Time and Space in Chinese Culture 9004102876, 9789004102873

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SINICA LEIDENSIA EDITED BY

E. ZURCHER IN COOPERATION WITH

P.K. BOL • C. HARBSMEIER • W. L. IDEMA D.R. KNECHTGES • D. KUHN· E.S. RAWSKI H.T. ZURNDORFER

VOLUME XXXIII

TIME AND SPACE IN CHINESE CULTURE EDITED BY

CHUN-CHIEH HUANG AND

ERIK ZURCHER

K]. BRILL LEIDEN . NEW YORK' KOLN 1995 'c..

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ISSN 0169-9563· ISBN 90 04 10287 6

© Copyright 1995 by E.]. Brill, Leiden, Ike Netherlands

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CONTENTS SETTING THE STAGE CHUN-CHIEH HUANG AND ERIK ZURCHER, Cultural Notions of Space and Time in China

3

DMSION ONE: CULTURAL FRAMEWORK KUANG-MING Wu, Spatiotemporal Interpenetration in Chinese Thinking

... 17

DMSION TWO: CULTURAL ENRICHMENTS Part One: On Time and Space CHRISTOPH HARBSMEIER, Some Notions of Time and of History in China and in the West CHUN-CHIEH HUANG, Historical Thinking in Classical Confucianism-Historical Argumentation from the Three Dynasties

49

72

Part Two: Time and Space as Lived LI-CHEN LIN, The Notions of Time and Position in the Book Vi of Change and Their Development '.:. 89 KIuSTOFER SCHIPPER, The Inner World of the Lao-tzu chungching 114 ERIK ZURCHER, "In the Beginning": 17th-Century Chinese Reactions to Christian Creationism 132 Part Three: Time and Space as Managed A. To Quantify or Not to Quantify CATHERINEJAMI, Western Devices for Measuring Time and Space: Clocks and Euclidian Geometry in Late Ming and Ch'ing China 169 EDUARD B. VERMEER, Notions of Time and Space in The Early Ch'ing: The Writers ofKu Yen-wu, Hsu Hsia-k'o, Ku Tsu-yu and Chang Hsiieh-ch'eng 201

CONTENTS

vi

B. To "Spatialize" and to "Temporalize" \ ) PAO-CHEN CHEN, Time and Space in Chinese Narrative Paintings of Han and the Six Dynasties LLOYD HAFr, Timeless in Time: Perspective-Building Devices in Yang Ling-yeh's Poetry

239 287

Part Four: Effects of Time and Space A. Effects of Time and Space on the Political Arena

MICHAEL LOEWE, The Cycle of Cathay: Concepts of Time in Han " China and Their Problems 305 CHANG-TZE Hu, Historical Time Pressure: An Analysis of Min Pao (1905-1908) 329 B. Effects of Time and Space on Our Life CHI-P'ENG Ho, The Lament for Autumn: A Type of TimeSpace Consciousness in the Traditiori of Chinese Literature WILT L. IDEMA, Time and Space in Traditional Chinese Historical Fiction

343 362

Division Three: Cultural Embodiments

J YIH-~

LI, Notions of Time, Space and Harmony in Chinese Popular Culture 383

Contributors

399

SETTING THE STAGE

CULTURAL NOTIONS OF TIME AND SPACE IN CHINA Chun-chieh Huang and Erik Zurcher This volume tells a great story of how peculiarly, concretely Chinese the notions of "time" and "space" are in Chinese culture and, conversely, how these peculiarly Chinese notions of time and space mould a grand living tradition called Chinese culture. And how significant this story is, as well as what characteristics this story exhibits, is to be considered in this introductory essay that sets the stage for what is to follow. A."TIME" AND "SPACE" AS CULTURAL NOTIONS

As we all know, time (then, now) and space (here, there) are the indispensable overall forms of human mind to organize sense data from the outside world, so as to intelligibly mould our experience. Kant made a big splash over them, saying that space and time serve as the "forms" of "intuition" to shape our human categorial experience. 1 "Intuition" here is something "transcendental," that is, among others, general, a-historical, a-cultural, indifferently shared by all human beings as long as they are rationally human. Such in our Western, commonsense understanding of the notions of time and space. But "transcendental" mean something pertaining to the subject, and the subject is the I which by its nature cannot be generalized. 2 The I-in-general does not exist any more than does the "every"-in-generaI. The "I" is always situation-specific, always a specific I in a specific cultural space and a specific cultural time. And 1 See Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, from A20=B34 to A49=B73, Cf. Norman Kemp Smith, Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, NY: St. Martin's Press, 1929, 1965, pp. 65-91. Interestingly, Kant took "forms of intuition" as those of "space and time," whereas the Chinese people take them to be "time and space" (shih k 'ung). 2,. To council us here on Kant's distinction between the empirical I and the transcendental ego merely begs the question. For our observation-that the I, in whatever sense, cannot be generalized-cuts beneath the Kantian distinction which simply assumes that the I can be generalized. Such a counsel merely bulldozes over the incorrigible specificity of the I that even logicians recognize when they classify the I as a key example of "demonstratives," "indexical words," etc. Cf. Palle Yourgrau, ed., Demonstratives, Oxford University Press, 1990.

4

CHUN-CHIEH HUANG AND ERIK ZURCHER

so what neither Kant nor our Western common sense did notice is the simple fact that these very spatio-temporal "forms," precisely because they are "transcendental," are not of "intuition" in general at all. Instead, these "forms" of our thinking and experience are themselves concretely and variously crafted by our various cultural modes of thinking and behaving, "cultural mode" in the widest sense of our mores and customs, accustomed ways of . J moving and styles of living. The spatiotemporal "forms of intuiII tion" are ones that are themselves historically and culturally contextualized. In other words, the "form" of space-time in which we live, move and have our experience, is itself shaped by the way in which we live, move and have our experiential being, and this our mode of living is called "culture" in all its historical depths and regional riches. Culture is the womb of our being "human," the universe of discourse in which our experience makes sense and distinguishes itself as humanly meaningful, not a mere spewing forth of animality. Human culture is then the form of those forms of space and time. And there is no such thing as culture-in-general, either; "culture" is always in the plural, as divetse as world history attests. As a result, there are as many kinds of forms of space and time as there are cultures, because there are as many kinds of human experience, moulded by those spatiotemporal forms, as there are cultures. One of the peculiar modes of human living in the world is the Chinese culture, a thoroughly concrete and reasonable culture. How peculiarly concrete and reasonable it is, is meticulously exhibited and brought out in this volume, concretely specifying various modes in which the notions of time and space are taken and lived through the widths and breadths of China, in the various periods and regions of Chinese culture.

l

B. DIVISIONS ONE AND Two And so, this volume tells a grand story of how the notions of time and space came to be peculiarly Chinese, as they on their part pervaded and moulded that great living tradition called Chinese culture. To begin with, in Division One Professor Wu descf~pes how thinking in Chinese culture is itself timed and spaced-l~irst, Chir nese thinking concretely moves from the familiar here to the

CULTURAL NOTIONS OF TIME AND SPACE IN CHINA

5

strange there, moving in space that takes time. This sort of thinking is as space-timed as it is "metaphorical."lS/condly, since such a spatiotemporal interpenetration is usually called "history," Chinese thinking is historical. Thinking in China moves in the context of history, moving between past and future, back and forth, and so history which typifies Chinese thinking is time-spaced. Thus spatiotemporal interpenetration in metaphor and history, as its predominant trend, typifies Chinese thinking. This essay in this manner delineates the culturalframework of time and space in what is to follow. Then comes the large Division Two, "Cultural Enrichments." Its four parts tell of four clusters of essays dealing with cultural enrichments of time and space-(l) Part one, on time and space; (2) Part Two, time and space as lived; (3) Part Three, time and space as managed; and (4) Part Four, effects of time and space. (1) In Part One, Professor Harbsmeier reminds us that chronicling in China requires an overall notion of time, variously used and described in various terms, constituting what can be termed "history." And so this overall notion of time in China is not a purely abstract notion but one that itself develops within history. Then Professor Huang takes on Chinese argumentation as itself "dipped in history"-arguing by citing paradigmatic precedents, arguing by facts and analogization to evoke our assent. In this historical argumentation, actual events are to be empathetically participated in-to be learned via our interpretation. Thus as we learn from history, history itself takes shape. History and modernity shape each other. And so Part One delineates the Chinese attitude toward space and time-the attitude itself is spacedtimed, and the lived space and time are shaped in a particular manner by a particular cultural attitude. (2) Part Two describes how the Chinese people concretely live their time and space. Professor Lin shows us the Chinese mode of living in time-space by probing into the classic of all Chinese Classics, the Book of Change, which shows us both how to find within our lived time the opportune moment for our undertaking, and how to find in life our strategic position for success, so that we carl respond to the auspicious time to preserve and promote our position in life (status, rank, lived location). This Book thus shows us how we can exploit opportunity to do what is "fitting," wherein man, time, and position are bound together in one propitious oc-

6

CHUN-CHIEH HUANG AND ERIK ZURCHER

casion in the actualities of human living. Three hermeneutical traditions on the Book of Change are specified to buttress this fundamental point-Meng Hsi's, Wang Pi's, and Chu Hsi's. Not just in this world do the Chinese people want to be successful, however. They want to go beyond the present space-time. This transcendent aspect of lived time-space is explored by Professor Schipper in his fascinating story of Lao-tzu chung-ching, where mythical time and space, not ordinary dates and authorship or geography, are real; the mythical is really the nature of things. Chung-ching is a didactic description of our techniques to tend our life, so as to reflect and take part in the mythical universe in mythical time and space. The microcosm of our body is to be brought into a visionary trance state to induce macrocosmic awareness. We attain immortality by thus entering the mythical universe inhabited by gods and goddesses. Whether to be successful within this life (as in the Book of Change) or beyond (as in Lao-tzu chung-ching), all the above descriptions concern. a peculiarly Chinese sentiment and mentality toward time and space. This Chinese-ness is so entrenched that, as Professor Zurcher aptly shows us, any'foreign ideas of the world are forthwith repelled. The Christian "creation out of nothing" simply collided with the Chinese "timeless evolution of the cosmos" through polarization and diversification. Inevitably the conflict resulted in dialogues of misunderstandings; two divergent universes of discourse just clashed and then parted their ways. (3) Then comes Part Three, "time and space as managed." Two themes emerge, one about quantification and another, for want of a better terms, about spatializing and/or temporalizing our daily living. Each theme is treated by two essays. On the theme of quantification of time and space, Professor Jami chooses a strategic moment in Chinese history when Western devices of measuring time and space, clockwork and geometry, were imported by Jesuit missionaries. Their imports were appreciated as an alternative to the Chinese calendar and astrology; their ulterior purpose of evangelization (the human had something divine in it, the universe was God's clockwork) was bypassed, however. Then, as if to substantiate Jami's observation that Chinese appreciation of Western quantification was a mere excitement over exotics, Professor Vermeer complains, in his citations of historical details, about the lack of quantification in various scholarly in-

CULTURAL NOTIONS OF TIME AND SPACE IN CHINA

7

vestigations in "modern" geography and chronicles during the Ch'ing Dynasty. All things and institutions indeed have a common underlying principle (Tao), which is nonetheless related to human behavior, not to the laws of inorganic nature in geometrical quantitative terms. Here is manifest the peculiarly Chinese indifference to quantification even in matters of scientific geography and chronicles. The next theme of spatializing and temporalizing our daily living is fascinatingly treated by Professors Chen and Haft. Professor Chen shows us how Chinese narrative paintings from Han to the Six Dynasties represent complex plots in a spatial sequence of paintings. This is to treat the time sequence of plot on the canvas of space. To be effective, this conversion required artistic devices which this essay addresses-simultaneous, monoscenic, and continuous compositions. Influenced by Buddhist narrative paintings, these Chinese narrative images of virtues effectively served as religious didactic vehicles. Professor Haft deftly probed into the techniques of expressing the lively identity of the I in the poetry of the contemporary poet, Yang Ling-yeh. The I cannot find itself in time; it has to "locate" its perceptions by expressing its shifting perspectives on time itself, wherein emerges also the awareness of the mysterious "you." In all these shifting moments the "you" connects the Subjective Time to mythical memories. The time-honored constants of history, poetry, philosophy, or mythology cannot be used to explain or give meaning to the I. Instead, self-expression of the immediacy of the I now gives them meanings, which express the absoluteness of the moment. For want of a better characterization, this sort of poetic devices can be dubbed a temporalizing of daily living in all its . immediacies. (4) All this handling and being handled by time and space cannot but result in their repercussions on our life. Hence, the final PartFouron "effects of time and space." Two areas are mentioned: their effects both on the political arena and on our life, each of which is addressed by two authors. Effects of time and space on the politicalarena is considered first by Professor Loewe who goes into genealogical historical records to see how the Chinese notion of time as cyclical, as a dimension of the universe, affects dynastic authority. We must (a) reconcile the Ch'in Dynasty's claim to eternity with linking the dynasty with one of the five phases, (b) reconcile patronage of one of Five Ele-

8

CHUN-CHIEH HUANG AND ERIK ZURCHER

ments with the arbitrary choice of the Heaven, (c) and above all, answer the question on why the ancient ideal Dynasties had to change their calendar. In addition, we have another problem of reconciling counting time in different cycles-in 2, 5, 12, 29, 41/83, 64, 28, etc. They must not only be made to harmonize among themselves; they must all be shown to fit in the one overarching principle of the Tao. Then Professor Hu considers, by perusing the Minbao (190508), the revolutionary notion of time in the political sphere. The Minbao was situated at a strategic point in time, when the traditional cyclical notion of time was turned over to the futuristic revolutionary notion of time, thereby coming out of the traditional Chinese politics to participate in the universal world history, turning from the Chinese notion of time as "cyclical" repose toward time as "linear" progress, from patterning after the paradigmatic past to creating the novel future. All this revolutionary notional change in the concept of time was effected by political revolutions of the time as reflected in the l)if.inbao. To describe the effects of time and space on our life, Professor Ho ponders on "lamenting autumn" in traditional Chinese poetry, reflecting our awareness of passing time and decaying space. This lament points to one's regrets over lack of (public) accomplishments in the all-too-short life span of an individual. Professor Idema on his part points to the difference between historiography and historical fiction. The difference does not lie in the contrast between fact and fiction. Rather, historiography consists in records of the exemplary, recurring, and public events; historiography thus "spatializes" time, without any progression at all, as in, e.g., Tso-chuan and Shih-chi. Historical fiction, in contrast, records miraculous, unique, and private affairs; it is idiosyncratic and reductive, mainly a plotted narrative. C. CHARACTERISTICS OF THE DESCRIPTION IN DIVISION

Two

Now we must sit back and consider what all this amounts to. All these essays in Division Two manifest three characteristics. (1) First, since cultural notions of time and space developed historically, Chinese time and space are themselves historical; (2) second, these notions manifest themselves in storytelling that is potently .\' creative; (3) third, these notions are incorrigibly concrete.

CULTURAL NOTIONS OF TIME AND SPACE IN CHINA

9

(1) To begin with, Chinese notions of time and space are themselves historical, in the widest sense of the totality of our living, layer after layer, in the context of time. This statement has two implications. First, the Chinese notions of time and space are not ready-made in the Platonic heaven of theoretical abstraction but themselves have developed out of the vicissitudes of our life, both private and public, on both the elite level and the popular level. The notions of time and space which shape the meaning of our life are themselves developed from, and rooted in, the very vicissitudes of our life. Our notions and our life thus shape each other, and this mutual shaping is what it means to have history. All our essays in this volume tell the story of how the history of notions of time and space form the warp and woof of our life, our history. Furthermore, to say that Chinese notions of time and space are "~ historical in a widest sense means that no aspect of life is irrelevant to all other aspects. A putatively cosmological treatise (e.g., in the Book of Changes, as Professor Lin aptly shows us) has much to do with business, naming, politics, etc. What is ostensibly a purely historical and scientific description by Professor ]ami of importations of clockworks and geometry is profoundly relevant to, i.e., had some profound political, cosmological and religious implications in, Chinese culture as a whole as it received these scientific gadgets and techniques. Every aspect of our life is impli- \ cated in every other aspect, so much so that cooking and politics, . politics and morals, morals and aesthetics, aesthetics and cosmol- ' ogy, are intertwined into a spatiotemporal unity, the "history" of , our life in all aspects. ' (2) Secondly, such a story of the development of Chinese notions of time and space is both a description of facts as they independently happen and happened, to be studied for their own sake, on the one hand, and our molding of facts via our very storytelling, to be interpreted-if not idealized-for our sake, on the other. During the Conference, Professor Vermeer asked Professor Huang whether history as fact-creation is not a universal phenomenon of history-writing throughout the world. History-making has indeed these two poles, fact-description and 'fact-molding, and both are intertwined. In this sense, this volume of storytelling concerning the development of the peculiarly Chinese notions of time and space is itself a history-shaping event in the form of a history-reportage.

10

CHUN-CHIEH HUANG AND ERIK ZURCHER

And yet it remains typical of the Western sentiment to emphasize the former factual pole as its ideal, while typical of the Chinese sentiment to emphasize the latter hortatory pole. In China, history always has something to teach us how to conduct our lives. This tendency is responsible for lack of quantification, as well as for the profound lived dimensions, and dimensions of various influences in various aspects of life, in Chinese notions of time and space, as exhibited in this volume. (3) Thirdly, let us consider what the previous two points amount to. To say that Chinese notions of space and time are themselves historical means that these notions carry within them solid internal historicity. This notional historicity implies that the stories of these notions are both those of fact-reporting and those of fact-shaping. All this amounts to saying that these notions are concrete. All these notions of time and space, and their stories that are shaping our culture and that have been shaped by our culture, are concrete, that is, concresced in significance, a tapestry of various aspects and meanings, tightly packed in events that seem to happen casually and naturally. But that these "simple" events are anything but simple-random, atomistic, incidental, absurd, superfluous, etc.-can be seen in the following essays which exhibit close ties among apparently discrete aspects-religious and political, cosmic and ethical, artistic and historical, etc .. If only the pure experience of the now can explain the pure experience of the now, as Professor Haft rightly insisted in this Conference, then, since language and reason unpack, Chinese culture is able at least to do the next best and the plainest, that is, explicate, unpack, the tight tapestry of meanings in events by reflecting on them as faithfully as our language and our intelligibility allow. And one way to do so is for us to metaphorize and to "historicize," that is, explain the new and unknown (whether in the past or at present) by extrapolating from the familiar, and to "create" history, to "mold" facts. To be concrete is thus to be historical, and vise versa, and to be historical is to tell stories of events and thereby shape them forth as history. Jean-Paul Sartre in his typical unkind hyperbole called our storytelling an instinct to tell a lie. He said,"

3

Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea, NY: New Directions, 1964, pp. 56-59.

CULTURAL NOTIONS OF TIME AND SPACE IN CHINA

11

[A] man is always a teller of stories.... [H]e sees everything which happens to him through these stories; and he tries to live his life as if it were a story he was telling.... While you live, nothing happens. The scenery changes, people come in and go out, that's all. There are no beginnings ... an interminable and monotonous addition .. .. But when you tell about a life, everything changes; ... events take place in one direction, and we tell about them in the opposite direction .... I wanted the moments of my life to follow each other and order themselves like those of a life remembered. I might as well try to catch time by the tail.

This is, we instinctively feel, false. But somehow we also feel that his "falsehood" has a point, some partial truth. What his exaggeration intimates is the fact that to express (something at all about) an event is to shape forth its meaning (otherwise hidden in dumb factuality) in our own manner. We admit that we try to be as objectively true to the situation as possible, but our story remains ours, our creation. Ssu-ma Ch'ien's Shih-chi remains Ssu-ma Ch'ien's and only he could have written that Shih-chi as he did, and no one else. to borrow Confucius to our purpose, events "lift one corner," and we historicize them- making them into significant stories-with "three" or more meanings in our own manner, in a literary, hortatory manner called "history." This is how history "educates" us." And since history is the tapestry of human space and lived time, this is how the Chinese culture shapes and lives the notions of time and space. This is how Chinese culture creates history and shapes facts. The fact molding thrust is the genius of the historian's task (shih); the metaphorical method is at the center of the literarytapestry (wen). The Chinese mode of living in space-time is neither intuitive nor )mmediate (as Western thinkers would have us think) but concrete and cultural, expressed matter-of-factly in history and literature. Chinese culture is concrete by virtue of its being characteristically "Wen and Shih (wen-shih)" at once. And the essays that follow amply testify to this cultural fact. Concrete, fact- . creating, historical, and storytelling, they imply one another, explain one another. As "concrete" typifies and sums up the other three notions, the other three notions explain what "concrete" means.

4

The Analects, 7/8.

\

1

12

CHUN-CHIEH HUANG AND ERIK ZURCHER D. ON DIVISION THREE

Now all these various concretizations of cultural time-space forms, in these various aspects of Chinese culture throughout the ages, are inevitably embodied in the daily folk lives. In Division Three, "cultural embodiments," one such demonstration is afforded by Professor Li Yih-yuan who concentrates his studies on the concrete embodiments of cultural time and space among the common people of Taiwan. We see there all cultural concretizations of cultural space-time forms that have been dealt with in the various essays collected here. The cultural time and space and their concretizations are all embodied and lived among Taiwan folks. The so-called "small tradition" among common folks is where the so-called "great tradition" of academia, of explicit expression in the "Wen" and the "Shih," takes root and is lived as the flesh and blood of the Chinese people. This fact is concretely borne out by Li's judicious, comprehensive, and succinct essay. j Here "Culture China" (wen-hua chung-kuo) is understood from the point of view of common people) daily lives, their folkways, in three areas: (i) in diet customs and beliefs, (ii) in family ethics, and (iii) in cosmological fortune-telling and geomancy, mutually harmonized under the natural order (t'ien), calculation of propitious time and most favorable locations for business, and the human body as microcosm with the Yin-Yang model. This harmony extends to foods and medicine, individual naming according to Five Elements, and social interactions both in this world and with the world beyond. All these phenomena manifest layers of deposits of the influences of what were considered in Division Two, Chinese "cultural enrichments" on time and space. Thus Li's essay appropriately concludes our volume, to demonstrate the plain fact that notions of time and space are lived matter-of-factly in the daily lives of common people steeped in Chinese culture. E. A

SUMMARY

By way of summarizing what is described above, let us survey the progression of our story of Chinese notions of time and space in a synopsis a la our table of Contents: Setting the Stage: Huang and Ziircher summarize, and locate the significance in history of, our story of notions of time and space in China.

CULTURAL NOTIONS OF TIME AND SI'ACE IN CHINA

13

Cultural Framework (Division One): Wu notices how Chinese notions of time and space are themselves timed and spaced, concretely, developmentally, inter-involved-Iy. CulturalEnrichments (Division Two): Part One: On Time and Space: Harbsmeier describes the universal "abstract" notion of time and history as peculiarly concrete in the Chinese language; Huang considers the Chinese argumentation on history as itself being historical. Part Two: Time and Space as Lived: Lin depicts the daily life-significance of opportune time and propitious position in the Book of Change; Schipper details the mystical transcendence, within Chinese culture, over common time and space, as told in the Lao-tzu chung-ching; Zurcher tells us about Chinese rejection of notions of space and time imported from the West. Part Three: Time and Space Managed: A. To QuantifY orNot to QuantifY: ]ami describes how exotically Western clockworks and geometry were taken and received in China; Vermeer talks about how even the supposedly scholarly and scientific investigative reports on lands and chronicles had no quantification. B. To spatialize and to Temporalize: Chen specifies the Chinese artistic devices of spatializing (in narrative paintings) plotted stories (in time); Haft delineates the peculiar manner in which a contemporary Chinese poet temporalizes the location of the elusive "I". PartFour: Effects of Time and Space: A. Time and Space Effects on thePolitical Arena: Loewe notes various difficulties concerning notions of time and space as they were applied to dynastic authorities, as well as the difficulties of reconciling various ways of counting time; Hu reports the revolutionary change of notions of time and space due to political revolutions. B. Time and Space Effects on Our Life: Ho addresses the autumnal limits of one's life in Chinese poetry; Idema points us to the plotted narration of unique lives and events in Chinese traditional fiction. Division Three: Cultural Embodiments: Li summarizes the lived

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CHUN-CHIEH HUANG AND ERIK ZURCHER

time and space among the common Chinese people in Taiwan as they live on from day to day.

*** In short, Huang and Zurcher set the stage by noting how culturally concrete the lived notions of time and space are in China, how peculiarly Chinese they are, and how significant such Chinese cultural-ness of the notions of time and space is. Then in Division One, Wu sets the framework of what follows by elaborating on how timed and spaced the notions of time and space themselves are, and how concretely lived they are in China. In Division Two the panoramic story of lived time and space, constituting the enrichments of Chinese culture, is developed in four parts: time and space as peculiarly Chinese, as lived, as managed, and as effects, by thirteen essays of specialists in various fields. In Division Three Li describes how these various aspects of lived time and space. are embodied in the popular culture in Taiwan. Thus this volume tells a great storY' of how distinctively concrete and Chinese the notions of time and space are in Chinese culture, which is in turn molded by these distinctively Chinese notions of time and space. The story thus corrects our usual conception of the Kantian "forms of intuition" as being transcendental and indifferently general. These Kantian "forms" of space and time rather are culture-specific themselves, concretely spaced and timed in various cultural-historical theaters, one of which is presented as "notions of time and space in Chinese culture" in this volume.

DMSIONONE

CULTURAL FRAMEWORK

SPATIOTEMPORAL INTERPENETRATION IN CHINESE THINKING Kuang-ming Wu INTRODUCTION

It is a commonplace in the West that if thinking is a "web of beliefs," to borrow Quine's felicitous phrase, then this web-thinking is of beliefs, not beliefs itself. Similarly, if our thinking is a web, then the web of space and time is neither space nor time but of them. Hence Kant's "form" of space and time as the form of our experience, which is not form of any sort.! ~ What is peculiar about Chinese thinking is that in China the web, the thinking, of space-time is itself space-timed and timespaced. The following pages explain what this statement means. First we note how basic space and time are to our thinking. Then we note how our thinking is the web of experience, that is, how it contexualizes experience; such "webbing" and contextualizing are themselves space-timed metaphorically. Metaphorical thinking understands the unfamiliar "that" in the light of the familiar "this." Metaphorical thinking goes from the "this" here to the "that" there, and this going-from-here-to-there is a movement in space that takes time. Thus metaphorical thinking is "web-ed" in a space-timed manner. All this goes to showing how Chinese thinking never leaves concrete things. Here "concrete" connotes the concrescence of space and time; they are indicators of concreteness. Without the "this" and the "that" there is no space; without such a progression there is no time.f By the same token, without space we cannot progress 1 Someone may protest that the word "of' has another meaning, an appositive one, such as in "the continent of Africa, " "the fact of your meeting him." My re. sponse will be that that sense of "of' is what Chinese thinking captures, as is described in the next paragraph. ...\ 2 This way of putting the relation between time-space and experience departs\ \ from the Western common sense. Kant said, for instance, that space and time are • the a priori intuition, prior to understanding and experience to make them possi- i ble. In Chinese thinking, in contrast, time and space are something worked out 1 by our experience and understanding; "Tao [=road] is made by walking," said Chuang-tzu in his Second Chapter (2/33). jJ

J

18

KUANG-MING WU

from the "this" to the "that"; without time we cannot progress at all. Similarly, space is defined by such a lived time-it takes time to get from "here" to "there." Space, time, and concreteness, all intertwine to make up the Chinese web-thinking. Also, imporI tantly, the phrase "Chinese thinking goes metaphorically" means j having time "spac-ed," that is, having past and future, "back" and '\ "forth,':Anrefpene~~ This spatiotemporal interpenetration is usuallfc'iifea="'l1is'tory." We must, then, first (I) consider what history is. Historyis the context in which we consider various topics in Chinese spatiotemporal thinking, such as (II) the spatial and the world, (III) the subject-object relation in space, (IV) the here and now and history, (V) the literal as metaphorical, and (VI)metaphor. Finally, we will conclude by describing what "predominant trend" means when we say that all this is the predominant trend of Chinese thinking. In short, Chinese thinking is claimed in the following pages to be predominantly historical and metaphorical. Historical thinking is time-spaced; metaphorical thinking is space-timed. They imply each other to constitute our",growth into our true selves. This essay explains historico-metaphorical thinking in terms of spatiotemporal interpenetration, and ends by explaining what a "predominant trend" is when we say all this is such a trend in China. I.

HISTORY

.1 I

We usually think about history, and are seldom aware that think-ing itself is a historical process. Thinking about history and being \ aware that such a thinking process is history-both of these constitute history. Living is historical, then. To realize this fact is the genius of Chinese historical consciousness; Chinese people are in this sense historical people. History is taken seriously in China as the web of space and time; historical thinking is spatiotemporally textured. This way of think~i ing differs from Kant's; Kant made space and time theoretical 1 forms of intuition, prior to thinking, different -from schema and , categories of thinking. For instance, Kant said, 3

I

Space is not a discursive or, as we say, general concept of relations of things in general, but a pure intuition. 3

Immanuel Kant, The Critique of PureREason, B39=A25.

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Now, to say that for Kant time is "pure intuition" does not mean that the Western world has no commoner's notion of time as there is one in China. The commoner's notion of practical time is one that is needed for daily living, and as long as people in the West are also people,' they must have such practical notion of time. To say that for Kant time is pure intuition is to say instead that, typically in the Western intellectual pursuit, we have a philosophical sort of knowing which is trans-physical, that is, abstract, theoretical, and comprehensive, knowing for knowing's sake. From this meta-physical angle, time is not a particular object that is pragmatically known, but known from above the world, as theoria, as "pure intuition," as a sort of principle for all. This is why time as pure intuition appears in the "critique of pure reason." It is this pure theoretical rationality that typifies the Western intellectual pursuit, which is nowhere to be found in China. In China, in contrast, thinking is historical and spatiotemporally textured. What is history, then? History is my understanding of other times. This means that history is my metaphorical reach-out in time. For metaphor is an activity of my understanding the there-then from the now-heremy present situation, my self. The then can be the future as much as the past. The future has, in its metaphorical relation to the now, as much historical connection to the now as the past does. The past is historical; the future is a proleptive, prevenient, history. In any case, if the now is myself here, then the then-future, past-are' others for me, the "others here." History is my metaphorical understanding of the others here. Let us look at history from the point of view of the future. History can be described as "my" future-my not [-yet]-me-comprehended retrospectively; history can then be called the "other here," because the future is myself yet-to-come, the "other" as uncertain as it is surely myself. As my "other," my history is uncertain, but it is not unfamiliar, thanks to my metaphorical reach-out in time from "here." In this sense, history is "my" other in the making, forming the dialectical process of the other for me. This "process" is my inevitable metaphorical extension that goes from here to there in time. This process is a "dialectic" in that it can be my home that lets me grow, and can be my hell that destroys me; history is then a home-hell dialectic of the other for me.

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, Let us continue considering history as metaphorical extension from the other end, the future. What is new belongs to what is to be, the future. The future is both what is going to be and what is coming to be, a unity of a going and a coming. Going moves from here to there; coming moves from there to here.? "Here" is what I am and do; "there" is what is not of me, the "other." "Going," then, is my growing, and "coming" is my destiny. And so the future is what I become-grow to be-what comes to me, where what I become becomes my destiny. My new free achievement turns out to be something inevitable, necessary, a matter of course. Novelty that comes to me, and what surprises me, turns out to be what I understand. The future comes to me, from me. This is also the structure of metaphor, ferrying me from the familiar here to the surprising there, which is in turn turned into something new that is familiar. Metaphor is thus the logic of my future that comes and becomes. Metaphor is the logic of time, andI cannot spatially check and survey it. For metaphor changes me into the future.P Why does the future come? Because the result arrives here always with an element of surprise. W1G.t is exciting about the empirical event is that no matter how much I plan and with how much care I execute my plan, I am always confronted with its unsuspected results. The outcome comes to me, staring me in the face. It is the other. Why is the future my growing? Because no matter how surprising the outcome is, it is my growing; I am part of the outcome. Without me the result would not have come out this way rather than that. No matter how surprising the outcome is, it is s'omehow expected, a part of me. Now, the mystery of the future lies precisely in this unity of unexpected expectedness (it comes) and expected unexpectedness (it grows). The future is literally "what is to come" from beyond (hence, the other), to become a new "me." In the "coming" we have a tension of the (be)coming of the other to me. The new, when assimilated, enriches me as my fresh addition, my new famil4 Someone may say that I afIl mixing metaphors on the word, "going." Going in the first sentence concerns tlme-transmittal.'going in the second sentence concerns space transition. I deliberately did so, to show how natural such a "confusion';' is in our daily thinking, thereby to show how natural Chinese thinking is about the web of space-time. 5 On metaphor as a disclosure of novelty, see Janet Martin Soskice, Metaphor and Religious Language, Oxford University Press, 1985, pp. 89-90.

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iar, making me into a fresh edition. This is why everyone loves something fresh, causing the growth of the self. The fresh other is then my home wherein to grow. But the fresh is not the new. Wilson O. Weldon said, "Everybody likes something fresh, although not everyone wants to experience something new." Although mutually synonymous, the fresh and the new have opposite effects. How does the attractive fresh differ from the threatening new? Perhaps when we experience the fresh, we ourselves become fresh; the fresh invigorates us toward living afresh. Perhaps, in contrast, the new threatens us with its raw difference from our accustomed way of life; we are left out. Even if we are made new, our hearts are still with the comfortable old where everything is familiar, where even imperfections are our home. And so we like the fresh and dislike the new. And so the fresh is not the novel which may hurt me; when the new that (be)comes is too novel to assimilate, it amounts to coming from beyond to destroy me, the other which threatens me with my extinction. I try to turn aside, exercising my freedom to take an alternative route. But what comes to me here is my future, and so I cannot avoid it, any more than can I myself." The other as hell comes about here. Thus the unexpectedness of the new in my future harbors the Janus-like uncertainty of home-hell dialectic; which way my future the "other" turns no one, by definition, knows. But one thing is clear: we cannot escape it. For we are this unity-the compossibility of opposites-of the future, which is nonetheless beyond us. The "we" here is the "I" and the "Thou," the home and the hell, the historical dialectic in which we live and move. And this movement is our "growth." How do we grow? By turning the threatening newness of the future into its freshness, by metaphorically moving in the historical dialectic. In other words, we must turn the new into the fresh. How? We can break through the threatening new into the fresh via the familiar; we then start anew in the secure old. And this is what metaphor brings us. Metaphor is thus a logic of disclosing the new and assimilating it into the fresh. Such a metaphorical renewal is "growth," which is life itself. In facilitating growth, metaphor facilitates life. 6

ing.

This makes sense if "myself' is taken as a historical process of constant grow-

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But how do we deal with fallacy and falsehood, the new that we detect, and turn it into the fresh? Well, these words mean that we have yet to see a correct metaphorical connection, that what we see as false today is an evocation, a clue, to a more inclusive truth tomorrow. Today's trash is tomorrow's treasure. Metaphor is the logic of novel discovery, which thrives on the provocation, the evocative call of "category mistakes" we for now see. That invalidity, falsehood, and contradiction are useful, "interesting" provocations toward growth of thinking and orientation, is foreign to formal logic. For formal logic has no elasticity in time, though logical operation progresses in time. Formal logic examines and judges; it is always retrospective, a pathological examination of an argument." This examination works by virtue of a mapping, a surveying from above in a timeless manner, although the survey itself takes time. In contrast, our capability to take falsehood and contradiction seriously comes from our historical capability to rejuvenate in response to untoward circumstances. When Whitehead said, "Precision is a fake," "Falsehood is interesting," "Seek precision and distrust it," he said so from the standpoint of process philosophy, which is in turn (without his quite noting it) a philosophizing about our historical life-process. Novelty fits ill with our accepted thinking. When things judged do not fit well with the category with which we judge, we call those things either "false" or "senseless." When we stretch our category to include them, we call the stretch a "category mistake" (Ryle). And this time the "mistake" is not on things judged (as false or senseless), but on the side of our category to judge things. What happens next, if we persist in it, is a "paradigm shift" (Kuhn)-a transformation of our categories (world view, framework), a deconstruction of our universe of discourse, a scientific revolution, in a wide sense of revolutionary expansion of how we think. Rather than negatively rescuing philosophers from category mistakes, as Ryle would have us do, we restructure understanding through category mistakes, ferrying ourselves beyond our accustomed categories. To restructure our manner of thinking by the stimulation of "falsehoods" we note is the process of evocation; thus evoked, we ferry ourselves beyond our accustomed manner

7 We can use such a retrospective formal logic as a guide toward our future argumentation, however.

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of thinking and this is the process of metaphor. And this evocative-metaphorical process is how we grow, constituting history. The metaphoric way is often called analogy. A most trenchant argument for analogy is that by A.C. Graharn.s who declares boldly:" It is not that on the borders oflogic there is a loose form called argument from analogy, but that all thinking starts from a spontaneous discrimination of the like and the unlike, and a tendency to group the similar in categories and expect similar consequences from similar conditions.

We need to show, beyond Graham, that all this is due to our thinking that goes from the familiar known to the novel unknown. We come to know the hitherto unknown in terms of-by an analogical stretch from, by a metaphorical extrapolation from-the known familiar. This going amounts to growing. Growth means not taking in a new element and fitting it into our ·fixed framework-an eternal "metaphysical world view." Rather, growth means acknowledging the call of the novel (evocation), then responding to it by adjusting both the novel into our familiar milieu and our milieu to the novel experience (metaphor). This is to turn the unknown into a new known in terms of the known, thereby turning the known familiar into a new enriched one; turning the novel into the familiar involves turning the familiar framework into a novel one. In bringing the novel into the self (evocation) by bringing the self to it (metaphor), one becomes a changed self. Thus evocation and metaphor comprise a novel experience. As I stretch my familiar self to accommodate what is different therefrom, I myself become different. My becoming thus different both expands myself and changes the different. This mutual transformative accommodation means growth.l" This expansive understanding amounts to a revolutionary poetizing (creation) of the world. Poets do it all the time. Scientists have to do it often to expand their theory and thereby its applications. The history of philosophy is a story of such a revolutionary growth in thinking. This historical growth amounts to the partial comprising the to8 Another one is Lakoff, George &Johnson, Mark, Metaphors We Live By, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980. 9 A.C. Graham, Reasonand Spontaneity, London & Dublin: Curzon Press Ltd & Totowa, NJ: Barnes & Noble Books, 1985, p. 52. 10 On "the logic of life" see my The Butterfly as Companion, Albany, NY: State University of NewYork Press, 1990, pp. 256-64.

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tal. The painter's "quest is total even where it looks partial," says Merleau-Ponty. As one problem is solved, another turns up; as one is engrossed with one problem, another old one is solved. Historicity is hidden in a labyrinth of detours and encroachments, where no "progress" is seen, only the shifting soil under foot is felt. This does not make us despair; it only indicates that "the very first painting went to the farthest reach of the future," that each creation changes and deepens all the others.l! The before is the monogram of the henceforth, the partial is the analogy of the whole, and history and the world are a tapestry of metaphors, here and there, back and forth. Analogy is thus a prospective logic of discovery, proceeding from our life; logic is a retrospective analogy through the prevenient governance of necessary and general principles, which in turn are discovered by analogical extrapolation from our life. II. THE SPATIAL and the WORLD

'"

If history as metaphor is time-spaced, then subject-object relation, also as metaphor, is space-timed. As Lakoff and Johnson pointed out,12 we live, think, and understand by metaphors. And metaphor is our movement of affirmation from the familiar this to the unfamiliar that. In the Chinese thought world, even negatives are often an emphatic form of Chinese affirmation, which is our living-out of affirmations, the "I" af-firming affirmatives "here" and "now," "actually." The so-called "demonstratives"-"I," "now," "here," "this" and the like- join themselves into a configuration of a situational matrix for our thinking and our saying. For instance, "this" is an existential complex of affirmation-"I pointing at this't-s-compacted'f into that single word, "this." "This" depends for its meaning on "I" and "pointing to"; "this" implies I-pointing as part of itself. By the same token, "that" is a compacted existential complex of metaphor-I here pointing at that there, by expanding on this-here.l" And, as "this" contains both 11 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Primacy of Perception, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964, pp. 189-90. 12 George Lakoff & MarkJohnson, Metaphors WeLive By, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1980. 13 Thisjustifies Confucius' compact argumentation explained above. 14 Thisjustifies Mencius' metaphorical argumentation explained above.

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the I and the this, so "that" implies the I, the here, the this, and the that as the situational elements of "that." "That" is "I standing here, perhaps pointing-at-this, pointing to that." If "this" initiates Confucius' compact argumentation and rectification of names, then "that" capsules Mencius's metaphoric evocation and ethicopolitical exhortation to act out properly in life such network of 1this-that. And this and that and that, and so on, pointed to by the "I," woven together, constitute the "world" of life, the Lebenswelt. Demonstratives are social-performatives dipped in "actuality" of the world, and are the favorites of Chinese philosophers. But how do these demonstratives-I, this, that-expand and grow into a spatiotemporal web to make up the actual world? This question brings us to the next section.

III.

SUBJECT-OBJECT RELATION IN SPACE

The world is a network of relations between subjects and objects. How do they come into being? Ian T. Ramsey bluntly said 15 what all artists-painterly, literary, musical, sculptural, Chinese, Western-already know and routinely practice, that not only may descriptive events be so ordered as to disclose a subject which while it includes them also transcends them, but that descriptive events may also be ordered so as to disclose an object which in a similar sort of way transcends them objectively and that indeed such a transcendent object is associated with a transcendent subject in the same situation. We become aware of it as we become aware of ourselves. . .. Persons are what is disclosed to each of us when we "come to ourselves" in recognizing a world that has likewise, in some way or other, "come alive", "taken the initiative", "declared itself' in a personal sort of way. (italics original)

The disclosure of a fact lets an object exist as a fact; and thisobject-disclosure to me also lets me exist as myself. How does this mutual letting-exist obtain? The image of a circle may help. A circle can be a centripetal disclosure; going over many perceptual data, we are evoked to recognize that these qualities refer and belong to one center-the thing, the self. And then the circle can centrifugally expand from the non-metaphori15 Ian Ramsey, Christian Empiricism, Grand Rapids, MI: William Eerdmans, 1974, pp. 43, ·14.

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cal center of the bodily I, to metaphorically understand more and .more things and finally the entire sky and the fields around me.l" i Thus the circle is a dynamic network of ontological and episte'~mological relations. The center of this circle is everywhere, for it is ·1disclosed everywhere as the self, the thing; the circumference is nowhere, for it is a metaphorically expanding horizon, the world. \ This centripetal-centrifugal dynamism of the self-thing-cosmic circle indicates the ebb and flow of the dynamic conatus (Spinoza), Ch'i *t (Mencius), that makes I I, makes things things, and thereby makes the world. Confucius was an expert in compact presentation of the centripetal circles of actuality; Mencius was a master in metaphorical expansion of the centrifugal circles of the world. Now let us consider how the evocative centripetal circle and the metaphorical centrifugal circle cohere into a mutuality of transitive co-existing, wherein the subject and the object move and have their beings. We consider this circle-mutuality first as an aesthetic abode, then as a sociopolitical utopia. First, as to the circle-mutuality as an aesthetic abode of co-existing: the artist's jottings-down of relevant details of a tree, evoked by the tree's call, configure into a space-canvas to invite the viewer's recognition, to evoke a disclosure of the tree-essence. This artist is a painter calling out to the viewer with his configured jottings-down to evoke a centripetal center, the tree. If the artist jots down a configuration of tree-details onto a time-canvas or word-canvas, he is a musician or a novelist, calling for listeners' or readers' discernment of the tree-essence, say, massive serenity or internal vitality, as Chuang-tzu presented, to conclude his delightful First Chapter. These configurative jottings form an evocative centripetal circle of storytelling, where the tree ("Thou") come to be as it is, and the "where" is the abode which is the artist ("I"), called forth by the tree's evocative beckoning and becoming. This is how the evocative-centripetal circle originates and expands. How does this circle expand? By virtue of our capability to 16 Oliver Sacks in his The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, NY: Summit Books, 1985, depicts a man who sees details of a glove without being able to recognize them as description of a glove, and a man who sees and lives (through) daily details of his life without being able to recognize them as his life. Sacks did not mention that these two inabilities go together; they belong to a disease of the lack of the center, both of the other (a glove, a wife) and of oneself. (Conversely, Sacks mentioned a lady [apraxic] who recognized the "centers" of things without knowing their detailed "circumferences.")

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dwell in other places. The capability of the "bodily self to dwell in other places" (she shen ch'u ti ~J1t~:i1!!) is twofold: spatially through imagination, time-wise through memory. Memory is bodily ek-stase towards the future and towards the past; it is historical. Imagination is bodily ek-stase towards the other, personal and otherwise; it is social and spatial. Let us consider "memory" first. J. Glenn Gray, a Heidegger scholar, saw that "mind" and "memory" share a common etymology, and "reflection" has a lot to do with "recollection" as "the collecting of ourselves, the gathering of what we have been and still are as well as what we expect to become"; and of course what we expect to become extrapolates from what we recall having been. For17 This collecting in memory and a/memory can transmute everything so that a seemingly trivial new experience changes the whole of one's perspective on one's past. More dramatically, the recollection of a forgotten incident in childhood may alter radically one's present and future relations to oneself and one's fellows.... The in. tensity of memory bears frequently little relation to the duration of importance of what it recollects. Normal connections of cause and effect seem curiously out of balance here, indeed hard to discover at all in many instances.

Causal efficacy itself is less upset, I would say, than that its significance is radically changed by our recollections. It is thus that our "reflection" naturally pervades our "memory," that our "recollection" is our radical self-collection, and that such self-becoming through memory amounts to no less than a revolutionary transmutation of our life-perspectives on things. Our stretching back into the past in memory remakes and enriches our bodily life; our recollection re-collects our life. IS For instance, the seemingly objective descriptions of various biographies and historical events in the Shih-chi (~~e) 19 suddenly take on autobiographical pathos, and are pervasively colored by it, when read in the light of the final essay-seemingly out of place in a historical writing such as this-that personal account of passionate poignance in his "Letter" to a friend of his. That Letter is the "eye" (the central tenor) of the entire storm of the history of 17

J. Glenn Gray, On Understanding Violence Philosophically and OtherEssays, NY:

Har~er

Torchbooks, TB 1521, 1970, p. 5. On how memory constitutes the human integrity of the self, see my History, Thinking, and Literature in Chinese Philosophy, Taiwan, ROC: Academia Sinica, 1991, Cha~ter One. 1 Burton Watson translat~d it as "The Records of the Grand Historian."

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China, which was judged and endowed with an almost unbearable weight of significance. It is this Letter and this pathos that collect all historical descriptions in the book into one personal focus. By the same token, these historical descriptions vindicate the author's life, giving it a new justification. Similarly, our imagination stretches our selves forward in space and into the future. Imagination is our power to stretch into the realm of the possible, to the hitherto unknown. As Shakespeare said that the poet's "imagination bodies forth/ The forms of things unknown," I say that the self bodies forth in imagination what has never been before. This power to stretch into the unknown grows the self in dreams and ideals. This is, as Glenn Gray said,20 much more decisive than the accident of his biological first nature, for it allows him the possibility of giving in his turn a local habitation and name to what would otherwise remain a chilling and lonely expanse of world.

Both memory and imagination are our powers to ekstasis (Plato), to go beyond our specific si9-Iation, to get outside our self in time and space, to participate 'in the transformation of the present through the past and the yet-to-be, to participate in others's experiences. This is the "capacity of self-surpassing," of "ecstatic union of the possible and the actual,"21 and the capacity of bodily expansion through self-recursive transformation in . perspectival subversion and paradigm shift. 22 Memory and Imagination are the selfs two inherent powers which make possible the metaphoric functioning of our understanding; we understand something hitherto unknown in terms of the known and familiar. Understanding is none other than our metaphorical self-stretch-starting at our memory of the familiar, in terms of which we make an imaginative outreach toward the strange. This is our bodily ekstasis to "metaphor" (ferrying the self over) toward the unknown. Gray, op. cit., p. 7. Ibid, p. 7. 22 Edward S. Casey has two books of detailed analyses on memory and imagination. See his Remembering: A Phenomenological Study, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987; Imagining: A Phenomenological Study, same press, 1976. See especially his emphasis on the importance of the body in memory (Remembering, pp. 146-215, on "body memory"), and in imagination (Imagining, pp. 125-74, and under "perception" in Index, p. 238, on the relation between imagination and perception). 20 21

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Thus, the memorable-imaginative circle metaphorically expands in centrifugal history, in the mode of storytelling. The jottings-down of details in Mencius' story, say, of "a baby about to crawl into a well" break in on the listener an awareness of his own "heart of alarmed pity,"23 which points to another story, with another configuration of details, about a ruler (not exactly a good one) who released an ox on its trembling way to sacrificial slaughter, because he could not bear the ox's jitters; the second story breaks in on the ruler an awareness of his "heart of not bearing (to see) people suffer)."24 These stories disclose the hearts of alarmed pity, of "not bearing people" (suffer), as the "buddings of human (e) ness," as the policy of human(e)ness." They urge the rulers to expand metaphorically (chi, t'ui, k'uo B; ' -0, from "my" such feelings to "my" elders and tender-aged, toward others's elders and tenderaged, and the "government of not bearing people (suffering)" comes into being. This new center, the "not-bearing-people-(suffer) government," needs a comparable yet new circumference, that is, concrete details of political implementation of such a governance, to complete the circle, and Mencius once again fills them in for the ruler-on how to "share the joys" of sex, wealth, and foods with people, on how not disturb seasons of their living, such as their farming and harvesting times, etc., etc. All this amounts to a historico-metaphorical expansion, i.e., time-spaced growth, from the past story of details depicting-disclosing the heart of not bearing people (suffer) to a future story of normative details disclosing-depicting the not-bearing-people(suffer) governance. Furthermore, most urgently, the ruler's very physical survival goes hand in glove with the ruler's working out of such a governance from his humane heart for popular welfare. If the ruler succeeds, all "under Heaven" is a circle that "turns on

*'

Mencius, 2A6. "The-ruler was-pleased, saying, 'The-Classic-of-Poetry says, "Other people have minds, I surmise them." This describes you. For though I did it, comingback-to-myself Hooked-for my motive in vain. You, sir, described it [and your words] struck a chord in my heart.' " (Mencius, lA7.) Incidentally, although "not bearing (to see) people (suffer)" (pujen IF;B) is awkward in English, I prefer the phrase to a more common "compassionate"; or "sympathetic", simply because this is what Mencius used to convey that constrained pathos when we see people suffer. The phrase in Chinese-"pujen"-is perfectly in order. The reader can replace the phrase with "compassionate" and its cognates, however. 23

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his palm" of humaneness, which is now his people's home. If he fails, not even he himself can survive, much less his royal family. The ruler and his people together constitute a symbiotic reciprocity of co-existing. Mencius warned,25 [The] ruler sees them as [his] hands, feet, then they see him as [their] bosoms, hearts; [the] ruler sees them as dogs, horses, then they see him as [other] people; [the] ruler sees them as grass, dirt, then they see him as enemy. Thus, existence is a co-existing, and "object"-formation comes about in a personal mutuality, whether in knowing, in arts, or in politics. IV. THE "HERE AND Now" AND HISTORY Besides the I and the objects, we have another relation at the base of our actuality that constitutes history-the I and the here-now. "Here and now" is defined by the I, that is, understood as such only through the I situated bodily here and now. Hence, "I am here and now" is tautological, and "(am not here" is situationally odd and existentially contradictory. Then "here and now" I understand-I expand myself metaphorically-to include descriptions of many others similarly situated with the I, such as "This tree is here now." Hence, "Here and now is I" is not tautological, because a tree can also be here now. Furthermore, this "then ... I understand" in the above statement constitutes I's response, in the activity of expanding myself metaphorically, to the evocation of the situation ("here" and "now"). This I's response is called "affirmation." I affirm-confirm, firm up-the there and the now, with all things relevant to them, and affirmatives are born. Here and Now are also directives for I to affirm in a certain definite direction, and not in any other, and negatives are born. Thus the negative is part and parcel of the affirmative, constituting the definite specificity of the affirmative, its definition. 26 Now, to understand Here and Now as thus inclusive of other things and other I's is, again, to ferry those I's from the familiar I

25 26

tion,

Mencius, 4B3. Cf. 3A2, 4A28. We note that to de-fine is to cut off alternatives, thus negative in connota-

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here to the novel there, from the existing now to the no-longerexisting then (in the past) and not-yet-existing then (in the future), making Then understandable as another Now, There as another Here. This ferrying-over of understanding is a stretching of I's awareness, that is, "imagination." This ferrying describes events. The ferrying-over (of understanding) is the metaphoric mode of concrete argumentation. But this situational invitation to metaphorical understanding of the flow of events is not an arbitrary call to an arbitrary movement, like leaves in the random wind, but a call from particular situation (and individual) to a specific I's free ferrying. This definite "from-to" direction negates many other bearings of understanding in a consensual tenor made up by the I and the herenow. And an "I" is itself a concrete, literally "concresced," situation, a history in the evoking, unfolding, thanks to my Thou's evocative prodding. Conversely, a story is an individual ex-pressed by being situationally evoked and metaphorically explicated. Individuals are made up of situations of I's, Thou's and It's; Thou's and It's are the I unpacked, that is, metaphorically expanded. Thus all explications are stories, and all individuals (and situations) are compact stories told at the inducement of the other, the Thou of the situation. Stories interpenetrate to constitute history. All sciences and arguments are unpacked individuals-situations, composing historical understanding. But the past, familiar, old, has to be there to initiate this forward-backward· movement of personal metaphoric push. The child is father to the man; "the Great One is one who does not lose one's child," said Mencius. The child eagerly looks forward, seeming to forget (let die) the past; this is what growth is. But he grows only by learning from his parents and parental tradition. No one looks forward more to the future than the child, because no one depends more on parents and precedents; he is a "copy cat," a "monkey see, monkey do." And it is thus, in turn, that the child invigorates the forefathers. The child grows from the past by forgetting himself in it. The past nourishes the child who embodies it, thereby forgets it, grows out of it. 27

27 This must be one of the reasons why Mencius treasures the child in us so much that he identifies the Great One with not losing the child in him (4B12).

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And this is Chuang-tzu's approach. He told us one story after another, about how to look forward and grow, by steeping in stories, the deposits of the past, dialogues with the past, such as dreaming of interchanges with the butterfly.v' Confucius also wanted us to go back and "warm [up the] olddead (ku ttc) and know [the] new" (2/11), for we grow by learning, which is no other than learning from the past. He himself kept claiming that "[I] narrate and [do] not make [up]; [I am] faithful and love [the] ancient" (7/1), and thereby revolutionized the tradition. His sigh, "How long [since] I [did] not again dream seeing [the] Duke [of] Chou!" (7/5), shows two things about him, that he dreamt studying in attendance on the cultural great, the Duke of Chou (.mJ0), then lamenting that he does not do it any more, he must have grown old. He was, in other words, on his way to becoming a tradition himself. In China we have three "imperishables" (pu hsiu ~H7j) to establish: virtues (integrity), deeds (accomplishments), and words (wisdom).29 They do not decay because generations of posterity embody and continue their forefathers' three imperishables. Metaphor and storytelling, the two wing/'w hereby we fly forward into the future, carry the historical weight of the "imperishables" of the great Dead. The weightier they are with the dead past, the farther they carry us forward.P" Chuang-tzu's statement, "[Unless the] sage [is] not deceased, [the] big thieves [would] not cease,,,31 perhaps urges a "decease" of self-consciousness that manifests the self. And then all Nature and my nature can be expressed together as the free-flowing, allflooding Ch'i (~), as Mencius said. Then I can "know words," that is, transparently see, hear, and discern ("know") people's spontaneous self-expressions despite themselves ("words"), thereby know that oJ:? account of which they are "covered, fallen, separated, trapped;" I see how what is born at the heart of their beings comes out to damage their management of affairs. I see "stalks of grain shooting high above the fields." Mencius' cosmos-flooding 28

They are familiar stories that conclude his famous Second Chapter. See my

Butterfly as Companion, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1990, Chap-

terTwo.

I

Tso Chuan, Duke Hsiang time" does not refer to any content of the times, and when Han Yii ~~ (A.D. 768-824) says jih yueh pu wei pu chiu B J'I /'G~/'G~ "that certainly was a long time" he may still be thinking of "days and months" for all we know. There is no way of reconstructing his thoughts in this re-

NOTIONS OF TIME AND OF HISTORY

59

spect. My point is that he could never have said anything like shih pu wei pu chiu yi ~:;;P11PI'~~ o. The word shih ~ though canonically translated as "time" is never used in this way until much later. In Liu Chih-chi jU~~ (A.D. 661-721), Shih-t'ungr£NJ. we find an observation in which shih "the times" is regarded in analogy to the seasons: §~~~r£~~ffl~~o~~$~~o

"From this time onwards those who were in charge of accounts of the states all used the new method. And in this way as the times changed, generations differed" (Shih-t'ung hsin chiao-chu r£NJ.~fQi± ch. 1, ed. Chao Lii-fu p. 22). The general idea was so popular that we have a wide range of similar proverbial sayings of roughly the same age and import," The current shih pu k'o shih ~:;;pnr1k "the opportunity must not be missed" from Chan-kuo-ts'e ~~m, shih pu tsai lai ~:;;Pfl}* "a lost opportunity will not come again" from Kuo-yu ~Mt, shih lai yun chuan ~*~,,"when the right time comes fortunes change" and shih pu yi ch'ih ~:;;P1l:~ "one must not be slow to take an opportunity" are all not concerned with time but with opportunities afforded by time. Shih ho nien feng ~fU~~ "mild seasons and abundant harvests" talks about the seasons rather than time as such. Vita brevis" [time passes], life is short" is a current ancient Chinese sentiment: A,1:tE:R:tt!!Zra' 0 tf~)j!iJz~~ 0 "Man's living between Heaven and Earth is [brief] like the passing of a white colt past a small crevice" (Chuang-tzu 22.39). This jen sheng A,1: "man's being alive" is not to be confused with the notion of human life as the product of human action, the Greek bios.

mali

The conceptoflife

In classical Greek there are two concepts translated into the English "life": firstly, the mainly biological term zoe "the fact of being alive, aliveness," opposite thanatos "death," and secondly, the more cultural term bios "life, way of life, life as a cultural product, description of a life." Plutarch wrote the bioi paralleloi "Parallel Lives," and he could not have called his book zoai parallelai. The pre-Buddhist Chinese notion of jen sheng A,1: "life" was close to that of zoe, and not at all to that of bios. In pre-Buddhist Chinese

60

CHRISTOPH HARBSMEIER

your sheng 1: "life" was not something that you form, live and diageis "act through." Ssu-ma Ch'ien I'lj,~~ (ca. 145-ca. 85 B.G.) wrote not vitae philosophorum "lives of philosophers" but chuan f.W; "accounts" and shih-chia 1!t~ "[accounts of] a hereditary houses." Jen chih sheng Az1: in Analects 6.19 does not refer to "the bios of man" but to the fact that a man is alive. The one text that is most interesting in the notion of life is the Chuang-tzu. For this text, life is a biological function which can be nourished, yang ~ (Chuang-tzu ch. 3; and 28.28) or injured shang ~: "ilJm/f'tJoog~1:~

0

"This may be called not injuring life on account of a country" (Chung-tzu 28.18). The definition is one of zoe, not of bios: Az1:*tz~il1o

"Man's being alive is the assemblage of ether qi" Chuang-tzu 22.11. In sheng wu suo y11 yeh 1::g.FJf~il1 "being alive [rather than dead] is something I want" (Mencius 6AIO) the speaker wants to stay alive. This is what is most desired: survival. Not any particular kind of bios, like Aristotle's bios politikos "life dedicated to politics," bios theoretikos "life dedicated to contemplation," and bios apolaustikos "life dedicated to pleasure." (Ethica Nicomachea I097b9). Life was not regarded as a product of human action in pre-Buddhist China, although there was a lively discussion of life-styles. There are many interesting reasons why the following Elisabethan epitaph, composed by the deceased person himself, could not have been found in China: Life is a jest; and all things show it. I used to think so, but now I know it.

The abstract concept oj history In the rest of this paper I turn to the conceptions and notions related to the word li-shih 1fl~ "history." The English word "history" is used in at least two fundamentally different senses. It may refer to either the record of events (Augustine: narratio historica) , or to the events (Augustine: historia ipsa) themselves, the course of history. This is a point to keep in mind for what follows. The ancient notion ku i1 "ancient times" does not include contemporary history and certainly not future history. Ssu-ma Ch'ien has the term ku shih "matters of the past" (Shih-chi 130, ed. Pe-

itt*

NOTIONS OF TIME AND OF HISTORY

61

king, Chung-hua, 1962, p. 3299) which undoubtedly refers to the facts of history as described and transmitted in historical records. The notion of history, on the other hand, crucially involves the notions of development, evolution, process: the change from a cave-dwelling to city-dwelling human societies and so on. Historians and philosophers were interested in such changes, but the questions is whether they had a general term to refer to these dy, namic historical developments. I once read about the events of June 1989 in Peking that they qf(~T~1IA.M**t39~~ "It transformed the whole future history of mankind." (Chung-yang-jih-pao ~~I3¥a 19.5.90, p. 5). In the West, the notion of "history" came to include the future as well as the past from the late 18th century onwards. Since when is there such a thought as that of a future "history" in China? Since when has the historicity of the concept of "history" itself, as we apply it, been recognised and discussed in China? Since when has it been discussed by sinologists? I note in passing that the notion of "historicity" in Europe is young. Le PetitRobert knows of no case of historicite before 1872, the newest edition of the Oxford English Dictionary has no examples of "historicity" before 1880. But, of course, the concept of historicity is not necessarily tied to the term historicity. Conceptual history is not the same thing as terminological history. Jacques Le Goff is said to have said (I did not hear him): "History needs historians, not authorised scribes." Le Goffs stance shows up historicity of the notion of "historian." We need to historically reconsider a term like ski' ~ "archivist, astronomer." We shall need to reflect deeply on such word-formations as li-shih ~~, shih-chia ~*, li-shih-chia ~~*, and li-shih-hsiieh-chia ~~!J*, all of which would appear to be loan translations. But let me begin with Nietzsche. When Nietzsche distinguishes between antiquarian history, monumental history, and critical history, this involves a degree of abstraction in the concept of history, a recognition of the historical conditioning, the historicity of history-writing itself. And in China, this historicity of historiography was recognised, as we shall see, by Liu Chih-chi iU9;D~. But there was no concept of "historicity" as such. Ambrosio Calepino's Dictionarium Latino-Lusitanum ac Iaponicum of 1593 has the following glosses the Latin word historia: 1. yurailiJ* "origin" 2. coji "matter ofthe past (as told)" 0

t!l.*

62

CHRISTOPH HARBSMEIER

3. raireki *~ "background" 4. denqi f.$jE! "biographic account" 5. yengui ~tg "origin" Significantly, his informants did not come to think of rekishi ~'3I:. Li-shih ~'3I:, in any case, is not in Kao Ming-k'ai iI1Ii,:g~ et al. eds., Han-yu wai-lai-tz'u tz'u-tien ilMt?1-*~ii]~iiJ:lJlJ:, but neither is it in the new Tz\u-yuan ttfiBj{ which covers current pre-Opium war expressions, i.e. expressions that were current before 1840. Chung-wenta-tz'u-tien q:r3t*ttf:lJlJ: p. 7629 uses the English word "History" to explain the entry li-shih ~'3I: and significantly this very large dictionary provides no traditional examples under this entry. The dictionary (p. 2309) does not recognise a meaning "the historical facts" for shih '31:, only a meaning "historical book," as in shih-pu '31:$ "bibliographic division of historical writings." However, there is an isolated occurrence of the combination li shih ~'3I: in the commentary to San-kuo-chih ::::~$ by Pei Sungchih ~~z (A.D. 372-451): m'JUif.$~ '31:

"He widely read books and biogr~p)ties and the history books throughout the ages" (Han-yu ta tz'u-tien 1986ff, 5.362). For the meaning "historical facts" the dictionary is unable to come up with anything better than a quotation from Mao Tsetung, Chung-kuo jen-min t'uan-chieh wan suei q:r~.AJo~IIl~~Ul, "Long live the solidarity of the Chinese people:" q:r~89~'3I:1ff:J!:tml MT -{IElfJftitfl;; 0 "Chinese history opened up a new era from then on." The history of the concept li-shih ~'3I: in modern Chinese is part and parcel of international global conceptual history. The influence of English and German, via Japanese, was dominant. Chinese tradition played but a small part. It is often said and it is probably correct to say that li-shih ~'3I: in modern Chinese is a loan from the Japanese. On the other hand I do find that there is a Mfng dynasty work, an outline of Chinese history, entitled Li-shih kang chien pu ~~Ifi:;m by Yuan Huang 1i.'1ii. (1533-1606), first printed in 1606. The book was reprinted in Japan in 1663 and remained influential in Japan until the Meiji period (1868-1912). Exactly how are we to understand the term li shih ~'3I: here? Until further notice r'translate: "A supplement to the overall mirror of the history books through the ages." The traditional concept of history, narratio historica, in China is tied up with that of an institution, that of the Court Astronomer,

NOTIONS OF TIME AND OF HISTORY

63

Archivist, or Scribe, shih~, whose functions varied greatly in the course of early Chinese history. In similar ways the concept of liberty in Greece and Rome is linked to the social institution of slavery. Conceptual history is inseparable from institutional and social history. Shih ~ were literary records, not the reality described in these. Thus we have the common shih pu chileh shu ~/f'ma "the history books write about this all the time" and in the equally current shih wu ch'ien li ~1WiiW{9lj the idea is not that there are no precedents in history but only that there are no precedents in the history books. Lu Hsiin is, as far as I know, the first author who uses shih li ~{9IJ to refer to concrete historical, factual examples. (Han-yil ta tz'u-tien llm*~iijJl4 vol. 3. p. 49). Just as in Rome the genre of annals was distinct from the of historiae, so in ancient China we have the Ch'un-ch 'iu :f:tk, Chu-shu chi-nien ¥ra~~ and in Shih-chi ~~e we have the chi *E "annals." Of course, ch 'um-ch 'iu :f:tk as well as chi ~ always remain a kind of text or book. The term never refers to the facts of history. Saint Augustine's distinction between narratio historiaca "historical narrative" and historia ipsa "history itself''I" was surely made in China. But one would like to know exactly how and when and by whom, and on what historical occasion. Of course, the ancient Chinese could talk about what we would describe as the fact of history, as when we have: ~ITii/f'fF mITiitff~

"I transmit and do not make. I am faithful to and love antiquity." Analects 7.1 Pao Hsien 19i9X; (6 B.C.-65 A.D.) explains this as tff~~*o

"He liked to transmit ancient events." And we do have the proverbial hao ku wen hsin tffUd/fil.~ "be fond of antiquity and familiar with what is current." But note incidentally that Chu Hsi (A.D. 1130-1200) in his Ssu-shu chi-chu l1:9a~IH± (p. 120) takes the ku ~ of the Analects to refer to ancient books which Confucius edited.... History as dynamic development is not part of the conceptual content of ku t!l. or of ku~. Eduard Chavannes thought that the concept "historique" is as old as the title Shih-chi ~~e, which, of course does not go back to

*_

10

Augustinus, De doctrina christiana, 2.28 (44).

64

CHRISTOPH HARBSMEIER

Ssu-ma Ch'ien ii],~~ (ca. 145-ca. 85 B.C.) himself. Chavannes translated Shih-chi ~~~ as "Memoires historiques," and he is followed in this by R.V. Vyatkin in his series of carefully annotated translations Syma Tsyan', Istori/eskie zapiski. "Ssu-ma Ch'ien. Historical Records) ." The translation has shown a remarkable tenacity throughout sinological history. It is as natural to take shih ~ as "historical" for a Westerner as it is for a speaker of modern Chinese. We are so prone to read our own conceptions into Chinese book titles that even the Shu 11 "Writings" has been translated on the basis of the later title Shu-ching 11~ as "Books of History." Such current translations pervert the conceptual scheme of the student of China. The history of the word shih ~, and of the problematisation of the subject indicated by the word shih ~ needs to be investigated in more detail than there is room for here. (An obvious starting point being Han-yi: ta tz'u-tien l'l~*~iij:Jll!. 3.48). The definition ubiquitously quoted in the literature is by Hsii Shen ~f1j (died ca. 149 A.D.) who defines in Shuo wen chieh tzu IDt)(m~ :

~'E.~&o

/

"Shih is a person who records things" (Tuan Yu-ts'ai fi)l::E~ (17351815), Shuo wen chieh tzu chu IDt)(m~f± p. 116). ~.Jllj~m: ' WJ:)( , ~)(Jllj~ 0 "The matter [recorded in the Spring and Autumn Annals] is that of duke Huan of Qi and Duke Wen ofJin; the style is that of the Archivist" (Mencius 4B21, ed. Chiao Hsiin ~Wl (1763-1820), Mengtzu cheng-yi :ii:.:rIEit p. 574). Shih shih ~. are not the facts of history but the task of writing history books in a memorial by the Song scholar Tseng Kung fi''I: and again in the Sung-shih *~, Shen-tsung-chi, san jjiIjJ**E ' :=::. The meaning "historical facts" represents a twentieth century development. Shih shih ~. "historical reality" is first attested in Lu Hsiin. Shih huo ~ffl~ are never ever historical disasters. On the contrary, they are misfortunes that an archivist incurs as a consequence of carrying out his duties. Shih-chi ~~ first comes to mean "historical relics" in the twentieth century. Shih-chi ~m first comes to mean' "historical achievements" in the twentieth century. The dictionary Ham-yii ta tzu-tien l'l~*~:Jll!. p. 571 refers to Ssurna Ch'ien's own preface where he mentions that the shih chi

NOTIONS OF TIME AND OF HISTORY

65

~~E!

have been dispersed. We are invited to read this in the spirit of Chavannes as "historical records," but there is reason to take this as anything other than "records by the archivists/recorders." Shih-chi, ed. Wang Li-ch'i p. 10ff has a detailed account of the use of the term shih-chi ~~E! "records of the archivists." The only other reference given in this excellent dictionary is to a clearly Westernised passage from Liang Ch'i-ch'ao ~P,§JeB (18731929) entitled Hsin shih-hsiieli fJT~¥! "New History" where, rather unsurprisingly, there is talk of shih-chia ~* "historians." Masayuki Sato considers that the concept rekishi in Japanese acquired the meanings historia narrata and historia ipsa as late as 1873 in Japan, under strong Western influence. From Japan, the concept was transferred to China. When Liang Ch'i-ch'ao used it in his Chungkuo li-shih yen-chiuja '*'~!ft~1itf~i* of 1922 he was under the strong influence of European historians. This was not an autochthonous Chinese development. The term shih-hsiien ~~, in any case, is old. In Tang times we might say that it refers to the study of history, but this is still understood as the study of history books. The Tang syllabus of the examination discipline shih-hsiieli ~¥! consisted of Shih-chi ~~E!, Han-shu~., and Hou Han-shu 1~~•. 11 A crucial term of Chinese historiography for my present purpose is the bibliographic category shih-p'ing ~wp which has been current at least since Sung times. This literally means "appreciation of histories." P'ing WI' is a technical term from the history of aesthetics. An outstanding example of the genre shih-p'ing ~wp is Liu Chih-chi jU~~ (A.D. 661-721), Shih-t'ung~fi. Take the very book title of the Shih-t'ung ~fi, which was compiled in 710 A.D. We have Masui Tsuneo, "Liu Chih-chi and the Shih-t'ung," in Memoirs of the Research Department of the Toyo Bunko, 34 (1978) 113-162; David L. McMullen translates "Generalities on History"; Stuart H. Sargent translates "Understanding History." But how exactly are we to understand "history" here? I think this is a point worth discussing. And any detailed discussion must be based on the use of shih ~ in that crucial text. 12 11 The history of the expression shih-hsiieli ~¥ "archival/historical studies" is well worth tracing in detail. The term goes back to Yen Chih-t'ui Mzlt (531-after 590) Yen-shih chia-hsicn M~*WII'IIJ~ 8.18, ed. Kao An-tse 1993, p. 211: tl'1f'f3liA~iI 0 B&I:n~~ • 1f-{~H • E1ff~¥: i----'I /

;'

'.

.

Ii'''....

,ed!~~:

I

" :c

Z tI

rJJ

~

II

t"l

Z II

::r:

Z t"l rJJ

t"l

~

:>0

~

J-j ....

1'f&:~

0

It would be easy to give some examples of poems on the same theme, such as Li Po's well-known "Longing on Marble Steps" 3iJi1@: The marble steps with dew grow white. It soaks her gauze socks late at night.

She lowers then the crystal screen And gazes at the autumn moon, pale and bright. I5 15 See 200 Tang Poems: A New Translation, eds. Xu Yuan-zhong, Loh Bei-yei and WuJun-tao (Taipei: Bookman Books, 1992), p. 124.

352

CHI-P'ENG HO

~~~~.'~~~m.o~~*A.'~~.~~o

Li Po's poem is undoubtedly the most graceful one among works of poetry dealing with this theme. The lonesome lady's lament for autumn is also based on the interaction between time-consciousness and space-consciousness. The process of poetic association here is similar to that of Sung Vii's "Nine Arguments." The only difference lies in gender, so to speak: the characters or narrators of the poems like "Nine Arguments" are male intellectuals, while the characters or narrators of the poems representing the sorrow of a lonely lady are, of course, female. For lonesome females in poetry, the decay of the autumn scene and the coming of the end of a year always remind them of the passing away of their youth. Their sadness thus reflects their deep hope for a colorful life. Such a hope is basically similar to an intellectual's hope for using his talent completely in the political arena. It is for this reason that many male poets indirectly describe their frustration at not being successful in their official career through the symbol of a lady's sorrow. To sum up, the above three themes show the new implications " derived from Sung Vii's theme of Eamenting Autumn. These three come into existence because of the interaction between the poet's time-consciousness and his space-consciousness. Furthermore, the concepts of these three themes all belong to "evocation," and the expansion of their meaning is implicitly or overtly related to the sense of frustration of the educated elite in the real world. In addition to these three themes, there is yet another notable type of Lamenting Autumn-one which involves. philosophical meditation. The following poem, the first of "Autumn Meditation: Eight Poems" ~Jlj\§ by Tu Fu, is a good example: Gems of dew wilt and wound the maple trees in the wood: From Wu mountains, from Wu gorges, the air blows desolate. The waves between the river-banks merge in the seething sky, Clouds in the wind above the passes meet their shadows on the ground. Clustered chrysanthemums have opened twice, in tears of other days; The forlorn boat, once and for all, tethers my homeward thoughts. In the houses winter clothes speed scissors and ruler; The washing-blocks pound, faster each evening, in Pai Ti high on the hill. l6 16

The translation quoted here is A.C. Graham's, see Anthology of Chinese Lit-

erature, p. 235.

THE LAMENT FOR AUTUMN

353

~m(mlflmW:f* ' 861lJ86~*"Ii~ 0 lUmBUJHl~r~ , ~L1::l\~~!1f!~ .~jifjlmft!!I3~' WHa--~Mcml,L.' o*:&~~fl7JR' S'*

: 0

~i\1Ij~;J.fi~ 0

The second example is "Meditating on the Past at West Fort Mountain" g§~ llJ_ti by Liu Yii-hsi jU~~ (772-842): How often in human life are we touched by events from the past! The mountain's image as of old is pillowed on the cold current. These days, within the four seas all are one family; Only the old forts, empty, dreary, are left to the reeds and the autumn. I 7 A~~@fltt*?IlJ~~.tt*~o~~~m~*I3'Mc~IiIi.~~o

In these two poems the poets ponder on human life which becomes very small and short by contrast to the vastness of the universe. Their meditations also take place in the interaction between the poets' time-consciousness and his space-consciousness, and also belong to the concept of evocation. However, it should be noted that while the previous three new themes emphasize the correspondence between man and nature, these philosophical meditations tend to stress the disagreement between them-for instance, the smallness of man vs. the vastness of universe.l'' Liu Yii-hsi in his poem grasps the human condition by virtue of his meditation on the historical past; he has thus overcome his individual sentiments and jumped into a philosophical contemplation.

See Herdan, The Three Hundred Tang Poems, p. 348. In dealing with the relationship between man and nature, hsing as a concept originally contains two aspects: one is to focus on the correspondence between man and nature, while the other focuses on the disagreement between them. The examples introduced so far all belong to the cases of correspondence. For the examples of disagreement, one might read a burial song of the Han dynasty, "The Dew on the Garlic-leaf' jimllfk: "How swiftly it dries; / The dew on the garlic-leaf, / The dew that dries so fast / To-morrow will fall again. But he whom we carry to the grave / will never more return." jiJ::m ' fiiJ £o1Iffl ' 17 18

mllfflW3iWJJ!1l1i ' A1E-~fiiJlf.¥li (the translation is adapted from Arthur Waley, transl., Chinese Poems, Taipei: Ou-ya publisher, 1964). And Po Chii-yi's s!i5£ (772-846) "Grass" 1i;t. expresses the similar meaning, although it has nothing to do with the lament for autumn. The poem reads: "How the wild grasses spread over the plain! / Year after year they wither to sprout afresh: / Even heath fires cannot burn them up-/ When the spring winds blow they rise again." I~UI)Jji;J::1jt , -~-tM~ , !fj(~:>G~ , IF:l\Ilk:JZ.1:. (the translation is from Herdan, The Three Hundred Tang Poems, p. 286).

354

CHI-P'ENG HO

Iv.

THE TRANSFORMATION OF LAMENT

When the poets try to overcome the Lament for Autumn, the transformation of this lament emerges. The "Long Song" one of the musical songs of the Han, is an early case in point. The poem reads:

*1lJXrr,

One always fears the coming of the Moon Festival, For flowers and leaves are withering. Rivers flow east to the sea. When can they flow back again? If one does not work hard in his youth, He might mourn vainly in his old age. m-~tk~~ , m~~~~ ~*~fl1/!;o

0

i3)11 *~ljm

' fiiJ~~gg~? j.,'JI:[/F~ JJ '

Here the sense of crisis-the awareness that one is wasting one's best years without achievement-is expressed in very clear terms. The coming of autumn reminds the poet of the fast approaching of his decrepitude. Hence, the poet exhorts himself to work hard when young. The Lament for Autumn here has been overcome by the poet's positive attitude towards hitown life. A transformation of this kind is partly determined by the poet's strong and tenacious character. It is since the period of mid-T'ang dynasty that the Lament for Autumn has been fading away. Ch'ien Ch'i ~Ug (722-780), in his "Having Dinner with Liang Huang on an Autumn Night" tk6T W:~~'t=, observes the fairness of the autumn day, the clearness of the autumn evening, the freshness of the autumn wind, and the brightness of the autumn moon; thus the whole poem is fraught with the feeling of gaiety. The poem reads: The guest is coming to my poor house, While the forest is full of the fragrance of orchids. Fine wind can come to us naturally. Bright moon will appear of its own accord.

, ***::i!J1jt ~ , tifm.~ 13 ~ , IlA f:l /l'~W1 0 Another good example is provided by Liu Yu-hsi, whose "Autumn" tk~iiJ praises the clearness of autumn by virtue of lucid and concise language. The poem reads: • ~ ~IJ~r~~

I

Since ancient time, there has been the lament for the desolate autumn. But I say the autumn is better than the spring. In the clearing sky a crane is hovering in the clouds. It leads my poetic thinking to the azure sky.

THE LAMENT FOR AUTUMN

I3ti3itl\1{!;$:~ ,~i§tI\l3lmlfM

0

355

PR~-.tJF~l:' fj!ijl~m3iIj~1!t

0

These two poems have already gone beyond the Lament for Autumn; the set out to describe such lovely autumnal features as clearness, profundity, elegance, lightness, nobility, and openness. The further development of this love for autumn finds its clear expression in the poem "Travelling in the Mountains" I1Irr by Tu Mu Wit (803-852), who writes: Far up the cold mountain the stony path slopes: Where the white clouds are born there are homes of men. Stop the carriage, sit and enjoy the evening in the maple wood: The frosty leaves are redder than the second month's flowers. 19 ~l:*I1IB~~'~~~~~A*o~.~~m~~,~~n~=~no

It is remarkable that here the poet joyfully appreciates the brilliant beauty of autumn. This is radically different from the mournful attitude of the previous poets toward the approach of autumn. Since the mid-T'ang dynasty, the poems expressing the Lament for Autumn have tended to be more "light" in style. Lightness is now considered one of the relative beauties of autumn and is always used as a symbol for the new way of living. Accordingly, the lament for autumn becomes lighter and lighter, and even unfathomable. The poem "For Secretary Ch'iu on an Autumn Evening" tI\~~.Ii:=T=~?I- by Wei Ying-wu .I!!\~ (737-792?) can be presented here as a good example: I hold you in my thoughts this autumn night. While I stroll in the cool air and chant poetry. Pine cones will be falling on the emp~ mountain And my solitary friend not asleep yet. 0 .~~tI\~,~&~re~'~I1I~T~'~AI!!\*~o

The transformation of the Lament for Autumn endeavored by the authors of the Sung dynasty marks a new turning point. In his "The·Sound of Autumn" tl\5tll[\, Ou-yang Hsiu ~~~ (1007-1072) expresses his insight in the nature of autumn in the following way: "For autumn is the minister of punishments, the dark Yin among the four seasons. It is also the symbol of arms, metal among the five elements. Hence it is said to be the breath of justice between Heaven and Earth, and its eternal purpose is stern execution.... Shang means .'grief; the grief of things which grow old. Yi means 19

See Poems of the Late T'ang, trans!. A.C. Graham (Penguin Books, 1968), p.

133. 20

Herdan, The ThreeHundred T'ang Poems, p. 394.

356

CHI-P'ENG HO

'destruction'; things which have passed their prime deserve to be killed."21 ~~'~~ili'T~~~;X~~ili'Tfi~~o~~~~Z~'~~j lJmH~;m~{., 0 • . . ilff ' flili ' ¥J.Jrec~;mlf!;fI ; ~ , ~ili ' ¥J.J~~;m,&~ 0

Ou-yang observes that every creature in the universe exists within the circle of life and death. Decay necessarily comes after prime, therefore it is natural that autumn, in which things tend to decline, becomes the symbol of destruction. Since this is natural, people do not need to mourn. He goes on to say: "Alas! The plants and trees feel nothing, whirling and scattering when their time comes; but mankind has consciousness, the noblest of all intelligences. A hundred cares move his heart, a myriad tasks weary his body; the least motion within him is sure to make his spirit waver, and how much more when he thinks of that which is beyond the reach of his endeavour, worries over that which his wisdom is powerless to alter! It is natural that his glossy crimson changes to withered wood, that his ebony black is soon flecked with stars! What use is it for man, who is not of the substance of metal and stone, to wish to vie for glory with the grass and trees? But remembering who it is who commits this violence againsj-us, why should we complain against the sound of autumn!,,22 ~"f ! 1i!*1I\Ii1flf ' 1f~g~

; A~ib¥J.J ' '!t¥J.Jz!i

0

S~~~,c"

' f.it:

.~~~o~~T*,~~~m;;m~~~nZm~&'~~~ zFJf;;r-;fjl§ • ~~i.!lHI~:Pt~:1ffl,~* • ltWJ~~~:1ffl,££ 0 ~{iiJj;)';1F1il!::fiZ1(

According to Ou-yang, the decay of human life often comes from man's self-affliction, man should not complain against the sounds of autumn. Furthermore, man does not need to grieve over the weakening of his own life just because of the ups and downs of trees and grass. He suggests that man should placidly accept the alternation of birth and death of all creatures and take the changes in man's life easy. Ou-yang's philosophy of life articulated here is a really significant element in the traditional literature of Lamenting Autumn. It is only when man is able placidly to accept the changes of the universal life that his lament can be totally transformed into happiness. Therefore, in his poem "Walking in the Outskirts on an Autumn Morning" ~~~fi, while describing autumn scenes Ouyang focuses his attention on the warmness of the human world, 21 This is A.C. Graham's translation, see Anthology of Chinese Literature, pp. 368-69. 22 Ibid., p. 369.

THE LAMENT FOR AUTU¥N

357

instead of on the decay of nature. Secondly, the unity of man and nature emphasized by the poets whom we have introduced previously now starts to be dismantled. For Ou-yang, there is not any definite correspondence between the human and the natural, so to speak: the coolness of autumn scenes is unable to decrease the warmness and happiness of man's world. Although Shao Yung B~~ (1011-1077), one of the earliest NeoConfucianists, had different academic interests, his concept of time is similar to Ou-yang's. According to Shao Yung, the concept of time is relative rather than unchangeable. He says: "The past and the present in the universe is comparable to morning and evening. When the present is viewed from the past, it is called the present, but when viewed from posterity, it will become the past. When the past is viewed from the present, it is called the past, but when viewed from the past itself, it would be its present.,,23

,

~~~~,~~~~~~g.&oU~.~'~~~~*;~ •• ~' JtIJ~7J)\~~~* ; ~J~.~ ~J~§.

'

JtU~7J)\~~~*

JtU~~~*

;

0

He observes that the different points of view entail different concepts of time. He also says: "Thus neither the present nor the past is necessarily the present or the past as such. The distinction is entirely due to our subjective points of view. People generations ago and people generations to comeall have this subjective viewpoint."24 ~~~7J)\*~a~,~7J)\*~a~'.§8®.~mo~~f~~ft' ~~~f~

, ;1'tA'/I'§8®.~&?

The above passage shows Shao Yung's idealistic concept of time, which regards the change of time as the reflection of the individual and subjective viewpoint, instead of the objective reality.25 Both Ou-yang and Shao share the notions that "ego" is considered the center of the world, for the objective world is viewed from 23 The translation is cited from Chan Wing-tsit I!ilt!!ltl!, A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), p. 485. 24 Ibid., pp. 485-86. 25 Su Shih iU.i\ (1036-1101) exhibits the same insights into the notion of time in his famous "The Red Cliff' i1F~llJit, where he writes: "For if you look at the aspect which changes, Heaven and Earth cannot last for one blink; but if you look at the aspect which is changeless, the worlds within and outside you are all both inexhaustible" §;1't/f'~~®.~ , JtU~~/f'fjg~J-~ , § ;1't/f'~~®.; z , JtU4o/.JW8.~a& 0 (the translation is A.C. Graham's, in Anthology of Chinese Literature, p. 382).

358

CHI-P'ENG HO

man's subjective viewpoint. Moreover, in regarding ego as primary and objects as subordinate, both of them reverse the traditional relationship between ego and objects, which emphasizes objects as primary and ego as subordinate, and which is prevailing in the literature of Lamenting Autumn. Based on such a notion, it becomes very easy for them to shake off lament. Therefore, Shao Yung expresses in his poems concerning autumn a style marked by profundity and elegance. Let us read a poem of his, the third of "Six Poems on Excursion in the Autumn" ~)lIfA1I: The bright moon is intentionally coming into my arms. The fine wind is, like a friend, blowing to my face. A person at leisure chants poems joyfully, Despite the fact that the court is not collecting poems.

•• e~m'~W~g~ano

~~A.~~.,~.~m~ffi~oMA

In fact, I am not saying that Shao Yung does not notice the unavoidable ageing of physical life, but that he is wise enough to accept it calmly. In his "Song of Autumn Thoughts" ~.IIlt, he expresses his reflection on this problem: Although my will to be a sage is still there, The body now is failing. Fortunately, my heart often feels joyful, And is able to understand the difficulty of becoming a sage. ~~~.!Mt~tE

' 4-13 ~9J~Wl~~?

~~-t{,\-me:g

, ~ABWl/;t;Pfig~

In emphasizing subjective viewpoints, Ou-yang and Shao have changed the tradition of Lamenting Autumn in Chinese literature and opened up a new possibility of being delighted with autumn. After them, there have been numerous works concerning autumn which display totally different styles. Ch'in Kuan ~fI (1049-1100), in his "Two Poems on the Autumn Day" ~ 13 11 discovers the vitality of nature in the desolate scenes, and man's gaiety in cold weather. Lu Yu ~Wi (1125-1210), in his poem "The Late Autumn" describes people's happiness about the autumn harvest. Chu Hsi (1130-1200) can even appreciate the passing of time and the solitude of life. His "Autumn Thoughts" ~. reads:

=

The parasol beside the wall, its yellow leaves are falling, While the trees beside the mountain stream are still green. The water with smoke is flowing into the distance. Sitting alone in the empty and chilly room, ... After appreciating the tranquillity, And desiring nothing, I forget where to go. tH~Baj'( I:fffi-ffi~

, i1'~'W~-@;~ , ~~I3,'isUiJT~

0 0

:Ilbj(m.~~

, ~.~lirl ' ...

0

359

THE LAMENT FOR AUTUMN

Authors of the Sung dynasty really achieve a Copernican change in the tradition of literature of Lamenting Autumn. Such a contribution made by Sung intellectuals is intimately related to the fact that within the long course of Chinese history the Sung is the dynasty of which the rulers had the greatest regard for intellectuals. It is for this reason that most intellectuals of the Sung dynasty, while facing reality, become very self-confident and optimistic. Another reason for the transformation of lament endeavored by Sung authors is that the Sung is an age in which intellectuals bring the development of Confucian thought to a new peak. In this new grand trend, the educated elite tends to emphasize the realization of self and the reception of universe by the human mind. It is within this atmosphere that "being happy about autumn" as a new theme makes its first appearance in the poetry of the Sung dynasty.26 After the Sung, there are many works expressing this theme. For instance, "Autumn in the Outskirts" f'k~ by Wang T'ing-yiin £lfgm of the Chin dynasty, describes the beauty of autumn scenes; "Autumn Day" f'k S by Chao Yiian describes the richness of autumn harvest; "Song of Autumn" f'k1lA,- by Huang Keng 'iii. ~ of the Yiian dynasty portrays the august atmosphere of autumn, while "Autumn Day" f'k S by Mei Yi m~ of the Ming dynasty expresses the way in which the heart opens up in autumn. Similar examples abound; they are too many to be quoted here. Finally, what calls for special attention is another remarkable transformation of the Lament for Autumn, the attempt to "moralize" autumn, that is, to regard autumn as a symbol of morality. For instance, in his "Fu on Autumn Scenes" f'ktsllJit Li Kang *~ of the Sung dynasty describes autumn as an unyielding and upright intellectual. Lu Yii's "Sigh at an Autumn Flower" f'kfEJ.: expresses the same theme: An autumn flower is like a righteous man, For they share their vicissitudes, Unlike the slight flowers, Being strewn here and there by the spring wind. f'kfE~o~±

' ~1$m~1i'fJ '

1t.H:~lifE

' ggj{j:llii!f:m,

0

26 Yoshikawa Kojiro i!f)11 $iXil~ contends that the transcendence of lament and the search for tranquillity are two important characteristics of Chinese literature, see his Sung-shih kai-shuo (An introduction to Sung poetry), transl. Cheng Ch'in-mao (Taipei: Lien Chin).

360

CHI-P'ENG HO

V.

CONCLUSION

In this paper I have elucidated the origin, development, and transformation of the Lament for Autumn in Chinese literature. From Sung Yii till the authors of the Sung dynasty, in numerous pieces concerning autumn the authors had been so occupied with the feeling of lament that the autumn almost became the equivalent of lament. The turning point in this tradition takes place in the Sung dynasty as a result of the change of the concept of timespace consciousness. In the periods prior to the Sung dynasty, the authors tended to grasp the universe as a subject, man as an object; according to this notion, the change of time-space of man's life is determined by the change of time-space of universal life; the frailty and transcience of man's life thus become irreversible, and lament thus becomes the focus of the works concerning autumn. Conversely, while man sees himself as a subject and universe as an object, then he can consider the impermanence and transcience of time and space as being determined by man's subjective consciousness. Moreover, sinc 7 the self can be separated from the universe, the interconnection between man's affairs and seasonal changes has been broken. Hence man is able to be delighted with the autumn, instead of feeling sad about it. In replacing lament by happiness, the intellectuals of the Sung dynasty have found a solution to their sad awareness of Fate that was caused by the inevitable frustration in official career. The facts that the pieces expressing the Lament for Autumn never appear in the Book of Poetry and that Sung Vii's "Nine Arguments" is the prototype of literary works of that type, makes it very clear that the origin of sentimentalism of Chinese literature lies in the Songs of Ch'u rather than in the Book of Poetry. The Songs of Ch'u really has exerted its tremendous influence upon the individualistic and lyrical elements in Chinese literature. Finally, in addition to the Lament for Autumn, the Grief over Spring is also a remarkable theme in Chinese literature. While the ageing intellectuals regret the coming of autumn, the young ladies tend to mourn the spring. The distinction of gender is one of the differences between the pieces expressing the Lament for Autumn and those expressing the Grief lover Spring. The author of Huai-nan Tzu ttti¥f.:r- in the chapter "Miu ch'eng hsiin" ~m~J11 says: "The ladies are thinking in spring, while the gentlemen are lamenting in autumn" llf;l:l~, ' ~±~ . The following couplets from

THE LAMENT FOR AUTUMN

"Ch'i yiieh" -l:::Jj of "The Odes of Pin" help to make this clear:

~J!\.

361

in the Book ofPoetry will

As the spring days lengthen out, They gather in crowds in the white southernwood. That young lady's heart is wounded with sadness, For she will [soon] be going with one of our princes as his wife.27 ~ 8~~ , *~ffiBffiB 'klt.,~Jlli ' 7h&0T/RJ~ 0

The other example is from "The Summons of the Soul" (Chao hun

miJlll.) of the Songs of Ch'u, containing the lines: On, on the river's water roll; above them grow woods of maple. The eye travels on a thousand li, and the heart breaks for sorrow. 28

••rr*~~~.'.§f.~~~~o

The above two poems from the earliest texts concern the same theme of sorrow over spring, however, they display different styles. What is the origin of the literature of sorrow over spring? What is the implication of its development? And, what is the concept of time-space consciousness in it? Those questions deserve to be investigated in the future. 27 28

TheBookofPoetry, trans!. James Legge, p. 228. The translation is David Hawkes', see Anthology of Chinese Literature, p. 78.

TIME AND SPACE IN TRADITIONAL CHINESE HISTORICAL FICTION Wilt L. Idema

The topic of this paper is very broad. One might even argue that it is the broadest topic in this volume, as traditional Chinese historical fiction does not provide us with just one but with many versions of Chinese history and so multiplies Chinese culture with an infinite factor. It will be clear, therefore, that no exhaustive, systematic treatment can be expected. I will only offer some highly impressionistic and subjective preliminary observations. I

As I am neither a philosopher nor a stndent of intellectual history, I will simply treat time and space as universal categories of the human mind for its organization of the sense data from the outside world. To me, as a student of traditional Chinese literature, the notion of "Chinese historical fiction" is far more problematical. However, before I turn in a moment to a more detailed consideration of the notion of Chinese historical fiction, I would like to stress that I realize of course that the internal division of time and of space is culture-specific. Moreover, I would argue that the relation perceived between time and space is not the same in each culture. If gross generalizations are permitted, one is perhaps entitled to say in the western tradition time and the sequence of events take precedence over space and its use, whereas in the Chinese tradition from its earliest beginnings space and its division according to the directions have taken precedence over time and development. The trigrams and the hexagrams, the earthly stems and the heavenly branches, the various interrelated cyclical counting systems, neatly laid out in the squares and circles of charts and diagrams, may, in a certain way, be pnderstood as, as many attempts to map out, to spatialize time.' Conversely, in the West the 1 Joseph Needham, Times and Eastern Man, The Henry Myers Lecture 1964 (London: Royal Anthropological Institute, 1965) stresses the obvious point that the Chinese primarily conceived of time as duration and progression.

TRADITIONAL CHINESE HISTORICAL FICTION

363

myth of the translatio imperii might be interpreted as an attempt to impose time on space. However, the relation between the notions of time and space is not static in any given culture and allows for many variations over the centuries. Discussions of traditional Chinese historical fiction usually start out by comparing it to official historiography. Most of the articles andmonographs that I have seen, focus on the relation between fact and fantasy in works belonging to both genres.f The result is often contradictory. Scholars have to conclude that, on the one hand, many of the works produced by the official historiographers contain numerous elements of fiction, whereas works of traditional historical fiction may at times be almost completely factual in nature. The argument often is further complicated by the comparison of Chinese historical fiction and historical fiction as it developed in the West in the course in the nineteenth century. The latter genre tried to make the past come alive in stories dealing with fictional characters in a recognizable period setting, while relegating great events and great names to the background. It simply does not have a counterpart in traditional Chinese fiction. Traditional Chinese novels are usually set in some named reignperiod of an earlier dynasty and the author may show a considerable knowledge of the court politics of the age, but I know of no , example in which a conscious effort is made to reconstruct the manners and costumes of a specific earlier period-all the girls who in Liju-chen's $i'tl:~ Ching-hua yuan ~n~ travel to the court of the Empress Wu Tse-t'ien JitJ{IjJ( in order to participate in the examinations for women, have bound feet. Moreover, traditional Chinese historical fiction primarily deals with great events and great names, even if it may feature a supporting cast of mainly fictional characters. 2 Y.W. Ma, "The Chinese Historical Novel: An Outline of Theme and Contexts," in Joumal ofAsian Studies XXXIV (1975), pp. 277-93; David Derwei Wang, "Fictional History/Historical Fiction," in Studies in Language and Literature I (1985), pp. 64-74; Anthony C. Yu, "History, Fiction and the Reading of Chinese Narrative," in Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews X (1988), pp. 1-19. Yet another very perceptive account of the relations between traditional historiography and traditional (historical) fiction is offered by Anthony H. Plaks, "Towards a Critical Theory of Chinese Narrative," in Anthony H. Plaks ed. Chinese Narrative, Critical and Theoretical Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), pp. 309-52, esp. pp. 310-23. Shelley Hsueh-lun Chang, History and Legend, Ideas and Images in the Ming Historical Novels (Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 1990) provides an extensive survey of the various themes in historical fiction from the Ming period.

364

WILT L. IDEMA

In the Chinese case, the borderline between historiography and hsiao-shuo 'J'IDt does not coincide with the grey area separating hard facts from pure imagination. Historiography is concerned with public events and public characters, that have an exemplary function in the public realm. By contrast, hsiao-shuo record private matters and private emotions, that because of their unique and non-recurring characteristics cannot have any exemplary value. Such unique and non-recurrent events often are of a miraculous nature, which easily shades off into the fantastic. As a result of this, hsiao-shuo have a reputation for non-reliability. However, the urge to fictionalize, to create events and characters ex nihilo, is only a late and weak tendency of the genre, and certainly not present in all works belonging to it. When we come to vernacular fiction (chang-hui hsiao-shuo jji@l/J'IDt), yet another element comes into play. Traditional Chinese historiography positively is characterized by the normative evaluation of events and personalities and the primacy of the source documents, negatively by its absence of a plot and a narrator. The absence of a plot and a narrator is obvious in the Tables (piao~) and Treatises (chih but atso is a distinctive characteristic of the Chronicles (chi *e) and Biographies (chuan f$). Traditional Chinese biographies do not provide a full survey of a person's life, they rather try to sketch the defining virtues of a person in his public role-the element of a temporal development is usually restricted to a brief summary of the bureaucratic career of the subject of the biography. The chronicles provide a year by year, season by season, month by month and, if possible, a day to day account of the most important events as perceived by the court, filling out each compartment of time; each event is recorded as a separate entity. David Der-wei Wang concludes: "Paradoxically enough, the passage of time is usually not the most conspicuous factor in classical Chinese historical writings; rather it is the attempt to 'spatialize' or commemorate morally or politically remarkable events and figures that becomes the central concern.t" Despite his obsession with chronology, the Chinese historian does not see the significance of history in progression, development or change, he is rather looking for an atemporal significance in each concrete event. The spatialized format of traditional Chinese historiography, on the other hand, allows for a record of the full-

zo,

3

David Der-wei Wang, "Fictional History/Historical Fiction," p. 69.

TRADITIONAL CHINESE HISTORICAL FICTION

365

ness of the (bureaucratic) past, which is not immediately possible in a plotted narrative. Such a narrative presupposes a beginning, a middle and an end, a causal temporal sequence, as a result of which some events and some characters acquire a primary importance, whereas other events and characters become peripheral and secondary-not to mention the events and characters that cannot be fitted into the plot at all. As many modern historians have argued, the plotted narrative by its very nature has to be a very idiosyncratic and reductive version of the past, one that cannot do full justice to its contradictory complexity. While traditional Chinese historiography is characterized by its deliberate avoidance of the plotted narrative-the earliest preserved canonical examples, such as the Tso-chuan tcff. and the Shih-chi '£~e may even be suspected of the willful dismemberment of preexisting plotted narratives-traditional Chinese historical fiction is precisely characterized by its adoption of the model of the plotted narrative and the resulting primacy of plot and narrator. Rather than the dichotomy of fact versus fiction, the opposition between discontinuous presentation and plotted narrative sets off traditional historiography from historical fiction. If historical fiction is willing to incorporate more not fully authenticated materials than official historiography, it is because it is also heir to the hsiao-shuo tradition and to the art of storytelling, not because it thinks it a virtue tofictionalize, That plotted narrative rather than fiction is the distinctive trait of traditional Chinese historical fiction may also be shown by a comparison of Chinese and Western texts dealing with the collapse of the Ming dynasty: while Martino Martini's De bello tartarico is classified as history, the comparable Chinese narratives on recent political events of the final decades of the Ming dynasty and its eventual collapse, that may be much more reliable, are classified as novels. The action of a plotted narrative requires for its development a certain temporal duration and a certain spatial setting. While this holds true for all kinds of plotted narrative, we cannot automatically assume that the interrelationships between time and space will be the same in all narratives, or even within the narrative originating from the same cultural background. Not only do we have to take into account the specific requirements of each individual story, we also have to be aware of developments over time and of the varying degree of intellectual sophistication within the genre. In the case of traditional Chinese fiction, I have earlier

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WILT L. IDEMA

proposed to distinguish at least the following four periods: a) early fiction (up to ca. 1550); b) late Ming fiction (ca. 1550-ca. 1650); c) Ch'ing fiction (ca. 1650-1875); d) late Ch'ing fiction (ca. 1875-ca. 1920). I believe that the novels from these four periods are each distinguished by a specific structure. If the plots of the novels from the earliest period may be described as centered around a conflict of competing forces, the plots of novels from the second period may be characterized by the inverse proportionality of virtue and its rewards, vice and its deserts. Ch'ing fiction is structured by plots that exhibit all the elements of bipolar complementarity, whereas the novels of the final decades of the Manchu dynasty feature an individual as their protagonist. Depending upon the particular plot structure, a specific relation between time and space within the universe of the novel may be observed, a specific "chronotope," which in its turn will have consequences for the way in which the past is written up. And while traditional vernacular fiction as a form of written communication definitely belongs to the sphere of literati culture, one also has t6 acknowledge the wide variety within the body of vernacular fiction as to literary sophistication and the demands that consequently are made of the reader. If, on the other hand, we have works written by and for the most demanding members of the literary establishment, we also have, on the other hand, many works that catered to the expectations of a wider, less-educated reading public." For our purposes, the 4 W.L. Idema, Chinese Vernacular Fiction, The Formative Period (Leiden: EJ. Brill, 1974), pp. 126-34. In my own work I used the term "equivalent iuxtaposition" instead of "bipolar complementarity," a term that was introduced by Andrew H. Plaks in his Archetype and Allegory in the Dream of the Red Chamber (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976). But whereas Plaks sees bipolar complementarity as a basic structure of Chinese thought, I prefer to see it as the specific structure observable in the literati novels of the first two centuries or so of the Ch'ing dynasty. I understand structure as the observable relation between comparable units such as events, narrative strands and characters. The authors themselves may have been more or less conscious of the structure in their own work. Structure is contrasted to construction, the deliberate handlingby the author of the materials at his disposal. Within each period one may observe how gradually the devices of an earlier period are discarded, while new devices are developed to deal with the requirements of the new structure. The sudden shifts in structure have to be explained, I believe, by changes in the socio-economic situation of the cultural (and political) elite. The changes in structure, of course, are not the only cause of change and development in traditional Chinese fiction, we also have to take into account e.g. the growing craft of narrative fiction and the continuous search for novelty.

TRADITIONAL CHINESE HISTORICAL FICTION

367

main representative of this type of compositions was the "military romance" as it flourished during the Ch'ing dynasty. This genre too, as we will see, displays its own peculiarities in the handling of time and space. II

The prime example of historical fiction from the period up to the middle of the sixteenth century is of course the San-kuo-chih yen-i ::=:Im;t;~~ or the "Romance of the Three Kingdoms." Whatever the role of Lo Kuan-chung .iilt4t may have been in its genesis, there is little reason to assume that the text as presented in the earliest preserved edition predates the sixteenth century by many years. Despite the title, most of the action of the novel actually takes place during the final decades of the Han dynasty. The conflict between the competing warlords, each carving out its own territory during the last years of the second century, eventually narrows down to the conflict between the fiendishly capable Ts'ao Ts'ao l!1~, and Liu Pei ~Uvm, the rightful heir to the throne of the Han. As long as Liu Pei maintains a coalition with Sun Ch'iian f*tI, his loyal adviser Chu-ko Liang ~:fjg?'t has told him, he and Sun will be able to ward off Ts'ao Ts'ao. The wisdom of this counsel is shown during the battle of Red Cliff, in which the combined forces of Liu Pei and Sun Ch'iian utterly destroy the huge invasion fleet assembled by Ts'ao Ts'ao, However, when Liu Pei's sworn-brother Kuan Yii 1UI~, because of his own arrogance, has been killed by troops of Sun Ch'iian, Liu Pei gives priority to the claims of friendship (i~) to a sworn-brother over his obligation as a ruler to his state. Liu Pei dies during a futile campaign of revenge against Sun Ch'uan, and so dooms the loyalty (chung ,~,) of Chu-ko Liang, who valiantly continues to support Liu Pei's simpleminded successor. In the end the troops of the Wei dynasty, founded by Ts'ao Ts'ao's son, complete their conquest of Liu Pei's kingdom, whereupon the Chin dynasty, which supplants the Wei dynasty, finally completes the reunification of the empire. The conflict in this novel moves from one between competing military groups to one between competing values, and ends in the victory of time over all human effort, however heroic. According to Y.W. Ma, in his inventory of traditional Chinese historical fiction, these novels can be divided into two major groups, one dealing with the theme of dynasty building, and an-

368

WILT L. IDEMA

other concerned with the theme of national security.P We will deal with this second theme in our discussion of the "military romance." The Romance of the Three Kingdoms clearly belongs to the first group. Novels on the theme of dynasty building usually treat the relatively short period of the collapse of one dynasty, the wars between competing claimants to the throne and the final victory of the predestined Son of Heaven, ending with the formal establishment of the new dynasty and victories against remaining pockets of resistance and against foreign invaders. Both in subject matter and periodization, this type of novel presents a mirror image of traditional historiography as exemplified by the dynastic histories. While the dynastic histories give due attention to military matters, they rarely provide stirring descriptions of battle scenes as they are more occupied with the paperwork of the civil administration, and while the career of the founder of the dynasty before his accession to the throne is recorded, the true subject matter of the dynastic history is provided by the centuries of order following its founding, and its slow decline. The historical novels on the theme of dynasty building deal)vith warfare on the battlefield and with the interstitial periods between dynasties: they celebrate the hectic short-lived chaos out of which order emerges. The magnitude of the conflict structuring the action of these novels may be underlined by various means, such as the superhuman qualities of the protagonists, their miraculous weapons and armour, the bravery and martial skills of their major commanders, the wisdom and wizardry of their counselors, and the size of their armies. It may also be underlined by the spatial extension of the conflict: the wars may rage over the full extent' of the Chinese world and its borderlands. However, in contrast to the novels on the national security theme that are clearly set on the frontier, the main theatre of war in these novels is and remains the heartland of China proper. The magnitude of the conflict may also be underlined by its temporal duration. However, this is rather rare. The main action in most novels on the dynasty building theme only takes a few years, in conformity with the facts of traditional historiography. This applies for instance to the Feng-shen yen-i !tiii$~~, the Hsi-Han yen-i iffi~~~ , and, the Ying-lieh chuan ~r.Uf'. 5 Y.W. Ma, "The Chinese Historical Novel: An Outline of Themes and Contexts," p. 285 mentions as a third but minor group the vernacular renditions of chronicles.

TRADITIONAL CHINESE HISTORICAL FICTION

369

The Romance of the Three Kingdoms is one of the exceptions to this rule as its action spans roughly a century.

III The preeminent example of a novel with a plot structured by inverse proportionality is the Chin P'ing Mei ~m;:~. This is of course not a historical novel but a brief consideration of its contents may help to clarify the notion of "inverse proportionality." The Chin P'ing Mei tells the story of the household of Hsi-men Ch'ing imr,~. Hsi-men Ch'ing is a rich apothecary and merchant who uses every means at his disposal to satisfy his lust for women and wine, riches and status. As a fitting punishment he himself dies prematurely from sexual exhaustion, and each of the members of his household is in the same way rewarded according to his or her deeds.. Those who suffered virtuous deprivation or were sinned against, live out a life of ease and luxury, while those who indulged their wishes and abused other people for that purpose, suffer misery in their turn. The basic operative notion is that of recompensation within one's lifetime: man as a moral agent is master of his own fate, which he shapes by his own good and bad deeds. Heaven is not anymore an inscrutable power that arbitrarily destroys and saves but is now described as an impersonal, automatically operating abacus. In fiction of this type, the focus switches from one on conflicts between parties and persons, to one on the single person and his or her moral actions. This concentration on a single main character is already observable in a novel like the Chin P'ing Mei. Despite its bulk, the novel is clearly focused on Hsi-men Ch'ing and his main wives. We may observe a comparable tendency to focus on a single central character in historical fiction from this period. Perhaps the finest example in this respect is the Sui Yang-ti yen-shih II1i:l$}WII'!§!:, which narrates the story of Emperor Yang-ti's unbridled pursuit of satisfaction, resulting in his unavoidable eventual downfall. The focusing of the narrative on a single character is often accompanied by a comparable narrowing down of the space in which the action of the narrative takes place. Even if Emperor Yang-ti moves his court from Loyang to Yangchow, most of the action of the novel still takes place within the walls of the imperial palace. Another example of the way in which history is now conceived of as the life-story of a single protagonist is provided by the

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way in which the tales of the defence of the Southern Sung against the onslaughts of the jurchen, is written up during this period as the story of the life of Yueh Fei ffi~-in his case, of course, ajust reward can only come after death. If the narrator focuses on a single character, he rarely will have enough materials to fill out a hundred chapter novel-personally, I think the Chin P'ing Mei utterly tedious. The anonymous author of the Sui Yang-ti yen-shih, who could draw on a large store of classical language hsiao-shuo, only managed forty chapters. During the final decades of the Ming dynasty the preferred genre of vernacular fiction, not surprisingly, became the hue-pen ~j5* or novella. Discussions of Chinese historical fiction usually do not touch upon hua-pen, yet many collections contain many novellas dealing with the great events and great names from Chinese history. Retribution presupposes a temporal sequence: an emperor-tobe will be protected by the gods at all times but a man who is responsible for his own fate cannot be recompensated for deeds he still has to do. As a result, the fiction of this period is very chronology-conscious. In a novel centered on conflict, flashbacks introducing the earlier exploits of our h{ro's antagonists are quite common. In novels structured by inverse proportionality, however, the narrators see to it that the actions are described in their correct chronological sequence. Historical novels produced during this period often stress their adherence to a strict and linear chronology by advertising that they are based on the T'ung-chien kang-mu lli~ilJ § or a comparable chronicle. However, one certainly should not expect a vernacular rendition of the chronicle concerned. The events in the novel may be largely a-historical, legendary or fictional, with the decision whether or not an event should be included depending on the requirements of the plot. The desire to date the narrated events may be due not so much to a desire to authenticate fictional elements as to the desire to deambiguate the chronology of the narrative, as a clear temporal sequence of suffering and reward, virtue and recompensation, vice and its punishment, sin and its just desert, is essential to the meaning of the story. IV

Vernacular fiction of the first two centuries of the Ch'ing dynasty is structured by bipolar complementarity. In a worldview struc-

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tured by bipolar complementarity everything-events, characters, values, qualities-comes in pairs of opposing yet equivalent phenomena, that define each other and may take each other's place. Consequently, the thematics of the fiction produced during this period shifts from conflicts between competing powers and the mathematics of the retribution, to the inquiry into the manifold relations between male and female, "hot" and "cold," movement and rest, appearance and reality, true and false, inner and outer, temporal and eternal, fact and fiction. Novels from this period often try to describe a world in which contrasting actions take place at the same time. They may even be constructed of two or four or eight contrasting strands of narrative that are intricately interlaced. Many novels from this period have an outspoken panoramic quality as they attempt to portray the fullness of contrasting qualities within one person, within one type, within one family or within one social stratum. As a result the emphasis in these novels is not anymore on a strict linear progression in time of the narrated events, but rather on the fact that contrasting events or states may be observable at the same time, are contemporary. As progression is slowed down, static description of localities grow in importance. In contrast to the fiction of the preceding period, in which the action tended to concentrate in a single, narrowly circumscribed location, we now observe the opposite phenomenon that the action of the narrative is supposed to take place at the same moment in two or more different locations. Linear progression in time is replaced by the doubling and redoubling of extension in space. As a perfect example of a novel structured by bipolar complementarity, we may have a brief look at Wu Ching-tzu's !ffiHitM' Ju-lin wai-shih 1I**?'i-~ -, In this novel, we encounter a panoramic survey of the literati class, which is portrayed in contrasting pairs of exemplars. The narrative continually arrests it forward movement by shifting to other characters at a different location, and their adventures in a world in which outward appearance and inner qualities rarely match. In Ts'ao Hsueh-ch'in's 11~1f Hung-loumeng n.~ too, the forward movement of the narrative is kept up as long as possible in the middle section of the work as we move, with the author, continuously back and forth between the serenity of the Garden and the hustle and bustle of the womens' apartments in the Chia mansion, and between the sheltered life within the mansion and the dangerous world outside. The contrastive

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description of contrasted locations achieves its maximal extension in the Ching-hua yuan, in which the detailed description of imaginary countries beyond the pale of Chinese civilization is balanced by a celebration of the pleasures of civilization in the centre of the empire. Bipolar complementarity is perhaps not the most suitable structure for historical fiction. Yet we may point to a few interesting experiments in historical fiction during this period. An early example is provided by Ch'u Jen-huo's *If All Sui T'ang yen-i Il1im~~. This novel was to a large extent composed by cannibalizing two preexisting novels dating from the final decades of the Ming dynasty. These novels are the Sui Yang-ti yen-shih, which we already mentioned, and the Sui-shih i-wen ll1i~jl3t by Yiian Yii-ling ~r,*. The latter chronicles the growth to maturity of Ch'in Shu-pao ~;J5l(., who, after many. tribulations in his early life, eventually reaches highest honours as one of the major generals in the founding of the Tang dynasty. The first sixty chapters or so of the Sui T'ang yen-i switch back and forth in their description between scenes from the life of the dissolute last emperor in his palaces, and scenes from the life of the noble 6ero out in the province. However, it has been pointed out that the Sui T'ang yen-i, while copying the Sui Yang-ti yen-shih, deliberately toned down the depravity of Yang-ti, moving away from the strident moralism of the preceding period. In the same composite, caleidoscopic manner, shifting from story line to story line, the historical narrative is continued down to the An Lu-shan rebellion and its aftermath." While the Sui T'ang yen-i because of its subject matter may be taken to belong to the historical novels concerned with dynasty building, in structure it is a world apart from the other novels belonging to this group. Another, in my opinion unduly neglected, historical novel from the Ch'ing dynasty on the dynasty building theme, the eighteenth century Fei-lung chuan 7IUI!.PJ, exhibits the same bipolar complementarity in its contrastive characterization of the young friends Ch'aiJung ~~ and Chao K'uang-yin Mll¥htl, both emperors-to-be but one as much a coward as the other a hero. . Yet another aspect of the Sui T'ang yen-i may be briefly commented upon. Ch'u Jen-huo makes Emperor Hsuan-tsung and Yang Kuei-fei ~Jl: ~E the reincarnations of respectively Chu

::t*

6 Robert E. Hegel, The Novel in Seventeenth Century China (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981), esp. Ch. 6.

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Kuei-erh ~dll: 5C, a loyal concubine of Yang-ti, and of Yang-ti himself. The first thing which is interesting here is that in the process of reincarnation the souls switch gender. This prefigures the fascination of Ch'ing novelists for heroes with feminine characteristics and heroines with decidedly masculine traits. At the same time, Chu Kuei-erh/Hsiian-tsung and Yang-ti/Yang Kuei-fei are identified as heavenly beings (respectively a flirting immortal and a heavenly rat), who reenact their outerworldly relation in this sublunary world. In this way out temporal world is contrasted to world of eternity, while at the same time the existence of bipolar opposites in this world is explained. We encounter the same device in works that otherwise, both in subject matter and literary sophistication, are as far apart as Lu Hsiung's gtffi Nii-hsien wai-shih :9:1Ul7'l-~ , Ch'ien Ts'ai's ~~ Shuo Yiieli ch'iian-chuan IDtffi3tf* and Ts'ao Hsueh-ch'in's Hung-lou-meng, which, to me at least, suggests that it is more than just a literary ornament. The authors of Ch'ing fiction are acutely aware of, and highly interested in, the opposition between fact and fabrication. The many ways in which Ts'ao Hsiieh-ch'in experimented with the opposition true and false, experienced past and fictional present, have been studied repeatedly. However, Ts'ao was certainly not alone in this respect. One intriguing result of this general obsession with fact and fiction in their many interrelationships during this periodwas the development of a type of historical fiction that one might call counterfactuaL Earlier historical fiction contained quite a lot of materials that was legendary in nature and their authors at times improved on their sources by rewriting events as they should have occurred. However, they rarely came up with stories they had completely made up. In contrast, a sizable number of Ch'ing dynasty authors wrote about the great events and great names of Chinese history, in a way that deliberately contradicted recorded history. A blatant example is provided by the Shuo Yiieli ch'iian-chuam. On the very moment Yueh Fei is poised to reconquer Northern China and to liberate the two captive Emperors Hui-tsung ~* and Ch'in-tsung ~*, he is recalled to Hangchow and murdered-but his fictional sons live to lead another campaign and bring back the imperial captives. A more blatant example of this predilection for counterfactual historical fiction is provided by the Nii-hsien wai-shih. This one hundred chapter novel rewrites the history of the early fifteenth

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century as it pits T'ang Sai-erh mJHr. against the Yung-Io emperor. The actual T'ang Sai-erh was a woman who led a short-lived rebellion in Shantung province. A rather factual account of her rise and fall was provided by Ling Meng-ch'u ~~W as a novella. Lu Hsiung turned T'ang Sai-erh into woman with supernatural powers, who protects the interests of the Chien-wen ~3t Emperor following the Yung-Io usurpation. Eventually her troops occupy a major part of China as she battles the Yung-Io Emperor to a stalemate, that lasts throughout his reign. In this inverted history, many things never happened: Cheng Ho A never sailed the Western Oceans and the barbarian envoys that did come to China never made it to Peking but offered their tribute in Chinan to T'ang Sai-erh. An even more outrageous example of this type of fiction is provided by the Yeh-sou p'u-yen !l!ff5C!lI § of Hsia Ching-chii :llit~. In this novel, the fictional alter-ego of our author, Wen Su-ch'en 3t~!:2, is described as the embodiment of the ideal minister, who combines all the contrastive qualities required for that role in his person. The action of the novel ranges over the whole extent of the known Chinese world. Due to ~n Su-ch'eri's superior administration the Ch'eng-hua reign-period of the Ming dynasty witnesses an age of perfect peace, during which the remotest countries and tribes, including Arabia and Europe, come to offer tribute, foreswear their native religions, such as Buddhism and Christianity, and embrace Confucianism. The counterfactual fiction of this historical extravaganza is underlined when in the novel the life-history of Wen Su-ch'en is staged as a play and events that have not yet taken place in the reality of the narrative are already enacted by the players. Also novels set during the reign of Empress Wu Tse-t'ien, such as the Ching-hua-yuan and the Wu Tset'ien ssu-ta ch'i-an JEtJlU7(IZ!3*~~ may be considered under this heading.

v The Ch'ing dynasty also witnessed the production of a great number of novels that catered to a less demanding readership. Most of these novels deal with the exploits of generals defending the Chinese empire against the unprovoked attacks by barbarians. Y.M. Ma discussed these novels under the heading of the "na-

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tional security" theme, while C.T. Hsia dubbed them "military romances."? The earliest example of the genre that remained popular through the ages, however, dates from the late sixteenth century. This novel, the Pei Sung chih-chuan ~t*~VJJ describes the heroism of the succeeding generations of the Yang family in the defence of the northern border of the Sung empire against the Khitan Liao dynasty. In Ch'ing times the action in this novel was carried forward in the Wu-hu p'ing Hsi :n.J£~iffl, that describes the great deeds of Ti Ch'ing ~x'jlf and his generals in the wars against the invading Hsi-hsia armies, and in the Wu-hu p'ing Nan :n.J£~i¥I, in which rebellious southern aboriginals are subdued. The early career of Ti Ch'ing was subsequently told in the Wan-hua-lou ;Ytrem. For the T'ang dynasty, the eighteenth century first produced yet another account of the founding of the dynasty in the Shuo T'ang ~}j!f. This novel had as its sequels the Hsiieh Jen-kuei cheng Tung ift:JttiEm: and Hsueh Ting-shan cheng Hsi ifTl1ItiEiffl, in which respectively Korea and Central Asia are subdued by the historical hero Hsueh Jen-kuei and his legendary son Hsiieh Tingshan. Hsiieh Ting-shan's son Hsueh Kangif~U, in his turn, succeeds in subduing the most vicious demon of them all, Empress Wu Tse-t'ien. Novels on the national security theme constitute together with the novels on the dynasty building theme the overwhelming majority of traditional Chinese historical fiction. However, the novels in both groups are widely' divergent. While both types of novels usually are structured by a conflict of competing powers, the way they handle their characters is quite different. In novels concerned with the dynasty building theme, the competitors for the throne are usually all described in a rather positive way. While only one of the competitors can emerge victoriously and be the true Son of Heaven, his rivals are often described as flawed heroes: Liu Pang jUn may be the destined founder of the Han dynasty but that does not diminish the greatness of Hsiang Yii lJ~. In contrast, the barbarians who invade China in the military romances are villains through and through as they invade China out of greed and arrogance. Even worse, they have the secret support of Chinese traitors, often high court officials, who, blinded by greed and jealousy, will go to any length in order to harm the

m

7 C.T. Hsia, "The Military Romance," in Cyril Birch ed., Studies in Chinese Literature Genres (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), pp. 339-90. This ar-

ticle also deals with a number of novels from the Ming dynasty.

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I

WILT L. IDEMA

loyal Chinese generals, who will sacrifice themselves and their families in the defence of the Chinese territory. This black and white characterization is different also from the moralism that may be observed in the fiction of the last century of the Ming. In fiction of that period authors are interested in finding out how people, who are fully aware of the inavoidable consequences, are yet seduced into sin. In the military romance, the blackness of the villains is a given, just as the irrepressible loyalty of the Chinese generals, in spite of the most outrageous acts of injustice against them from the side of the beclouded Emperors. I would suggest that this simplified characterization in the military romance may be due to the ritual scenario that underlies the action of novels of this kind. The generals who push the invading barbarians back beyond the border of the empire and subdue them, clean the civilized world from malevolent influences in the same way as the priest who chases demons beyond the ritual borders of the village. The basic scenario of the militar¥...r.oman.c.e. is :e~~2r~,t~~!~ rite, that from time immemorial constitutes such a basic element of Chinese religion. The setting of the military romance, therefore, primarily i(the border. However,just as exorcistic rites have to be performed whenever a malevolent ghost has sneaked into the community, at times the action of the military romance may be directed against malevolent forces in the heart of the empire. The popularity of stories from this type of fiction in all types of popular theatre must be closely connected to the homology between these stories and the exorcistic function of the rituals at which these plays were performed. The ritual model may also help us to understand why these novels have a tendency to group themselves into foursomes, in which each novel is connected to one of the main points of the compass. Actually, the only example of such a completed foursome is the Ssu-yu chi gg~~e, which aligns four mythological novels of demonquelling deities with the four directions of east, south, west and north. While the Ssu-yu chi reproduces earlier texts that are quite heterogeneous in their origin, their combined publication under a common title is a mid-Ch'ing phenomenon. In the case of the novels about the generals of the Hsiieh family, the campaigns against the East and against the West 'were supplemented by a campaign against the North by the simple expedient of publishing the final chapters of the Shuo T'ang separately as Lo T'ung sao Pei m3~Hffl~t. A southern campaign is lacking, instead we have

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Hsiieb Kang fan T'ang fifIl'1lU&Jl!:t. For the Northern Sung dynasty, a campaign against the East is lacking, as the campaigns against the North of the generals of the Yang family are followed by the campaigns against the West and against the South ofTi Ch'ing. While there is a candidate to make up for the missing campaign against the East in the shape of the Yang Wen-huang p'ing Min m3tJJ(Z(iOO , it would appear that this latter novel enjoyed a regional distribution and never acquired a popularity comparable to the other works in this series. VI

As stated before, the action in the overwhelming majority of traditional Chinese fiction, also when it does not deal with the great events and great names from the past, is explicitly set in the past. We also noted that usually no attempt is made to recreate the specific manners and customs of the age in which the story is set. " However, "the problem of anachronism in language, costume, manners and morals, and so forth, though frequently occurring in the narrative of Chinese fiction, is seldom taken seriously by the writer/storyteller, because more often than not historical data serve mainly as a reminder alerting readers to some a-temporal)ignificance of moral mechanism, thereby highlighting a fundamental premise of classical Chinese historiography.t" In contrast to this overriding tendency to set the action of one's narrative back in time, one may also observe a countercurrent of " interest in the description of contemporary society. However, the motives for this interest would appear to be different periods. In novels in which the action is structured by conflict there usually is little interest in contemporary affairs. In this world of supermen, familiarity breeds contempt and it usually takes a considerable distance in time before the characters in the narrative can acquire the required mythical proportions. In fiction in which the action is structured by inverse proportionality, however, the moral choices (and their consequences) of each and every human being, including common contemporaries, have an exemplary function. Accordingly, there occurs, especially during the final decades of the Ming dynasty, a remarkable upsurge of fiction, espe- J cially novellas, dealing with contemporary or near-contemporary events. In the fiction of the Ch'ing period, we first observe a resur8

David Der-wei Wang, "Fictional History/Historical Fiction," p. 70.

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gence of the traditional predilection for a setting in the past. However, narratives structured by bipolar complementarity invite panoramic descriptions of social groups, while the thematic interest in appearance and reality, inner nature and outward pretention predisposes toward satire. While the Ju-lin wai-shih still makes a show of being set in the Ming dynasty and the Hung-lou meng is deliberately vague about the historical period during which its events are supposed to occur, Ch'en Sen i!*~ in his P'inhua pao-chien ~:reJ!f1i makes no attempt to hide the fact that he is describing the multifaceted fascination for the theatre in the fashionable Peking society of his own days. J This tendency towards contemporary settings becomes predominant in the fiction of the final decades of the Ch'ing dynasty. In this type of fiction, structured by the relation between an individualized protagonist and the society in which he moves, we often observe societal corruption through the eyes of a young and . innocent country-boy coming to the big city. This pattern is already observable in Han Pang-ch'ing's ili$:fflit Hai-shang-hua liehchuan ml::re7Uf,; , in which the late nineteenth century circles of " Shanghai courtesans and their nouveau-riche patrons are exposed. A wider variety of social evils is exposed in this way in Wu Wo-yao's ~tJZ:~ Erh-shih-nien mu-tu chih kuai-hsien-chuang .:::::.-tiJ': § 1m2~ffiJI*. In contrast to earlier periods, not only histori-· cal fiction in but also fiction set in past ages now for the first time I is only a minor phenomenon. The few historical novels that were . written during this period serve the new purpose of anti-Manchu nationalism. An example of this type of fiction is Wu Wo-yao's T'ung-shih mi~, that describes the career of Wen T'ien-hsiang 3t::R~, the last prime minister of the Sung dynasty, who died in a Mongol prison. The above survey concerning time and space in traditional Chinese historical fiction unavoidably is both superficial and highly subjective. Still I hope to have shown that traditional Chinese fiction, including historical fiction, in the course of its development has come to exhibit a wide variety of narrative structures, each of which has great consequences for the treatment of time and of space, and for their interrelation. Even if further research may well lead to modifications of this chronotopical scheme and may well lead to its rejection, I hope this essay will at least have had some function in drawing attention to the richness and complexity of this important and voluminous part of the heritage of Chinese culture.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Shelley Hsueh-lun Chang, History and Legend, Ideas and Images in the Ming HistoricalNovels (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990). Robert E. Hegel, The Novelin Seventeenth Century China (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981). C.T. Hsia, "The Military Romance," in Cyril Birch, ed., Studies in Chinese Literary Genres (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), pp. 339-90. Wilt L. Idema, Chinese Vernacular Fiction, The Formative Period (Leiden: EJ. Brill, 1974). Y.W. Ma, "The Chinese Historical Novel: An Outline of Theme and Contexts," in Journal of Asian Studies34 (1975), pp. 277-93. Joseph Needham, Time and Eastern Man, The Henry Myers Lecture 1964 (London: The Royal Anthropological Institute, 1965). Andrew H. Plaks, Archetype and Allegory in the Dreamof the Red Chamber (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976). Andrew H. Plaks, "Towards a Critical Theory of Chinese Narrative," in Andrew H. Plaks, ed., Chinese Narrative, Critical and Theoretical Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), pp. 309-52. David Der-wei Wang, "Fictional History/Historical Fiction," in Studies in Language and Literature 1 (1985), pp. 64-74. AnthonyYu, "History, Fiction, and the Reading of Chinese Narrative," in Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews 10 (1988), pp. 1-19.

DMSION THREE

CULTURAL EMBODIMENTS

NOTIONS OF TIME, SPACE AND HARMONY IN CHINESE POPULAR CULTUREI Yih-yuan Li

In recent essays concerning the topic of "Culture China" (wen-hua Chung-kuo 3t1t9='~), Professor Tu Wei-ming has posited that this concept may be seen in terms of three symbolic universes or substances (shih-t 'i JUI). The first encompasses all Chinese living in mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore, the second includes all overseas Chinese, while the third is composed of scholars, intellectuals, writers and journalists.f Professor Tu's clear presentation of these three symbolic universes is undoubtedly a significant contribution which provides an important basis for future discussions of the concept "Culture China." At the same time, however, it must be said that Tu's ideas represent a model derived from a horizontal perspective of Chinese culture, one that is in fact based on the concept of the so-called "great tradition." The predominant emphasis therefore is on the elite culture of Chinese scholars, officials and members of the gentry. It is therefore reasonable for us to analyze the concept "Culture China" from a vertical perspective of Chinese culture, one that views it as consisting of both upper-level elite culture and lower-level popular culture. It is particularly important for us to treat the meaning of "Culture China" from the perspective of popular culture, the so-called "little tradition." This is in no way meant to contradict Professor Tu's arguments; in fact, I wish to supplement and support them. The overall goal of this paper .is to thoroughly investigate "Culture China" from the perspective of popular culture, thereby helping increase our understanding of this important concept and its many profound implications.

* 1 This paper was originally presented under the title "Ts'ung min-chien wenhua k'an Chung-kuo wen-hua" ~ra,:;t{t.;g,*,I!/lI:;t{t. at the Wen-hua Chung-kuo chanwang kuo-chi yen-t'ao-hui :;t{t.,*,I!/lI~~I!/lI~lffW1f, held at the Chinese University of Hong Kong from March 10-12, 1993. 2 See Tu (1990),60-61 and (1991), 1-32.

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The concept of "culture" itself is highly abstract, but it finds expression in concrete form in a people's daily life. In fact, highlevel abstractions like culture are often formed out of an array of concrete facts. The significance of investigating "Culture China" from the point of view of popular culture requires that one carefully observe the folkways of the Chinese people. While the data derives from nothing less than the realities of everyday life, this does not detract from its value in aiding us form a high-level theoretical framework. Close examination of everyday life has in fact enabled us to determine that all Chinese covered by the concept of "Culture China" have three characteristics in common: 1) Specific customs and beliefs relating to diet; 2) A Chinese-style family ethics which also extends to the realm of inter-personal relationships; and, 3) A cosmology largely based on fortune-telling and geomancy. Apart from pure physical appearance, .these three characteristics may be said to be indicators of individual's Chineseness, regardless of where he or she may live. Even those overseas Chinese who have been influenced by indigenous cultures, such as the Perarakan of Indonesia and the Baba of Malaysia, share these three characteristics to a certain degree. If these characteristics gradually fade away, the possibility of being identified as a Chinese from a cultural point of view declines accordingly. In other words, if we put aside viewing "Culture China" from an abstract perspective and do so from the perspective of popular culture, culinary habits, family ethics and a cosmology based on fortune-telling and geomancy become three key indicators.

* A large amount of research has already been done on these three aspects of Chinese folkways, particularly by anthropologists, including E.N. Anderson's investigation of Chinese culinary culture,3 Myron Cohen's elucidation of Chinese familyethics," James Watson's interpretations of Chinese ritual and the cosmology un-

3 4

See Anderson (1980). See Cohen (1991).

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385

derlying it, etc. 5 Of course, these topics cover a wide range of issues, and much room remains for further discussion. Nevertheless, the major aim of this essay is not to treat these topics per se; rather a further underlying motive is to search for the roots of those special characteristics that define Chinese folkways. To put it bluntly, we are attempting to explain why these folkways and basic traits find expression in the lives of Chinese throughout the world, and whether there are some basic principles of culture at work. From our point of view, these issues not only involve how profound principles of Chinese culture are expressed in the process of daily life, but are also linked to the problem of how the "great tradition" of elite culture and the "little tradition" of popular culture become joined together. This in fact is what deserves our greatest attention. In two essays presented in conferences held in 1986 and 1987 respectively, I formulated a scheme of three systems, or strata, of value-orientations." These essays postulated that one of the basic forces underlying Chinese culture involves the quest for equilibrium and harmony, referred to in the Classics as "equilibrium and harmony existing in perfection" (chih chung-ho 3if(J:j:!:fp ). In order to attain this ideal state, one must achieve equilibrium and harmony in each of these systems. These three systems, and their respective sub-systems, can be illustrated by the following chart:

5 See "Standardizing the Gods: The Promotion of 'T'ien Hou' along the South China Coast, 960-1960," in David Johnson, Andrew Nathan and Evelyn Rawski, eds., Popular Culture in Late Imperial China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985). See also "The Structure of Chinese Funerary Rites: Elementary Forms, Ritual Sequence, and the Primacy of Performance," in Watson and Rawski, eds., Death Ritual in Late Imperial and Modern China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988). 6 See Li Yih-yiian (1988 1) and (1988 2) .

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YIH-YUAN LI

1. The system of tian Ji(. or natural order

The state of harmony and equilibrium

{

Sub-system of spatial relations

2. The system of { renA or individual organisms

{

3. The system of shehui Iftf.Wl

Sub-system of temporal relations

Sub-system of internal harmony Sub-system of external harmony Sub-system of worldly relations

or society Sub-system of otherworldly relations

This model of three strata of harmony was also used as the framework in the preliminary design of an exhibition held in 1988 at Taichung's National Museum of Natural Science, entitled "The Mind of the Chinese People," with Mr. Lu Li-cheng §J!I!J!& working under my supervision in a thorough data-gathering process, the results of which will be formally exhibited this year.? This exhibition reveals even more clearly how the search for equilibrium and harmony finds expression in a variety of ways in the "mind of the Chinese people."

* The three strata of equilibrium and harmony presented above represent the actions one must take in pursuit of this ideal condition. In other words, the ideal state of existence in the popular imagination, ranging from individual well-being to universal order, involves attaining the ultimate goal of equilibrium and harmony, something which must be achieved in all three strata. This becomes clearer when we examine each system or strata one-byone. Let us begin with the system of natural order. In order to un7 See Lii, T'ien, jen, she-hui-shih-lun Chung-kuo ch'uan-t'ung mo-hsing (Taipei: Academia Sinica, Institute of Ethnology, 1990).

te yii-chou jen-chih

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derstand popular representations of how harmony in this system may be achieved, we must look at its two sub-systems: temporal and spatial relations. In terms of temporal relations, each people has its own set of concepts which represents an important part of its understanding of the natural order. In Chinese popular culture, the sub-system of temporal relations constitutes an important part of Chinese cosmology. Generally speaking, traditional popular culture divides time into a number of segments, the most important of which was the lunar year or sui~. Each year is represented by combinations of the 10 celestial branches (t'ien-kan :R=f) and 12 terrestrial stems (ti-chih!1!!3() which form a 60-year cycle, for example a chia-tzu Ifl-=f year (1984, 1924, 1864, etc.). Each year may also be symbolized by a real or legendary animal, the twelve zodiacal animals (shih-erh sheng-hsiao f' =~ 'W), such as the year of the dragon (1988, 1976, 1964, etc.). Whenever someone passes through or crosses one of these temporal units, he or she is said to have aged one year. For example, someone born on Chinese New Year's Eve would be considered two years old on Chinese New Year's Day (this person would be considered one year old at birth because the aging process begins at conception). This process of determining one's age is called a "crossing over technique" (k'ua-yueh fa ~7*), and contrasts sharply with the Western method of counting one's age, which might best be labelled a "cumulative technique (lei-chifaW::H7*). In terms of Chinese popular religion, the concept of temporal harmony involves matching one's fate with the temporal order of the cosmos. When each individual is born, his or her parents or relatives will use celestial branches and terrestrial stems representing the year, month, day and hour of birth to calculate that person's Eight Characters (pa-tzu i\*). These are permanently fixed, and are criticalIn determining one's fate or destiny (ming liIl), which is considered to be unalterable. However, as one's life takes its course it also corresponds to cosmic time, with various possibilities for change (chi-yuan ~~) occurring at specific moments. These are considered an individual's opportunities (yun 31), although whether these are opportunities for beneficial or harmful change depends on the situation. In traditional popular religion, while one's ming is considered fixed, one's yun may be changed if one uses specific methods for bringing about such an alteration. In other words, the pursuit of temporal harmony by the Chinese finds its clearest expression in the idea of changing one's yun.

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Each Chinese person attempts to calculate how to best match his or her Eight Characters with specific points occurring in the flow of cosmic time. In matching individual and cosmic time, one encounters harmonious moments, which are considered to be propitious (chi i!r) and bring good fortune, and discordant moments, which are considered inauspicious (hsiung ~) and bring calamities. Due to this basic conceptualization of time, Chinese people have persistently attempted to determine the most propitious and beneficial points in time for attempting changes for the better, referred to as "auspicious beginnings for new enterprises" (tse-chi k'ai-chang Wi!r~~). According to such beliefs, no new undertakings should be taken until the most propitious moment has been determined. At the same time, however, one should not passively wait for such moments but actively strive to determine the propitious and inauspicious moments affecting one's life, in order to "pursue good fortune and shun calamities" (ch 'ii-chi pi-hsiung ~i!rlm~). This is the most basic principle underlying Chinese concepts of fortune-telling and divination. These two activities have been an integral part of Chinese spiritual life for hundreds and thousands of years, and continue to persist despite the rapid pace of the forces of modernization. In fact, traditional techniques involving this age-old pursuit of temporal harmony appear to have become more popular in recent years. In the case of modern Taiwan, not only the masses but also intellectuals are becoming more and more interested in fortunetelling and divination. In fact, such activities have been popular among both groups of people since ancient times. The techniques used by the masses, such as bone-rubbing (mo-ku and appeasing the God of the Year (an t'ai-sui 't(*~), may appear to be somewhat "crude," while the techniques used by intellectuals and scholar-officials such as calculations based on the I Ching or stellar divination using the pole star (tzu-wei tou-shu ~jl'g(41t), appear more "refined." However, the underlying conceptual framework is the same. This helps explain why Chinese the world over all possess the common cultural trait of intense interest in fortune-telling and divination. At the same time, this common cultural trait helps us understand one basis for mutual interaction between the "great tradition" and the "little tradition." However, in order to attain equilibrium and harmony in the system of natural order, simply settling the temporal aspect is not

m*)

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enough; an equal level of harmony must be achieved in the subsystem of spatial relations as well. In traditional Chinese popular culture, the concept of spatial harmony takes the forces of yin and yang as its root, but also adds the Five Elements and the Eight Trigrams. Welded together, these forces find expression in the Chinese system of geomancy or feng-shui oo.7.K.Ancient geomantic theories not only drew upon the Eight Trigrams, celestial stems and terrestrial branches, but also utilized related features of the Five Elements system, including the Five Directions, Five Tones, Five Colors, Five Numbers, etc. These form a coherent system which clearly reveals the Chinese people's search of equilibrium and harmony in the spatial sub-system. Looking at modern Taiwan, we find that while popular beliefs related to spatial concepts are not as well-formed as they were in ancient times, they still preserve unique features which merit our attention. Taiwanese popular beliefs draw on the concept of the Five Elements in defining the sacred space which surrounds a village. This may be seen in the belief in the Five Legions (wu-ying 1itft ), spirit soldiers who protect the village against the incursions of demonic forces. On specific ritual occasions, local priests (hoat su i*ffifi in Min dialect) and/or spirit mediums (tang-hi:i: &) escort the village deity in his palanquin in a tour of inspection throughout the village, which also involves fortifying each legion, represented bra bamboo stake or small shrine situated at the four corners of the village (the fifth and central legion is in fact the village temple). The Five Legions may also be represented by five colored flags representing the spatial position of each legion (wuying ch'i 1itft1J);.) according to the Five Directions. In daily life, a related concept involves using the Five Directions in making decisions involving seeking out a physician, setting out on a journey, or recovering a lost item. If, for example, one falls ill, one can consult a spirit medium who uses one's Eight Characters and other factors to determine in which direction one should proceed to seek a physician. Similar techniques are used in determining which direction one's journey should begin towards or where to seek a lost item. All these examples reveal the search for spatial harmony as expressed in popular beliefs. Despite all this, however, the concept of spatial harmony finds its clearest and most systematic expression in the sacred geography represented by geomancy. Geomancy may properly be said to lie at the core of popular beliefs concerning spatial harmony, par-

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ticularly as regards the siting of ancestral graves. Legends concerning such events are too numerous to count, and even in today's modern society one is constantly hearing new stories regarding the geomantic siting of buildings or the arrangement of furniture in a home or office. The popularity of using geomancy for interior decorating not only represents the intense drive for material success in today's society, but also reveals that the search for temporal harmony is not only an integral part of popular culture but also elite culture as well. Even wealthy and reputable businessmen or university presidents are not immune from these phenomena, which reveal the deep-rooted nature of this concept in Chinese culture. According to a survey my students and I conducted in the city of Hsinchu during the late 80's, nearly half of those who labeled themselves atheists believed that correct geomantic siting of ancestral graves could bring benefits to family and commercial fortunes. Furthermore, nearly one-third of those interviewed believed in using one's eight characters to achieve temporal harmony. Even more remarkable was that thirty percent of those who believed in foreign religiens like Christianity still relied on geomancy in choosing favorable locations for their ancestors' graves." These facts reveal that the concept of spatial harmony in geomancy remains one of the most deeply-rooted ideas undergirding Chinese cosmology. It not only binds together the "great tradition" and "little tradition," but also constitutes a common trait linking Chinese throughout the world. Next let us turn to the second stratum of harmony in our system, the system of individual human organisms, which again consists of two sub-systems: the internal organism and the external organism. In the pursuit of total harmony, this system is just as crucial as the system of natural order described above. In Chinese popular culture, the first or internal sub-system emphasizes the harmony of the biological organism, while the second or external sub-system stresses formal or symbolic harmony. In traditional Chinese popular culture, the basic idea behind harmony or balance in the organism is the perception of the human body as a microcosm, where, just as in the cosmos itself, balance between yin and yang and harmony among the five elements are crucial. This idea finds its clearest expression in a conceptual

8

See Sung Wen-Ii and Li Yih-yuan (1988).

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framework which defines various foods as "hot" (je ~) or "cold" (leng'IP), and which extends to ideas about patching or replenishing the body (chin-pu Wi1lli) by means of certain foods. Such popular ideas, which date back to ancient Chinese history.? rely on the yin-yang model in determining whether one's body is too hot or too cold, and how to remedy the situation. If one's body is too cold, then one should consume foods considered to possess hot qualities in order to achieve equilibrium. If one's body is too hot, the opposite holds true. During the frigid days of winter it is considered advisable to eat hot foods to warm up the body, while during the torrid days of summer cold foods are in order so the body may cool down. Such concepts have led to all foods being labeled as either hot or cold. Foreign foods are no exception. Take for example the pomegranate, introduced from the Southeast Asia relatively late in China's history, which has been classified as having extremely hot properties. The same holds true for Western liquors, which are classified in this manner and not according what time of day they should be drunk. All this is done so that the food and drink one consumes may contribute towards the goal of maintaining internal harmony, which brings good health. This sub-system of internal harmony, combining yin-yang ideas with concepts of hot and cold, has not only influenced Chinese perceptions of food, eating habits, and culinary techniques, but has also been linked to traditional Chinese medicine, forming one of the unique traits of Chinese daily life. This is not only true for Chinese living in China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore, but also for overseas Chinese throughout the world for whom material comforts are often even more readily available. For the Chinese, foods and drugs are not clearly differentiated; rather they constitute a continuum. This also indicates another level at which the great and little traditions have overlapped to a certain extent. For the traditional Chinese though, simply strengthening the individual by balancing hot and cold internally is not enough. To obtain optimal strength the external organism needs care as well. Here we shall discuss the sub-system of external harmony of an individual organism in the context of the institution of naming in Chinese society. For most people today, the name is a classifier, even a sign or a symbol, indicating an arbitrary relationship be9 See K.C. Chang, "Introduction," in Food in Chinese Culture: An Anthropological and HistoricalPerspective (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977).

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tween the signifier and the signified. However, traditional Chinese ideas of naming imply a mysterious link between the two, the name having a transformative power towards the individual. This transformative power may be seen in two areas: 1) The use of Five Elements theoryin naming; and, 2) Counting the total number of strokes in a Chinese ideograph in choosing one's name. We see here that in Chinese society, naming represents the desire to produce a balance in terms of external formality. According to Chinese folk concepts, each person's name contains different portions of the Five Elements, which must be properly balanced in order to maintain one's well-being. If one lacks one specific element, balance is lost and the individual organism encounters a crisis of instability. This balance of the Five Elements cannot be achieved by ingesting external substances, as in the case of hot or cold foods; rather, one must produce a balance symbolically and in terms of external formality by changing one's name to include a character with the radical for that missing element. For example, if one suffers from an imbalance of wood, he or she may add a character with the wood radical to one's name. If one suffers from a lack of water, one adds the~ater radical, and so on. All this represents the belief that the individual organism's existence is linked to a balance of the Five Elements, and that one's name is an integral part of this organism. Therefore, if the individual organism is lacking one of the Five Elements, balance can be restored by adding this element to one's name. In religious anthropology, this would best be considered a form of contagious magic, which is achieved linguistically through metonymy, whereby the part may represent the whole. In terms of logic, this may be considered a syntagmatic relationship. The concepts described above were an essential part of traditional naming systems, and in places where popular religion flourishes today such practices may still be observed. However, in more modern societies the use of the Five Elements in naming is gradually being replaced by a system of counting the total number of strokes in the characters making up one's name. Such a system also constitutes an attempt to achieve harmony in terms of external formality, yet it is much simpler and has a more mysterious aura of magic attached to it. According to this system, if the number of strokes in one's name harmonizes with one's gender, Eight Characters, Five Elements, etc., then good fortune is assured. There are fixed techniques for calculating whether the

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number of strokes is auspicious or inauspicious, and these are often contained in almanacs circulating throughout Chinese communities in Asia; One need only to choose the appropriate system in order to be able to determine whether one's name will bring good fortune or not. If the latter is true, one can use other fortune-telling techniques to change one's name to one containing an auspicious number of strokes. Such naming techniques have grown increasingly popular among the urban population of Taiwan. My own fieldwork results indicate that one unique phenomenon of today's modern society is that the sub-system of external harmony has become more popular than the sub-system of internal harmony, while naming techniques using stroke totals have gained favor at the expense of traditional techniques linked to Five Elements theory. While emphasis on the sub-system of external harmony in terms of naming techniques may not be very popular in overseas Chinese communities, nevertheless the emphasis on naming itself remains an important cultural trait linking all Chinese, as well as a phenomenon which clearly links the great and little traditions. The last stratum of this harmonious universe is the system of human relations or society, which consists of the sub-system of this worldly relations and the sub-system of other-worldly relations. For the Chinese, this world, that of the living, and the other world, that of the supernatural, are complementary. Achieving harmony in human relations has always been seen as having the highest value in Chinese culture, and may be seen in the ideal of establishing a nation guided by Confucian ethics. In Confucian philosophy, such harmony needs to be achieved in two areas, the first being family relations and the second being the relationship between the living and the dead. The former may be seen as a type of synchronical harmony, where parents are loving, children filial, and brothers maintain harmonious relations. The latter is a type of diachronical or transcendent harmony, perhaps best expressed by the saying that: "There are three kinds of unfilial behavior. The worst is the failure to produce descendants" (puhsiao yu san, wu-hou wei-ta /G~~:::::: ' ~1&~ *). The perpetuation of a family is part of the pursuit of transcendent harmony, involving both living family members and their ancestors. One of the essential characteristics of this system of human relations is that it considers living and deceased family members as making up one body, and that true equilibrium may only be achieved when the

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relationship between the two is harmonious. This ideal of human relations is one of the most deeply-rooted traits of Chinese culture, perhaps accounting for the fact that authoritarian patriarchal family systems and their attendant ancestor worship remain highly prevalent in Chinese society. Many forms of worship of supernatural forces, intimately linked to ancestor worship, also have retained a high degree of popularity. All this forms a system of human relations which not only applies to this world but also links the natural and supernatural worlds in a harmonious relationship. Such a system of harmony and equilibrium is nothing less than the main pivot holding the great and little traditions together. The former may place greater emphasis on abstract concepts, while the latter may stress ritual actions, yet at their roots both are but two sides of the same coin. Some might expect that in overseas Chinese communities, particularly those made up of new immigrants, such systems of family ethics and their related rituals might be declining in popularity. But in fact the forms of family relations witnessed do not escape the influence of this cultural value system. In the above-mentioned survey of Hsin-chu popular beliefs, we discovered that 61.9% of those self-professed atheists continued to practice ancestor worship, not to mention 38.9% of those who belonged to Christian and other foreign religious communities. There is nothing strange about this, as Christian sects in Taiwan now encourage ancestor worship. Every year, Catholic priests and Protestant ministers participate in inter-faith rituals for the dead alongside Buddhist, Taoist, and popular sectarian specialists. This undoubtedly attests to the profound impact of family values on Chinese culture. To sum up, these three systems of harmony are but three steps to achieve the Chinese ideal of universal harmony, but in formal terms they provide an important link between the great and little traditions. In the little tradition of popular culture, the quest for harmony and equilibrium finds expression in the activities of everyday life. Therefore, the goal of total harmony is intricately linked to ideals of individual well-being and family prosperity. In the great tradition of elite culture, such a quest is expressed in ideals relating to the cosmos and the nation. In this system, the highest goal involves "equilibrium and harmony existing in perfection" (chih chung-ho ¥!c q:tfU). According to The Doctrine of the Mean:

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While there are no stirrings of pleasure, anger, sorrow or joy, the mind may be said to be in the state of equilibrium. When those feelings have been stirred, and they act in their due degree, there ensues what may be called the state of harmony. Let the state of equilibrium and harmony exist in perfection, and a happy order will prevail throughout heaven and earth, and all things will be nourished and flourish. 10

This deeply-rooted system provides an important link between the great and little traditions, with the ideal of universal harmony consistently remaining a central part of elite systems of thought and the desire for individual and family harmony underlying the daily life activities of the masses. Such a deeply-rooted concept also underlies the cultural characteristics linking Chinese the world over.

* In conclusion, if we agree that Chinese people all over the world share the above-mentioned cultural characteristics-Chinese-style dietary habits, Chinese-style family ethics which extend to social relations, and a cosmology based on geomancy and fortune-telling-then it becomes clear that these characteristics are linked to the ideal of pursuing equilibrium and harmony in three different strata described above. The pursuit of harmony in these three strata is in turn related to the goal of achieving universal harmony. Such universal harmony is in fact a popularization of the ideal "equilibrium and harmony existing in perfection" (chih chung-ho) expressed in the Classics. Such a phenomenon links the little tradition of popular culture with the great tradition of elite culture, due to the fact that both share common value systems, thereby forming cultural characteristics common to Chinese the world over. If we agree that the classical ideal of "equilibrium and harmony existing in perfection," or its popular form of pursuing harmony in three strata, is the core value of Chinese culture regardless of whether expressed in the great or little traditions, then we need to pose the following question: How has this core value adapted to the forces of modernization which have so profoundly influenced Chinese people all over the world? I would like to conclude by briefly exploring this problem. 10 From James Legge, The Chinese Classics, Second Edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961), pp. 248-49.

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My research concerning popular religion in Taiwan has proposed that it possesses at least two traits which might in some way be related to economic development: an open-mindedness towards new things and a desire to actively manipulate one's environment.l! The former may be seen through the practice of allowing all manner of deities to be worshipped in one temple, the most I encountered being a total of 61. Such a phenomenon may also explain why many commercial enterprises in Taiwan produce or market a wide variety of products, perhaps due to the influence of the Chinese attitude of attempting to attain equilibrium and harmony in relations with the supernatural world. The latter finds expression in the drive to use one's resources to the utmost, even to the point of taking risks. This is most likely due to the fact that in terms of spatial and temporal harmony, people believe that although fate (ming) is fixed, changes for the better may be obtained through careful manipulation of one's opportunities (yiln). In other words, this is also related to the first of the three strata of harmony described above: attaining harmony with the natural order. I believe that these two characteristics may explain the relationship between Taiwan's ecohomic modernization and its traditional popular culture, something Peter Berger has referred to as the spirit of popular Confucianism.P Some might think it strange to connect economic development and popular culture, and conclude that I have been overly influenced by ideas concerning economic development. Such people might assert that one should adhere to Professor Tu's argument in favor of stressing the interaction between Confucian humanistic values and Western democratic thought.P Or perhaps one should accept Professor Chang Hao's advice and emphasize the great changes occurring in the dialogue between tradition and modernity.l" As regards these problems, perhaps the following passage from an article written by Professor Wang Hu-ning £~. of Fudan University, Shanghai, comes closest to the ideas I am trying to explain in this paper: Today's Chinese culture, revived after having been cast aside, posSee Li Yih-yiian (1991). See "An East Asian Development Model?" in Berger and Hsiao, eds., In Search ofan East Asian Development Model (Brunswich: Transactions Books, 1988). 13 See Tu, '''Wen-hua Chung-kuo' ," p. 61. 14 See Yu-an i-shili yit min-chu ch'uan-t'umg (Taipei: Lien-ching ch'u-pan-she, 1989), pp. 117-38. . 11 12

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sesses a regulatory power towards the Chinese people. Its most valuable aspects are the following cultural values: heaven and man should be as one, one's deeds should match one's thoughts, truth and goodness should stand side-by-side, and one should cultivate oneself and the surrounding environment. These represent a basic attitude and methodology for living one's life. Based on this methodology, one can attain a new balance between heaven and man, thoughts and deeds, truth and goodness, and inner and outer. Although this spiritual regulatory power was cast aside in the past, we believe that it has its value in the future, a value which derives from its encouraging a system of harmony among the people.l'P

Isn't this value of attaining a balance in the four areas Wang describes and thereby helping people reach a state of total harmony exactly the ideal of achieving harmony among people and between the natural and supernatural worlds described in this paper? A number of problems remain to be solved, particularly those of what the above-mentioned regulatory power is and what exactly Wang means by inner and outer harmony. Nevertheless, Wang's comments are significant in that they indicate the continued importance of pursuing harmony to the Chinese people, especially in the face of painful social and cultural adjustments brought on by the process of modernization. The model of three systems of harmony proposed above, therefore, becomes an important supplement to Tu's concept of "Culture China," in that it reveals the ties that bind Chinese people the world over, regardless of social class or educational background. BIBLIOGRAPHY

Anderson, E.N. "Heating and Cooling Foods in Hong Kong and Taiwan." Social ScienceInformations, 19.2(1980) . Berger, Peter L. "An East Asian Development Model?" In Berger and Hsiao, eds., In Search of an East Asian Development Model. Brunswich: Transaction Books, 1988. Chang, K.C. "Introduction." In Food in Chinese Culture: An Anthropological and Historical Perspective. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977. Chang Hao ~Jm. Yu-an i-shih yu min-chu ch'uan-t'ung ~IFaEililHIi!~±f~Uji'E. Taipei: Lien-ching ch'u-pan-she, 1989. Cohen, Myron. "Being Chinese: The Peripheralization of Traditional Identity." Daedalus, 120.2 (1991), 113-34. Legge, James. The Chinese Classics. Second Edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961. Li Yih-yiian. "Ancestor Worship and the Psychological Stability of Family Mem15

See Wang Hu-ning (1991).

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bers in Taiwan," in Yoshimatsu and Tseng, eds., Asian Family Mental Health. Tokyo: Tokyo Psychiatric Research Institute, 1988. _. "Ho-hsieh yu chiin-heng: min-chien hsin-yang chung te yii-chou ch'uan-shih." fl:fnii~~ffkj : t\~la'ffi"frp9='l39~m~" . In Lin ChilJ~pj.nK.**~-¥ ,ed., Hsientai jen hsin-ling te chen-k'ung yii pu-ch 'ang f\:;.A,L.,!l1J:J wt 2~1iIifit Taipei: Yiichou-kuang ch'u-pan-she, 1988. _. "T'ai-wan min-chien tsung-chiao te hsien-tai ch'ii-shih: tui Pi-te Po-ko chiao~ho~ tUl}~1.a fa-chan wen-huaJiIl-su-lun te hui-ying" ai1!t~ra'*~I39~f\::m !~ • M'O.li~fBm~~3t{tlZ:;j~IDfQI39@1U! . In K.C. Chang et aI., eds., K 'ao-ku, li-shih yii wen-hua lun-chi ~I!i ' !fl~~3t {t~6li~. Taipei: Cheng-chung shuchii,1991. Lii Li-cheng. T'ien, je1!J she-huj~shih-lun Chuntt!!uo !h'uan-t'ung te yii-chou jen-chih ~~6li9='~f$ti1tI39T"ma2~m~. Taipei: Academia mo-hsing :R. ' .A ' Sinica, Institute of Ethnology, 1990. Sung Wen-Ii *3tJI!. & Li Yih-yiian. "Ko-jen tsung-chiao hsi~: T'ai-wan ti-ch'u tsu!1g-c::hiao hsin-yang te Ii~[ i-chung kuan-ch'a" M.A7J'~M;.: ai1!t:tt!!@:' */llCffi", Ch'ing-hua hsiieh-paofri1f;~m, 18.1 (1988). Tu Wei-ming.-"'Wen-hua Chung-kuo' ch'u-t'an" m1f;~m. Chiu-shih nien-tai yiiehk'an7t -t~f\:;J:J fU, 245 (1990),60-61. _. "Culture China: the Periphery as Center." Daedalus, 120.2 (1991),1-32. Wang Hu-ning. "Ch'uan/ttsao-hsing tsai-sheng: Chung-kuo ch'uan-t'ung wen-hua te wei-lai ti-wei" :aUkM;.1'J1:. : 9='~f$~3t {tl395f(3101!!fll. Fu-tan hsueh-pao m:.§.~m, 3 (1991),67-72. Watson, James. "Standardizing the Gods: The Promotion of 'T'ien Hou' along the South China Coast, 960-1960." In David Johnson, Andrew Nathan and Evelyn Rawski, eds., Popular Culture in Late Imferial China. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985. _. "The Structure of Chinese Funerary Rites: Elementary Forms, Ritual Sequence, and the Primacy of Performance," in Watson and Rawski, eds., Death Ritual in Late Imperial and Modern China. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988.

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CONTRIBUTORS Pao-chen CHEN IljH*~ is a member of the Faculty of Art History at National Taiwan University, and has written extensively on Chinese paintings and calligraphy. Lloyd HAFT is associate professor in modern Chinese literature at Leiden University; his special field of research is modern Chinese poetry; in addition, he is an outstanding poet, writing both in English and in Dutch. Christoph HARBSMEIER is professor of Chinese studies at the University of Oslo; his main field of research is Chinese philosophy in its relation to classical Chinese modes of expression. Chi-p'eng Ho fiiJ~iW, professor of Chinese litarature at Taiwan National University, has written extensively on Sung and modern Chinese literature. Chang-tze Hu tiij~~, a specialist in Chinese historiography, having taught history at Tung-hai University, T'ai-chung, Taiwan, is a representative of the National Science Council, R.O.C., in Europe. Chiin-chieh HUANG ji'i~~, professor of history at National Taiwan University, is a recognized authority on Mencius, and on postwar Taiwan; on both subjects he has written many publications in Chinese, English and Japanese. With Erik Zurcher, he has co-edited Norms and State in China, published by EJ. Brill, 1993. Wilt IDEMA is professor of Chinese language and literature at Leiden University; he is an outstanding authority in the field of traditional Chinese fictional literature. Catherine JAM! is a senior researcher at the Centre National de Recherches Scientifiques in Paris; she has published extensively on Chinese mathematics.

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CONTRIBUTORS

Yi-yiian LI :$1J'IiI, a well-known anthropologist, is a member and fellow of the Academia Sinica, President of the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange, and founder and dean of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences, National Tsing-hua University. Li-chen LIN :tt.~, professor of Chinese literature at National Taiwan University, has written extensively on Wei-Chin literature and thought. Michael LOEWE is emeritus reader of the University of Cambridge; he has written many publications on early Chinese history, especially of the Han period. Kristofer SCHIPPER is professor of Chinese history at Leiden University; he has published many studies on Chinese religion, especially religious Taoism. Eduard VERMEER is.associate professor in Chinese modern history at Leiden University and director of the Documentation Centre for Modern China at Leiden; his main field of research is Chinese economic history. Kuang-ming Wu ~1CIY:l, the John MeN. Rosebush University Professor in philosophy, emeritus, of the University of WisconsinOshkosh, and professor of history at National Chung-cheng University, Taiwan, has written extensively on Chuang Tzu and Chinese modes of thinking. Erik ZURCHER is emeritus professor of Chinese history at Leiden University; his main field of research is the pre-modern Chinese reactions to complex (notably religious) systems introduced from abroad.

SINICA LEIDENSIA 11. ZURCHER E. the Buddhist Conquest qf China. The Spread and Adaptation of Buddhism in Early Medieval China 1. Text. 2. Notes, Bibliography, Indexes. Reprint of the 1st (1959) ed.,. with additions and corrections. 1972. ISBN 90 04 03478 1 12/2. ACKER, W.R.B. (tr.). Some Tang andPre- Tang Texts on Chinese Painting. With Annotations. Vol. II. Chang Yen-Yuan. Li tai ming hua chi, Chapters IV-X 1. Translation and Annotations. 2. Chinese text. 1974. ISBN 90 04 03938 4 13. IDEMA, W.L. (ed.). Chinese Vernacular Fiction. The Formative Period. 1974. ISBN 90 04 03974 0 15. IDEMA, W.L. (ed.). Leyden Studies in Sinology. Papers Presented at the Conference Held in Celebration of the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Sinological Institute of Leyden University, December 8-12, 1980. 1981. ISBN9004 06529 6 16. IDEMA, W.L. the Dramatic (Evre qfChu ru-Tun (1379-1439). 1985. ISBN 90 04 07291 8 17. HULSEWE, AF.P. Remnants qf Ch'in Law. An Annotated Translation of the Ch'in Legal and Administrative Rules of the 3rd Century B.C. Discovered in Yun-meng Prefecture, Hu-pei Province, in 1975. 1985. ISBN 90 04 07103 2 18. HEER, PH. DE. the Care-Taker Emperor. Aspects of the Imperial Institute in Fifteenth-Century China As Reflected in the Political History of the Reign of Chu Chi'i-yii. 1986. ISBN 90 04 078983 19. STANDAERT, N. rang Tingyun, Confucian and Christian in Late Ming China. His Life and Thought. 1987. ISBN 90 04 081275 20. ZURNDORFER, H.T. Change and Continui9i in Chinese Lacal History. The Development of Hui-Chou Prefecture 800 to 1800. 1989. ISBN 90 04 08842 3 21. MANSVELT BECK, BJ. the Treatises qf Later Han. Their Author, Sources, Contents and Place in Chinese Historiography. 1990. ISBN 90 04 08895 4 22. VERMEER, E.B. (ed.), Development and Decline qf Fukien Province in the 17th and 18th Centuries. 1990. ISBN 90 04 09171 8 23. RUITENBEEK, K. Carpentry and Building in Late Imperial China. A Study of the Fifteenth-Century Carpenter's Manual La Banjing. 1993. ISBN 90 04 09258 7 24. IDEMA, W.L. (ed.); ZURCHER, E. (ed.). 7hought andLaw in Qjn andHan China. Studies Dedicated to Anthony Hulsewe on the Occasion of His Eightieth Birthday. 1990. ISBN 90 04 09269 2 26. HAAR, BJ. TER. the White Lotus Teachings in Chinese Religious History. 1992. ISBN 90 04 09414 8 27. YOSHIDA, T.Salt Production Techniques in Ancient China. The Aobo Tu. Translated and revised by H.U. VOGEL. 1993. ISBN 90 04 09657 4 28. HUANG CHUN-CHIEH (ed.); ZURCHER, E. (ed.), Norms and the State in China. 1993. ISBN 90 04 09665 5 29. BLUSSE, L. (ed.); ZURNDORFER, H.T. (ed.). Corflia and Accommodation in Early Modern EastAsia. Essays in Honour of Erik Zurcher. 1993. ISBN 90 04 09775 9 30. MING-WOOD LIU, Madhyamaka 7hought in China. 1994. ISBN 90 04 09984 0 31. EDWARDS, L.P. Men and Women in Qjng China. Gender in the Red Chamber Dream. 1994. ISBN90 04101233

32. EIFRING, H. Clause Combination in Chinese. 1995. ISBN 90 04 101462 33. HUANG CHUN-CHIEH (cd.); zDRCHER, E. (cd.). Time and Space in Chinese Culture. 1995. ISBN 90 04 102876

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