Chih and noted how they seem to have been composed by different hands.61 It is for these reasons that we know that when "natural spontaneity (t'ien-chi f;.A~)6 2 is flowing free," the yin and yang pitch pipes are naturally in tune, but when "the six emotions are clogged," 63 then the notes and pitches (yin-lii) become halting and off-key. Even though Lu Chi said that a poem should "shine like multicolored embroidery;' 64 would anyone expect a fabric whose "colors were rinsed in the waves of the Chiang" 65 to have in addition a patch in its middle made out of the coarse linen garment of Duke Wen of Wei (#r :J:_ ~, r. 659-635 B.c. )? 66 You have quoted the words of Master Lu Chi, but even he did not say the last word on the subject. Furthermore, in addition to the distinction between consonance and dissonance (yiin yii 60 Since P' ei Tzu-yeh ~ -T Jf was a champion of the "old style" and had written a "Discourse on Carving Worms" ("Tiao-ch'ung lun" )ljJ A~), presumably aimed at the Yung-ming innovations, Shen's flattering reference to his disciplined and harmonious style was a diplomatic stroke of genius. A fragment of P' ei' s discourse may be found in Yen K'o-chiin, Ch'iian Liang-wen 53.15b, but no direct reference to the Yung-ming Style appears in it. 6 1Jn connection with Lu's reference to Ts'ao Chih's lost poetic essay "The Wild Geese on the Pond" ("Ch'ih-yen fu" ;'1!'..~~). 62 See Lu Chi, Wen-fu (Wen-hsiian 17.9b): "When natural spontaneity is swift and unimpeded, I Then, pray, what is confused or disorderly?" (~ k~-Z-~itcf'J, :k 1"T

*:jrrfil ~Jl'.)

63 Ibid., 9a: "When the six emotions are blocked or clogged, I The intention goes on, but the spirit remains behind." (&_Jt.;;'d~- ;J&,iif", ,t,-{i.+fW/) 64 Ibid., 6a: "Shining like multicolored embroidery, I Poignant as a many-stringed zither." (ltrJ:J:;G- fo!}~, t;t:;G- .If.~). 6 5Probably the Embroidery River (Chin-chiang jfjl)_r.) a tributary of the Min if.\ River outside of Ch'eng-tu (Szechuan), is meant. See Tso Ssu ft.,\!'!., (fl. ca. 300), "Shu-tu fu" 3fj :11(\AA_ ("Poetic Essay on the Shu Capital"), Wen-hsiian 4.22b (Knechtges, Wen xuan 1: 361 ): "Cowrie-patterned embroidery is elegantly fashioned, I Its colors rinsed in the waves of the Chiang" (~1 jfjl}:!_·h\, il!'. @..j_r.)Jt). Li Shan .t.f. (ca. 630 -689) in his commentary quotes an !-chou chih J;i.fl·l.t: (Gazetteer of I Province): "After embroidery woven in Ch'eng-tu is finished, it is rinsed in the waters of the Chiang, where its clarity becomes even brighter than when it was first fashioned." 66 See Tso-chuan, Min 2 (Legge, Chinese Classics 5: 131): "Duke Wen of Wei (#r:J:. ~), in coarse linen clothes and coarse silk cap, labored to improve his resources, taught the peasants, gave free access to merchants, was generous to artisans, respectfully instructed the people, encouraged learning, imposed just laws, and employed those with ability."

53

CHAPTER 5

pu-yiin -il~~T- -il~) there is also the matter of degrees of refinement or crudity (ching-ts'u *;tiL) in such a distinction. Wheelwright Pien (~~) was unable to put this into words, 67 and neither can this old man explain it exhaustively.68

Li Ycn-shou concludes the debate with the comment: "Shen Yiieh's discussion of the four tones subtly combined both elucidation and argumentation, yet in his compositions he too from time to time ran afoul of his own rules for tones and rhyme." Defending himself against Lu Chiieh's charge that he was claiming "discovery" of a secret already understood implicitly by Lu Chi in the late third century and stated explicitly by Fan Yeh in the mid2: fifth century, Shen Yiieh insisted that he was not talking about melodies or the notes of the pentatonic scale as such. Of course, anybody can recognize a tune. What he meant was the interaction and permutations of the four tones operating within a line or couplet. Therein lies the point of confusion-a confusion that has not entirely disappeared even in our own day6 9 -between all the imprecise near synonyms for "tones" which Shen Yiieh and others in this period were using without settling upon any standard terminology. First, they used combinations of low, lowfhigh, or medium-range notes, such as kung-shang (do-re), kung-yii (do-la), shang-chih (resol), and chiieh-chih (mi-sol). Or, perhaps, "rising and descending" (shang-hsia), or "lowered and raised" (ti-ang), all vaguely representing tonal configurations. We also find them using the twelvetone gamut (lii-lii) or the colors "dark and yellow" (hsiian-huang) to symbolize the interaction of Heaven and Earth or yin and yang. In addition to this, there was some confusion implicit in the term yiin -il~, which sometimes means "tonal consonance" and sometimes "rhyme." There are also contrasting terms like "clear and turgid" (ch'ing-cho), which may refer to a pitch distinction or to voicing and 67 68

Chuang-tzu chi-shih 13.218 (Watson, Chuang-tzu, 153). Nan-shih 48.1196-1197.

69See, for example, Kuo Shao-yii ~~t;gJA:, "Tsai lun Yung-ming sheng-pingshuo" .jlj-~;t"jr.

b'iiiu jiwvng jiwvng diiim miiit'

59

CHAPTER 5

It is obvious from the above examples-all drawn from Shen Yiieh's own compositions-that he did not always practice what he preached. It is true, however, that nearly all the examples were written in the archaistic yiieh-fu form, and most of the violations involve only "benign" level tones. In the case of poems which can confidently be dated after 487 and are not yiieh-fu, there is a noticeably greater conformity with the rules. Lu Chiieh' s letter to Shen Yiieh had been prompted by his perception of Shen' s arrogance in claiming credit for discovering something which had been known for ages. He did not try to refute the basic principles of tonal euphony. On the contrary, he claimed to applaud them. But his understanding of what they were was in reality a misunderstanding. In the case of Chung Jung, author of the Shihp'in, however, his opposition was a clear-cut rejection of the principles themselves, just as Emperor Wu's had been. In the same "Third Preface" quoted earlier, Chung had written: Wang Jung initiated [the notion of "tones" and "maladies"] and Shen Yiieh and Hsieh T'iao whipped up its waves. These three seem to have been scions of aristocratic families who showed some literary discernment in their youth. For this reason members of the gentry set have admired them highly and in their poems have labored over fine minutiae, piling up petty trivialities like pleats in a garment, each one trying to outdo the others. As a result they have imposed many crippling restraints on the writing of poetry and damaged its true beauty. In my opinion, literary compositions should basically be written to be recited aloud and should not be hobbled and hindered. Just let the clear or turgid (ch'ing-cho) sounds flow freely in complete harmony with the mouth and lips. This is enough. As for all this nonsense about "level," "rising," "departing," and "entering," I'm sick and tired of it and incapable of making any use of it. When it comes to "wasp's waists" and "crane's knees," by now even village yokels know all about themJ 8

Chung Jung's primary problem with the Yung-ming poets was his perception that they were destroying the natural and spontaneous expression of human feelings with cruel and unnatural restraints. Furthermore, they were cluttering the free flow of plain language with arcane expressions and recherche allusions. It is one of life's 78

60

Shih-p'in, "Third Preface" (Shihin, 76); see also Wixted, Literary Criticism, 4 72.

THE FLOWERING OF THE YUNG-MING STYLE

little ironies that often when a person is trying against great odds to accomplish a certain end, his actions will be perceived by some to be accomplishing the exact opposite of his intention. Shen Yueh' s thumbnail sketch of the evolution of Chinese literature in his "Postface" quoted earlier reveals a strong predilection both for the "expression of emotions" (ch'ing-li ·lt.l.'f.) and for "vigorous plainness" (ch'i-chih .fR )'(). In discussing the lyric poems of Ts'ao Chih, Wang Ts' an, and Sun Ch'u, he praised them precisely because they" directly express heartfelt emotions and do not depend on allusions to the Book of Songs or the histories." Apart from Shen Yueh's poems themselves, independent confirmation of his commitment to the very ideals Chung Jung claims Shen was destroying comes from the conservative critic and historiographer Yen Chih-t'ui l;1.Z;t!t (531ca. 590). In his Family Instructions for the Yen Clan (Yen-shih chiahsiin l;1!;\~1J1J) he wrote: Shen Yiieh said, "Literary pieces should proceed from three kinds of ease _::::_~).The first is ease in perceiving the topic (chien-shih ~$);the second, ease in recognizing the words (shih-tzu ~:t); the third, ease in reading or reciting aloud (tu-sung -t:t-tm)." 79 Hsing Shao 1f~~~ (d. 560) used to say, "In Marquis Shen's literary pieces the allusions (yung-shih ffl $) never make the reader aware of their existence; they seem like words which come directly from his own breast. For this reason I admire him deeply." Tsu T'ing ;fliJ~ once remarked to me, "A line from one of Shen Yiieh's poems runs, 'The cliff leans overhead, protecting the stalactites' (if. 1>Ji -ti_~ tV· Does this sound like an allusion?" 80 Hsing Shao and Wei Shou (author of the History of the T'o-pa Wei) both enjoyed honorable reputations. By popular standards of the times they were in great demand as teachers and masters of the art of writing. Hsing admired Shen Yiieh and despised Jen Fang 1:iH! (460-508), 81 while Wei loved Jen Fang and had no use for Shen Yiieh, always, letting it show in his words and expression during conversations or banquets. Everyone in Yeh 7f.~ (the Northern Ch'i

(san-i

The source of Yen Chih-t'ui's quotation is unknown. poem is not among Shen Yiieh's surviving works. Professor Teng implies that there is a hidden allusion to the apocryphal tale of Hsi K'ang 1&-* (223-262) and Wang Lieh .£.~~I. (fl. ca. 220-265) wandering in the hills near Lo-yang and finding a cakelike stalactite which they shared, after which they both turned to stone (see Chih-shu 49.1370). It seems more likely that the line is merely an example of pure description, free of allusions. 81 Both Shen Yiieh and Jen Fang were participants in the Prince of Ching-ling's salon. Shen was deemed the better poet; Jen the better writer of prose. 79

80 The

61

CHAPTER 5

capital in Hopei) was busily forming cliques [either pro-Shen or pro-Jen). Tsu T'ing once said to me, "The 'rights' or 'wrongs' of Jen Fang and Shen Yi.ieh are really only reflections of the strong or weak points of Hsing Shao and Wei Shou." 82 In the body of the Shih-p'in Chung Jung awards Shen Yiieh a middle rating (chung-p'in

J;.iX..~-l-;f:f.

Another game similar to the assignment of yueh-fu titles, involved themes from Buddhist or Taoist scriptures, and was usually played during religious festivals, such as on the eve of fast days. One such theme was the "Four Gates of the City" ("Ssu ch' eng-men" I''Hm:.r~), in which the company would be divided into four groups, each group assigned one of the four gates of the city of Kapalivastu through which the Bodhisattva, Prince Siddhartha, went out on successive days before his quest for enlightenment: from the East Gate, where he saw a sick man; from the South Gate, where he saw an old man; from the West Gate, where he saw a dead man; and from the North Gate, where he saw a mendicant ascetic. To make it more interesting, everyone was also assigned the same rhyme category. We have a single example of one of Shen Yiieh's contributions on this particular theme. It appears his assignment was the South Gate and old age: Not only have the Sixfold Dragons96 sped their rounds, The Two Rats Night and Day have also chased the light. In one's declining years, how hard to heed or help; The sunset body, oh how easily decayed!97

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Except for a "crane's knee" lurking in the final syllables of the first and third lines, the two finely balanced couplets are otherwise unblemished. Among Shen's most successful poems are his numerous descriptions of objects (yung-wu). The next four examples-one of a manmade instrument, which predictably is filled with artifice, and three of natural phenomena, which by contrast are almost entirely free of allusions or other devices-will give some idea of the range of his technique: Ch'iian Liang-shih 4. 987. the six yang lines of the hexagram Ch'ien !it(=... _); here, apparently, representing the passage of time. 9 7 Ch'iian Liang-shih 4.1022. 95

96 I.e.,

67

CHAPTER 5

"Singing of a Mouth Organ" ("Yung-sheng" t;j(Jt)98 That beauty, now in truth but "withered boughs"; The "lone bamboos" at last in serrate ranks. The "jungle fowl" has made her chattering cry; "Beneath the jujubes," too, the fruit "lies strewn about." 5 Originally pledged to feast with Wang-tzu Ch'iao, Who needs the "guest of Lo" to play?99

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The first thing to know about this admittedly cryptic poem is that its real subject in not a mouth organ (sheng), but a literary composition about a mouth organ: P'an Yiieh's ~-& (247-300) "Poetic Essay on a Mouth Organ" ("Sheng-fu" .i.Jti\:), a work well known to all literate persons in Shen's day. That he should have taken such an indirect approach is, I suppose, understandable for a literary man who was not himself a musician. P'an Yiieh's original poetic esay begins conventionally by naming the materials used in making the mouth organ: the hanging gourd for the wind chamber, grown only between the Yellow River and its tributary the Fen if/ (in Shansi); dwarf "lone bamboos" (ku-hsiao ~1..f..) for the pipes, native to Tsou 8Bit and Lu ·f- (Shantung); the reeds, cut from full-grown kan $f bamboos. P'an's essay goes on to describe how the pipes are carefully measured for perfect pitch and set into the gourd like wings in the body of a bird poised for flight. Then it names some of the dances and songs accompanied by the mouth organ and quotes at length the text of one, an old drinking song: Beneath the jujubes gathered thick The bright red fruit lies strewn about. How dead and fallen are they now, Reduced all to withered boughs!

tT~~

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98 The sheng !1. made of a gourd wind chamber set with a ring of reeded bamboo pipes tuned in semitones, may have been introduced originally from Southeast Asia, but it is mentioned in Chinese literature as early as the Book of Songs (ca. 1000600 B.c.), and is described in the Han dictionaries, Shuo-wen chieh-tzu -;!Jt:;Z~~ (Explanation of Simple Graphs and Analysis of Complex Characters), and Shih-ming ff-t (Explication of Names), both compiled in the second century A.D. A wellpreserved specimen of its larger cousin, the yii f., was excavated in 1971 from a second century B.C. tomb near Ma-wang-tui (Hunan). See also Kurt Sachs, The History of Musical Instruments, New York, 1940, 182- 184. 99 Ch'iian Liang-shih 4.1019.

68

THE FLOWERING OF THE YUNG-MING STYLE

If men while still alive cannot make merry, Dead, what will they do with empty fame? So rouse the flying dragon, And let cry the jungle fowl, While twin swans soar And white cranes fly! Tzu Ch'iao now lightly rises; Ming-chiin dreams of home. The King of Ching is moaning his long song; Consort of Ch'u heaves sighs and grows more sad. 100

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The numerous veiled allusions in P'an Yiieh's poetic essay could lead us far from my purpose in quoting from it, namely, to show what Shen Yiieh has done with the source of his inspiration. Selecting particular strands from the song, which is itself a composite of older songs-the jujube trees with their fallen fruit, the bamboo pipes, the cry of the jungle fowl, and the heavenly ascent of the transcendent Wang-tzu Ch'iao-he has woven a completely new composition with its own new message. In the face of death, symbolized by the fallen fruit, the withered boughs, and the lone (literally, "orphaned") bamboo pipes no longer growing in their native habitat, he urges his reader not merely to "make merry" with drinking songs, but rather to follow the example ofWang-tzu Ch'iao, a skilled player on the mouth organ who lightly rose to heaven on the back of a white crane.l 01 Shen Yiieh has added his own allusion to the court musician Tu K'uei ;f±.~ (fl. ca. 220-226), who was cashiered for refusing to play the mouth organ for the "guests of Lo" in Emperor Wen's court. 102 Tu K'uei has somehow become identified in Shen's poem with the Master of Fu-ch'iu ()-¥- ..6:.-A), who met Wang-tzu Ch'iao near the Lo River and climbed with him to the nearby summit of Mt. Sung ~, 103 never to be seen again. With a Wen-hsiian 1822a-1826a. See Liu Hsiang f1 fol (77 -76 B.c.), Lieh-hsien chuan 7•] 1.1.1-"- (Lives of Transcendents) 28 Cheng-t'ung tao-tsang, Taipei, 1967, 8: 6117b; Max Kaltenmark, translator, 100

101

Lie-sien tchouan: Biographies legendaires des immortels taoistes et de l'antiquite, Peking, 1953, 109-114.

chih _::_ W!,j ,t,, Wei-shu ~ -t 29.806. Lieh-hsien chuan 28 Tao-tsang 8: 6117a, (Kaltenmark, Lie-sien tchouan, 109-

102 San-kuo 103

110).

69

CHAPTER 5

little poetic license, Shen seems to have Tu K'uei refuse to play because he would rather listen to the transcendent organ playing of Wang-tzu Ch'iao. There is no doubt, in any case, that the mouth organ (sheng) has a double connection with immortality. Not only was it the instrument of immortals, but the traditional etymology of the word is that it represents "life" (sheng :i.), like "plants growing up (sheng) from the earth." 104 That is why it was used at funerals as a symbol of rebirth and the songs it accompanied so often dealt also with death. "Singing of the Snow" ("Yung-hsiieh" i;f-11:) was a favorite topic among poets in the south, to whom snow was rare enough to belong to a totally exotic and even magical world reminding them of Taoist paradises. The most illustrious example is Hsieh Hui-lien' s ~ ,i!, i!. (ca. 396-433) "Poetic Essay on the Snow" ("Hsiieh-fu" 'ii:M.) included in the Wen-hsiian. 105 Characteristically, Shen Yiieh has chosen an entirely different approach. He could not think about the snow in purely aesthetic terms, nature lover and good Buddhist that he was. Instead his imagination and compassion were aroused by the thought of wild creatures shivering amid the cheerless shelter of reeds at night:

10

My thoughts are with the wild birds gathered in the chilly reeds, As azure clouds turn dark with shades of dusk, In the night snow, huddled together and apart; With dawn winds, startled or again at rest. Gently drifting snow sifts in through latticed windows; Nervous and upset, the ducks are at wit's end. Like weak osmanthus which cannot support the snow, In feeble flight they often droop their wings. Jade Mountain may be seen afarCan Jasper Pool be hard to reach?I06

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104 Liu Hsi J•H!'; (second century A.D.), Shih-ming ;ff.t 7.22.3a (Ssu-pu ts'ungk'an edition). 105 Wen-hsiian l3.8a-12b; translated and analyzed in Stephen Owen, "Hsieh Hui-lien's 'Snow Fu': A Structural Study," Journal of the American Oriental Society

94.1 (1974), 14-23. 106 Ch'iian

70

Liang-shih 4.1011.

THE FLOWERING OF THE YUNG-MING STYLE

The last couplet, reverting to the usual niveous imagery of Taoist paradises, may be intended as a word of encouragement to the shivering birds to persevere in their migration till they reach a more hospitable climate. Very similar in theme and mood is "Singing of the Wild Geese on the Lake" ("Yung hu-chung yen" -&~l--< jt Clouds above Shamanka Mountain shade you like a canopy. ~}] 5~r ~8 'h" Against swift rapids you have turned your back on tides ofWu; With plashing sounds your boat skims past the shoals of Ch'u. Once having viewed the waters of the Chii and 5 Chang, Will you recall this meeting by the Chiang and Sea? -'¥ .~ 5.:r.)lij, -tf,q~{Jli. -;j-.-:; With all my heart, no larger than an inch, I'll follow you beyond a thousand li. 112 1ft# -t .'IU~

*

True, it is a conventional farewell, one of a well-populated genre so crowded with cliches it would be difficult for even the greatest poet to say anything original. Yet Shen Yiieh has provided a rather subtle suggestion of Hsieh T'iao's vulnerability by referring to the Han River as a "moat" (ch'ih ;t.), a term first used in relation to that river by an envoy from Ch'u who, when the Marquis ofCh'i planned to invade his state in 656 B.C., warned him with the words: "In Ch'u we have Mt. Square Fortress (Fang-ch'eng "/?~)for our battlements and the Han River for a moat (ch'ih). Even though your army is large, you will find no way to use it." 113 The reference to the "clouds above Shamanka Mountain," which dominates the Yangtze Gorges above Chiang-ling, while recalling the love meeting of King Huai of 110 All seven poems are gathered in the T'ang anthology Ku-wen yuan ?;- :5c1fi.. (Garden of Ancient Literature) 9. 9a-l0b (Ssu-pu ts'ung-k'an edition). 111 Shen Yiieh's admiration for Hsieh is clear from the remark credited to him in the latter's biography (Nan-Ch'i shu 47.826): "In the last two hundred years there have been no poems to equal Hsieh's." 11 2 Ch'uan Liang-shih 4.1013. 113 Tso-chuan, Hsi 4 (Legge, Chinese Classics 5: 141 ).

73

CHAPTER 5

Ch'u (r. 329-299 B.C.) with the goddess of that mountain,ll 4 may be a veiled warning of dangerous entanglements. Hsieh's patron, the Prince of Sui Commandery, was a contender for the succession after the death of Emperor Wu, which actually occurred two years later. Caught in the power struggle, the prince was killed by his cousin, Hsiao Luan 1f; (Emperor Ming, r. 494-498), in 494 in his nineteenth year.l 15 Hsieh T'iao himself managed to survive another five years before he too was killed after being slandered to the Marquis of Tung-hun (r. 499-501) by another ambitious prince who had failed to enlist Hsieh's aid in a plot to overthrow Tung-hun himself! I have dragged in all this unpoetic background only because I am convinced that many of the rather obscure literary allusions in the poetry of this period do indeed have an oblique reference to contemporary events. When we remember that, in the brief twentythree-year tenure of the Ch'i Dynasty (479-502), six rulers with an average reign of less than four years each sat on the dragon throne and each of these six spawned a brood of princes and imperial grandsons (an average of eight apiece), most of whom developed their own pretensions to the throne, it is not difficult to imagine the power struggles and the atmosphere of intrigue, suspicion, and terror under which anyone in the employ of such a prince was constrained to live. Even in moments of relaxation and conviviality that atmosphere was never fully dispelled. The last six lines ofShen's farewell poem seem sufficiently straightforward to require no comment, but it is interesting to observe some of the poem's prosodic features, which are totally lost in translation. Just as in the later "regulated verse" (lii-shih 1:f-tt) of T'ang times, there are eight lines with a single rhyme. But Shen's rhyme scheme is even more demanding than that of the lii-shih because all four couplets-not only the middle ones-observe a rather strict parallel structure. In the last couplet, "my heart, no larger than an inch," is at least a quasi parallel of "you, beyond a thousand li." Furthermore, the four characters used in the rhyming binomes at the beginning of each line of the second couplets, tsiet-jiuet ~n~EJ and dz'iiin-jiuiin 5.4ht, not only all employ the water classifier, but are 1 14

Wen-hsiian l9.2a; translated in Arthur Waley, The Temple, London, 1923,

65-72. m

74

Nan-Ch'i shu 40.710.

THE FLOWERING OF THE YUNG-MING STYLE

in fact cognate. Both are glossed in dictionaries as "the aspect of water flowing" (shui-liu mao 1]t "J] 4'-.,. #;. JL .t, -t 1:. ·f! Ali :1- it ·1/n.

In all these very Taoist poems addressed to T'ao Hung-ching, the basic inner contradiction that haunted Shen Yiieh all his life-his lack of singlemindedness-keeps coming to the surface. T'ao's withdrawal from the world was total; Shen wanted to transcend the ----~--

95 An allusion to the dragon horse that emerged from the Lo River with a chart of the Eight Trigrams on its back in the legendary age of Fu Hsi; here it evidently refers to the founding of the Liang Dynasty in 502. 96 Thc designation for the eight sons of the legendary ruler Ti K'u of .If (trad. 2435-2366 B.c.); see Tso-chuan, Wen 18 (Legge, Chinese Classics 5: 282). Here, apparently, high-ranking Liang courtiers are meant. 97 Indications heralding the presence of ceremonially dressed officers assembled for the dawn audience. 98 Ch'iian Liang-shih 4.1005.

liB

THE TAOIST RECLUSE

world, but kept being drawn back by a vaguely felt Buddhist compassion-a need to save suffering begins that was equated in his mind with Confucian civil duty. His poem, "In Response to Master T'ao of Hua-yang ("Ch'ou Hua-yang T'ao hsien-sheng" t1iitj~J%-f,t:J7tj:_), probably written during the Tung-yang period or soon thereafter, expresses the contradiction poignantly, though in somewhat technical terms. The heavens of the Three Clarities99 have never yet been visible, The Single Pneuma, 100 too, I've tried in vain to visualize. !OJ What I would like is to revolve my bright effulgences,I02 To rescue ills and save my endangered soul. 103 Ifi should ever get a gift of the Nine-cycled Elixir,104 Why should I fear the Sixfold Dragons' flight?10 5

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99 In Taoist cosmology the heavens are subdivided into three levels. The highestJade Clarity (Yii-ch'ing J;.i~)-is the abode of sages (sheng !fl); the middle-Upper Clarity (Shang-ch'ing J:.~)-is reserved for the perfected (chen Jt_); the lowestGrand Clarity (T'ai-ch'ing ;;k~)-is the domain of mundane transcendents (hsien

1J.). 100The primal substance of the universe. 101 "Visualization" (ts'un 1}} is an internal alchemical process by which Taoist divinities are made visible to the adept. See Strickmann, "Alchemy," 128. 102 There are twenty-four "effulgences" (ching -,?:-)-interior luminous gods that circulate within the body after having been brought down from their original celestial abode through "visualization." See Strickmann, "Alchemy," 173-175. 103 The hun ~. or yang soul, separates from the physical body during dreams and at death. 1°4 Emending wan )L (pellet) of Ting Fu-pao's text to chiu 1L (nine) after the Mao-shan chih !f J.t ;t 28.3 (Tao-tsang 9: 7032a). The "nineccycled divine elixir" (chiu-chuan shen-tan IL-14#-fl-), whatever its ingredients or method of preparation, was definitely a lethal concoction intended to induce "liberation from the body" (shih-chieh f' ~)- It is, of course, only an educated guess that T'ao's lifelong experiments with the nine-cycled elixir ended with deliberate ritual suicide in 536 when he was exactly eighty-one (9 x 9). See Strickmann, "Alchemy," 132-138, 146-151, and 191. 105 Ch'iian Liang-shih 4.1008. The six yang lines of the first hexagram, Ch'ien ~ (' -), represent, inter alia, a moment auspicious for "mounting to heaven." See Book of Changes 1.1 b (WilhelmjBaynes, Changes 2: 3): "Because the holy man is clear as to the end and the beginning, as to the way in which each of the six stages completes itself in its own time, he mounts on them toward heaven as though on six dragons" (:k Bfl ~. :f;-1;1.U~n\.. a~*-.:f;--JtUA-f.lp;k).

119

CHAPTER 6

Shen Yiieh envied T'ao Hung-ching's single-minded discipline, which enabled him to hold concourse with celestial beings and renounce the world, but he finally despaired of ever being able to accomplish this "inner alchemy," which involved inwardly visualizing the heavens with their astral denizens, himself. Though it is tempting to read a bodhisattva-like compassion for suffering humanity into the fourth line, he is probably thinking more of his own ills and "endangered soul" in his precarious flight heavenward than of the souls of other sentient beings. Since the Nine-cycled Elixir was supposed to bring instant death to the physical body, we can easily understand Shen Yiieh's rather tentative feeling about "getting a gift" of it from his Taoist friend, and the bravado of the last line appears to be buttressed by his near certainty that he will in fact never get it. The "Sixfold Dragons' flight" may, of course, refer only to the passage of time and the "Nine-cycled Elixir" only to some more benign macrobiotic drug that would delay its swift progress. Shen said as much later, almost in the same words, in his poem, "Spending the Night in the Eastern Garden" ("Su tung-yiian" :~if ~00), probably written after 507 when he moved to his retirement villa: If only I could get the West Hill herbs, My failing years might still be made to last. 106

:¥-'t®c4~ ~Jl~1f/,J1iL~

But the sentence from the Book of Changes from which the image of the Six Dragons is taken makes it clear, I think, that Shen is talking here about the ritual suicide and "mounting to heaven" of a truly perfected Taoist adept-an act he was not at that stage of his life prepared to perform. In "Spending the Night in the Eastern Garden," which was written around the same time as the lighthearted "Returning to Garden and Home" quoted earlier, he has made a similar truce with the unrelenting quest for celestial transcendence which continued to drive committed recluses like T'ao Hung-ching to search for elixirs and even suicide, but only created internal contradictions for engaged public servants like Shen Yiieh. The poem, "In Response to Master T'ao of Hua-yang" makes essentially the same point that was made in "Wandering on Gold Floriate 106

120

Wen-hsilan 22.23ab; Ch'ilan Liang-shih 4.1008.

THE TAOIST RECLUSE

Mountain," also quoted earlier, where Shen disclaimed the hope of ever gaining the celestial transcendence of a Zither Kao and opted instead for the earthbound reclusion of Yen Tzu-ling. But, as will become apparent, he was not even able to do that. Emperor Ming (Hsiao Luan, r. 494-498) mounted the throne in the tenth month (November/December) of 494, about nineteen months after Shen's departure from Chien-k'ang, and word of this event reached him in Tung-yang soon thereafter. Shen Yiieh harbored no love for this ruthless man who had crushed all his rivals to reach supreme power, but at the same time he recognized that with Hsiao Luan actually on the throne and not maneuvering behind the scenes to eliminate or threaten to eliminate whoever was ostensibly occuping it, the situation at court would be considerably more stable than it had been during the past year and a half. Therefore, obeying his own dictum stated in his preface to the "Biographies of Recluses and the Carefree" in the History of the Sung, in which "worthy reclusion" (hsien-yin ~k~), or "reclusion on the basis of principle" (tao-yin ~f.~), is carefully distinguished from mere "reclusion of the body" (shen-yin )t ~), 107 he packed up his belongings, said goodbye to his beloved hills and, taking the monk Huiyiieh with him, returned to the capital. Now that order had been restored and an amnesty declared, 1os he could no longer use the excuse offered in the Book of Changes, "When heaven and earth are closed (i.e., when chaos prevails in the realm), worthy men go into reclusion." 109 As his preface had made clear, worthy reclusion is different from just staying out of harm's way and refusing to take office. A man may maintain true reclusion even in the overheated climate of court intrigue, provided he keeps his principles to himself. It is, to be sure, "inferior to sagehood" (ya-sheng ll.!l"L), a mere "approximation and second best to the highest ideal" (lin-ya tsungchi ~ll. ;j;:f.~). Nevertheless, it is first of all possible, and second, preferable to just keeping out of sight like Ho T'iao 1..I. and the Ch' en-liu Hsiehs F-t. W/"~t, with whom they were by now closely intermarried. Earlier, Liu Yii had also risen from almost total obscurity after the year 400, solely through his military exploits. For the new Liang mandate, therefore, the threat of rebellion from holdovers of the previous regime was minimal compared to what it had been at the beginning of the Sung and Ch'i. As a consequence, the number of precautionary executions was far smaller. 148 Both Liu Yii and Hsiao Tao-ch' eng had killed potential rivals by the dozen. Hsiao Yen, on the other hand, already magnanimous by nature, and under the circumstances relatively unthreatened, was personally inclined to show clemency to the last Ch'i emperor, Ho-ti, and to his immediate family. His plan was to change the name of Nan-hai 1Tni/t Commandery (in modern Kwangtung) to Pa-ling Principality ~l'k !g) and let the prince and his descendants live there in perpetuity. But once more Shen Yiieh intervened to toughen his resolve. "Antiquity and the present are entirely different matters," he said, repeating a familiar argument. He then reminded the new monarch of a saying attributed to that cynical paragon of Realpolitik, Ts'ao Ts'ao f~ (155~220), "In your eagerness to win a false reputation, don't end up with a genuine disaster!" (:::f-'f ~AI[~ ifQ ~11' ~)1 49 Chou I-liang }l;]-6l_, "Lun Liang Wu-ti chi ch'i shih-tai" t~.ttEJi\'f~ ("On Emperor Wu of Liang and His Age") Chung-hua hsiieh-shu lun-chi, Peking (1979), 123-137. 149 T'ung-chien 145.4518. 148 See

Jt-at1-\:.

130

THE TAOIST RECLUSE

The emperor got the point and immediately dispatched a trusted minion, Cheng Po-ch'in ~~1€11!;-, to Ku-shu to offer the prince a lethal drink of "raw gold" (sheng-chin ~ 1;:-). The prince declined the gold with the words, "If I'm going to die, there's no need for gold; unmixed wine will be enough." Whereupon he drank until he was dead drunk, and Po-ch'in stepped forward and "crushed him to death" (la-sha chih fflir~.Z.). 150 Be it said to Shen Yi.ieh's credit that this grisly incident did not leave him unmoved, but literally haunted him to his dying day. Whether it was because of this and other similar precautions or not, the reign of Emperor Wu of Liang (502-549) remained singularly free of challenges for forty-seven years. For his own part, the recluse of Tung-yang had said enough. Throughout the remainder of his incumbency in various honorary posts at court he seemed to most people to have withdrawn again into his "reticent" shell. His biographer notes that he "rode with the times and followed the trends, becoming involved only in 'pure conversation' (ch'ingt'an 1!~). 151 When he occupied prime positions, he would always proclaim his intention to 'stop when the had had enough.' 152 Each time he was promoted to an office he would invariably make earnest requests to retire, but in the end he was unable to leave the court. Those who discussed personalities used to compare him with Shan T'ao .1.!14 (205-283). 153 He served the Liang court over ten years (502-513), yet in that time he never made any recommendations or proposals. In critical matters involving gain or loss for the government, his only comment would be 'Quite so, quite so (wei-wei ~1f.

"1t) .' " 154

In view of what we have already observed in his reclusive poetry, this ambivalent behavior simply reflected the inner conflict that had plagued him all his life. When he first threw in his lot with Hsiao Yen in 502, he had the ambition of attaining one of the Three Ducal 15 0Ibid.

!51 I.e., on politically neutral or arcane subjects. See Lao-tzu chu 44.28: "To know when one has had enough is no disgrace; / To know when to stop is no danger." (jo~::f-4}, jo.J:..::f-7~) 153 Shen T'ao was a member of the famous reclusive coterie, the "Seven Worthies of the Bamboo Grove," but in the end accepted very high office under the Western Chin regime. 154 Liang-shu 13.242. 152

131

CHAPTER 6

ranks (san-kung :=...-A} at the top of the official scale-either Director of Instruction (ssu-t'u ii} 1t), Director of Works (ssu-k'ung ii} 1:), or Grand Marshal (ta ssu-ma k ii} .~). But even though others thought it appropriate, Emperor Wu, except for that brief moment of recognition before he mounted the throne, never quite trusted him. When Fan Yiin died in 502, everyone urged the emperor to replace him as Right Vice-President of the Imperial Secretariat with Shen Yiieh. But the case was similar to that of Yiieh's friend Wang Jung ..E~, when the latter had attempted to place the Prince ofChing-ling on the throne in 494. Hsiao Yen characterized Wang at that time as "not of the caliber to save the world" (fei chi-shih ts'ai 31~ i~-t~t-::f).l 5 5 In the same way he considered Shen Yiieh too "light and facile" (ch'ing-i ~~)and appointed Hsii Mien 1~~ (458-527) instead. 156 On the other hand, perhaps for the same reason, he would not let Shen leave the court either. In frustration, in the year 510, Shen wrote the letter to Hsii Mien, referred to earlier, requesting him to intercede on his behalf. Since the letter is itself a deeply revealing document, I will quote it in its entirety. In my youth I was left fatherless and destitute and had no close relatives to rely on. I was on the point of falling to earth, toiling painfully and in want from morn till night, hobbling along with meager appointments. My aim was not merely selfish, but I looked forward to receiving some small emolument and, depending on this, to returning east to my native Wuhsing. Ten years went by before I undeservedly got an appointment in Hsiang-yang Prefecture (in modern Hupei). 157 Public and private planning is not my forte, but in order to keep my body supplied with material needs I could not avoid taking responsibility for human affairs. At the end of the Yung-ming era (493 sic), when I left the capital to become grand warden of Tung-yang, my intention consisted in "stopping when I had had enough." 158 But when the Chien-wu era (494-498) began its cycle, the human world once more crowded in on me. To leave the court then once and for all, never to return, was not yet easily accomplished. At the beginning of the reign of the Dark Suspicious One (hun-ts'ai ~~) 15 9 there !55 156

T'ung-chien 138.4332. T'ung-chien 14'5.4530. Hsii Mien's biography can be found in Liang-shu

25.377-387. mAs a member of Ts'ai Hsing-tsung's staff in 467. !59 I.e., the Marquis of Tung-hun (r. 499-501 ).

132

158 See

note 152 above.

THE TAOIST RECLUSE

were many factions within the royal government, and for this reason planning to retire seemed almost attainable. At that time I commissioned you to convey my feelings to President Hsii (Hsii Hsiao-ssu .f~;f ~)1 60 and would like to record the fact that I've not forgotten your kindness. When the way of sages was restored,l6I quite by mistake I met with good fortune and my past resolve and former intention once more became sidetracked. At the beginning of this year, with the celebration of the New Year, my request for retirement (hsiian-ch'e ~ Jt)I62 was denied because of the emperor's kindness. It is certainly true that I am unable to promote or proclaim morality or good government, or gloriously to unfold the policies of the court. But I still would like to search out and explore texts and documents to find the similarities and differences among contemporary discussions. Ever since the beginning of the year, my illness has increased and my anxieties grown more acute. It is doubtless due to the fact that my vitality is limited and my work has been excessive. The result of all this is that, withered and exhausted, I am going home in the evening years of my life. Dragging my staff, now walking, now halting, I exert my strength to work as conscientiously as I can. Looking in from outside, watching from the sidelines, I still manage to preserve myself whole. But the strength and use of my body and bones are not mutually coordinated. I constantly find it necessary to pass through a period of self-restraint before I can put forth any energy. When I take off my clothes to go to bed, my limbs no longer have any relation to the rest of my body. When the upper parts are hot, the lower parts are cold; every month it gets worse, every day more intense. If I take something warm, I feel overheated, and if I apply something cool it's always sharply painful. The later improvement is never as much as the earlier improvement, while the later severity is always greater than the earlier. Every hundred days, or even after only fifty or sixty days, I have to shift to a new hole in my leather belt. When I grasp my arm with my hand, I figure that every month it is smaller by half a degree (fen 5]'-). Estimating my prognosis from this, how can I last much longer? If it goes on like this day after day without getting any better, I will leave behind for my sage lord an irrevocable regret. I therefore presume to hope to hear if I might petition for an official rank 160Biography, Nan-Ch'i shu 44.771-774; Hsii was President of the Imperial Secretariat (shang-shu ling i1fJ t" 4'-) between 497 and his death in 499. See also T'ung-chien 141.4408 and 142.4453. 161J.e., when the Liang Dynasty was founded in 502. 162 Literally, "request to hang up my carriage."

133

CHAPTER 6

for my retirement and old age. If Heaven lends me the years to regain as much as my talents and strength were able to endure in the days of my normal health, this is all I would ever want. 16 3 The petition fell on deaf ears. All the emperor was willing to grant him was an orchestra of pipes and drums (ku-ch'ui :iYt"k.) to liven his declining days. Shen Yiieh's last years in semireclusion, in which he seemed almost to find something akin to contentment, will be the subject of a separate chapter. Before proceeding with that, however, it is necessary to look more deeply into the other religious tradition to which he belonged. I63Liang-shu

134

13.235~236;

T'ung-chien 147.4595.

Because of the Commandments I've grown weary of Samsiira, Yet, inured to Hindrances, I follow dust and filth. The way of the Four Truths is hard to open; Doorways to the Eightfold Path still tightly shut. Attaining Truth is not yet easily in reach; It's only after getting lost, I know the risk. Not only is delusion's path well-worn; But even quick enlightenment is not without gradations. -"The Fast of the Eight Prohibitions" 1

7. THE BUDDHIST LAYMAN Such a frank statement of the practical impossibility of "sudden enlightenment (tun-wu ¢Ji.'l%) may seem surprising, coming as it does only one or two generations after the heady exhilaration that followed the discovery by Tao-sheng ~:i. (ca. 360-434) of this principle in the Nirvana Sutra (MahiiparinirviirJ.a-siitra; Ta pan-niehp'an ching k-M.5~:~H7 -t" 4'-) and Junior Tutor to the Crown Prince (t'ai-tzu shao-fu :k 1- }'14 ). He was venerated by the court and literary circles alike. But, as we saw in his letter to Hsii Mien quoted earlier, 1 in the spring of 510, and increasingly through the next three years, he suffered from a painful and emaciating illness that severely limited his enjoyment of such honors. We have also seen that his usefulness at court after the initial consolidation of Liang power was minimaL since the emperor was not inclined to place weighty matters within his discretion and he himself rarely contributed any significant opinions even when consulted.2 The final rebuff came with the emperor's denial of his request for a sinecure as one of the Three Ducal Officers (san-kung ..:=.. -A). 3 What seems to have consoled him most in his retirement was puttering about the natural and man-made beauties of his estate, writing poems and enjoying the visits of aspiring young writers. The estate, built near the ruined foundations of the former villa of Shen Yiieh' s old patron from the early years of the preceding dynasty, Crown Prince Wen-hui (Hsiao Chang-mao), is lovingly described in Shen's last major work, the "Poetic Essay on Living in the Suburbs," composed shortly after he moved there in 507 and included in its entirety in his biography in the History of the Liang (Liang-shu ~-t-). 4 It was not merely a description, but in a very real 1 See 4

Chapter Six. 2 See Chapter Six. Liang-shu 13.236-242.

3 See

Chapter Six.

175

CHAPTER 8

sense his apologia pro vua sua-a summation of his own ideals and lifelong aspirations-full of autobiographical revelations whose exact reference to events is not always apparent. There are, however, enough clues to make the general tenor of his thought and the context in which it arose roughly visible through the dense verbiage. The inspiration and model for the work seems to have been Hsieh Ling-yiin's "Poetic Essay on Living in the Mountains" ("Shanchii fu" .lJ,% ~), which Shen Yiieh himself had included whole in Hsieh's biography in his History of the Sung.s One can only regret that he did not also see fit to attach a "self-commentary" of the sort Hsieh had written to accompany his work, which has made the latter far easier to interpret than Shen' s. The poetic essay, totalling 450 lines with forty-one separately rhymed stanzas, can be divided for convenience into eleven parts: (1) a prologue stating the poet's reasons for retiring to the suburbs; (2) a brief history of the Shen family through fifteen generations; (3) Shen's own lifelong hope of becoming a recluse; (4) the troubles of the last years of Ch'i; (5) the founding of Liang; (6) a description of the estate, with its flora and fauna; (7) a brief excursus on gardening; (8) the view commanded from all sides and the memories it awakens; (9) a mystical journey through space, symbolizing his desire to be free of the world; (10) reflections on the recent past and the poet's quest for self-fulfillment; and finally (11) a sigh of regret over his own failure to achieve consistency in his life. To gain some idea of what was occupying Shen Yiieh' s mind in this final period of his life we cannot do better than to look at this remarkable document in detail. l. Prologue (lines 1- 20) None but the Perfect Man and his denial of self Can truly say both 'T' and "Others" are forgotten. All the rest, from middling wise on down to fools, Must make attaining their true natures be their field of action.

·lit £A.-Z.il' C. ffi ~&.7 ~ if] f.: .~ tJ tf t' YA T :'f'!. )i)X..ff'f:i r'A $, :J~

With these sententious opening lines Shen Yiieh sets the tone of the whole poetic essay. They reveal a fundamental shift from his s Sung-shu 6 7.1754- 1771.

176

DEATH IN THE SUBURBS

earlier, rather strait-laced view of "reclusion on the basis of principle" (tao-yin .i'Q.f~), in which abandoning one's civic responsibilities is only permissible when one's principles cannot be put in practice.6 Now he is admitting that those principles must be left to the "Perfect Man" or sage. He himself could not lay claim to the requisite objectivity or selflessness to play such a heroic role. All he wants now is to settle for being true to himself: "to attain his true nature" (te-hsing 1-lt·ti.), to live in his suburban retreat in the same way that the birds and animals there attain their natures by living in nests or dens.7 Even beasts have dens from which they get to run, And birds first nest before they soar. s Ch'en [Chung-tzu's] lane was stark; his legacy was great; 9 [Yen] Ying's abode was bare; his virtue flourished .10

*

W~[t;J J,lrtii~~

.~ 7t:.

rti1 {~.}~~

~~~rtii1t*-

See Chapter Six. See Huai-nan-tzu 11.169 (Chu-tzu chi-ch' eng edition): "To follow one's nature is called the Way (Tao); to realize one's nature (te-hsing {f•li.) is called Virtue (te {.t)." See Benjamin Wallacher, The Huai-nan-tzu, Book Eleven, New Haven, 1962, 29. "Ibid. (Wallacher. Huai-nan-tzu. 48): "Now birds lodge in nests and foxes in dens. After the nests are completed the birds get to roost in them, and after the dens are completed the foxes get to live in them. To pursue a course of action or give it up-action and morality-this in turn is where human beings roost and live. Each creature delights in the place where it is comfortable." 9Ch'en Chung-tzu Ft-1'1'-t (fourth century B.c.), whose story is told in Mencius 2B.IO (Legge, Chinese Classics 2: 284~287), was so scrupulous he would not live in the house of his older brother Tai ~(., minister of Ch'i, because he considered his brother's salary to have been gained by immoral means. He and his wife migrated to Ch'u where they lived frugally by spinning and weaving hemp sandals. Sun Ch'o :Jt,?.'-f (fourth century A.D.) singled him out for admiration in the preface to his lost poetic essay, "Sui-ch'u fu" ~ c{tl-

Ying Chii }.l!.l)j_ (190- 252) was the younger brother of Ying Ch'ang 1%, one of the "Seven Masters of the Chien-an Period" (poets at the close of Later Han). He once wrote, "In an unguarded moment I took up the red silk sash and got involved in three appointments in succession" (;;f-·~ -;f $..~, -==..;a- *-:.fflif); quoted in Li Shan's commentary on Hsieh Ling-yiin's poem, "Ch'u ch'ii-chiin" -{ ~+ J:.k 1!1 ;Jjo ~Jt..~~

4:t,;{f;f;'--tf .a

1f ;: 4r:ZJiA- ;t

view,'' 42

95

He met the ripened harvest of accumulated evil. Calming the "pervasive damage" among those "whelmed below," 43 He cleared the thick miasma from the "grime above." 44 He had no time himself for morning meals, And often sought his clothes on the night pillow. 45

1r1itt .~z·idt ~7i~·J;f;'-T:l-

MJil af{;f;'- tJJ i' 'f ;JC:tz;f;'- 1Z -tk.

41 According to Liang-shu 1.22, on the i-ch'ou day of the second month (March 7) of the year 502 the Ch'i commander of the army in Southern Yen Province (Kiangsu) discovered a jade engraved ch'i-lin .11Jt.~4 ("unicorn"), a gold engraved jade disc (pi 1£), and two crystal bracelets (huan ~) while digging a well inside the walls of Huan-ch'eng. They were acclaimed by the Ch'i Empress Dowager Hsiian-te 1[ it,, Wang Pao-ming .1.. faJJ (455-512), widow of the former Crown Prince Wen-hui (Hsiao Ch'ang-mao) and mother of the two deposed Ch'i rulers, Hsiao Chao-yeh (r. 493-494) and Hsiao Chao-wen (r. 494), to be "auspicious omens" (fu-jui ;ffJ;i!,). Since the event is recorded in the basic annals of Emperor Wu of Liang (r. 502-549), we must conclude this meant auspicious for the founding of a new dynasty. 42 An apparent reference to Hsiao Yen's "going down" the Yangtze River from Yung Province (Hupei) where he had been stationed by the Ch'i court. See T'ungchien 144.4481 and Book of Songs 395.4 (Karlgren, Book of Odes, 265-266): "Heaven charged the king to go down to view the realm" (;k 4(1-ft .!!a} 4 3See Book of Documents, "Yao-tien" (Legge, Chinese Classics, 3: 24): "Overflowing everywhere, the floodwaters are wreaking pervasive damage" (~~iJkJZt..::.. -~ y'_,(

*Jt ~

1?-MJ1l~z "f

1f ~J!!]*IJtr~ ~f. ;k:!V*7f ~

1"J-tJIJ.Z5ili]5i$] ~llj~f,... if,*{}-A.

After this nostalgic digression, the poet brings us back to the estate itself and to the reveries that it evokes: In my imagination I converse with worthies of a bygone age 86 Square Mountain (Fang-shan -}j J-J) is twenty kilometers directly south of Mt. Chung. It is an extinct volcano, square on the sides and flat on top, resembling a walled city. The identities of the Homeward Ford (Kuei-chin $fit) and Cassia Isle (Kuei-chu of± i-f) are not clear to me. 87 Two legends have come down concerning the First Emperor's effort to neutralize the kingly aura of Chin-ling 1:-l't (modern Nanking). The first claims that he dug a passage through the western flank of Square Mountain to permit the Ch'inhuai River to pass northward to join the Yangtze River southwest of the city (see Chih-ta Chin-ling hsin-chih .f.:k1:-ft#Jj-,t, 5A.lla, and Chiang-ning-fu chih (1789 edition] 6.4a). The second version has him cutting through the western flank of Mt. Chung to permit the Green Stream (Ch'ing-ch'i -]!)-5¥..). a channel branching northward from the Ch'in-huai just south of the city and flowing through the eastern section of modern Nanking, to empty into Hsiian-wu Lake -t"Ji\i>JJ (see preface to Chang Tun-i 5!\:_~k_!ljj (f1.1160], Liu-ch'ao shih-chi pien-lei :!;- ~Jrf: i[i'~.Jijj (Arrangement by Categories of Six Dynasties Events], facsimile of Pao-chang-ko woodblock edition dated 1160). From Nanking the First Emperor proceeded to K'uai-chi 1/-:ff in Yiieh (Chekiang). There is no record of his reaching Min (Fukien). See Shih-chi 6.234 and 260. 88The Three Birds are messengers of the Queen Mother of the West (Hsi-wang mu ®.l..·l~'): Blue Bell (Ch'ing-chung -]!]-~t), Crane (ho t~), and Swallow (Yen-tzu ~-f). Cf. Liu Hsiang f1 f,;J (77 -6 B.c.), Nine Laments (Chiu-t 'an :ILJJ: ), Ch' u-tz'u chi-chu 16.18b-19a. (Hawkes, Ch'u-tz'u, 162): "Three birds come flying from the south; I I mark their constancy and wish to follow northwards. I I wanted the three birds to take a message for me, I But they left with a start and I was too late to catch them."

196

DEATH TN THE SUBURBS 270

275

Who roamed on foot at various times to this same spot, Attended by bright pennants, reins abreast, Or joined by dragon boats along the shore. At times they sit in serried ranks composing poetry, Or pass the cup around in festive colloquy. But then the "gauzy curtain" guickly fades away; The "Western Mausoleum" -suddenly how blue and clear!

11' f'*-*. .ti1 ~ fo,f! F·Ht.f.J-.ti1 i!1;f A. 7•J !$ .ti1 AA.Jt A. J]J. ~ .fo

*

·t,(j-

.~!+It- .¥!1 }~ ~~

® J't.~.Jt.~~

The specific reference for the "Western Mausoleum" is to the tomb of Ts'ao Ts'ao f;},lf. (155-220) in Yeh l~ (Honan). According to legend, Ts'ao's last instructions were to place his gauze-curtained bed on the Bronze Sparrow Terrace (T'ung-ch'iieh t'ai ~-t.f·), where female performers were to dance before it on the fifteenth of every month. But for Shen Yiieh the sudden fading of this diaphanous vision of past worthies and the stark revelation of the mausoleum is a reminder, as it had been to Lu Chi F:t~ (d. 303) before him, of the transiency of life against the permanence of death. 89 On this disturbing note he turns his attention to another landmark only a few hundred yards from his estate. About one kilometer due south on a small knoll at the base of Mt. Chung was Sun-ling kang ;Jt~ l'k Jili], the site of Sun Ch'iian' s ;Jt~ tl (r. 222-252) tomb, which Shen Yiieh deals with in a later section. Adjacent to the ruined tomb was a stately building erected only twenty years earlier by the Ch'i Emperor Wu (r. 483-493). Shen Yiieh, together with the other poets of the Yung-ming era, had on one notable occasion in the fall of 487 celebrated the Ch'ung-yang if I% Festival on the ninth day of the ninth lunar month in this building, which was named the Hall of Autumn Winds (Shang-piao kuan i!'fi~tn or Terrace of the Ninth Day (Chiu-jih t'ai :Jr... El .f).90 I gaze out toward the Hall of Autumn Winds and heave long sighs; 89 See Shih-shuo hsin-yii chiao-chien 2.86 (Mather, Shih-shuo, 70), where the commentary cites Ts'ao Ts'ao's "Wei-Wu i-ling" :lt.li\it ~ ("Last Will and Testament"). See also Lu Chi's ft~ "Tiao Wei Wu-ti wen" if> :lt.li\ 'f:;Z ("Condolence for Emperor Wu of Wei"), dated 298 (Wen-hsiian 60.2lb): "I grieve over the gauzy curtain's disappearance, f And feel resentment at the eternity of the Western Mausoleum" (•t.f-.~~'I*.Z-?;)Jt-, ~®i't.Ztftf). 90 See Nan-Ch'i shu 3.54.

197

CHAPTER 8

How often I made merry in this tower! The revels started with the ring and chime of bells and lithophones, 280 But ended in a whelming orgy of the fish and dragons. Some would rise or sit in decent order; Others drank their forfeits9 1 having lost all count. Among the nobles present: Ping [Chi], Wei [Hsiangj,92 Hsiao [Ho], and Ts'ao [ShenJ.93 Of royal relatives: the Marquis Wu of Liang94 and [Chi] Tan, Duke of Chou.95 285 These all, like frost or mist, have ceased and disappeared, And with the winds and clouds have scattered in thin air.

**-'lft.~:M"fm ·M; Jl'] :it.{; j#f 51!.

5\11-ilt1rtf -~J¥-8~-W-

Writing so soon after the events referred to, Shen felt it prudent to conceal the identity of his fellow revellers in the Hall of Autumn Winds behind personae of the Former Han and earlier. But we may speculate that the "nobles" he is referring to were other members of the salon of the Ch'i Prince ofChing-ling, Hsiao Tzu-liang-poets like Wang Jung, Jen Fang, and Hsieh T'iao. The "royal relatives" were the prince himself, with his older brother, Crown Prince Wen-hui (Hsiao Ch'ang-mao). It was one of the happiest and most creative periods of Shen Yiieh's life, now dissipated with the winds and clouds on the mountain. Adjacent to the Hall of Autumn Winds was the previously mentioned mausoleum of Sun Ch'iian, founder of the Wu Kingdom.

a

91 Fu-pai 5'f means "to make someone pay a forfeit (fu) by drinking a full cup (pai)," for failing to drain his cup during a toast. See Liu Hsiang's Shuo-yilan -t>t#!.. (Garden of Tales) 1l.l0a (Ssu-pu ts'ung-k'an edition). 9 2 Ping Chi iJ.il.. h!{ 10 At grass roots gather frost and dew. Jf-~Mk1t ;¢ The furtive deer moves on and does not rest; t-/f-t-~.~­ Migrating birds from time to time look back. {iE .~ at;tl'l tJi From a thatched ridgepole shrills the mournful owl; :'f #.."it fb If.~ On level moor runs by the shivering hare. -f-!ll;J?l~5t 15 The evening dark enfolds the layered hills; 1 ~1!/l'-!i .$Long mists draw out light silken skeins. *~ 5l.t1-! The fleeting daylight suddenly oppresses me: ilt 71:. .~ ~it! Is it the year alone that's ending now? ~.J:_~.z-;l If only I could get the West Hill herbs, %-'t®J.J~ 20 My failing years might still be made to lastP 7 1 ~Ji~1iU~.

t.

In this flight of fancy Shen Yiieh' s recollection of two poems, Ts'ao Chih's "Famous City" ("Ming-tu" __g ;l!~)l 72 and P'an Yiieh's "Eastern Suburb" ("Tung-chiao" t_3(~), 173 have stimulated him to recreate Chien-k'ang's Eastern Suburb, where he is living, to fit the corresponding suburb of Lo-yang, the old capital of both the Wei Kingdom and Western Chin. In such a retrospective context it is only natural that the images of the poem-the deserted countryside, the half-dilapidated fences and weed-grown footpaths, the Ch'iian Liang-shih 4.1008; Wen-hsiian 22.23a. See Ch'iian San-kuo shih ~..::..l!ll# 2.144: "The fighting cocks on Eastern Suburb Road; I The racing steeds amid the tall catalpa trees" (~j,tjtit_3i~it, .:iJ:.~.ffi:. 17 1 172

iti:.Ml·

17 3 Quoted in Li Shan's (seventh-century) commentcry (Wen-hsiian 22.23a): "I went out through the Eastern Suburb, I Where my grieving heart was shaken. I There along the fallow fields I I gathered firewood" (:1:: ~ it,3i~, :t·.:_:~f.~f., i!ft

*

H7'

218

-t *-Jt.~~J

DEATH IN THE SUBURBS

shrill autumnal wind and gathering frost, and the eerie passage of frightened birds and animals in the gathering dusk-all point with cumulative poignancy to Shen Yiieh's awareness of his own approaching death. As we learned from his letter to Hsii Mien, written in 510, Shen Yiieh's health was already beginning to fail. The excruciating illness he described in the letter was undoubtedly the ultimate cause of his death. During the last three years of his life he tried valiantly to keep active, but minor, insignificant things would upset him and destroy his aplomb for days at a time. It was an intensified manifestation of a problem he had mentioned in his "Confession" of many years earlier.l 74 One evening, as he was seated with others near to Emperor Wu at a banquet, a servant brought in some tribute chestnuts (li #-)from Yii ft Province (modern Anhui and southern Honan) as large as one and a half inches in diameter. After admiring them, the emperor turned to Shen and asked, "How many historical or literary incidents can you recall involving chestnuts?" Shen Yiieh knew the emperor's foibles well enough to realize that he could not afford to outshine his host in anything, not even a trivial thing like this, so he managed adroitly to recall three fewer examples than the emperor. Anyone in better health, or with a more placid disposition, might have passed the whole incident off as an amusing joke. But Shen was not amused. When he came out from the banquet he made the mistake of complaining to someone: "This gentleman always has to preserve his superiority. If I hadn't yielded to him, he'd die of humiliation!" Word of this got back to the emperor, who also was not amused. It took some forceful calming down by Shen' s old friend and benefactor, Hsii Mien, before he desisted from imposing some kind of penalty. 175 Soon afterward, however, another trifling incident occurred whose outcome was far more serious. Although I have been unable to trace the exact connection, it seems that Shen Yiieh, either through his wife's family (whose name is never mentioned), or through his daughter,l 7 6 was related by marriage to Chang Chi *-11 See Chapter Seven. 175 Liang-shu 13.243; T' ung-chien 14 7.4605. one whose marriage was mentioned in the poem, "Returning to My Garden Home" ("Huan yuan-chai"). 174

176 The

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(451-513). 177 Chang had gained great merit in the eyes to Emperor

Wu by leading the commando force that killed the notorious Ch'i despot, the Marquis of Tung-hun, early in 502. 178 He had been honored by a series of appointments under the new dynasty, culminating in Left Vice-President of the Imperial Secretariat (shangshu tso p'u-yeh r/;]1;" £.1ft]"), but had never actually enjoyed much authority. He himself felt his merits had not been adequately recognized, and at a New Year's banquet in 511 in the Hall of Happy Longevity (Le-shou tien $--~),after a few drinks he "allowed his resentment to show in his remarks and facial expression." Emperor Wu rejoined, "Your older brother (Kuei ft) murdered the grand warden of his commandery (Liu Hsia f'J :i]!., the Sung grand warden of Wu [modern Su-chou] in 477)1 79 and you, his younger brother, murdered your ruler (the Marquis of Tung-hun), so what claim to fame have you got?" Chi murmured, 'Tve got no claim to fame. But in relation to Your Majesty, you can't say I'm without merit. Tunghun was violent and cruel, and the loyalist army (led by you) also came to punish him. How can anyone say it was only me?" The emperor stroked his beard in silence and then said mockingly, "Master Chang is certainly a man to be feared!" It was at this point that Chang Chi, sensing that events had taken a nasty turn, requested an assignment outside the capital. His request was promptly granted, and he was packed off to serve as governor of Liang's two northeastern provinces ofCh'ing if and Chi Jt (in modern Kiangsu and Anhui). 180 There, disgruntled at what amounted to exile, he instituted a very lax regime. Since the people of the area were already accustomed to trading with their neighbors across the border in Northern Wei territory and since Chang did nothing to strengthen the border defenses, his day"S as governor were clearly numbered. Sometime early in 513 one of the local leaders led an insurrection, killing Chang Chi and delivering his head with a note of surrender to the Northern Wei.IBI Word of this debacle had just reached the capital, and in a casual conversation with Shen Yueh, Emperor Wu recalled the incident of his unpleasant exchange with Chang Chi at the New Year's banquet 177 Biography, Liang-shu 16.270-272. 178 T'ung-chien 144.4507. 179Ibid., 134.4209. ISOJbid., 147.4597. 1B1£iang-shu 16.272; T'ung-chien 147.4604.

220

DEATH IN THE SUBURBS

two years earlier, apparently still nursing a lingering rancor against his insubordination on that occasion. With an edge in his voice, Shen Yiieh replied: "Left Vice-President Chang left the capital to serve as governor of the border provinces. What's the point of discussing a bygone affair?" Somewhat startled by this unexpected outburst, the emperor, supposing Shen Yiieh was taking Chang's part because of the marriage bond between their families, became angry and shouted, "Would a loyal subject talk to me like this?" Summoning his palanquin, he returned forthwith to his own quarters within the palace. Shen Yiieh was so shaken by the emperor's anger that he did not even notice he had left the room, but continued to sit where he was in a dazed stupor. Slowly pulling himself together, he finally called for his driver and set out on the painful journey through the east gate of the city to his mountain retreat. After his arrival he was feeling faint and started toward his bedroom to lie down. As he reached the door, for no visible reason he lost consciousness and collapsed headforemost on the floor. It was then clear that he was seriously ill. In a delirious dream he saw the boy-emperorEmperor Ho of Ch'i, whose execution he had advised in 502coming toward him with a two-edged sword with which he cut off his tongue. Awaking in a sweat, he immediately summoned a shaman (wu £.) to examine his condition. The shaman explained what had happened, confirming what he had seen in the dream. It was clear to him now what was causing his illness. He was paying the penalty for having advised the death of an innocent person. As a faithful Taoist, he also realized that any remission of his symptoms would depend on a full confession, accompanied by a petition to heaven to spare his life. Calling in a Taoist priest (tao-shih .1!.± ), he made his confession and instructed the priest to send up a "red petition" (ch'ih-chang ~1().1 82 In it he claimed that the idea of a change of dynasty (from Ch'i to Liang) had not originated with him. 1B3 Meanwhile the emperor, learning of his illness, was naturally very concerned and dispatched his top physician, Hsii Tsang 1~~, and 182 A petition written on red paper and burned by the priest, the smoke of which was presumed to carry the message to heaven. IBJLiang-shu 13.2~3; T'ung-chien 147.4605.

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CHAPTER 8

his principal secretary, Huang Mu-chih -;'t;f~z, the first to examine and the second to visit the patient. Late that evening when Huang returned the emperor demanded a full report. Huang was reticent about immediately revealing Shen's true condition, perhaps fearing to offend the emperor by implying the latter had precipitated it. But he did take it upon himself to pass along what he had learned from the physician Hsii Tsang about the "red petition." Predictably, the emperor was outraged. On top of all the other annoyances, this blatant perjury on Shen's part about his role in the change of dynasty was the coup de grace. In the course of the next few days, instead of further solicitous inquiries, he sent a succession of sharp reprimands. Whether, as the sources imply, this was the immediate cause of Shen's death seems somehow irrelevant. The obvious truth is that his health had been growing more and more fragile for over two years. On the i-ch'ou day of the intercalary month (April 22) of 513 he died. His biographer in the History of the Liang records that after his death: The officer charged with proposing a posthumous title suggested "Wen" (The Literary). But the emperor would not accept it. "Since his real feelings were never fully expressed," he said, "he should be called 'Yin' (The Reticent)." So they conferred the posthumous title Yin-hou (Reticent Marquis). 184 Earlier, when he first moved into his suburban retreat which, as we have seen, was near the former residence of the Ch'i Crown Prince, Hsiao Ch'ang-mao, he had worried over the specter of that unhappy person's ignominious end, sensing he might some day share a similar fate_185 The worry was a self-fulfilling prophecy. He, too, had died in disgrace. Shortly before his death Shen Yiieh dictated a final memorial to his estranged emperor. It is an eloquent document and a fitting statement with which to close this all-too-fragmentary account of his life. Your servant Yiieh has been bearing in his body a long and incurable illness. Now at any moment he will be transformed in death. Body and Liang-shu 13.243; Nan-shih 47.13; T'ung-chien 147.4605. above, the "Poetic Essay on Living in the Suburbs," lines 303-314, and immediately preceding commentary. 1" 4

185 See

222

DEATH IN THE SUBURBS

spirit have been on the verge of separation for the last ten months or so. 186 I have no words to describe the suffering or the excruciating pain. In my normal days when I was in sound health I never spoke like this. To be hoisted on knives or seated on two-edged swords would be a light matter compared to this. I only hope that, having entered deep within the Dharma Gate, I may pass through this season of suffering. To be compassionate toward oneself and forgiving toward others is truly rooted in human feelings. I humble pray that the Buddha mind may be repeatedly enlarged within me. Then, as your petty servant faces the road ahead, he will leave behind no lingering regrets. Although his progress be gradual. yet all is weJl.l87 186 This poses a problem of timing. If it means that he had been bedridden since the summer of 512, the incidents assigned in the sources to early 513, which presumably precipitated his death, should be reassigned to an earlier date or discounted as fictional embellishments. 187 "Shen Yin-hou lin-chung piao" )it.f,@d~ !l,\;,iq:..;fZ_ ("Memorial of Shen the Reticent Marquis on the Eve of His Death"), found in Kuang hung-ming chi 30 (Taishii 52: 356ab).

223

BIBLIOGRAPHY PRIMARY SOURCES

Collections of Shen Yileh's Poems Hao Li-ch'iian .ms..!l.:fft, Shen Hsiu-wen shih-chu )lt1i;.~~t ii. (Commentary on the Poems of Shen Yiieh), Cheeloo University Press, 1935. Shen Hsiu-wen Chi )lt.1i;.~.f.;. (under Liang Poets in Ting Fu-pao T :f£1% [1874-1952], Han Wei liu-ch'ao ming-chia chi, q.v.). Shen Yin-hou chi )lt.f~1~.f.:. (under Liang Poets in Chang P'u ~~JJ. (16021641], Han-Wei liu-ch'ao pai-san ming-chia chi, q.v.). Shen Yiieh (under Liang-shih 6 and 7, pp. 1613-1669, in Lu Ch'in-liift$J:...!Z., Hsien-Ch'in Han-Wei Chin nan-pei-ch'ao shih, vol. 3, q.v.). Shen Yileh (under Ch'iian Liang-shih, pp. 987-1028, in Ting Fu-pao, Ch'iian Han san-kuo nan-pei-ch'ao shih, vol. 2, q.v.).

Other Texts Amitiibha-siitra (see under 0-mi-t'o ching). Analects (see under Lun-yii). Arai Ken t -1t1Jt and Kozen Hiroshi .J!!./1! ~, editors, Shih in ( = Shih-p'in) ~,l.fo (Gradings of Poets), in Bungaku ronshii ~*~.f.:. (Collection of Discourses on Literature), Chiigoku bunmeisen 13, Tokyo, 1972. Birrell, Ann, translator, New Songs from a Jade Terrace (Yil-t'ai hsin-yung .1:..-i--iffri,f_), London, 1982. See also Uchida Sennosuke. Bunkyo hifuron (see under Kiikai). Chang P'u ~~JJ. (1602-1641 ), compiler, Han- Wei liu-ch'ao pai-san ming-chia chi ~~~;;';- .¥JJ1.)-=:_.i:; ~.f.:. (Collected Works of 103 Famous Poets of the Han, Wei, and Six Dynasties), woodblock edition of 1879 (see also Yin Meng-lun). Chang Tun-i ~.fk!Y!! (fl. 1160), Liu-ch'ao shih-chi pien-lei ;;';- .frrl1 _i;!f',~$.~ (Arrangement by Categories of Six Dynasties Events), Ts'ung-shu chich'eng edition (reproduced from the Ming collectanea Ku-chin i-shih -5-~.i!..R. (Lost Histories of Ancient and Modern Times]). Changes, Book of (see under I-ching). Ch'en Shou l'f-.:4- (233-297), San-kuo chih -=:._~ .t. (Record of the Three Kingdoms, Wei, Shu, and Wu, 221 -365), commentary by P'ei Sung-chih Jl;fhz (360-439), Peking, 1972. 224

PRIMARY SOURCES

Cheng-t'ung tao-tsang iE.f.\ l ("Tentative Notes on Hsiao Tzuhsien's 'Discussions' Attached to the Literary Biographies in His History of the Southern Ch'i"), Tenri daigaku gakuho 90 (1974), 58-63. Yoshida Koichi ifro 4--, "Bunkyo hifuron ken dai'ichi 'Shiseiron' ni tsuite" ~:l)t,f;&j(.f~~~-I1."'J$~J t:-J,' 1("0nChapter0ne: 'Discourse on the Four Tones' of the Bunkyo hifuron ofKiikai"), in two parts, Shoshigaku "t'~