A patterned past: form and thought in early Chinese historiography 9780674008618

Table of contents :
Frontmatter
Conventions (page xi)
Dukes of Lu in the Spring and Autumn Period (page xiii)
Abbreviations (page xv)
Introduction (page 1)
Part I Speech and Pattern
1 The Rhetoric of Good Order (page 21)
2 Wen and the Meaning of Verbal Art (page 57)
3 Intelligibility in the Extra-human World (page 96)
4 Order in the Human World (page 125)
Part II Narrative and Justice
5 The Anecdotal History (page 163)
6 Narrative and Recompense (page 191)
7 Aesthetics and Meaning (page 222)
8 Writing and the Ends of History (page 256)
Appendix
Orality and the Origins of the Zuozhuan and Guoyu (page 315)
Reference Matter
Notes (page 327)
Works Cited (page 443)
Chinese Character List (page 471)
Index Locorum (page 487)
Subject Index (page 491)

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A Patterned Past Form and Thought in Early Chinese Historiography

Harvard East Asian Monographs 205

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

Published by the Harvard University Asia Center

and distributed by Harvard University Press Cambridge (Massachusetts) and London 2001

© 2001 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College

Printed in the United States of America

The Harvard University Asia Center publishes a monograph series and, in coordination with the Fairbank Center for East Asian Research, the Korea Institute, the Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies, and other faculties and institutes, administers research projects designed to further scholarly understanding of China, Japan, Vietnam, Korea, and other Asian countries. The Center also sponsors projects addressing multidisciplinary and regional issues in Asia.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Schaberg, David, 1964-

A patterned past : form and thought in early Chinese historiography / David Schaberg. p. cm. -- (Harvard East Asian monographs ; 205) Includes bibliographic references and index. ISBN 0-674-00861-8 (cloth : alk. paper)

| 1. Zuogiu, Ming. Guo yu. 2. China--History--Spring and Autumn period, 722-481 B.C.-- Historiography. 3. Zuoqiu, Ming. Zuo zhuan. 4. Confucius. Chun qiu. 5. Historiography--China. I. Title. II. Series. DS747.15.S32 2001

931'.03'072--dc21 2001039651

Index by the author

© Printed on acid-free paper | Last figure below indicates year of this printing

II 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 03 O02 OI

things will not remain connected, will not heal,

and the world thickens with texture instead of history, texture instead of place. _ —Jorie Graham, “The Geese” Yet it will not have been profitless to look into those things, at first glance trivial, from which the movements of greater events often arise. — Tacitus, Ann. 4.32

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Acknowledgments

This book has benefited from the attentions of numerous discussants and readers. I am grateful to my professors and classmates at Harvard, to my colleagues in the Department of East Asian Languages & Cultures at the University of California, Los Angeles, and to scholars at other institutions who gave me the opportunity to test elements of my argument in talks and

conference presentations. |

Several graduate students at UCLA have helped to make this a better book. Zvi Ben-Dor, James Benn, Steven Day, Bruce Rusk, Lai Guolong, and others pointed out valuable bibliographical leads and electronic resources. George Keyworth, Zhao Gang, and Guy Horton, all of whom served as research assistants at various points during the past years, helped me with the time-consuming task of obtaining and reproducing secondary materials from Chinese and Japanese periodicals. Research assistants’ salaries and other costs of research were supported

by grants from the Council on Research and the Center for International

Studies and Overseas Programs, both at UCLA. The excellent Gateway Service Center of Chinese Academic Journal Publications, administered by the University of Pittsburgh, was immensely helpful in making out-of-theway Chinese articles available.

Special thanks are due to my colleague Lothar von Falkenhausen, who | with characteristic generosity read the entire manuscript and made extensive comments on it. I am equally indebted to David Keightley, whose detailed remarks have done much to improve the clarity, logical consistency, and per-

viii Acknowledgments suasive force of the argument. My friends Michael Nylan and Haun Saussy

have been constant sources of intellectual inspiration and support. Yuri Pines, whose own specialty is the Zuozhuan and Eastern Zhou intellectual history, has given friendly help and intelligent challenges; his work has raised the bar for this sort of study considerably. I also thank the anonymous read-

ers of the manuscript for their timely and perceptive comments, and John Ziemer, whose excellent reputation as an editor is justified in every way. In many respects this book is a distillation of the love and support I have

| received from my family. My wife, Daphne Lei, and our sons, Milo and Rafe, have been a constant source of joy and encouragement. Both Daphne and her sister, Beatrice Lei, have given freely of their own research time to

help this project along. Now that the book is done, I look forward to returning the favor. This book is dedicated to all of my many parents, who taught me to read. D.S.

Contents

Conventions XI

Dukes of Lu in the Spring and Autumn Period Xiii

Abbreviations | XV

Introduction | I Part I Speech and Pattern

1 The Rhetoric of Good Order 21 Speech and the Order of Prose 22/ Rhetoric in Practice 30/

Rhetoric in Theory 40/ Rhetoric in Philosophy 50 |

2 Wen and the Meaning of Verbal Art 57 Wen and the Burden of Artifacts 58/ Text as Artifact: , Citing the Zhouyi 65/ Artifacts of the Zhou: Citing Shi and Shangshu72/ King Wen and Wenci 81/ ‘The Concert for Ji Zha 86

3 Intelligibilicy in the Extra-human World 96 Heaven and Earth 98/ The Five Phases and Yin-yang 104/

Theories of the Human: Music, War, and the Responsive | Universe 112

X Conventions

4 Order in the Human World 126 Spirits and Ancestors 126/ Cultural Others 130/ The Royal Center 135/ The Hegemon 139/ _ Interstate Relations 142/ Internal Administration 148/ The Confucian Virtues 154 Part II Narrative and Justice

5 The Anecdotal History 163 Readings of Historiographical Narrative 164/ Form and Judgment 171/ Experiments in Vision 183

6 Narrative and Recompense 191 } The Anecdote Series 192/ Bao and the Economy of Narrative 207

7 Aesthetics and Meaning 222 Pleasures and Consequences 223/ Poetry Recitation 234/ War and the Utopian Gesture 243

8 Writing and the Ends of History 256 The Invisible Authors 258/ Time and Narration 270/ The Decline of the Zhou Order 276/ The Rise of the South 284/ The Dilemma of Writing 293/ The Death of Confucius and the Birth of Historiography 300

| Appendix Orality and the Origins of the Zuozhuan and Guoyu 315

Notes 327 Works Cited 443 Reference Matter

Chinese Character List | 471

Index Locorum 487

Subject Index 491

Conventions

In order to distinguish homophones and remove ambiguities, I have occasionally departed from standard pinyin. I follow the standards established in Loewe and Shaughnessy, Cambridge History of Ancient China, p. xxv, with some additions. Thus, King Jiing of Zhou ruled before King Jing, his son.

: Wey is the state founded during the Western Zhou, and Wei is the state that became an autonomous entity only during the Warring States period. Qi is the great northeastern state; Qii a much smaller neighbor. Han is the name of a dynasty; Hann the name of a Warring States polity. Both Xu and

Xuu were small states associated with Chu during the late Spring and Autumn period; the territory of Xu was in present-day Jiangsu, and that of Xuu in present-day Henan. Shen was a region of Chu that produced several key advisors to the Chu kings; Shenn was further to the east, in present-day Anhui. Characters for these and most other Chinese words used in the text are

given in a list at the back of the book. I include characters in the text and notes only for long translated passages, where they will be of interest to readers of classical Chinese, and for smaller passages or words where imme-

diate reference to graphs is desirable. | All references to Zuozhuan cite the name of the duke, the year of his reign, the section within that year, and page numbers as in Yang Bojun, Chungiu Zuozhuan zhu. References to Guoyu show the geographical section, and the fascicle, passage, and page numbers as in the Shanghai guji edition prepared by the Shanghai shifan daxue, Guji zhengli zu; references to Wei

Xil Conventions Zhao’s (d. 273) commentary are to the same edition. “Zuo, Xi 22.8 (Yang, pp.

296-69),” for example, is the Zuozhuan passage recounting the defeat of Duke Xiang of Song; “Guoyu, Zhou 3.2 (pp. 94-100)” is the great speech on Sun Zhou.

I have followed the convention of referring to most rulers of Spring and Autumn period states as “dukes,” despite the problems and misconceptions _ that result from this convention; the latter are discussed in Tay, “On the Interpretation of Kung (Duke?) in the Tso-chuan.” All rulers are referred to by posthumous names. Reign dates are based on the tables in Loewe and Shaughnessy, The Cambridge History of Ancient China, pp. 25-29. I use the term “Confucian” to refer broadly to thinkers who cited the words of Confucius approvingly; I do not see these thinkers as having formed a highly organized school during the Warring States period.

Dukes of Lu in the Spring and Autumn Period -

Yin f= r. 722-712 | Huan #8 r. 711-694 Zhuang H+ r. 693-662

Min Bq r. 661-660

Xi f= r. 659-627 Wen rt. 626-609 Xuan r. 608-591 Cheng px fr. 590-573

Xiang 38 t. 572-542 Zhao 4 1. 541-510 Ding 7E fr. 509-495

Aik | | tr. 494-467 {Dao {5 | r. 466-429]

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Abbreviations

BSOAS Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies

CLEAR Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews

EC Early China HJAS Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies HQJJ Huang Qing jingjie Chungiu lei huibian 5 Ys HS 2 AR EK FA a (Qing exegesis of the classics, Chungiu section). 2 vols.

Compiled by Ruan Yuan [7 7 et al. 1860. Reprinted— Taipei: Yiwen yinshuguan, n.d.

JAOS | Journal of the American Oriental Society

MS Monumenta Serica SBBY Sibu beiyao JY #8 tg 22 (Complete essentials of the four divisions). Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1936.

SKQS Yingyin Wenyuan ge Siku quanshu #2 EI) Hi Ae Ss (Complete Collection of the Four Treasuries, photo-

| reprint of Wenyuan pavilion edition). Taipei: Taiwan Shangwu yinshuguan, 1983.

SKQSZMTY Wang Yunwu = # Ff etal., ed. Heyin siku quanshu zongmu tiyao ji siku weishou shumu jinbui shumu & Ef UO fe = SB a

Ate 2X ORK SS A AS A (General catalogue

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

SSJZS Shisanjing zhushu +-= IEG (Notes and commentaries to the Thirteen Classics). Ed. Ruan Yuan [yt jC. 1816. Re- © printed—2 vols., Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1980.

TP T’oung Pao | | XJJ Xu jingjie Chungiu lei huibian #8 #& fe A Fk FA Se Ha (Supplement to Qing Exegesis of the Classics, Chungiu Section).

Comp. Wang Xiangian -F 7c i#f et al. 4 vols. 1888. Reprinted— Taipei: Yiwen yinshuguan, n.d.

A Patterned Past Form and Thought in Early Chinese Historiography

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Introduction

In 638 B.c.., in an episode that was to become a matter of some difficulty

to Confucian commentators, an army from the southern state of Chu de- : feated a force of the state of Song on the banks of the river Hong. Song's ruler, Duke Xiang (r. 650-637), had worked for some years to establish himself as hegemon (ba) of the central states, a role left vacant by the death of

Duke Huan of Qi (r. 685-643). His efforts had necessarily brought him into conflict with Chu, the threat against which the earlier alliance had been organized. On the battlefield, according to all extant versions of the story, the duke displayed a fastidiousness that at first looks admirable, even heroic:”

A -+t—A- CE WM ROERBARF UM: RAR MI BARE

BARA - RRR RARGBL BPEL CA AD - RBM KAI MOA - OA: Ra - RMR? + RMB - OBER: In winter, on the day jisi, the first day of the eleventh month, the duke of Song did battle with the Chu troops by the Hong. When the Song troops had already joined ranks, the Chu troops had not yet finished crossing. The master of horse said, “They are numerous and we are few; allow us to strike them before they have finished crossing.” The duke said, “It is not permitted.” When they had finished crossing, but had not yet joined ranks, he again reported it. The duke said, “It is not yet permitted.” Striking them only after they had made their formation, the Song army was routed. The duke was wounded in the thigh, and his gate officers

were destroyed.” ,

2 Introduction The difficulty of the scene lies in its unusual pairing of generous selfrestraint and disaster. In the moral universe of anecdotes about the Spring and Autumn period (722-479 B.c.E.), victory normally goes to the more decorous and ceremonious combatant; in the generic habits of these anecdotes, those who defer battles seldom lose them.’ In this context, the defeat

at Hong is an absurdity. Why did a well-intentioned act fail so signally? How could a narrative tradition otherwise quite clear in its lessons preserve so striking an instance of misguided moralism? In the version we are reading, that of the Zuozhuan (‘Zuo tradition, Zuo commentary), the demand for an explanation is met by a pair of speeches. _ The duke explains himself, and a minister, perhaps the same master of horse whose advice was ignored, refutes him:

RAB SA-GA-ATTEG - AEE - AZBBH- PUK

8 SAREE CER BRAM + FRA + ARAM - ASA - he MPA) KERW MMR? - TPO BABB - ASZHWA-F

ay ti - | |

Sit HLS - UZ MARIS BRAM RBA BARR UMIaDsB- ARBs: HAE -BHR-S- RMR = BAA - S@RUSRh- FMA - Pa BR RE

All the people of the state blamed the duke. The duke said, “The gentleman does not wound a man twice and does not take graybeards as prisoners. Those who un- | dertook military actions in ancient times did not do so by cutting others off in hemmed-in places. I am no more than the remnant of a lost state, but I do not drum my army forward against forces that have not formed their lines.” Ziyu said, “You do not know how to do battle. That the troops of a powerful enemy were hemmed in and had not yet formed their lines was because Heaven was aiding us. Would it not have been permissible to drum our forces forward against them while they were cut off? Even then we would have been fearful. Moreover, the powerful ones in this case were all of them our enemies. Even when it came to the aged among them, if we captured them then we must take them; what would it

matter if they were graybeards? |

“One elucidates what is shameful and teaches about battle because one seeks to kill the enemy. If you have wounded him once and he has not died, why should you not wound him a second time? If you are sparing of a second blow, then it is as if you had never wounded him at all; if you spare their graybeards, then it is as if you

are surrendering to them. | |

“The three armies are used for the sake of advantage; the bells and drums are used for the sake of giving sound to the fighting spirit. If the use is advantageous, then it is permissible to cut them off in a hemmed-in place. If the sound flourishes

Introduction 3 and rouses morale, then it is permissible to drum an army forward against forces in disarray.””

In the accounts in the Zuozhuan, as in many other early Chinese anecdotes, the longer speech and the last word carry the greater weight. Ziyu’s interpretation has the tacit sanction of this tale’s teller. ‘The duke has invoked the precedent of the ancients where it no longer holds; like a newcomer to the forms of prestige, he has misused the power of citation. In battle, if nowhere else, right action is whatever brings advantage, and advantage lies in de-

stroying the enemy. | |

If in these terms the defeat still seems surprising, the complete Zuozhuan account of the duke’s career before and after the battle makes its outcome

seem overdetermined. The anecdotes in which the duke attempts to wield power among the states generally end with predictions of disaster from Ziyu and others. By ordering a human sacrifice, the duke shows himself to be unworthy; Song is too small a state to lead the alliance; and the duke will be punished for attempting to restore the status of his line, descended from the overthrown kings of Shang.” The Zuozhuan explains events, and prepares for catastrophes, by arraying signs, predictions, and interpretations in advance.

Song’s defeat justifies the premises both of the predictions and of Ziyu’'s military analysis. The reader is to conclude from this and from other narratives of battle that received wisdom guides the successful ruler in the admin-

istration of his state, in the mustering of an army, even in the approach to the field; the practices of the ancients, however, cannot dictate tactics, which

at times require unpredictability and deceit. In the Zuozhuan, then, Duke Xiang’s failure at Hong is an exception that proves a rule, in this case the principle that adherence to precepts passed down from earlier generations brings success. The narrative practice that teaches this precept relentlessly, but with brilliant variety, also marks its limits; it sets apart a strictly circumscribed realm of practicality. For the muscular conservatism reflected in this version of the story, the lesson is one of practicality, and the anecdote does not call into question the overall value of lessons from the past.

The Zuozhuan's solution, arguably the earliest that we have, did not become the authoritative interpretation until much later, and during the centuries of the Warring States (479-222) period and Western Han (206 B.C.E.—C.E. 8) it was only one among several explanations of what had hap-

pened. For this event and for countless others, there was at the outset no force to prevent the proliferation of accounts. Documentary evidence con-

4 Introduction cerning the original events was limited or nonexistent and, in any case, could often be disregarded; what primary sources there were did not control later

interpretations. Equally important, no school of thought had the unity or power to impose a single, uncontradictory vision of the past. Even among the diffuse group of thinkers who saw themselves as followers of Confucius (Kong Qiu, 551-479 B.c.B.), there were differences about basic matters of fact and interpretation. The Gongyang zhuan (Gongyang commentary), for

instance, can be called a “Confucian” text in that it frequently cites the authority of Confucius and shows reverence for a text—the Chungiu (Spring and Autumn annals)—thought to have been the work of Confucius; in both these respects the Gongyang resembles the Zuozhuan. But the Gongyang sides unambiguously with the duke, praising him for his self-destructive rectitude and even likening him to King Wen, a culture hero and founder of the Zhou dynasty (ca. 1045-ca. 249 B.C.E.).” The third early commentary on the Chungiu, the Guliang zhuan, tells the tale as the duke’s punishment for a series of unjust acts and includes an essay on the proper uses of war.’ An opponent of Confucian views, Han Fei (ca. 280-ca. 233 B.c.B.), sharpened Ziyu’s perspective beyond anything imaginable in the Zuozhuan, seeing in the defeat “the disaster of admiring humaneness and rightness.” Sima Qian (ca. 145-

ca, 86) presented both views in the Shiji (Records of the scribe) but in authorial statements adopted the Gongyang position.” The differences over the battle at Hong disclose something that, for good

reasons, we tend to forget when we read the Zuozhuan. The text was not born to authority but grew into it over a period of decades and centuries. The anecdote in which Ziyu lectures the duke on his misapplication of precedent is not the Urtext from which later writers departed to tell the story in their own tendentious ways; it is one among several tendentious tellings, each of which attempts to make sense of a set of historical givens. Historical anecdotes were polemical, political, and philosophical weaponry during the

Warring States and Western Han periods, when the story of Hong was being retold, and the Zuozhuan was no less engagé than any other text. New judgments often came to be attached to anecdotes as they were transmitted;

other characters could appear to explain where Duke Xiang had gone wrong. The anecdotes gathered in the Zuozhuan and the closely related Guoyu (Legends of the states) were distinguished from other versions by the relative inconspicuousness of the polemical framework surrounding them; their narrators, authors, and compilers never revealed themselves by name

| , Introduction 5 and rarely wrote directly of their own views. Instead, they worked through their anecdotes and through the characters who spoke in them, insinuating their variety of what we have come to call “Confucianism” into a depiction of the events of the Spring and Autumn period. For many reasons, but especially because of the association of both texts with the Chungiu and because of the unequaled density of detail their anecdotes provide for the whole of the Spring and Autumn period, they came to overshadow the numerous rival accounts.’ Canonized, they became history; seen as superfluous, the oth-

ers came to be viewed as the origins of fiction. | | The Zuozhuan is a collection of anecdotes and exegetical comments related to the Chungiu, a terse chronicle of events in the state of Lu and associated states during the years 722 through 479 B.C.E. In its current form, the Zuozhuan, like the chronicle, is organized around the years of the reigns of the twelve dukes who ruled Lu during that period. For each year the compilers give several anecdotes and comments, for the most part maintaining chronological order on the level of seasons, months, and days.” The anecdotes concern all the major northern states of the period, as well as such southern states as Chu, Wu, and Yue. At just under 200,000 characters, the Zuozhuan is by far the longest of all pre-Qin texts.”” As early as the second century B.c.E., legend held, quite implausibly, that the work had been written by Zuo Qiuming, a contemporary of Confucius. The Guoyu, a collection of anecdotes having for the most part to do with events of the Spring and Autumn period, was also attributed to Zuo Qiuming. In content it is closely related to the Zuozhuan, but it differs in organization, in emphasis, and in many of the historical details it presents. The primary organizing principle in the Guoyu is geographic. Anecdotes are categorized by state, with three sections of material for the Zhou royal domain, two for Lu, one for Qi, nine for Jin, one for Zheng, two for Chu, one for Wu, and two for Yue. Coverage is less complete than this listing might suggest and less complete than in the Zuozhuan, Within sections of the Guoyu, the organization is chronological but not annalistic, and there are often gaps of years between recorded events. The selection is limited for some states: the section for Zheng concerns only the events preceding the founding of the state, the section for Qi covers only certain administrative measures during the reign of Duke Huan, and the Wu and Yue sections have largely to do with the period of conflict between those two states. Narratives about

Jin, the Zhou royal court, and Lu (a distant third) dominate the work,

6 Introduction which at just over 70,000 characters is less than half as long as the Zuozhuan.*°

The two works have much in common and probably originated in the same general milieu, although perhaps at different periods.” Despite numerous divergences—in minor matters of historical fact, in diction, and even in the preferred length of their speeches—the similarities between the two

| works greatly outweigh the differences between them, especially on the level of narrative and quoted speech. In scores of cases, they give similar or nearly

_ identical versions of the same anecdote. Even when they are not telling the same stories, they use many of the same narrative techniques, adopt the same rhetorical figures in the formal speeches they attribute to characters, and uphold the same general philosophical principles for the administration and interpretation of the world. An old view holds that the Guoyu—the title of which is sometimes understood to mean the “speeches” delivered in the various states—gives more space to formal speeches than the Zuozhuan does.” Although the commonplace is true, it has been used to draw too sharp a distinction between the works. It is misleading to say that the Guoyu is dedicated to the recording of speeches and the Zuozhuan to the recording of affairs. Both works record speeches solely in the context of anecdotes, and

in both works the centerpiece of most anecdotes is the formal speech or dialogue. The Zuozhuan includes extended narratives of a sort not found in the Guoyu, and a few of the speeches in the Guoyu are longer than any in the Zuozbuan, but the basic features of anecdotes in the two works are the same. At least since the Han dynasty, the works have been treated as a pair. For later ages, the literary habits and techniques embodied in the Zuo-

: zhuan and Guoyu had the appearance of a coherent historiographical whole: a virtually complete record of the major political, military, and ritual events in the most powerful Chinese states during the first centuries of the Eastern Zhou period (770-222). I use the term “historiography” to denote both the

process of writing history and the written works that result. In the latter sense, it often designates the Zuozhuan and Guoyu considered together as a single corpus. But this appearance of comprehensiveness resulted from a series of historical accidents and misunderstandings and was only tangentially related to the measures early Chinese courts took to preserve knowledge of the past in writing. As is known from the oracle bones, the rulers of Shang (ca. 1500-ca. 1045 B.c.B.) and pre-dynastic Zhou employed literate functionaries, and insofar as records of divinations and responses constituted histori-

Introduction 7 cal writing, the duties of these functionaries were historical. But there was apparently no exclusive term even for “scribe,” much less for “historian”; in the oldest writings, the graph that would later acquire both those meanings, shi, implies nothing about writing and is indistinguishable from graphs meaning “to employ” (shi) and “to serve” (shi).’” The royal and local courts of the Western Zhou (ca. 1045-771 B.c.E.) greatly expanded the use of writing in official business and probably employed larger groups of literate officials, whose duties were perhaps distinguished by specialized titles. But we know

very little about these officials and cannot say with any certainty how their writings resembled or contributed to historical documentation.” The earliest descriptions of this literate bureaucracy come from texts written centuries later and appear to be attempts to systematize the disparate references to scribal duties found in earlier sources.” One late legend, for instance, held that the “historian of the left” (zuoshi) recorded words, and the “historian of the right” ( youshi) recorded events—or vice versa. However well such offices might account for the differences between the Shangshu (Writings of antiquity) with its long speeches, and the later Chungiu, with its complete lack of quoted speech, the division of labor appears to be a fiction.” The Zuozhuan and Guoyu certainly benefited from recording practices developed in Zhou courts, most notably the maintenance of chronicles such as

the Chungiu and the transmission of written accounts of certain types of events. They may also have drawn on historical lore transmitted by the blind scribes (gushi) reputedly employed in courts.” But the perception that they are coherent and complete accounts was in large part a result of develop-

ments that took place not in the courts of the early Eastern Zhou but in other places and later centuries. The political and ethical attitudes embodied in many of the anecdotes strongly suggest that even if they had their origins in official court contexts, they achieved their final form in a milieu somewhat removed from the direct control of any court." The perspective dominating the anecdotes is that not of rulers but of ministers, especially independentminded conservatives who, as we shall see, espoused “traditional values.” Because this orientation is expressed more forcefully and frequently than any other view, it informs even those elements of the texts in which it is not directly expressed. The feeling of coherence in the texts is thus an effect both of their origins and of the habits of reading they impose. The gradual process that led to the canonization of the Zuozhuan as one of the central Confu-

cian texts, with the Guoyu as a valued supplement, only strengthened the

8 Introduction sense of coherence and completeness. As texts that were, for readers in the

Han and ever after, the most authoritative account of the events of the Spring and Autumn period, the Zuozhuan and Guoyu had a prestige that im-

plied regularity and comprehensiveness. __ | In the following chapters, I read the Zuozhuan and Guoyu together as traces of a historiographical practice that flourished before, during, and perhaps after the fourth century 8.c.z., almost certainly among thinkers who considered themselves followers of Confucius. Although little is known about the lives and habits of these thinkers, it is clear from the texts they produced that they were, like the Confucius of the Lunyu, concerned with the problem of rendering correct judgments of historical individuals and events. For the most part, they expressed these judgments not directly, as Confucius generally did, but through their narratives and especially through the speeches in these narratives. As the problems surrounding the dating of the texts (discussed in the Appendix) demonstrate, neither the Zuozhuan nor the Guoyu came into being at a single time; there are good reasons to believe that the anecdotes were composed, recomposed, and refined over a period of decades and even centuries, through a process of both literate transmission and unwritten teaching and discussion. By referring to the many anonymous authors of the works as “narrators” and “historiographers,” then, I am being deliberately—and necessarily—vague.” The general consistency of perspective in the works derives not from a single controlling authorial conscious-

ness but from the continuity that the generations of teachers and students who retold these narratives were able to maintain in their explanations of Spring and Autumn period history. It is possible to exaggerate the unity of perspective in the two texts. The compilers of both works drew on a variety of sources, and there is no reason to believe that those sources were uniform in every aspect of their philosophical orientation. As treatments of the episode at Hong suggest, historical narration in early China was neither static nor univocal. It was implicated in polemical projects of all sorts and was regularly used to provide new evidence for doctrines as they evolved. ‘The emergence of philosophical schools and the debates among them during the Warring States period was accom-

panied by variation in historical accounts; not even shared allegiance to a founding figure like Confucius ensured uniform views of history and its events. Readers of Mencius and Xunzi know how deep the divisions among followers of Confucius were and how philosophical differences were as a

Introduction 9 matter of course expressed in divergent visions of history. It is apparent, too, that for much of this period the term ru denoted not only specialists in the thought and textual exegeses of Confucius—as it would later—but a much broader and more diffuse group of ritual experts and teachers whose roots were older than Confucianism proper.” As ru who followed Confucius by working through historical accounts,

the historiographers of the Zuozhuan and Guoyu supported his authority both in direct references to his judgments and, more pervasively, in the values they wrote into their narratives. Without suggesting that anything like a sense of orthodoxy controlled the historiographers’ retelling of historical anecdotes, I hold that the viewpoints that receive implicit or explicit sanction in the anecdotes, as various as they are, can be called “Confucian,” as long as

it is understood how encompassing that classification is for the Warring States period. The term does not presume a deep uniformity of doctrine; rather, it implies that the narrators of the many anecdotes collected in these two works held similar views about the best political order, about the value of classical texts, and about ritual and were not convinced by objections to these views advanced by Mohists and other of their contemporaries.

Confucian thought did not start out ideologically pure and develop through cycles of pollution and reform. Like any successful philosophy, it flourished by accommodating and assimilating different views and developed toward orthodoxy only in response to internal and external challenges.” Only in its most practical-minded statements on administration—the Qi and Yue sections of the Guoyu—does historiography seem to defend views

that many Warring States Confucians would have rejected.” However, given the ambivalence that even the Lunyu shows toward Guan Zhong, the seventh-century minister reputed to have introduced major political and economic innovations in the state of Qi, and given the accommodations between Legalism and Confucianism during the Qin and Western Haan, it is not difficult to imagine some self-identified followers of Confucius endorsing even those chapters.” During the Han, arguments for the canonization of the Zuozhuan gained strength and finally prevailed over claims that it could not be read as a commentary on the Chungiu. After this success, a presumption of correctness and coherence colored readings of the Zuozhuan and the associated Guoyu, and despite occasional challenges on grounds of style and content, both works were habitually understood—and continued to exert influence—as expressions of Confucian points of view.

10 Introduction Although the external events of canonization influenced the perception of the texts, the idea that they are coherent and systematic is also grounded in qualities of the texts themselves. That is, it is justified by textual or, prop-

erly speaking, literary characteristics. To borrow a distinction made by Pierre Bourdieu, the works are an opus operatum—a finished work—that bespeaks the existence of a modus operandi, a way of doing the work.” This modus operandi was a practice of historical discourse, of storytelling, that accommodated events to a set of central values, which functioned both de-

scriptively (in narrative) and prescriptively (in political philosophy and ethics) and were held as core beliefs by some followers of Confucius. Because practice apparently dictated that the transmitters of anecdotes remain silent about their own activities, the nature of the practice must be inferred almost entirely on the basis of the works it produced. This is not necessarily an un-

desirable state of affairs.” The reader of the Zuozhuan and the Guoyu as _ documents of intellectual history is forced to attend to the texts themselves, to internal patterns and intratextual connections, rather than to the little that is known about the origins of the texts. Conventional narrative and rhetorical techniques, type scenes, formulaic judgments of events, and other signs of constancy in practice represent the intellectual commitments of the historiographers and—in the near absence of other information—the histo-

riographers themselves. — |

Constants in practice, expressed in the medium of narration, produce the consistent habits of the text. In historical narration, the result is a coherent

. representation of the past. As heterogeneous information about the past is gathered and incorporated into an account, it challenges and ultimately strengthens the unifying perspective, which is forced to develop new means of explanation. In this sense, historiography does not merely share the techniques of fiction writing, as Hayden White and others have argued; history (historia rerum gestarum) and the sense of a history (res gestae) arise out of fic-

tion.” Habits of representation and plot construction are highly durable, both because they belong to lasting communities that have a stake in them and because, as a mainstay of culture—our second nature—they tend to create invisible, self-evident standards of interpretation and judgment. Changes in the kind of facts they must encompass can alter them slowly, as can new theories of historical change, but for self-conscious reasons (like genre) and for unconscious reasons (like some forms of ideology), they tend to last. The habits are logically prior to the data they control. The Zuozhuan

Introduction II and Guoyu cannot truly serve as sources for the history of the Spring and Autumn period until they are understood as intellectual and literary pro-

ductions of the Warring States period. |

My emphasis on the fictional dimensions of historical writing may trouble some readers. It is widely agreed that avowedly historical texts represent worlds in different ways and, in some sense, make the worlds they represent.

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

12 Introduction who prepared these texts. In looking at a work of art, one may not know how accurately a scene is depicted, but one may nevertheless learn, from the brushstrokes or the marks of the chisel, how the image was made, what tradition of depiction it belonged to, and how it related to contemporary works of its kind. Something analogous is possible with early Chinese historiography.

The organization of this book is dictated by literary features of the two texts. In Part I, I examine the rhetorical tendencies and intellectual content of the more plainly philosophical mode of historiographical discourse, the speech. Speeches, in which characters express their judgments of events and individuals, provide the intellectual armature for historical narrative and allow the views of the historiographers to emerge in articulation with historical particulars. Narratives, which are the subject of Part II, set the stage for speeches and furnish the details on which speakers comment; they also assert the existence of a world in which Confucian values, expressed in a Confucian rhetoric, make for predictions that are canny, criticisms that are just, and policies that are successful. The two discursive modes complement each other: speech without narrative would be the unmoored speech of an individual of unknown authority, and narrative without speech would have only mute means of controlling readers’ interpretations. Ultimately, the speeches’ explicit handling of ordering principles becomes a guide to the narratives’ subtler didacticism.

Chapter 1 sketches a rhetoric of the speeches in historiography. After considering the reception of these speeches by readers in imperial times and in our own era, I return to the origins of historiography’s distinctive speech rhetoric. Although long, formal speeches are a feature even of texts datable to the early Western Zhou, the tropes peculiar to historiographical speeches first appear in texts dated to the early Warring States period. The makers of

| these speeches prized marked verbal patterning above all else; other tropes and techniques contributed to the marking of patterns. ‘Two examples show how the rhetoric of good order worked in practice to draw observed particulars into regular structures governed by sanctioned values. Speeches in the Zuozhuan and Guoyu are designed to substantiate moral and aesthetic

judgments through the application of principles (drawn from inherited knowledge and from received texts) to the particulars of historical events. The language of speeches has traits that serve the ends of patterned applica-

| Introduction 13 tion; fluidity in the definition of philosophical shibboleths allows them to function in numerous contexts. Among the techniques used to produce marked patterns, the most prominent are enumeration and repetition with variation. No Chinese Aristotle, early or late, catalogued the tropes of this rhetoric. But several writers remarked on the problem of speaking well and on the difficulty of applying inherited wisdom and historical knowledge to matters under deliberation. More important, all early essayists, Confucians in particular, used some version of patterned rhetoric in their own writings. _ The utterances attributed to Spring and Autumn period courtiers exerted an enormous influence as models of principled discourse.

In Chapter 2, I examine how pattern was made meaningful. The word that came to denote specifically literary patterns, wen, suggests connections —

between those patterns and a much larger set of markings, the signs that function in representation, imitation, and the preservation of cultural norms. Speeches had wen because speech, like flags and fabrics and the other accoutrements of ritual signification, was an inheritable artifact that imposed responsibilities on its inheritors. After reviewing wen’s status in early discus-

sions of cultural reproduction and artistic representation, I show that its meanings are united around problems of correct signification and interpretation. In the narratives of historiography, which exalt hermeneutic acumen, wen in the surface of an object or an utterance opens its interior and its past to understanding. Considered from this perspective, the inherited texts that speakers cite to support their interpretations are wen-bearing artifacts that make their patterning available for application in new contexts. The most artifactual of these was the Zhouyi (Zhou changes), a mantic text that in the Zuozhuan and Guoyu is still closely associated with the manipulation of divi-

| nation equipment to generate interpretable signs. The most important source of citations for speakers, the Shi (Songs, or Poetry), acquired its artifactual character not by association with divination but through long use in ritual exchanges. Like many passages cited from the Yi, Shi songs are memorable for their rhyme and for other obvious manifestations of pattern; adduced in speeches they become tokens of truth and tend to guide the interpretation of historical particulars. As a whole, the citations from the Shi and from the Shangshu in historiographical speeches suggest a mimetic devotion to one culture hero above all others. For the makers of the speeches, King Wen was both the embodiment of effective patterning and the founder of

reproducible Zhou cultural patterns. As references to “patterned words”

14 Introduction (wenci) indicate, speaking well was an act of devotion to the inherited order and to its founder. As a coda to this chapter, I consider the famous Zuozhuan scene in which the Ji Zha, a nobleman from the state of Wu, comments on a performance of traditional song and dance, including the Shi, during a visit to Lu. In his interpretations, the historiographers voice their conviction that the inherited textual artifact is primarily a vehicle of historical interpretation

and cultural preservation. | In Chapters 3 and 4, I shift my focus from the form of the speeches to their intellectual content. I begin with the extra-human world, or those dimensions of the world that are represented as largely detached from human control; these are not completely knowable to human observers and are the subjects of historiography’s fragmentary, ad hoc investigations of the natural world. For the speakers depicted in historiography, whose rhetoric is an exercise in sanctioned interpretation, heaven and earth are suppliers of signs, with the human world, the political realm in particular, as the ultimate referent. Perhaps because of the centrality of the human, however, historiography imposes limits on signification in nature; several episodes imply that natural

events do not always signify and that the regularity of ritual responses is more important than the omens themselves. Turning to uses of the Five Phases and yin-yang classifications, I show that these are best understood in the context of the other principles speakers apply; that is, they are flexible sources of ready-made patterns with mythologized roots in the practices of ancient rulers. Like the other, disparate elements of natural philosophy in historiography, music and war presume the existence of discernable patterns in nature; unlike the other proto-sciences, however, musical understanding and strategy are evocations of pattern through action rather than through interpretation alone. In no case is a pure scientific understanding permitted to invalidate commitments to traditional wisdom. In speculations on the extra-human world, expressed in the rhetorical patterns of good order, the historiographers hold up areas of experience that appear to be above or beyond the control of ritual propriety (li); ultimately, however, they measure

all knowledge and action against the standard of li. Chapter 4 takes up the philosophy of proper action in the human world. I begin with the edges of this world. On the margins of the living and the dead, in their ritual interactions with the ghosts of ancestors and with spir- | its, as in their interpretations of inhuman omens, the speakers tend to see everything as occurring for the world of the living. The order of sacrifice, in-

Introduction 15 deed the whole order of ritual, exists for the sake of commemorating and preserving human distinctions. Content and correctness matter in all practices, but they matter primarily because of public perceptions; the effectiveness of ritual in historiography lies not so much in the real blessings ancestors might grant as in the apprehension, on the part of the governed, of their rulers’ propriety. On the cultural borders dividing the Zhou world from its exterior, speakers again find in otherness the justifications for what they consider their own, the inherited order. Images of the Rong, the Man, the Yi, Chu, Wu, and Yue shift between two extremes. These groups lack knowledge of the old Zhou lessons and are therefore barbaric; they are isolated from the new Zhou depravity and therefore.exemplary. Noble savagery

is for the historiographers a productive oxymoron. From the periphery, I turn to the internal organization of the political world, presenting the major principles that speakers defend in their discussions of the royal court, of the fact of hegemony, of relations among states, and of relations within states. What underlies the speeches on all these subjects is a commitment to ritual propriety and, what is more significant, to an expansion of its range of signification. Perhaps the most important effect of the scores of policy speeches is the development of a flexible notion of li that encompasses everything from specific ritual practices to cosmic forces. At the end of this chapter, in a brief account of speakers’ uses of the main Confucian ethical terms, I show that although all the terms retain the fluidity of definition that speech rhetoric required, the historiographers imply that all are subordinate to the more encompassing value of ritual propriety.

Beginning in Chapter 5, I consider how the explicit lessons of the speeches are borne out in the medium of narrative. In this chapter, as in Chapter 1, I describe formal tendencies and their critical reception. The ba-

| sic form of narrative in historiography is the anecdote, which has a regular morphology organized around the substantiation of judgments. In discussions of several well-known examples, I argue that the motive energy of nar-

rative in the anecdote derives from the ubiquitous drive to interpret and from the value of exchanged gifts, services, and disservices. Anecdotes can be

understood as experiments in interpretation and as demonstrations of the historiographers’ success in constructing plots around Confucian assumptions about interpretability. Chapter 6 extends the consideration of narrative to a higher level of organization. Although the Zuozhuan and Guoyu are anecdotal throughout and

16 Introduction recount events only by means of anecdotes, both works gather some of their accounts into series of anecdotes. This allows for the coherent narration of complex events involving multiple incidents and multiple groups of actors.

The principle of exchange that operates within anecdotes becomes more

marked in series, in which personal and impersonal forces of return and compensation (bao) establish the conditions for narrative completeness. ‘The main exhibits in this chapter are the series constructed around the careers of King Ling of Chu (r. 540-529) and Duke Wen of Jin (r. 636-628). The king is destroyed by revenge, whereas the duke succeeds through rewards; in both cases, ritual propriety is the standard against which the reciprocal value of

deeds is measured.

In keeping with the roles ritual display, material value, and exchange play in the anecdotes, aesthetic judgment is of central importance in the historiographers’ construction of historical meaning. In Chapter 7, I first discuss the aestheticization of the five senses and the perils and benefits associated

with them and then turn to the topos of the banquet. As opportunities for synaesthetic enjoyment, banquet scenes in the Zuozhuan allow displays of a Zhou sensus communis that draws anecdote series together into narrative wholes and endows the interactions of states with hallowed significance. The most privileged of all cultural performances practiced at banquets is the poetry recitation, in which ministers represent their own and their states’ aims in the shared medium of the Shi. Although the banquet and poetry recitation are most appropriate to times of concord, they have utopian echoes in certain battlefield gestures of noble warriors. In the military narratives, for which the historiographers of the Zuozhuan are famous, they tested

ritual propriety under the stress of violence. As the tale of Hong showed, they esteemed tactical sense, but in their depictions of war and bravado they | also suggested that a uniting structure of propriety subsists even between

warring armies and forms the basis for peace. | In the concluding chapter, I consider what historiography as opus implies about the historiographers and their modus operandi. The historiographers are all but invisible in these works; they do not draw attention to their role in the collecting, retelling, and arranging of their anecdotes, and they adopt a

narratorial position that tends to obscure the distance between their own time and the time of the events. However, their depictions of the heroic actions of scribes in recording the immoral deeds of rulers probably reflect their own vision of the duties of the historian and imply that their own ef-

Introduction 17 forts are a similar form of judgment and correction of the historical record, however belated. History is so opaque that only a Confucian vision can penetrate it, but to an observer with the proper understanding, it illustrates that morality is constant even as it records an increasing departure from that standard. In their narratives of the ending of the Spring and Autumn period, the historiographers establish the conditions for the reception of their work through a drama of reification. Narrating a series of political crises and collapses that mark the end of the classic Zhou order, they show how the values associated with the traditional order survive the catastrophe and make it intelligible. Finally, in tying the meaning of the ending to the rise of written law codes and to the death of Confucius, the historiographers make a place for themselves and their vocation; acting invisibly behind their anecdotes, they carry on Confucius’ work of historical judgment and turn writing to its proper juridical uses. In an Appendix, I review theories about the dating and authorship of the Zuozhuan and Guoyu. The prevailing opinion holds that the works had multiple authors and were complete in content (although not in form) by the end of the fourth century and the beginning of the second century B.c.z., respectively. Without challenging this view, I suggest, on the basis of the work of several Chinese and Japanese scholars, that oral transmission had an important role in the preservation and development of the anecdotes. ‘The

Zuozhuan and Guoyu are not straight transcriptions from lore; they are clearly based in part on primary written documents and on revisions of earlier transcriptions. But pervasive features of the anecdotes—including the prevalence of true predictions, the prominence of well-crafted speeches, and the differences in the versions given in the two works—make it likely that many of them were transmitted by word of mouth for a period of decades or

even centuries. ,

Literary criticism and historical analysis work synecdochally; they claim to do justice to their subjects through informed selection and re-presentation. The length and complexity of texts such as the Zuozhuan and the Guoyu

make such justice elusive. Some interesting particulars, whether of narrative | or of philosophical principle, will always escape the attempt to characterize _ historiography as a whole. For this reason, a secondary study must be satis-

fied with approximate justice: a description of the general features of speeches and narratives, supported by closely read examples and references

18 Introduction to corroborating passages, that approaches the truth and necessarily falls short of it. For every passage I have been able to discuss in depth in these chapters, there are ten or twenty others, equally intricate, equally unique, that constitute the real texture of historiography: a web of particular individuals, events, and judgments that embody the play of generalities without ever disappearing into them. As the narrative of Duke Xiang’s failure at Hong shows, and as the constant testing of inherited values within the anecdotes implies, the historiographers’ material was still alive for them; they

| were trying both to get the facts right in all their specificity and to see the rightness in the facts. My sketch of their sense of justice and of the literary forms to which they entrusted it is at best a prolegomenon to the works themselves and to the centuries of reading they inspired.

PART I Speech and Pattern

BLANK PAGE

ONE | | The Rhetoric, of Good Order

In the chapter devoted to speeches in the Shitong (Penetration of history), Liu Zhiji (661-721) emphasized both the cultured elegance and the admira-

Bay |

ble stylistic restraint of speeches in the Zuozhuan:

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RE BBKRSMBA FEM ie MAR MT : Rie AB

The Zhou, observing the two previous dynasties, was refined in its cultural practice. Ministers and envoys especially stressed the language of protocol; their speeches were subtle yet to the point, while their words were flowing and beautiful yet never in excess. The Chungiu's accounts of Lii Xiang’s break with Qin, of Zichan’s presentation of the prisoners, of Zangsun’s remonstrance with the duke over the installation of the tripods, of Wei Jiang’s response concerning the execution of Yanggan—all are examples of this.’

That Eastern Zhou historiographical works possess specifically literary qualities and that such qualities inform their representation of reality are nowhere more obvious than in the speeches these works purport to record. I distinguish the “speech” from other forms of utterances both by its length and by the unique rhetorical tendencies it can display. Speeches may reach hundreds of characters in length, and unlike the shorter remarks exchanged

in dialogue, they generally show an attention to such strictly rhetorical | considerations as diction, structure, and the use of topoi. The form is of singular importance. Other literary modes in historiography have their own

22 The Rhetoric of Good Order functions: dialogue reveals truths about the character and knowledge of the speaker and, often, the state he or she represents; narrative imports the events of the world into the text and in the process naturalizes assumptions of all sorts. But it is speech that makes assumptions patent. Reflections on the workings of the world, formulations of the laws of history, thoughts on morality, and elaborations of theory belong, in this historiography, to the speech; with very few exceptions, they are uttered by named speakers who

are placed in and comment on particular situations.’ The speech is not the only mode of presentation for these things; other modes, narrative in particular, are used to establish the connection between event and meaning. Still, because it is in the speech that theoretical reflection becomes explicit, the rhetorical and structural habits that distinguish the speech as a literary form leave their mark on all enunciations of thought within this historiography. Although the rhetorical tendencies that operate in speeches underwent significant changes during the first millennium before our era, the centrality

, of quoted speech in literary representations was a constant. The endurance of these formal habits testifies to a lasting set of assumptions and activities among the people who produced the writings. In establishing the importance of quoted speech for these historiographers, I first give an overview of later critical treatments of the speeches they report and then survey uses of quoted speech in earlier Zhou writings. These historical sketches provide a context for the main business of the chapter, a detailed analysis of two major speeches and a general description of the rhetorical and structural principles at work in them. Speech rhetoric in the Zuozhuan and Guoyu tends toward an ideal of proportion and order, and since the speeches are quite clearly the most carefully composed passages in this historiography, it is worthwhile to see what heights this rhetoric could reach. This understanding of the surface characteristics of the structure will serve, in the following chapters, as the basis for discussion of the significance the historiographers attributed to structure itself and the implications speech rhetoric had for the development of theoretical knowledge.

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

The Rhetoric of Good Order 23

evaluated the work according to two distinct standards.’ On the one hand, the fierce academic conflicts that preceded the Han canonization of the Zuozhuan as a commentary on the Chungiu had never quite subsided. Although a thinker like Liu Zhiji could expose the inadequacies of the Chungiu, far more common was the attitude that led to the work of Dan Zhu (72470) and his followers, who attempted to read the classic without reference to | the supposed distortions of the three commentaries.’ On the other hand, even partisans in the debates acknowledged the Zuozhuan’s stylistic excellence. Fan Ning (339-401), a proponent and annotator of the Guliang commentary, wrote of the Zuo that it was “beautiful and rich” (yan er fu) but overly interested in the extra-human business of spirit mediums (wu). The Jin scholar Xun Song (262-328) followed Zheng Xuan (127-200) in observing that the Zuo emphasized ritual propriety but noted that “in it luxuri| ance and lovely phrases abound” (duo gaoyu meici). He Xun (d. 320), also of the Jin, wrote: “The commentary of Master Zuo is the acme of historiography. It is as patterned (wen) and as variegated as the clouds and the moon, as high and as deep as mountains and oceans.” An ambivalence attends these praises, as it does Han Yu's judgment: the stylistic richness of the Zuozhuan | is an abundance, yet it is also an excess that interferes with its function as commentary. The Guoyu, thought of since the Eastern Han as a collection of Zuo Qiuming’s surplus material and as an “outer commentary” (waizhuan) to the Chungiu, has been the object of a similar ambivalence, perhaps the more so because some of its speeches outdo the Zuozhuan counterparts in prolixity and rhetorical complexity.° One occupation of literary critics is the making of anthologies. These, in conjunction with other factors, determine what part of the literary tradition is read. The history of prose anthologies during the past ten centuries shows how first speeches, then complete narratives from historiography, were accorded a specifically literary value as models for guwen prose and as uniquely

interpretable traces of ancient minds. Although many important early anthologists of guwen deliberately avoided selections from the Classics,’ even in

the Song there were those who were willing to put passages from the Classics side by side with more recent writings. As the editors of the Siku quanshu (Complete collection of the four treasuries) noted, Zhen Dexiu (1178-1235)

was the first to include passages from the Zuozhuan and Guoyu in a prose anthology.” In his Wenzhang zhengzong (Correct lineage of essays), he presented numerous excerpts from both works in his categories of diplomatic

24 The Rhetoric of Good Order speeches (ciling), critical expositions (yilun), and narratives (xushi). Six fascicles contain anecdotes built around set speeches; only one is devoted to the

narratives. ,

Anthologists of subsequent centuries followed Zhen’s lead in emphasizing speeches over narratives. In compiling the Miaojue gujin (Wonders old and new), Tang Han (fl. mid-thirteenth c.) selected eight anecdotes from the Zuozhuan and seven from the Guoyu, presenting them without categorization or commentary. In every case, his choices reflect an interest in set speeches and dialogues; he included none of the great battle narratives.” In Wenbian (Compilation of prose), Tang Shunzhi (1507-60) neglected the famous narratives entirely, placing speeches and dialogues from the Zuozhuan and Guoyu under the rubrics of answers (dui), memorials of remonstrance (jianshu), discursive memorials (lunshu), memorials for requests (shuging), dis-

cussions (lun), and diplomatic speeches (ciming)."° Altogether these accounted for seven of the sixty-four fascicles of the work. The Yuxuan guwen yuanjian (Profound mirror of ancient-style prose, selected by the emperor), which contains pieces selected by the Kangxi emperor (r. 1662-1722) in 1685, devotes four of its sixty-four fascicles to the Zuozhuan and two to the Guoyu. The emperor included the battle scenes and a few other famous narratives, but most of his excerpts are remonstrances, discussions, and other types of formal speeches. The texts are accompanied by eyebrow commentary written by editors working under the emperor. The most influential of all guwen anthologies, the Guwen guanzhi (Cynosure of ancient-style prose), published in 1695 by Wu Chengquan (fl. 16951711) and his great-nephew Wu Tiaohou, omits the battle narratives entirely; almost all of the thirty-four Zuozhuan passages and eleven Guoyu passages

with which it begins are famous speeches and dialogues." Yu Cheng’s (fl. 1743) Guwen shiyi (Elucidation of ancient-style prose) resembles the imperial selection in the space it allots to Zuozhuan (two fascicles) and Guoyu (one), in its emphasis on speeches, especially remonstrances, and in the sheer quantity of commentary it adds to each passage. With the rise of the ‘Tongcheng school, conventions of guwen anthologizing changed. At first, like some of their Song predecessors, ‘Tongcheng adherents avoided excerpting passages from the Confucian classics and other

pre-Qin works; this exclusion was intended to show respect for the Classics.” The Guwen yuexuan (Ancient-style prose: a concise selection) of the

The Rhetoric of Good Order 25 school’s patriarch, Fang Bao (1668-1749), starts from the Western Han and

includes nothing from the Zuozhuan, Guoyu, or other Classics. Yao Nai (1732-1815) departed from Fang’s precedent by including in his famous Guwen ci leizuan (Categorized collection of ancient-style prose; 1779) selections from the Zhanguoce (Stratagems of the Warring States), a Han compilation of clever diplomatic speeches and ruses. Many readers apparently regretted the omission of the Classics.’* But it was only in the nineteenth century that

another important Tongcheng figure, Zeng Guofan (181-72), again presumed to anthologize the Classics alongside other exemplary prose. In his Jingshi baijia zachao (Various transcriptions from the Classics, the histories, and the Hundred Schools), he placed a total of twenty-eight passages from the Zuozhuan in five categories.” Although Zeng did include several famous remonstrances and letters, it is significant that most of his excerpts are narratives of battles, civil disorders, and treaties, which, although they encompass speeches, have generally been valued for their narrative style rather than for their speech rhetoric. A supplement to Yao’s anthology, the 1895 Xu Guwen ci leizuan (Supplement to Categorized Collection of Ancient-Style Prose) by Li

Shuchang (1837-97), has sixteen pieces from the Zuozhuan under the categories of memorials (zouyi), letters (shushuo), edicts and orders (zhaoling), admonitions and inscriptions (zhenming), elegies and sacrificial orations (aiji), and detailed records (xuji). Narratives of battle and related subjects domi-

nate.” Commentarial works by Tongcheng adherents suggest an abiding interest in the narratives of historiography and in the ways they convey meaning through subtleties of style.”° Late imperial anthologies and commentaries inculcated the assumption, still operative today, that Eastern Zhou historiography is properly the object of literary study. ‘The work of the Tongcheng school, especially, established it as a given that style is intrinsic to historiography’s methods of conveying moral judgments. Even in the midst of protracted debates over the authenticity of the Zuozhuan and its relation to the Guoyu,’ admiration for the literary excellence of the two texts has not flagged. Especially in recent decades,

Asian and Western scholars have devoted articles and monographs to the specifically literary characteristics of the works and the rhetorical features of the speeches. In some cases, their methodology builds on the techniques established by imperial-era readers. Other scholars apply European methods and categories. In what follows I adhere strictly to neither methodology and

26 The Rhetoric of Good Order , borrow from both in an attempt to identify the rhetorical values that the

historiographers held most dear. ! As literary works and as intellectual documents, the Zuozhuan and Guoyu advanced the claim that a well-wrought speech stands in a privileged relation to truths about human beings, social situations, histories, and futures. This claim was written into what I call the rhetoric of good order. The main attraction of these texts for guwen reformers and prose anthologists was their tales of literary talent put to practical use. Even when Spring and Autumn period ministers failed to convince their immediate audience, their carefully crafted speeches generally had the tacit approval of the narrators; they were not mere models of style but examples of a literary activity whose value was not in question. Late imperial connoisseurs of the speech, like the historiographers themselves, were fascinated with the effect of eloquent speech on policy. The roots of this fascination are nearly as deep as the beginnings of Chinese writing. Long speeches are found in bronze inscriptions, and they are the rule in the earliest Shangshu texts. Poems in the “Greater Elegantiae” (“Daya’) section of the Shi sometimes include extended quotations of speech,” and the texts of the “Hymns” (“Song”) are obviously to be imagined as utterances, even when the speakers and audience are not identified. The Western Zhou elite cared about remembering words that had been spoken, and they found ways to preserve both speeches and the stories of how they had come to be delivered. As late as the Warring States period, when the lore of the Chungiu was being collected in source-texts for the Zuozhuan and the Guoyu,

that ancient work of preservation was effective: inherited words are the soundest source of authority for historiography and are constantly cited in speeches as unerring tokens of the truth.

Who composed the speeches in the Zuozhuan and Guoyu? Were the speeches in fact delivered as recorded by the Spring and Autumn period statesmen to whom they are attributed? Are they late fabrications of the compilers of the historiographical texts? Or is there a mean between the literalist and skeptical readings? As I argue in the Appendix, some of the detailed information in historical anecdotes of the sort found in the Zuozhuan and the Guoyu almost certainly derives from written sources—most of them now lost—whose accuracy we have little reason to doubt. In the case of the speeches, however, we have every reason to suspect revision, amplification, and even outright fabrication during the decades or centuries separating the

The Rhetoric of Good Order 27 supposed moment of utterance and the inclusion of the speeches in collections of historical anecdotes. It is notoriously difficult to transcribe speeches verbatim, and efforts to establish how Spring and Autumn period courts would have produced such transcriptions have so far relied upon circumstantial evidence.” The speeches themselves, whether they are predictions or regular deliberations, frequently betray more knowledge of later events than would have been available to a real speaker. Different anecdote collections often record very different speeches for the same event, and even the Zuozhuan and the Guoyu, which are more similar to each other than any other two early Chinese works, always give at least slightly differing versions of the same speech.

We know that speakers loved to recall and cite the words of their predecessors in their own speeches. Speeches were in circulation, as were memories of what had occurred on important historical occasions. We have no evidence that speakers checked their memories of speeches against written records, and we can only surmise that the speeches in circulation were subject to variation and revision to serve the purposes of the recollector. In recollection and repetition, the oration would become more suitable to its occasion and more prescient than any true utterance could be. Its rhetoric would acquire a perfection implausible in impromptu speech. Its grammar and diction might lose certain vernacular features they had had and become more formal. In short, even if the speech as it has come down to us in written form

shared a great deal with what someone, say the great Zheng statesman Zichan, said in 548 B.c.z., it would have undergone a literary reworking that , might well reflect specific intellectual needs of a later period.

Given the difficulty of pinpointing a moment of composition for any of the speeches, it is impossible to write a history of the development of rhetoric during the Spring and Autumn period. It is possible, however, to outline the most common rhetorical features of speeches recorded in the two most important works about the period. This literary investigation is not without relevance to the continuing problem of determining the value of these texts as historical documents. Historical knowledge does not pass untroubled into and out of texts; rather, it assumes particular forms in response to the needs of historical individuals, some of whom are authors of historiographical works. The received accounts of Spring and Autumn history are selective, biased, and manipulative—because their authors and users needed them to be so. Their consciousness of history was affected both by what they knew

28 The Rhetoric of Good Order about the past and by what they needed to be able to say in the present.” The historiographers do some of their best work on the past in their recording of speeches.

Although the Zuozhuan and Guoyu are not the earliest texts in the Chinese tradition to attribute lengthy speeches to historical individuals, they are ~ the first in which the narrative frames surrounding the speeches amount to something resembling a continuous historical account. The oldest Shangshu documents are devoted to the words of founding Zhou luminaries and include only a few disconnected narrative passages.” Certain chapters are thought to date from the same centuries as the Zuozhuan and the Guoyu, but

| these, too, largely eschew narration in favor of quotation.” Differences extend to the substance of speeches themselves. The grammar of the earliest Shangshu chapters, which perhaps date to around 1000 B.c.z., differs quite markedly from that of the historiographical speeches, a fact that is unsurprising no matter what dates are assigned to the historiographical texts. ‘The rhetorical differences are at least as striking. None of the early Shangshu texts has an elaborate and obvious structure that subordinates all parts to a single principle. The style of harangue or injunction typical of the earliest texts favors the accumulation of imperatives rather than the systematic analysis of a particular problem.” Although speakers in the Shangshu emphasize the

authority of the past models of behavior by speaking of them frequently, they do not generally quote them. In historiographical rhetoric, by contrast,

clarity and elegance of structure are the pre-eminent rhetorical achievements, and the authority of the past is brought to bear through citations (especially of the Shi) that contribute to and influence structure.

, In only one Shangshu text does the rhetoric at all resemble that of historiographical speeches. The “Hongfan,” generally dated to the Warring States period, is an exposition of the nine components of the “Great Plan,” which Heaven denied to Gun and then granted to his son, the sage / waterengineer Yu.” It begins by listing nine components (“The first is the Five Phases; the second is reverence in the Five Duties . . .”) and then elaborates on the contents of each component. Thus for the Five Duties (wu shi ):”

LS -—-AR- HS: =H OAR FAR: RAR: SAR: Hh FAW HRA BES: Ate REM AAR APR: AEE The Five Duties. The first is called appearance; the second is called speech; the third is called vision; the fourth is called hearing; the fifth is called thought. Appearance refers to being respectful; speech refers to compliance; vision refers to discernment;

The Rhetoric of Good Order 29 hearing refers to acuity; and thought refers to penetration. Respect makes for reverence; compliance makes for good order; discernment makes for intelligence; acuity makes for good counsel; and penetration makes for sage wisdom.”

This passage, like the rest of the “Hongfan,” works on a principle of substi-

tution. Under the heading “Five Duties” is a list of duties (“appearance,” | etc.). Each of these is then matched with another term describing the proper form of behavior (“respectful”), and each of these is in turn matched with the result of such behavior (“reverence”). This pattern of listing and equating is found in longer speeches in the Zuozhuan, Guoyu, and in essays in some of the philosophers, but it is rarely pursued so doggedly as in the “Hongfan.” Western Zhou and Spring and Autumn period bronze inscriptions possessed well-defined structural conventions that barely changed for several centuries.” Inscriptions frequently contained speeches, most commonly the remarks of the king or other political superior who granted the gift that occasioned the casting and inscribing of a vessel. Neither the inscriptions nor the speeches show the tendency toward marked pattern that is observable in historiographical speeches and in “Hongfan.” Only in one late and exceptional set of inscriptions does a speaker use techniques of organization and citation closely resembling those found in historiographical speeches. ‘The inscriptions on three vessels associated with a late fourth-century king of

Zhongshan, unearthed between 1974 and 1978, present relatively long speeches buttressed by appeals to aphorisms, to historical precedents, and to

such virtues as “good faith” (xin) and “loyalty” (zhong). The speaker also draws a contrast between “former times” (xizhe) and the “present day” or “current situation” (jin), a rhetorical technique typical of historiographical speeches but rare in bronze inscriptions and Shangshu speeches.” Anecdotes in the Zuozhuan and the Guoyu often depict confrontations between a knowledgeable, hermeneutically talented observer and a set of events that are narrated as raw phenomena. Much of the interest of an anecdote lies in the speech that results from such a confrontation, especially in the citation of authoritative texts to explain the meaning of events.” These acts of interpretation, which are the focus of the next chapter, repeatedly open passages from the Shi, the Shangshu, and other received texts to new interpretations and, at the same time, find in the world evidence of the received texts’ relevance. Even when a canonical tag is of itself perfectly applicable to the events at hand, the historiographers seem to have relished the working out of the problem: observed events are recounted and restructured

30 The Rhetoric of Good Order to bring them into line with the order of the received language, the terms of the received language are applied to observed events, and the speech itself takes shape as it accomplishes the reconciliation of general truths from the past and particular events of the present. Between knowledge and phenomena lies rhetoric, the set of habits that give the written speeches of historiography much of their literary value and intellectual authority. In historiography, knowledge finds expression largely in its application to particulars; since such applications always occur in speeches, we must examine rhetoric

in order to see how it might affect the knowledge it conveys. There are worlds of Eastern Zhou wisdom here: natural and political philosophy, ethics, mythology, and literary and cultural history. But all this knowledge is refracted through rhetoric, which has properties of its own.

This rhetoric is not primarily an art of persuasion. These are not the records of oratory in action, and as analysis of these narratives will show, outcomes are frequently determined by circumstances that no degree of eloquence can change. Whereas a Greek rhetoric such as Aristotle's can justifiably concern itself not only with the construction of a speech but also with the manipulation of the audience and the self-presentation of the speaker, the framing of Eastern Zhou historiographical speeches in narrative tendsto make successful persuasion a secondary consideration: a speech can be good even when it fails to convince.’” For these speeches, erudition and structural elegance are paramount, both as they serve to import knowledge into the text and as they illuminate the qualities of the speaker.

Rhetoric in Practice To illustrate some of the more striking and pervasive features of rhetoric in historiographical speeches, I present here a pair of examples in which the

tendency toward structural balance reaches an extreme. Although few speeches are quite as intricate as these, all representations of eloquence share at least some of the qualities of verbal art these two examples epitomize. During a visit to the Chu court, Beigong Wenzi of Wey observes the behavior of the chief minister of Chu, Prince Wei, and delivers a series of re-

marks in which the ornate patterning of citations and observed phenomena forms the basis of reasoning and of rhetorical brilliance.”

RES - IE XS RAF ACER: SROKA: SPHUAR: HA tha - HEBER RMW- HAO- BAAD BRAK - RZE

The Rhetoric of Good Order 31

H- SFRRARSA CA SMUAS HA HBO: RRR eR ZA SARA RR RRA: RAR - OAR EE: PHA UK-o A: em Wma HA AmMmM I Re 2h: A em A RFS a AAA CHR HERMES: AimR2: MRR AK: THR

tH PAR CKA HRM? hee TReR: RRA: WED

PRs: BOUL PRR MRA RRR: AUR: Sab ~ ER SRF. RBS AN. KAS RR: RA: ABA

Dak: SAAR ZIMA D MAR: ABRNMECE: A: ABR

HA /)\HRHRE- SRMEZH HA: PMA: MA: Sal

MARZ MANMECE RBRARCA ARETCEM a: WE

ZL MEK BRMMBE: SRAM HRC MECCA: KE

Mae OBR SC KRELZT BCRE VRRZ AER

th: MATFENA RR: HB oS IRAE: Apes A: Aika RM: fF

BoA MTR: Bee MAN SRAB: OBA: HZ

Ay ak BE tH °

When the marquis of Wey was in Chu, Beigong Wenzi observed the dignity and _ deportment of the Chu chief minister Wei and said to the marquis, “The chief minister has come to resemble the ruler; he will have ambitions of another sort. But even if he attains his ambitions, he will not be able to carry them through to the end. The Shi says: ‘No one is without a beginning; few are able to have an end.’ It is in fact quite difficult to make it to the end, and the chief minister will not be an exception. The lord said, “How do you know this?” Wenzi replied, “The Shi says: ‘Respect and be mindful of dignity and deportment; be a model to the people.’

The chief minister is without dignity and deportment, and the people have in him no model. One in whom the people find no model and who yet is above the people

is not able to have a (good) end.” | The lord said, “Excellent! What do you mean by dignity and deportment?” Wenzi said, “If you have dignity that inspires awe, that is dignity; if you have deportment that inspires imitation, that is deportment. The ruler has a ruler's dignity and deportment; his subjects are in awe of him and cling to him; they make a model of him and imitate him; thus he is able to keep his country and family and enjoy a fine reputation for long generations. The subject has a subject's dignity and deportment; those below him are in awe of him and cling to him; thus he is able to preserve his official position, protect his clan, and benefit his family. Relations follow this

, 32 The Rhetoric of Good Order pattern all the way down, and in this way those above and those below are able to consolidate one another. The Shi of Wey says: ‘Dignity and deportment are peaceful and harmonious; they cannot be calculated.’

These lines say that ruler and subject, above and below, father and son, elder brother and younger brother, the inner and the outer, the great and the small, all have dignity and deportment. The Shi of Zhou says: ‘That for which peers and friends give help— they help each other to dignity and deportment.’

These lines say that the way of peers and friends is necessarily to instruct one another in dignity and deportment. In enumerating the virtuous attainments of King Wen, the ‘Writings of Zhou’ say: ‘Large countries feared his strength; small countries cherished his virtue.’ _.

These lines tell how people stood in awe of and clung to him. “The Shi says:

‘Do not comprehend, do not know: follow the model of the emperor above.’ These lines speak of making a model of and imitating the lord above. “[King] Zhou [of the Shang] imprisoned King Wen for seven years. The rulers of the states all followed him into imprisonment, so that Zhou finally took fright and released him. This can be considered clinging to him. “King Wen attacked Chong. He advanced twice and made subjects of their people. The barbarians were led to submit: this can be considered standing in awe of

him. .

“All under heaven recite and dance and sing the accomplishments of King Wen:

| this can be considered making him a model. “The acts of King Wen are even today a law: this can be considered imitating him.

“(King Wen) had dignity and deportment. “Thus when the gentleman is in office, he is to be held in awe; when bestowing gifts, he is to be clung to; in his entrances and withdrawals, he is to be regarded as a standard; in his ritual motions, he is to be treated as a model; in his facial expression and movements, he is to be observed; in his managing of affairs, he is to be made a law of; in his moral action, he is to be imitated; in his sound and air, he is to be enjoyed. His movements and risings have a pattern to them; his utterances and conversations have order to them. By means of these things, he oversees those below, and we consider him to have dignity and deportment.””

The Rhetoric of Good Order 33

named Ling.” |

Not surprisingly, Wenzi is proved correct. Prince Wei kills his king the next year and usurps the throne as the arrogant and doomed king posthumously

A logic based on citation informs the speech itself, the brief dialogue that precedes it, and the narrative frame of the whole. “Dignity and deportment” (weiyi), which will provide the armature of the speech, are introduced in the voice of the narrator. Even before anyone speaks, weiyi is a matter for observation and judgment.” In the dialogue, Wenzi uses two Shi lines to buttress his prediction of Prince Wei's imminent change of status. Questioned by the duke, he explains his prediction by quoting two more Shi lines, which allow him to connect weiyi and the notion of the ruler as a model for the people; as often happens, the mechanism that makes prediction possible in the political _ world runs through the people and presumes that they see their rulers’ acts and respond to them on the basis of moral judgments. Asked to explain weiyi further, Wenzi first relates wei “dignity” to awe and yi “deportment” to imitation and then establishes these two extended concepts as the basis of social hierarchy: the ruler who has weiyi inspires in his subjects awe and concern (or “clinging,” ai) and becomes a model and an object of imitation for them. ‘This section of the speech concludes with two citations that provide canonical evidence for the role of weiyi both in hierarchical organization and in the relations of equals, Both citations contain the word weiyi. Rather than seeing them as footnotes to an independently developed understanding of weiyi, we should recognize that they serve as the starting texts for Wenzi's sermon,

authoritative words understood anew and applied to the events of this

moment. The second half of the speech goes beyond the evidence of individual ci-

| tations to the general example of King Wen. As I show in the next chapter, King Wen was for these historiographers perhaps the most important model of political and literary behavior. Wenzi first uses citations from the “Writings of Zhou” and the Shi to show that King Wen, in his virtue, did inspire awe, concern, modeling, and imitation. Then, going one step further, he cites incidents from the life and cultural legacy of King Wen to demonstrate that the Chinese states showed and continue to show each of these four responses to the king, This passage constitutes a complex syllogism in which the behavior of the king is juxtaposed with the preceding four-part definition of weiyi to prove the argument that King Wen had weiyi.

34 The Rhetoric of Good Order In what remains, the behavior of the gentleman is prescribed; the terms used in the analysis of weiyi are central here, but others have been added to complete the picture of the gentleman as model. Most interesting among these are the terms that define the movements and words of the gentleman: the former have “elegance” or “pattern” (wen), a sort of palpable grace and correctness; the latter have “order” or “clarity” (zhang), which is pattern made perceptible for general observation. Later literary terminology originates with usages of this sort and conceives of a text as an elegant and orderly exposition (wenzhang). But in this context the terms have less to do with literary activity in particular than with the grand theme of the effective public image and the role it plays in the ideal society's mimetic organization.” Although the speech seems to have left him behind, King Wen is still implicitly the subject of this section. In a larger sense, he is present implicitly at the beginning of the speech and in many other speeches that never so much as mention him.

An extraordinary speech in the Zhou section of the Guoyu shows even more clearly than Beigong Wenzi’s speech the rhetorical value placed on marked structural integration. Like Wenzi’s and scores of others, this speech is prompted by a moment of observation and interpretation. Having seen a

certain young nobleman of Jin who is serving in the Zhou capital, a high minister of the royal court speaks well of the man and predicts greatness for him. The speech includes no canonical citations, but is an extreme example of rhetorical habits of categorizing and enumerating. For clarity and convenience of analysis, I have labeled the elements of the introductory narrative and of the speech.”

BRR ZT A: SS BR - [a9] 10 FR BR - (bo) th FE * [co] HS ee [do] BS FE ik: [Eo] BMY RR: [Fo] BROKE: [Go] Baw R&

S-(HJISCUYRA: (hl SRY RFA - PISA Y RES: (KISBYR |

fll - (lh) SAY RH: (M) SFU RH: (NI SRY RA - (O.) SB KK : [po] SHA BRE TR (o]l ARS AF IB Zhou, the son of Sun Tan of Jin, went to the royal domain, where he served Duke Xiang of Shan. [ap] When he stood, he never slouched. [bp] As he looked at something, he never glanced around wildly. [co] Listening, he never pricked up his ears. [do] And in speaking, he never touched on the distant. _ [Eo] When he spoke of reverence, he always brought up Heaven. [Fy] When he spoke of loyalty, he always brought up intention. [Go] When he spoke of good faith, he always brought up the self. [Ho] When he spoke of humaneness, he always brought up the human. [Ip] When he spoke of rightness, he always brought up the

The Rhetoric of Good Order 35 benefits. [Jo] When he spoke of intelligence, he always brought up affairs. [Ko] When he spoke of bravery, he always brought up restraint. [Lo] When he spoke of the teachings, he always brought up discernment. [Mo] When he spoke of filiality, he always brought up the spirits. [No] When he spoke of beneficence, he always brought up harmony. [Oo] When he spoke of yielding, he always brought up parity. [po] When there was some matter of concern in Jin, he never failed to worry about it, and [qo] when there was cause for celebration, he never failed to rejoice.

So far we have only the description of a man, but a description so inflexibly symmetrical that it is clearly preparing the way for something else. Four

parallel phrases, each of three characters, render in language the rigorous discipline by which the man controlled his appearance in court: neither posture, nor facial expression, nor utterance strayed from the implied norm. Then, in eleven parallel phrases, Sun Zhou’s conversational habits are anatomized to show how he attended to what we must assume was considered essential in each topic.” Finally, in two parallel phrases, the narrative notes that besides acting and speaking well, the expatriate Sun Zhou shared the sorrows and joys of his homeland. One might have suspected in reading Beigong Wenzi's speech that the term weiyi was introduced in the framing narrative to justify the speaker's choice of topic and citations. Here the motivation of narrative is even more explicit. This framing narrative, like some others in the Zuozhuan and Guoyu, is designed not as a transparent account

of matters of fact but as preparation for a rhetorical display. Well-crafted preludes of this kind, as well as the numerous concluding passages in which

spoken predictions are fulfilled, must be read in conjunction with the speeches, not as wholly independent historical accounts. Given what follows the description of Sun Zhou’s behavior, it cannot be

doubted that the introductory passage is entirely informed by the needs of the speech and its overall structure.

ZAR FAAMEZ A VUESA- BESA Hwy: te MAG: KHBATPE AMR - RE): MCB: (RIB MZ

Bw: (GJ) fa M2 Ww (HIE M2 Bw- ih) R-M Zz il th:

(JS MRZBw KI) A Maw: (LIA: MS ht: (MJ XZ

AS (Ni) BR MCR: (0) BR: MMH:

Duke Xiang, having fallen ill, called for [his son, the future] Duke Qing and declared to him, “You must treat Zhou of Jin well, for he will win the state of Jin. His behavior is wen, and if one is capable of wen, one can win Heaven and earth. Those whom Heaven and earth bless start small but in the end possess states. Now,

36 The Rhetoric of Good Order [E,] reverence is respectfulness in accordance with wen. [F,] Loyalty is following through in accordance with wen. [G,] Good faith is correspondence through wen. (H,) Humaneness is concern through wen. [I,] Rightness is restraint through wen. [J,] Intelligence is the vehicle of wen. (K,] Bravery is leadership in accordance with wen. [L,] Teaching is the promulgation of wen. [M,] Filiality is the root of wen. [Nj] Beneficence is kindness in accordance with wen. [O,] Yielding is the material of wen.

Duke Xiang begins his speech by commanding his son to be good to Sun

Zhou, who will one day rule Jin. To support his prediction, Duke Xiang judges that Sun’s behavior is “cultured,” “elegant,” and “orderly” (wen) and adduces a pair of principles: he who is capable of wen can win the help of Heaven and earth; and the one whom Heaven and earth thus bless may start in obscurity but will end up at the head ofa state. If these principles are true, then to prove his prediction Duke Xiang must demonstrate the validity of his initial claim that Sun Zhou’s behavior is in accordance with wen. The two sections that follow complete this demonstration. First, drawing on the introductory description of Sun Zhou’s ways of speaking, the duke systematically matches the virtues Sun Zhou discussed in Ep—Op with wen, isolating in each case a term that somehow stands for the relation between wen and the virtue. Thus, taking up the framing narrative’s statement that “when he spoke of reverence, he always brought up Heaven” [Eo], the duke now avers that “reverence is respectfulness in accordance with wen” [E,]. The relation of wen and each of the eleven virtues discussed creates eleven mediating terms (gong, “respectfulness,” is the first) that will become indispensable

| in the ensuing argument. Returning to the details described in Ep-Oo, Duke Xiang now shows how the directions Sun Zhou took in his discussion of the various virtues proved that he possessed those virtues:

(E,] & K Be a > [F)] Bl 4 BE > (G.] BS 86 1a > (Ho) BABE ~ (E) FI il BE > [J.) BEBE S ~ ([K,] bl RHE SS ~ ([L,) HERE RE Ae. (M.] HA te S (N2] ABE RK ~ (O.) HERR BER UL —4@ + RT BAR [E.] By making Heaven a model, one may be reverent. [F.] By carrying out one’s intention, one may be loyal. [G,] By thinking upon oneself, one may have good faith. [H,] By being concerned for humans, one may be humane. [I,] By reaping benefits from restraint, one may be right. [J,] By handling affairs for success, one may be intelligent. [K,] By following what is right, one may be brave. [L,] By promulgating discernment, one may teach. [M,] By bringing illumination to the spirits, one may be filial. [N.] By being kind and harmonious, one may be beneficent.

The Rhetoric of Good Order 37

all of these eleven. , [O,] By pushing one’s equal ahead, one may be yielding. This gentleman partakes of

At the outset, the identifications that are accomplished in E,—-O, are left im-

plicit; although each of the principles stated in the series relates two terms | that appear in the description of Sun Zhou’s speech (Ep—Op), it is only at

the end of the list that Duke Xiang declares in summary that Sun Zhou is virtuous in all eleven respects.

The relation of specific topic and general virtue in E,-O, has created a set of mediating terms that overlaps to a certain extent with the set produced in E,-O,. Three cases reveal the fundamental rhetorical drive toward pattern that accounts for the presentation of these parallel lists. In H, L, and N, the final iteration (H2, L,, N2) weaves together the observed behavior of the first list (Ho, Lo, No) and the wen-definition of the second list (H,, L;, Nj) in the syntax of a single expression. For example, it was said of Sun Zhou that

“When he spoke of humaneness, he always brought up the human” [Ho]; further, “humaneness is concern through wen” [Hj]; finally, “By being concerned for humans, one may be humane” [H,]. The syntax of the culminating sentence completes a miniature chiasmus, or ABBA structure: [Hp] humaneness—human [H,] concern—[{H,] concern for humans—humane. The notion of concern was introduced only in the second series (H;), and served to relate the named virtue (ren, “humaneness”) to the field of wen. In the third series, the “human” from the first series and the “concern” from the second series are brought together, producing both a more intricate definition of the named virtue and a demonstration that Sun Zhou possessed the virtue. ‘hat he made a habit of bringing up the human when he was speaking of humaneness shows that he understood both how the virtue should express itself (in a concern that accords with wen) and what object this expression should take (humans, other people). In the case of two other virtues, teaching and beneficence (L and N), the third series likewise applies the wen-defined behavior of the second series to an object or topic delimited in the first series, producing perfect chiasmatic structures. Although the treatment of the other eight terms does not yield such neat patterns, the significance of the three iterations is clear enough. The list of virtues and of their places in the order of wen (E,-O,) suggests an implication of wen in the definition of each of the named virtues and in the observed

behavior of this particular historical actor, while at the same time establishing wen as an entity with its own rules, forces, and boundaries. Although a

38 The Rhetoric of Good Order fixed grammatical paradigm provides for the relation of each of the virtues with wen, the specific terms and order of that paradigm admit a great deal of flexibility. In every case, the virtue X is the Y of wen. Wen inflects the several virtues subordinated to it in various ways, either becoming the whole of which they are parts or characterizing the manner in which they show themselves in behavior or serving as the object of a propagation or devotion. This flexibility of application is typical of the handling of the various hallowed terms that the speakers and historiographers used regularly and that Confu- _ cian philosophers would eventually claim as their own.”

A transition follows: |

AAA MB: MSC K MD: RRA RS MCR: KM

EAM RARE CZUR ER RFRYZR> HUBER -

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

Two moves of summation complete the first part of the speech. First, in “Six

for Heaven and five for earth ...,” the listed virtues are counted and their number—eleven—is matched with Heaven and earth, whose unexplained “constants” are six and five, respectively.” No identity between the terms in each set of eleven is elaborated; number serves only as a transition from the virtues to the Heaven-earth dyad, which will permit certain developments. By matching Heaven with the warp threads in a fabric and earth with the weft, the speaker leaves behind the cosmic and returns to the level of culture: warp and weft in perfect order are the very image of wen. The definition of wen as pattern, unattested in bronze inscriptions, is central to the term’s use in historiographical speeches, not least because it makes possible rhetorical transitions of the sort we observe here.”

Second, in “King Wen was wen in his substance ... ,” the speaker exploits , another element of wen's polysemy. King Wen is a part of the order of wen, its foremost historical embodiment and its first evangelist. From the recollection of his teachings and of his biography come precedents that guide right action in the present. In this case the precedent is simple: Heaven

: blessed King Wen with sovereignty over the earth because he personified wen. Since Sun Zhou has “covered himself” (pi) in the fabric of wen and has in this way repeated King Wen’s moral achievement, he can expect a similar

The Rhetoric of Good Order 39 political reward. That he has the right genealogical credentials (“is close in

the order of generations”)—whether from King Wen or from the Jin

duke—adds to his political eligibility. | At this point another chiasmatic structure has become complete. Beginning with a prediction, Duke Xiang first brought wen and the Heaven-earth dyad into an explicit relationship. He then related each of eleven virtues to wen, defined for each of the eleven virtues a manner and focus of attention that characterized the possessor of the virtue, returned to Heaven and earth by way of the number eleven, reintroduced wen by way of the textile metaphor, and finally repeated the prediction. If it is noted that the series E,-O, begins by emphasizing Heaven as the focus of reverence and thereafter tends to make worldly, concrete phenomena the foci of more abstract virtuous attention, then the chiasmatic core of this section emerges: wen (E,O,)—Heaven/earth (E,-O,)—Heaven/earth—wen. The initial prediction, repeated at the end of the section, may provide an additional frame, with the first enunciation of the wen—Heaven/earth relationship inserted as a guiding

principle.

more complex: | ,

The structural and rhetorical effects achieved in the next section are still

AR [a] 12 ERK: TE th: (by) PEPE th [co] BRE - Mw: da) SR

wm TRL: HK la) IE: HE 5B th (bo) Om SS fe: (co) He EK ti, * (d,] te > SF t+ TF RS AE el (= d,, c.] 18 ik. fa [= ay, a2, by] ° BA 43 te

RR fA E(=dvebpal M2: RSKRKig pl HRA : MC AAS + FE Bd Ay EX

Furthermore, [a,] standing without slouching is correctness. [b,] Looking without glancing around wildly is propriety. [c,] Listening without pricking up one’s ears is stability. [d,] Speaking without touching on the distant is caution. Now, [a2] correctness is the way of virtue. [b.] Propriety is good faith according to virtue. [c,] Stability is the completion of virtue. [d,] Caution is the preservation of virtue. To preserve the completion pure and fast [= d), c2] and to make a way for correctness while serving good faith [= a, a), by] are to make good virtue bright. Being cautious about stability properly and correctly (=dj, c,, by, a;] is the help of virtue. Rejoicing and sorrowing for Jin [q, p,], he does not turn his back on his roots. Covering himself in wen and using the help of virtue, what could he take if not

the state? : ,

Duke Xiang now takes up aspects of Sun Zhou’s observed behavior that had at first been set aside (ap—dg and po-qo). First, in ay—d), each is equated with

40 The Rhetoric of Good Order a moral attribute: “Standing without slouching is correctness” (a,). Next, in a)—d,, each of the attributes so produced is placed in the order of de, “virtue”: “Correctness is the way of virtue” (a3). Finally, in two virtuosic passages, the ultimate consequences of the equations are summed up in an order that completes a chiasmus for this section. Thus the first of these passages takes

the terms produced in a,-d, and presents them in nearly perfect reverse order, producing a statement about virtue (“.. . are to make good virtue bright”); the second of these passages takes the terms produced in a;—d, and presents them in strict reverse order, identifying them as “the help of virtue.”

Taken with the first part of the speech and the material that precedes the speech, this section now completes yet another chiasmatic pattern: general behavior (ap—do)—speaking habits (Ep-Oo)—treatment of speaking habits (E;-O,, E,-O., with conclusions)—and treatment of general behavior (a;-

dj, a,—d, with conclusions). | , |

Duke Xiang handles Sun Zhou's thoughts for his country (po-qo) simply, identifying them with a devotion to his roots,“ and then reasserts the two main justifications for his prediction in a pithy four-character phrase: “Covering himself in wen and using the help of virtue.” Each half of the phrase is the result of logical equivalences established in the two halves of the speech. That Sun Zhou covers himself with or clothes himself in wen was the explicit result of operations involving E-O; that he uses the help of virtue was likewise established through the manipulation of a-d. I leave untranslated Duke Xiang’s conclusion, in which he recounts various divinations and dreams that point to Sun Zhou’s succession to the Jin throne. These remarks lie outside the tight structure that he develops in the first part of the speech and form a sort of coda for it. As always in historiographical speeches, the well-wrought prediction comes true: the composers of this speech knew that Sun Zhou was to become the very successful Duke Dao of Jin (r. 572-558).

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

The Rhetoric of Good Order 41 tures of the sort identified in the speeches of Beigong Wenzi and Duke Xiang, which are unparalleled in Western oratory, elude the available terminology.” Yet the urge to create orderly structures is the most pervasive rhetorical characteristic of historiographical speeches and is more fundamental than any of the particular figures through which it is achieved.” As I argue

in the next chapter, it contributes to the representation of the art of good speaking as a practice of virtue. G. E. R. Lloyd, in his comparisons of Chinese and Greek ways of proof,

has pointed out that the Chinese were on the whole less interested than the Greeks in formal analysis of methods of persuasion. © In analyzing speeches

attributed to Warring States characters, he shows that Chinese writers tended to emphasize the psychology, rather than the logical basis, of persuasion.” Lloyd is right about the speeches and texts he discusses: it is true that the Mohists did not formalize the syllogism as Aristotle did, and the orations from Zhanguoce that Lloyd examines do not incorporate it. But Lloyd's formulation does not entirely do justice to the speeches attributed (in the Warring States period) to Spring and Autumn period speakers. For these speakers, the psychological elements of the situation of persuasion—the interpersonal tactics of speaking—matter occasionally, but they matter far less

than the rhetoric of good order and the application of inherited wisdom, features that are both foregrounded and, on occasion, explicitly discussed.” Apodeixis—logical demonstration—and epideixis—showy display—are in-

tertwined in the historiographical texts.” , _ The speeches analyzed above show that the syllogism was among the techniques of proof available to early Chinese speakers and writers. Beigong Wenzis syllogism takes the following form: one who is the object of awe, concern, modeling, and imitation has weiyi; King Wen was the object of awe,

concern, modeling, and imitation; therefore King Wen had weiyi.” The eleven terms in the first part of Duke Xiang’s speech are not treated syllogistically, since the conclusion—that Sun Zhou possesses these virtues—is left implicit. But it is easy to see how the three iterations of each term function just as Wenzis pairing of definition and historical fact did. Sun Zhou speaks of human beings when he speaks of the virtue of humaneness; the virtue of humaneness, in one definition, is a concern (no doubt for human beings) characterized by wen; one who is concerned for human beings is capable of being benevolent. The implication, then, is that Sun Zhou has revealed his own humaneness by speaking correctly about humaneness. Such

42 The Rhetoric of Good Order structures of proof are hardly emphasized in historiographical speeches. As in both of these examples, opportunities for patterned presentation seem to upstage the mechanics of logical demonstration. Perhaps a faith in the incontrovertibility of received definitions and texts—a faith that the writers, who were actively defending it, must never open to question—encouraged a looseness of form in proofs.” As long as the starting definition or text could not be denied, the work of proof lay in demonstrating that the particular at hand could be matched somehow with the starting generalization. The re-

sult would be the rhetorical tendency one observes in historiographical speeches, a steady alternation between authoritative generalities and their application to the specifics at hand.

Had Eastern Zhou scholars desired, as did Aristotle and many before and after him, to name and categorize the techniques exemplified in the best speeches, they could perhaps have compiled an impressive list of effective

| tropes, not to mention a guide to the parts and construction of a speech and advice on the self-presentation of the speaker and the manipulation of the audience. As Lloyd notes, however, abstract discussions of rhetorical techniques are rare and brief; some of these are discussed below. The recounting of remembered speeches and anecdotes differs from the agonistic oratory of the Athenian agora, and recollection of particular words and incidents seems to have mattered more during the Eastern Zhou than did reflection on rhetorical technique. Even in the tales of eloquence and deception collected in the Zhanguoce, with their explicit thematization of rhetorical brilliance, the celebration of the abilities of a few orators abounds, and the genre seems to rule out abstract consideration of their skills. Unlike music, ritual, and cer-

tain sciences such as the study of the calendar, rhetoric was not one of the fields of knowledge to which early Chinese thinkers devoted lengthy theo-

retical treatises. | In the absence of extensive early discussion of rhetorical techniques, it is necessary to develop a description of rhetorical habits on the basis of the speeches themselves. The historiographical speech is built from the following elements: a judgment of present events; general principles; citations from canonical works, aphorisms, and the like; historical precedents; observation

and description of events at hand; matching of principles, citations, and precedents with these events; and a prediction of future events. Like other literary morphologies, this list is more comprehensive than most specific ex-

amples, which need not contain every one of the available elements. The

The Rhetoric of Good Order 43 elements fall into two groups: knowledge and application. Principles, citations, and precedents are knowledge, and the others are application. Taxis, or the arrangement of the given elements, is neither strictly determined nor entirely free. Perhaps because the rhetorical art of the speech lies in its pairing of inherited tenets with observed events, abstractions and historical particulars are normally deployed in alternation, so that knowledge in its vari-

ous forms can surround kernels of observed reality and control their interpretation.

_ Other principles of order operate within the separate sections of the speech. Some forms of knowledge inevitably affect taxis. When a citation is cited in the analysis of a contemporary event, historical particulars must be presented in the order suggested by the citation. The same is true when a historical precedent is cited. But many types of theoretical knowledge do not have a given order and could be arranged to fit the material at hand. A flair for enumeration produced many texts in which speakers expound and apply sets of abstract terms, as the speaker does in “Hongfan.” Loose relations of entailment among individual principles are presented in sorites, a chain-like

structure in which each phrase repeats the ending of the phrase that pre-cedes it. The most intricately structured speeches use several ordering techniques, and the result is a tightly woven fabric of knowledge, citations, and observed events. The grandest and most memorable speeches in historiography are mostly of this type. The parts of speeches in the Zuozhuan and Guoyu, as well as some of the more common rhetorical techniques adopted in them, serve to distinguish them from speeches quoted in other works and attributed to individuals of other eras.” The character and function of these elements of the speech de-

rive from the textual impetus behind speech-making: the concern with weaving together general knowledge and particular observation in a clearly patterned structure. Judgment. Unlike orations preserved from the law courts and public assem_ blies of Greece and Rome, speeches in Chinese historiography are normally framed by anecdotal material that establishes relevant facts and identifies, if only implicitly, the question that the speech will address. For this reason, speeches often lack introductions and begin with the most succinct statement of the speaker's contention: bu ke “That [policy] won't do”; .. . gi wang hu “[This state or person] is doomed”;” or, in Duke Xiang’s speech, “You must treat Zhou of Jin well.” Considered as part of the speech, such utter-

44 The Rhetoric of Good Order ances are statements of the case to be proved, and the remainder of the speech is the argument proper. Considered within the historiographical system as a whole, these statements are judgments; strategically placed at the

junction of straight narration and speech-making, they serve to introduce the historical text’s theoretical reflections on the historical detail it has presented. Judgments do not always come at the beginning of the speech; they may be presented at the end, as the result of the reasoning that makes up the argument. Depending on the circumstances of the speech, judgments may be predictions. When the speech is deliberative,” as in Duke Xiang’s case, the prediction is subordinate to the policy recommendation: “You must treat Zhou of

Jin well, for he will win the state of Jin.” In the many speeches devoted to the | display of knowledge and to the interpretation of preceding anecdotal material, prediction of good or bad consequences may constitute the judgment on which the entire speech is built. Another important type of judgment is the aesthetic, which neither engages knowledge with policymaking nor isolates it in prediction, but encourages rulers or social superiors to accept simultaneously aesthetic and moral interpretations of their acts. Because of its role in the construction of the historiographical system as a whole, I defer full discussion of this variety of judgment.”

Principles. The demonstration of the truth of a judgment depends on the successful assimilation of the particulars of the occasion (which may be acts observed or policies contemplated) to truth. The latter always makes its appearance in the form of specialized statements, well suited to the matter under consideration and often presented in balanced, gnomic phrases. These phrases are the principles of the speech and often, as in Duke Xiang’s case, account for a large portion of the text. Perhaps the purest example in that speech is the series E;-O,, in which each of the eleven virtues is assigned a relation to wen. Principles are represented as utterances that admit of no debate. Despite the frequent disagreements between speakers built into the an-

ecdotes of this historiography, these tokens of a larger truth never come under attack. In a minority of cases, statements of principles import truths into a speech without citing an authority or a source. In such instances, the literary form in which the principles are presented—parallelism, antithesis, rhyme, and sorites—may imply a basic sort of authority and truth value. But such

unattributed principles seem to belong to the same general category as

The Rhetoric of Good Order 45

quotations from titled works. Principles thus include citations, which vary from the barest attribution of the truths adduced (chen wen zhi “I have heard that .. .”) to full citation (Shi yue “The Shi says .. .”). The first style of reference merely attributes the principles to received wisdom, while per-

haps retaining traces of the oral character of education and wisdom. The

cited. |

second style marks the difference between the speech and the source of the cited truth, while inevitably demonstrating, through the application of principles to particulars, that distance does not impair the validity of the text Another variety of principle is the type implicit in a precedent, which assigns a normative value to historical events. By the conventions of this historiography, historical examples of triumph are repeatable, whereas failures are bound to recur. Citing an example either guides a policymaker toward possible success or warns him of inevitable failure. ‘The use of precedent differs from that of other types of principle only in that its summary or fragmentary narrative form does not lend itself to textual elaboration as plain principles and citations do. Although a series of principles can become the basis of the sort of text-making Duke Xiang did, precedents are events first and language second, and they do not normally yield a set of terms upon which a matrix can be built. The precedent is useful as a token of the truth because of its general correspondence with the matter at hand and because of an intrinsic

faith in history's repetitiousness.”” | |

Application. Finally, it is useful to distinguish application from judgment and principles. Because principles and the literary structures they make possible dominate these speeches, there is little effort to distinguish the statement of

facts from the application of principles to those facts. As we have seen in Duke Xiang’s speech, even the anecdotal material that precedes a speech can

at times obey the rhetorical dictates of that speech, with facts disposed in readiness for rhetorical use. Thus narration, considered a separate category in Greek and Roman forensic oratory, does not constitute an independent section in an Eastern Zhou historiographical speech, since much of the necessary information is provided before the commencement of direct discourse, and any reference to events in the world directly serves the purposes of application, that is, of the substantiation of principle. Like precedent, narration is dominated by principle and its application. Application itself is only

partly distinct from the statement of principle, since, as in the passage E,Oz, it is the process by which facts and principles are woven together.

46 The Rhetoric of Good Order Historiographical speeches are distinguished not only by their parts but also by certain stable rhetorical tendencies that they display. Besides citation, full consideration of which I reserve for the next chapter, the animating tendencies of the rhetoric of good order are fluidity of definition, enumeration, and repetition. All these are aspects of a single tendency, the drive toward manifest verbal patterning. They are unlike the tropes identified in traditional Greek and Roman rhetoric in that they pertain not to the local effects of language but to the overall shape of an utterance. In these tendencies, structure acquires a meaning of its own and becomes much more valuable than any single technique of persuasion. Fluidity of definition. Duke Xiang’s speech, as intricate as it is, exemplifies rhetorical habits that are characteristic of historiographical speeches in general. Despite his focus on wen and de and despite his extended treatment of various canonical virtues in their relation to those two master terms, it is un-

likely that any reader would be tempted to identify this text as a central statement of Eastern Zhou moral philosophy. The texture of the speech affects the quality of the terms. Even wen and de are rendered more diffuse and

less weighty than they would be in, say, a Lunyu apothegm. At the same time, because there are so many similar weavings of terminology throughout

early historiography, this particular articulation makes no claim to the authoritative status a saying of Confucius might have. It is instead one among many distinct performances in a single rhetorical-historical genre. Seen from another perspective, the flexibility of terminology is the very thing

that makes possible the characteristic brilliance of these speeches and the pervasive application of Confucian principles to the problems of the world. The matching of concepts that goes on in Duke Xiang’s speech, as for instance when he identifies each of the eleven virtues as a part or effect of wen, resembles definition. Yet in some respects it is the antithesis of the drawing

of limits implied in definition. Far from establishing a closed pocket of meaning represented by the defined term, these matchings open the term to transmutation. Matchings are crafted to fit the rhetorical architecture that is under construction. Essential definitions give way to relational definitions, which take on solidity in the structure of any given speech but have a calculated fluidity in the corpus of speeches as a whole. A named virtue, or any

other term from the various bodies of knowledge that support speechmaking, is a bundle of possibilities loosely organized around a theme: it is a variable or tool whose usefulness depends on its adaptability to rhetorical

The Rhetoric of Good Order 47 circumstance. ‘This is not to say that basic concepts like ren (humaneness) and xiao (filiality) or shibboleths like wen and de are empty categories. They do have a delimited referential force.” But in practice that force depends on the cultivation of a certain openness at the heart of any matching or definition: differing rhetorical needs fill the same open term with different signifying contents. To put it another way, the corpus of speeches implies a vision of language as a vast network in which each term is related to all other terms and placed at the intersection of many possible paths of significance. Any single speech isolates a subset of these connections that is appropriate to the historical circumstances of the occasion. Thinking and speaking about events evoke truths that are already latent in language’s internal relations.” Although Duke Xiang’s speech is an extreme case, fluidity of definition and the weaving of equivalences that fluidity permits are defining characteristics of the speech form in historiography. The speech differs from narrative and dialogue in foregrounding complex, highly marked patterns, which constitute a rhetorical feature in their own right.

Enumeration. Another technique that contributes to the crafting of large rhetorical structures is enumeration: the terms making up one section of the. speech are counted, and their number is stated, either before or after they are presented.” In Duke Xiang’s speech, for example, the number eleven was first mentioned as the sum of the virtues in E-O. By the logic of equivalence, the number was then available as a mediating term and permitted a transi-

tion to Heaven and earth, which had numbers of their own. In the Zuozhuan, to give only a small sample, one reads of the “six defiances” (liu ni) and the “six compliances” (liu shun); of the “five crimes” (wu zui) of the Di tribes; of the “five advantages” (wu mei) of a large state’s visit to a smaller state; and of the “six breaths” (liu gi) of Heaven, the “five flavors” (wu wei), the “five colors” (wu se), the “five sounds” (wu sheng), the “six illnesses” (liu ji), the “four seasons” (si shi), and the “five sections” (wu jie). The Guoyu provides many similar examples.”

Enumeration raises a basic problem of interpretation: some enumerated sets appear in a wide variety of texts (e.g., the “five flavors”) and some are obviously of purely local utility, resulting from the circumstances of the occa- _

, sion (e.g., the “five crimes” mentioned above), but most belong to neither | extreme. In many cases, it is impossible to determine whether the speaker is applying an existing categorization to historical contingencies or drawing a provisional abstraction from these contingencies. The difference is the one

48 The Rhetoric of Good Order marked by the translator's definite article: “six defiances” or “the six defi-

ances’? Since enumeration has a role both in the rhetoric of individual speeches and in the process of abstraction that allows knowledge to become systematic, it lies at the junction of knowledge and application. In this respect, it resembles the virtues as they were presented above. Like the named virtues and principles from other fields of knowledge, to be examined in

Chapters 3 and 4, enumerated sets claim some of the status of universal truths while at the same time showing their responsiveness to particular facts.” Facts are details imported from the narrative surroundings of the speech and matched with abstractions in the weaving of the rhetorical structure. As Duke Xiang’s anecdote demonstrates, the requirements of rhetorical structure seem, at least in certain cases, to precede and define the narrative approach; facts seem frequently to be recorded for their anticipated

rhetorical utility. The flexibility of principles and the uncertain status of enumerated sets facilitate the accommodation of general truths to particular

historical events. |

Repetition. Speeches like Wenzi's and Duke Xiang’s require calculated repe-

titions of words, structures, and concepts. The authors of these speeches valued choices of diction and arrangement that drew attention to the language itself and to the skill of the speaker in using it. Perhaps the simplest figure of repetition is anadiplosis, in which the word that ends one phrase is

repeated at the beginning of the next phrase. The “Great Learning” (“Daxue”) chapter of the Liji (Record of rites) furnishes a canonical example of the figure in its simplest form: “Only when knowledge is sufficient does one have stability; only when one is stable is one capable of calm; only when one is calm is one capable of tranquility ...” FI IE ff Ja AE * JE MM Ja BE

af BF 1 fe Be &. A little further on the figure reappears, this time with slight complications: “Those who, in the past, wished to make bright virtue

shine throughout the world first brought order to their states. Those who wished to bring order to their states first regulated their homes .. .” -y Z &K

RR KES: RAHA: KARMA: FHA” When

anadiplosis furnishes the basis for a chain of reasoning, as it frequently does in these examples and in historiography, it is termed sorites. As a literary effect and a persuasive tool, sorites seems to imply that the structural same-

| ness of consecutive phrases captures real relations of logical implication among the phenomena described in the phrases.

The Rhetoric of Good Order 49 Although the repetitions in the Zuozhuan and Guoyu can be quite as simple as in these examples, Duke Xiang’s speech is more typical in its use of the form in combination with other ordering principles. The progression from one instantiation of a particular element to the next (as from a; to a, or from |

E, to E,) is exemplary. In the case of a,;—-a,, the progression is rather straightforward and depends on mediating terms like zheng, “correctness”; the procedure is discussed above. The transition from E, to E, is more complex: whereas analogous phrases (e.g., H,; and H,) show the perfect recombination or weaving together of terms from Hp and H, in H), E, is only implicitly the result of a chain of reasoning: that “by making Heaven a model, one may be reverent” (E,) has no explicit connection with the assertion that “reverence is respectfulness in accordance with wen” (E;). But the distribution of formally perfect examples of chains among the E,-,—O,-, series may train the reader to understand each element in E,-O, as the product of chain reasoning and to infer that the respectfulness mentioned in E,; neces-

sarily involves an imitation of Heaven's ways. ,

This form of sorites is a great deal more sophisticated than the rudimentary series of the “Daxue.” Now the same operation is being carried out in up to eleven analogous phrases at once, and the total operation comprises several smaller operations, some of them requiring the presentation of earlier results in reverse order. This is something like a rhetorical algebra, the set of skills by which a text may transform observed behavior into moral vision,

interpretation, and truth; it is the technique by which the text brings into play the truths that are immanent in the network of language. ‘The practice of this technique is nowhere more advanced than in the speeches of the Zuozhuan and the Guoyu. -

Duke Xiang’s comments on Sun Zhou exemplify the measured, even structure that is a standard feature of speeches in historiography and in certain other Warring States texts. More than the word yue (“say”) separates narration and direct discourse in historiography. Except in rare introductory passages like the one preceding Duke Xiang’s speech, narration is almost de-

void of repetition, parallelism, and patterned phrasing. Speeches, on the other hand, employ all these techniques, with the result that they stand out from the surrounding material as conspicuous structures.” These examples of verbal art, which clearly cost their authors more time and effort than the narrative passages did, are the jewels of the text. They invite the reader to

50 The Rhetoric of Good Order | delight in linguistic pattern both for its own sake and for the sake of what it represents. Well-worked language is a pleasure to contemplate: the symmetries of a speech, with its parallel phrases and orderly progressions, bring the joys of architecture or geometry to a linguistic performance. But these joys are not without purpose. The meaning of the form here is decreed by content, namely by the theme of wen, which, as I show in Chapter 2, relates good speech and the beautiful manipulation of language to the cultural legacy of the premier Zhou culture hero. Since the speech serves to bring together observed details of reality and learned principles of knowledge, rhetoric acquires a hortative force. The perfection that is possible in language is something we wish for, and occasionally claim to observe, in reality. Good speakers, it is implied, seek the beauty proper to language in the hurly-burly of political life, whether through learned interpretations of events or through performance of official duties in accordance with received prescriptions. Lying behind Confucius’ theory of the “correct use of names” (zhengming) is a large corpus of anecdotes in which admired speakers show how linguistic order corresponds to moral behavior and administrative practice.” Rhetorical tendencies, the customary parts of a speech, and the narrative habitus of historiography help to determine the sorts of speeches that are made. The majority of speeches are deliberative; this type includes remonstrances on rulers’ misbehavior, military planning, and more general strategic advice. Speeches of prediction are also common, with visions of doom for a

| state or individual outnumbering good tidings by a substantial margin. Finally, a small number of speeches (always accompanied by at least a thin delib-

erative justification) are excursions into recondite learning. These are the most purely epideictic of all speeches, and their authors apparently exulted in the beautiful display of knowledge and verbal skill. All three types of speech share a basic function provided for them by narrative: they are readings of the world (the military situation, the enemy’s intentions, the future) that make it intelligible by bringing it into linguistic contact with principles.”

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

The Rhetoric of Good Order 51 the “Hongfan” and the bronze inscriptions of the Zhongshan king employ a rhetoric of patterning and citation rather than the looser forms of the Western Zhou Shangshu texts and inscriptions. Many of the longer utterances in the Lunyu do the same. One familiar example is Confucius’s advice to Zizhang, whose goal in studying is to earn an official salary:”

FfA-SZHMR RERR NB 2AM RT we aS iS: SEL TRB RERAR:

The Master said, “If you listen widely, exclude what is doubtful, and speak carefully about the remainder, then you will make few errors. If you observe widely, exclude what is perilous, and carefully put the rest into action, then you will have few regrets. When there are few errors in your speech and few regrets about your actions,

that is when an official salary is to be found.” , Although this remark, like others in the Lunyu, stops far short of the complexities of the grand examples, it nonetheless shows the same pattern of parallel listing and final integration.” The speeches attributed to Mencius (Meng Ke, late fourth c. B.c.z.), the Confucian famous for his belief in the goodness of human nature, have even more in common with the speeches in the Zuozhuan and the Guoyu. The Mencius (Mengzi), like the historiographical works, prizes symmetry, balance,

and regular progression in language and uses many of the same figures of speech to achieve these effects.” The Mengzi is known for its use of Shi cita-

tions and for its passages of overt reflection on the practice of citation.” Mencius weaves citations into his argument, developing connecting tissue that relates the content of these citations to the specific issue at hand. An argument can also culminate in a citation, which is then revealed as a secret objective of the whole speech. Both techniques are also found in historiography. But one of the implicit programs of historiographical speeches has become even more pressing in the Mengzi. The relevance of canonical texts to practical questions of political stability and power must now be displayed at

every opportunity. The “pointed style,” by which so many of Mencius’ speeches seem to head inevitably toward closure in a capping citation, reflects the urgency of this project.

Mencius’ most important Confucian opponent, Xunzi (Xun Qing, ca. 335?—-ca. 238? B.c.E.), adopted many of the same rhetorical techniques. Whereas Mencius and his followers preferred to transmit his words as speeches with anecdotal frames, Xunzi presented his ideas in essays. Like Mencius’ speeches, these essays rely on the techniques of verbal art exempli-

52 The Rhetoric of Good Order

| fied in the historiographical lore about the Spring and Autumn period.” Xunzi is even more regular than Mencius in his stereotyped employment of | citations, especially from the Shi’? These appear most frequently at the end of sections within larger essays, marking the ends of paragraphs and a shift in direction.

The rhetoric of good order was not confined to the writings of thinkers who associated themselves with Confucius. Mozi (Mo Di, late sth c. B.c.8.) and his followers were the first thinkers to mount a coherent critique of Confucian thought. Although they generally avoided rhetorical flourish in their writings, certain passages of plodding repetition suggest a reduction of pattern-making to its simplest and least flexible extreme." A passage from the first of three chapters on “Promoting unity” (“Shangtong”) is typical:””

eEMBR A B2CAt BRSMREZAY BSA HSnrhsUO OASHMRR - RRA VASE: MRSC: OBIE: BA

RGSS PRRZSBS KAF ST SMR CST: MARU

aR SMC ReAw MRR SAMA eM Aw: ME

6 MCCA: ,

For this reason, the village head is a humane man from the village. The village head exercises administration among the hundred families of the village, saying, “When

you hear of something good or something not good,’ you must report it to our district head. What the district head affirms, you must all affirm. What the district head rejects, you must all reject. Eliminate words of yours that are not good and imitate the district head’s good words. Eliminate behavior of yours that is not good and imitate the district head’s good behavior.” How could the district then be persuaded by chaotic (speech)? If one examines the means of the district's governance, one sees that it is because the district head is able to unify the rightness of the district. Therefore the district is governed. The district head is a humane man of the district. ...

The next two paragraphs repeat the wording of this long passage, substitut-

: ing only the word for the appropriate political rank: the district head encourages the people of the district to heed the words of the state ruler, who encourages the people of the state to heed the words of the Son of Heaven. As is apparent even in translation, the Mozi displays an extraordinary toler-

ance for repetition, for obvious antithesis, and for monotonous diction. These characteristics, perhaps a reflection of the Mohist interest in linguistic precision, are stylistic choices that speakers in historiography avoid despite their passion for conspicuous pattern. If, as I argue in the next chapter, liter-

The Rhetoric of Good Order 53 ary patterning in speeches was conceived of as an image of the order that cultural achievements would bring about in the world, then the order Mozi

envisions is one of flawless conformity on all levels, including that of lan- | guage. As were the texts early Warring States philosophers cited to support their arguments, many rhetorical techniques seem to have been common property, not yet marked as the sole possession of any single school. ‘The Mozi and other texts show that the common style could be adapted for specific philosophical ends that differed from those of historiography. As I have suggested above, early Chinese thinkers did not write treatises about the rhetorical techniques they were using. A few writers did, however,

consider such techniques in connection with the problem of persuasion. Xunzi was the first to remark at length on the proper forms and practices of speech. Having demolished the claims of fortune-tellers in his essay “Against Physiognomy” (“Feixiang”), Xunzi reasserts the value of inherited standards, — social hierarchy, and moral absolutism. He then writes of the great pleasure the true gentleman takes in words that conform to ancient principles and advocate the good. To him they are more valuable than precious objects, more beautiful than the patternings (wenzhang) of brocade. Wen is indispensable in these words of the gentleman.” Next Xunzi considers the speech itself, in which the primary problem is the choice of “references” (ju). Xunzi assumes that in persuasion one adduces the best examples of the past to encourage change in the worst situations of the present:

VRZH VERS IRER- DERPREA ARI RBS HW: Baw

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et HEU - Ramm SAAB RERBE CRO: tS Ar Bm AMAA G The difficulty in any explanation is confronting the most exalted with the most demeaned and relating the most perfectly ordered to the most completely disordered. They cannot be brought into direct connection. If one adduces distant examples, one suffers from exaggeration; if one cites recent examples, one suffers from commonplaceness. A true expert is sure to avoid both difficulties by adducing only distant examples that are not exaggerated and by citing recent examples that are not commonplace. He modifies and changes them with the occasion, adapting and adjusting them to the age, sometimes indulgent, sometimes urgent, sometimes expansive, other times restrictive. Channel them as if with canal ditches, force them as if

with the press-frame, and accommodate them to the circumstances so that your audience will get hold of the idea under discussion, yet will not be given offense or

be insulted.” |

54 The Rhetoric of Good Order Next follow several lines on the gentleman’s tolerance in his judging of others, culminating in a Shi citation. In the next section, provided with its own title, Xunzi returns to rhetoric proper:”

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

The chapter concludes with a consideration of different types and levels of “discriminations” (bian). ‘This material has less to do with the internal organization of a speech, but Xunzi’s statement that the utterances of the sage “are well composed yet convey realities” (wen er zhi shi) is worthy of note.’ Good

speech is an adorned artifact, a work that is both beautiful and effective.” The rhetoric Xunzi outlines in these passages is one appropriate to his time, but one also shared by historiography and early Warring States philosophical writings. In identifying the choice of examples as the greatest challenge facing the speaker, he emphasizes one of the oldest and most enduring features of persuasions, the adduction of historical precedents, a practice with roots in the mimetic injunctions of bronze inscriptions. We will return shortly to this matter of polemical uses of the past. In the second passage cited, Xunzi anatomizes the speech, hinting at a division of its parts (introduction, development, illustrations) while also dispensing morally colored tips on delivery. The well-made speech becomes a treasure to be esteemed above all else. Its wen surpasses all other beauties, and by the play of homog-

raphy, the “persuasion” (shui gt) brings a righteous “pleasure” (yue i). Throughout the passages, Xunzi, whose prose is as sophisticated as that of the Zuozhuan, employs a rich, metrical style full of balances. In some pas-

The Rhetoric of Good Order 55 sages, the reader is reminded of the Zuozhuan's carefully composed remarks on the delights of the Chungiu.””

| Other pre-Qin philosophers touch on the problems of persuasion. In one scene in the “Human World” (“Renjianshi”) chapter of the Zhuangzi, Yan Hui explains to Confucius how he plans to convince the ruler of Wey to change his stubborn ways. Among the methods Confucius rejects as impractical is “drawing comparisons from the past” (shangbi), which Yan Hui believes will allow him to criticize without incurring blame. From Yan Hui’s description, it appears that he intends to cite ancient examples, as Xunzi proposed.” Xunzi’s student Han Fei, who was patently concerned with the problem of using historical examples in persuasion, comments on rhetorical techniques in the chapter “Difficulties of Speaking” (“Nanyan”). The last item in a long list of ineffective sorts of speech—the glib, the stodgy, the presumptuous, and so forth—is “recitation”: “If you continually cite (cheng) from the Shi and Shu, making a path and model of ancient times, then it will seem like a recitation (song).””” By the time Han Fei was writing, increasing complexity in the worlds of politics and philosophy had brought a prolifera-

tion of argumentative techniques, and the rhetoric that both Xunzi and the

historiographers practiced and praised was something of a relic.”° | Part of what Liu Zhiji, Han Yu, and the late imperial anthologists responded to in the speeches of the Zuozhuan and the Guoyu was the rhetoric of good order, for which these texts were the earliest and richest sources.

Whether they idealized this rhetoric or (as did Han Yu and some others) _ found it excessive, they recognized that its importance lay in the way it crafted patterns from words. In this respect, later readers gave the speeches their due. As the preceding analysis of the speeches of Beigong Wenzi and Duke Xiang has shown, much care was given to the creation of verbal pat-

terning, and patterning was organized around the problem of defending judgments, substantiating principles, and justifying citations from received texts. Evidence from Warring States philosophical texts demonstrates that the morphology of speeches is relevant outside the study of historiography, since it would appear that Confucian and non-Confucian thinkers alike em-

ployed a similar morphology and similar patterning in their essays. The rhetoric of good order was in many ways the starting point of the classical prose tradition in China and was understood as such by many later readers. Xunzi's repeated references to wen in his discussion of persuasion attest

56 The Rhetoric of Good Order to the significance he and others ascribed to pattern. The intricacies of speeches are not unpurposive adornments. As I have suggested, the possibility of substantiating a judgment by matching received principles with the observed particulars of a case implies a view of language as a treasury of truths. Good speakers, far from being criticized as glib, are almost always represented as morally upright and correct in their judgments of affairs. They are in fact the heroes of historiography in the sense that they make possible the continual explanation of historical events in the light of received knowledge,

| of historical precedents, and, most important, of inherited texts. They are

chapter. }

masters of wen; they know their texts.” But they also perform wen in the more general sense of bringing their learning to bear in every one of their speeches. It is to wen as the significance of pattern that we turn in the next

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

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

The term wen, which has a pre-eminent place both in Confucian philosophy and among the virtues named in the Zuozhuan and Guoyu, is notorious for the complexity of its semantic range. In oracle bone and bronze inscriptions, it functions largely as an epithet for deceased ancestors and rulers and appears to mean something like “accomplished.” In references to artifacts, it

denotes stripes of the sort found on cowry shells or patterns woven into cloth.” It is the preferred pre-Qin word for “logograph.” In the writings of certain philosophers, most notably Xunzi, it becomes a more abstract sort of “pattern,” the gestures and acts that constitute correctness and give due expression to the performer's emotions.’ And, as in the remark by Confucius quoted in the epigraphs to this chapter, it denotes a kind of cultural accomplishment—the preservation of inherited learning. In this chapter, without joining the debate over the original meanings of the word wen and its graph, I investigate the crucial uses to which the word was put by the historiographers, who drew links all along its semantic range, connecting decoration, writing, the classical curriculum of elite education, ritual, the characteristic

poise and ceremonial competence of the good man, and the king whose

58 Wen and the Meaning of Verbal Art posthumous name was Wen. By the assumptions they wrote into the use of their term and by the connections they forged among its various meanings, the historiographers laid the foundations for much of China’s later literary and historical thought. What the several meanings of wen have in common in the context of historiography is a set of aesthetic assumptions that operate in the speeches and narratives. As I will demonstrate in detail in Part II, it was the habit of these writers to construct plots around moments of interpretation that reveal truths hidden behind the visible things of the world. Typically, a talented observer sees in the historical particulars of an incident a meaning in-

visible to others and then defends his interpretation in a speech of prediction, remonstrance, or, more rarely, praise. Because what is perceptible

is interpretable, the precise control of appearances counts for everything. The public image—the way rulers and their ministers look to the people they rule and to their peers in other states—amounts, in the historiographical imaginaire, to inescapable surveillance and an effective reality that can bring political success or disaster.” Every deed of the ruling elite is visible, and every visible image affects the attitudes of political subordinates and colleagues. In this society, which places such importance on vision, wen is the sign on the surface of things that both invites the best possible interpretation

and ensures that interpretation in general is possible. An individual, an object, or a deed that strays from inherited specifications becomes interpretable because it departs from wen. ‘The decoration of a ritual object and a sacrificant’s controlled gesture are called wen because they are manifestations of a cultural legacy’s survival in the objects and practices of the present; as I will

| argue below, a speaker's manipulation of literary artifacts is wen for the same reason.’ In this context, the texts that would become the Confucian classics closely resemble other sorts of cultural artifacts. As with the bronzes and the other paraphernalia of ritual display, the texts themselves are wen, and using them correctly is wen.”

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

Wen and the Meaning of Verbal Art 59 formity with the past as the best guide to present action, and narratives tend to back them up. Wen is a part of this ideology of mimesis or cultural repro-

duction. In using the term “mimesis” (instead of “imitation” or another synonym), I have in mind Athenian usage during the fifth and fourth centuries B.c.z. For Greeks and for pre-Qin Chinese, conceptions of imitation

linked two distinct types of behavior. On the one hand, mimesis was the imitation of past models for the sake of cultural reproduction. The terms for “memory,” “imitation,” and “paradigm” employed in inscriptions and other early Chinese texts amount to a rich vocabulary of mimesis. The objects of mimesis were several, but the activity was in principle always conservative. Memory was a matter of constant attention to past models, and was desig_ nated by the word nian, “to think on.” The nature of this attention was indicated by the compound jingnian, which adds the notion of “continuing” or “carrying on” to the basic concept of attention: one thinks on things so that

| these things, which belong to the past, can be preserved in the present.” Other words that establish the commemorative aspect of mimesis are zhui, “to direct (action or thought) back toward,”” and two terms for forgetting, always used with a negative to yield the meaning “do not forget.”"* Imitation or replication of past behavior is designated by such words as xiao, “to imitate,” and shuai, “to follow.””* The paradigm preserved through commemoration is the “standard” (xing).’° Whether the object of commemoration and imitation is an ancestor, a king, or an abstract model of behavior established by such figures’ deeds, the mimetic vocabulary always directs attention to the past and to the problem of conforming the present to the past.’ Although historiography adds a number of terms to this vocabulary, it retains the assumption that mimesis is the basis of cultural continuity. Both narratives _ and speeches represent correct and successful action as the result of imitation. The citation of inherited texts is the rhetorical manifestation of this assumption. On the other hand, for the Chinese historiographers, as for Plato, terms for mimesis could also denote the representation of reality in an artistic medium.” The texts that speakers might cite in fact belonged to a larger category of cultural artifacts that were thought to embody both features of the physical world and the hierarchical relations of the inherited order. The flags and other markings reserved for the ruler, for instance, signify his prerogatives by the objects they represent.” Predictably, discussions of such artifacts regularly make mention of the abstract wen, in this context often translated

60 Wen and the Meaning of Verbal Art as “adornment.” Wen designates both the readable markings by which an object refers to things other than itself and the sumptuous quality of decoration by which the object signifies social status. More generally, it is decoration of every sort, the feature added to an object or a quality to make it visible, valuable, and readable. Just as the patterns woven into the clothing of the perfect ruler serve to “exhibit his wen,” words can be understood as the — wen of the body.”

| In a famous scene, King Zhuang of Chu (r. 613-591), campaigning against

| Rong tribes near the border of the Zhou royal domain, reveals his own hegemonic ambitions by asking a Zhou minister about the nine cauldrons, legendary symbols of royal dynastic legitimacy. Wangsun Man’s account of the cauldrons’ history links mimetic representation, political centralization, and display.*®

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th ARFEHA TE + AAT IE MESA bh HST hE CAR Aran ty, + el BSE SE - Kap Ac’ - HA CAR + RA th King Ding (of Zhou) sent Wangsun Man to greet and congratulate the ruler of Chu. The ruler of Chu asked him about the size and weight of the cauldrons. He replied, “It is a matter of virtue, not of the cauldrons themselves. Long ago, when the Xia first had their virtue, they made pictures of things from distant places, had metal presented as tribute by the masters of the nine regions, and cast cauldrons to represent the (distant) creatures. All the hundred creatures were made complete so that the people could know spirits and monsters. Thus when the people ventured

among the rivers and swamps and the mountains and forests, they encountered nothing harmful, and goblins and demons could not get to them. For this reason

Heaven. ,

there could be cooperation between the rulers and the ruled to receive the bounty of “The virtue of Jie was bedimmed, and the cauldrons were transferred to Shang.

, Six hundred annual sacrifices followed. Zhou (the last king) of Shang was violent

and cruel, and the cauldrons were transferred to Zhou. | “When virtue is good and bright, though (the cauldrons) be small, they are heavy. When there is depravity and darkness and disorder, though they be large,

, they are light. |

“Heaven blesses the virtue that is made bright, and (the blessings) have a determined place. King Cheng established the cauldrons at Jiaru. He divined thirty gen-

Wen and the Meaning of Verbal Art 61 erations; he divined seven hundred years. That was what Heaven commanded. Although Zhou's virtue is in decline, Heaven’s command has not yet changed. The

weight of the cauldrons cannot yet be asked about.” | Wangsun Man does not use the term wen. Yet the order of display he describes is the same order of ritual acts and objects in which wen becomes effective. The passage is a very rich one, bringing together mythology, mime-

sis, a semblance of art history, and a sketch of cultural history. The cauldrons, forged as a material representation of the tributary sway Yu wielded, function as aesthetic objects par excellence. They concentrate the freely given wealth of the world, but they are designed for the benefit of the

people, who see on them depictions of their fears and are prepared by this | vision to venture into frontier regions as bearers of culture. The vessels are richly decorated, but their mimetic luxuriance is blameless. The marks on

their surfaces, like Fuxi’s first wen in China's myth of the invention of writ- | ing, are imitations of phenomena from the animal world, and knowledge of them arms its possessors against threats from beyond the human realm.” As the treasures are passed down from lines whose virtue is “bedimmed” or “clouded over” (hun) to lines whose virtue is newly “clear” or “brilliant” (ming), they mark the success of another sort of mimesis, the imitation of predecessors’ excellence. They are vehicles for a circulation of generous services between the kings and the spirits who receive their sacrifices and, as before, between the kings and the people who benefit from and uphold the ruling line’s prestige. ‘The first act of tribute, which produces the cauldrons themselves as depictions both of the world and of its hierarchical relations, initiates a history of faithful and failed imitations. Artistic representation and cultural reproduction converge as every new generation attempts to renew the old exchanges of wealth, learning, and loyalty. All ritual objects resemble the cauldrons in that they represent the world © of social relations and, when passed to later generations, demand the repro-

duction of that world.” Historiography condemns objects that do not perpetuate the ritual order by functioning within it. In one well-known example, the Jin minister Shu Xiang’s condemnation of the law codes cast in _ bronze in the state of Zheng, the speech culminates with a direct reference

to King Wen and the order of mimesis.” The speakers of historiography are silent about most forms of aesthetic pleasure. They barely register the changes in artistic conventions that the archaeological record shows took place during Eastern Zhou times. The one

62 Wen and the Meaning of Verbal Art function of art that they do discuss (and at length) and that they view as legitimate is the effectiveness of artifacts as vehicles of display within the system of public imagery and mimesis.” Wen and associated terms designate the qualities of an artifact that make it socially effective for its whole audience, from noble connoisseurs to lowborn spectators. When Duke Yin of Lu (r. 722-712) expresses his intention to visit the fisheries of ‘T'ang, his minister

Zang Xibo explains in his remonstrance that the ruler properly concerns himself only with the objects and activities that constitute his military and

sacrificial order. According to the “system of old” (gu zhi zhi), the ruler | makes one hunting expedition in each season, using it to exercise his troops and to demonstrate good order. “He displays the patterned insignia (wenzhang), clarifies the noble and base, discriminates levels and ranks, establishes obedience between the young and the elders, and exercises his dignity and deportment (weiyi).” The ordinary products of the mountains and lakes are not the ruler’s business.” Zang Xibo’s son Zang Aibo delivers an even grander remonstrance when Duke Yin’s successor, Duke Huan (r. 71-694), commits the ritual impropriety of placing the cauldrons of Gao in Lu’s Great Temple (taimiao). The articles used by the ruler are designed to show his own frugality and the rank distinctions among his subjects, and the patterns (wen), colors, sounds, and astronomical figures used in his own accoutrements serve to impress on his ministers the stability and clarity of the system. Enshrining the Gao caul-

drons, a bribe from the state of Song, advertises not good order but Lu’s openness to bribery and the very failures that brought Gao’s annexation by Song. As Zang notes, even the most celebrated display of cauldrons, King Wus installation of the nine cauldrons in Luo, still had its principled detractors, and Duke Huan’s action falls far short of the king's.” Speeches concerning gifts exchanged between political superiors and inferiors also emphasize the effectiveness of display. Confucius, for instance, is made to criticize a duke’s gift of bells and a caparison to a minister; the items are a prerogative of the ruler, and by sharing them he endangers his own position and ritual propriety itself. Writing, whether or not it is termed wen, is one among several effective means of display. When Ji Wuzi of Lu commemorates a Lu victory over Qi in an inscription on bells cast from captured

Qi weapons, a member of the Zang family explains that inscriptions are properly used by the various ranks to remind descendants of ritually sanc-

Wen and the Meaning of Verbal Art 63 tioned gifts, achievements, and military campaigns. Lu’s questionable deeds in this campaign do not bear commemoration.” Persons described as wen have in some sense made themselves artifacts,

and like other artifacts they help to reproduce the cultural inheritance. In a fine commingling of several of the word’s meanings, the young Zhao Wu (posthumously named Wenzi) is told of his ancestor Zhao Shuai: “He adduced the records of old (gianzhi) to aid our former ruler, followed the law, and finally administered the government; how could he not be considered wen?” Zhao Shuai was great because he imbued himself and the state he served with the inherited standards of behavior that were handed down in records of normative ambitions (zhi).” On another occasion, Zhao Shuai is described as wen because of his mastery of the Shi and his ability to use the poems correctly in ritual settings.” The ruler Zhao Shuai serves, Duke Wen of Jin, is only one of the many characters whose posthumous name (shi) appears to glorify his cultural achievements and to identify him with the most

eminent possessor of the name, King Wen.”

The body is a vessel for personality, and the words and gestures by which a person expresses himself reveal the otherwise hidden contents of his heart. An aide to the Jin ducal heir Shensheng, who has been given strange clothing and sent on an inappropriate military expedition by his father, explains that “clothing is the marking (zhang) of the self’ and that his father is thus

disowning him.” Elsewhere, “regalia” (in this case halberd-bearing bodyguards) “are the wen of the heart; like the turtle shell, when there is a burning within, there must be wen without.” The character observed is Prince Wei of

Chu, whose hidden ambitions and checkered career are the subject of much interpretation by speakers. To the talented observer, the prince's halberdbearers are the sign of his intention to make himself king of Chu.” Considered as accoutrements of a person, words are wen in the sense that they reveal to a good interpreter the meanings that a principled or perfidious

speaker might intend to keep concealed. Jie zhi Tui, a follower of Duke Wen of Jin who goes into reclusion after refusing to claim a reward for his efforts during the duke’s years of exile, explains to his mother why he cannot

make his objections known to the duke: “Words are the wen of the self. When the self is about to go into hiding, what use is there for adorning it with wen? That would be seeking fame.”” Yang Chufu of Jin maintains fine appearances, but unintentionally reveals his deficiencies in his words, which

64 Wen and the Meaning of Verbal Art are described, exactly as in Jie zhi Tui’s case, as “the wen of the self." In all cases, a character’s choice of expression—in clothing, accoutrements, ges-

tures, and words—is a performance that through the readable element of wen ineluctably reveals an inner intention. The best wen is adornment in accordance with the standards of display, but by extension the term applies to empty facades and to improper displays as well. _ Speeches on gifts and ritual artifacts imply that all the objects used in rit-

| ual performances were in principle made according to inherited specifications and, in many cases, were themselves handed down from generation to

| generation.” In their materiality and in the functions their forms implied, | they are imagined as a bulwark against ritual change and as a force for mimetic stability. Although it is not the sort of point historiography could make, changes in practice had to be accompanied by time-consuming and expensive reworkings of ritual equipment.” Texts, despite their special properties, also functioned as ritual artifacts, and like other objects involved

, their users—singers, readers, citers, reciters, exegetes—in negotiations be- . | tween text and use, “original” meaning and application, mimetic faith and mimetic extension.

~ The ritual system not only included texts among its paraphernalia but has itself come down to us in textualized form. Much of what we know of it |

| comes from texts, and specifically from the most highly patterned and self, consciously crafted portions of texts, the speeches of historiography.” Ritual _ practice cannot be separated from the rhetoric of good order in which it is described and defended. The symmetrical rhetorical forms one finds in well-

made speeches on ritual and other subjects are not simply the results of faithful representation; they exploit the grammatical, semantic, and rhetorical resources of the language. By the same token, the marked orderliness of ritual practices as they are represented in the speeches cannot be a fiction perpetrated for its rhetorical advantages. Ritual practices and the spoken or

written discourse describing them worked together and influenced each

| other; ritual practice was informed by writing (or at least by orderly language), and certain types of discourse, including many of the speeches re-

_corded in historiography, were ritualized. — If texts, like bronzes, temples, and official ranks, are passed down from generation to generation, binding every new possessor in a commitment to those who created the texts or transmitted them, then citations are one way

| speakers in historiography fulfill their obligations. Citations are special ob-

| Wen and the Meaning of Verbal Art 65 jects in the texture of the well-wrought speech. By their archaism and by the whole formal apparatus of quotation, they mark the distance between origin

and reception, a distance that is overcome only through the continual efforts | of devoted ritualists and good speakers. Wen is the system of cultural reproduction in all its parts: it refers equally to the texts cited, to the speeches that result, and to the learned individuals who carry on the work.

Text as Artifact: Citing the Zhouyi | The citation of received texts and sayings, a common rhetorical technique of

the historiographers in presenting speeches and more than likely of the speakers of the Spring and Autumn period whose speeches they are purportedly recording, attests to the status of traditional learning during the Eastern Zhou. To judge from the range of quotations and isolated statements in Warring States period accounts, a noble education included tuition in a number of techniques, including reading, and in a number of specific texts.” It is hardly surprising that the texts said to have been included in the

curriculum are precisely the ones that are quoted most frequently in the speeches of the Guoyu and the Zuozhuan. The conclusion generally drawn is

that elite education was designed in part to prepare students to speak eloquently. Although there is little reason to challenge that conclusion, it does —

beg for amplification. The two historiographical works do not stop at recording the events and speeches of the Spring and Autumn period. They are also continually involved in a struggle to legitimate certain kinds of knowledge and to exclude other kinds. This is not to say that ideology is unitary within the texts; it is not. But no one who has read the two works carefully can deny the sheer tendentiousness of their narratives, which work through

historical facts to demonstrate the validity of certain views, most of them _ | readily understood as elements of Confucian thinking, One unchallenged tenet is that verbal compositions inherited from previous generations are directly relevant to contemporary problems of policy. Beigong Wenzi's speech, discussed in the preceding chapter, showed how

the fabric of a speech could be woven around a set of citations. The use of weiyi and the careful description of Sun Zhou's behavior further demonstrated that framing narratives were sometimes pretexts for speeches, subtle legitimations of the citations and elaborations taken up in the speeches. A more general consideration of the phenomenon of citation as it is depicted in the Zuozhuan, the Guoyu, and other texts makes possible a sketch of the state

66 Wen and the Meaning of Verbal Art of textual and historical knowledge during the late Spring and Autumn and early Warring States period. Citations give us a sense of what speakers and writers thought they knew about the past, how they knew it, and why they thought it was important. The evidence suggests that speakers did not have a comprehensive, even knowledge of their texts; rather, they favored some parts of those texts over others. Continuities between the interpretation of received texts and the reading of physical signs in the world are clearest in the use of the Zhouyi, the divination manual also known as the Yijing (Changes classic).”” Divination links

the system of artifactual display to the purely textual practices of citation and interpretation. Unlike other texts, which in historiography are cited more often than they are put to practical use in ritual, the Zhouyi is represented as one of several texts whose primary purpose is to make sense of divination results. Although the Zhouyi is mentioned less frequently than such texts as the Shi and the Shangshu, it forms part of a social and religious practice of finding and interpreting relevant words, and in that sense it establishes the very possibility of the rhetorical use of citation. The historiographers do not always tell how the outcome of a divination—auspicious or inauspicious—was determined, but when they do, they take for granted the initial reading of the physical evidence of bone or stalks. What they stress instead is the problem of interpreting the language that goes with that evidence. Passages from the Zhouyi and otherwise unknown divination-rhymes (yao) are handled in identical fashion: the task of the scribe or diviner who issues the prognostication is to cite the relevant language and to relate it to the matter under divination. The authoritative speech explaining the results takes the same form as a speech woven around Shi or Shangshu citations. Sometimes speakers cite the Zhouyi for its exemplary language even in the absence of a divination, a sign that the process that would transform the work into one of the Classics had already begun when these speeches were

composed,” |

Besides the regular techniques of matching inherited language and present events, Zhouyi divinations and citations exemplify another rhetorical tool: the use of conventional imagery. Each of the sixty-four hexagrams in the Zhouyi is formed from a combination of two trigrams. Associated with each of the eight possible trigrams are several conventional images. Although prognosticators do read the Zhouyi’s | divination-rhymes, hexagram statements (guaci), and line statements (yaoci) as they would read a Shi tag, they

Wen and the Meaning of Verbal Art 67 also explain the hexagrams’ meanings by way of their constituent trigrams, finding in the latter and in their images the terms that pertain to the matter at hand.” This method of interpretation, most familiar from the “Judgment” (“Tuan”) and “Image” (“Xiang”) commentaries on the Zhouyi, reaches virtuosic extremes in the Zuozhuan and the Guoyu. Speakers exploit the intrinsic _ flexibility of the system of trigram images, piling interpretation on interpretation and demonstrating finally, in the overdetermination of the prediction, that the composers of the speech knew full well the outcome of the events being divined. Divination speeches, like many of the other speeches in historiography, were composed or revised in hindsight and for the sake of making events intelligible through citation.

One of the more spectacular divinations in the Zuozhuan shows how thoroughly hexagrams and the language of the Zhouyi could determine retro-

spective readings of events. Shusun Bao (Shusun Muzi) of Lu was forced into a brief exile because of an affair between his elder brother and the mother of Duke Cheng of Lu (r. 590-573). After spending a night with a woman in the Lu town of Gengzong, he dreamed that Heaven was crushing him and that he could not escape. Catching sight of a dark, hunchbacked man with deep-set eyes and a nose like a pig’s snout, he cried, “Niu (Ox), help me,” and was saved. On waking, he could not identify the man among his followers but had a description of him recorded. After he returned to Lu, the woman of Gengzong reported to him that she had had a son, whom she sent to him. He was the man Shusun Bao had seen in his dream, and his name was Niu.” Although an illegitimate younger son, Niu hoped to control the Shusun lineage. Brought to Lu, he moved against his elder brothers, starving his father to death when he opposed him. The following is the Zuozhuan account of a divination performed at the birth of the father, Shusun Bao:

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68 Wen and the Meaning of Verbal Art Earlier, when Shusun Bao was born, his father, Zhuang Shu, performed a milfoil divination with the Zhouyi about him. Receiving Mingyi’s Qian as his response, he showed it to the diviner Chuqiu. Chugqiu said, “This child will go into exile and return to perform ancestral sacrifices for you. He will bring a slanderer into the state, whose name will be Niu, and in the end he will starve to death. “Mingyi is the sun. The number of the suns was ten, so there are ten periods in the day, which also correspond to the ten official ranks. From the king down, the second is duke, and the third is the minister. The sun at its height is in the center; the time of eating is second; dawn is third. In the first line of Mingyi, it is bright but not yet high; would this not correspond to dawn? Therefore I say, ‘He will perform

ancestral sacrifices to you.’ , |

“Tt is the first line of the sun trigram, which corresponds to a bird, so (the line statement) says, “The calling pheasant is in flight.’ It is bright but not yet high, so (the line statement) says Tt lowers its wings.’ This resembles the movement of the sun, so (the line statement) says, “The superior man is traveling,’ Corresponding to the third place is dawn, so (the line statement) says, ‘He does not eat for three days.’ “The Li trigram is fire. The Gen trigram is a mountain. As fire, the Li trigram burns the mountain, and the mountain is destroyed. In the human world this refers to words. Destructive words are slander, so (the line statement) says ‘He has somewhere to go. The ruler has words.’ These words will necessarily be slanderous. “Accompanying the Li trigram is the Niu (ox) trigram. In a chaotic world slan-

der will prevail, and when it prevails it will attach itself to the Li trigram, so I say, ‘His name will be Niu.’ ““Modesty’ is insufficiency, and in flying (Shusun Bao) will not soar far. ‘Lowering’ (his wings) means they are not high; his wings are not broad, So I say, ‘He will be your successor.’ You, Sir, are a secondary minister; but he will fall short of having

a good end”? In this complicated prognostication, the diviner Chuqiu claims to see details of the newborn child’s future successes and sufferings in the figures of

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

oe Wen and the Meaning of Verbal Art 69 some element of the particular events under consideration. The speaker invokes separate systems of knowledge along the way (official ranks, periods of the day, trigram images), but his speech is unified by the problem of matching the readable signs of the hexagrams and the line statement with the extratextual reality being read, the future of the child. Like the speeches of Beigong Wenzi and Duke Xiang, Chugiu’s is both extreme and typical. Few speakers venture such bold reaches of metaphor and inference, but in most speeches based on citations it is taken for granted that events will prove the speaker right and that the correctness of the speech will justify all apparent interpretive liberties. __ More than any other commonly cited text, the Zhouyi establishes in the act of divination a magical connection among physical signs, cited language, and interpreted events.” This text is an artifact. It is one of the few texts of which historiography can claim that someone saw a written copy.” And in practice it forces the diviner to attend to the marks made on or by the sacred tools of divination and to assume a necessary connection between these marks and specific passages of received divinatory language. No other early text is so closely associated with the precious material possessions of Zhou courts. But the fundamental claim of divination practice—that properly cited language makes for the understanding of historical particulars—un-

, derlies all citations in the speeches of historiography. The citation of passages from the Zhouyi raises the question of how the historiographers viewed the authorship of the texts they cited and why these texts were authoritative. Various anecdotes make it clear that the Zhouyi belongs to and supports the Zhou cultural order.” Yet the Zuozhuan and Guoyu make no reference to well-known legends of the text's authorship. In particular, they do not overtly associate any part of the text with King Wen and do not stress the role of the text as a means of reproducing the king’s teachings for future imitation.” As patterns in the citation of other texts will show, the Zhouyi is in this respect somewhat unusual. Perhaps the impersonality imputed to the association of divination results and mantic language discouraged the identification of authors of that language. It is even possible that particular attributions were common knowledge, and there was no reason for them to surface in the relatively few instances of divination and cita-

tion included in Zuozhuan and Guoyu. Despite their silence about the authors of the Zhouyi, however, speakers in historiography leave no doubt that citations obtained through divination and citations chosen from this

70 + Wen and the Meaning of Verbal Art and other texts for rhetorical purposes belong to the same method of making sense, the same accommodation of present facts to old language. To cite is to assert possession of an inheritance. But to take possession of a text is problematic. If the cited texts are artifacts, then who made them?

And who controls them now? Authorship as speakers in historiography seem to know it differs fundamentally from later, more familiar models. Named attributions are the exception rather than the rule. Although one might speak about “authors” in the case of the bronze inscriptions, where the caster of the vessel and the composer of the inscribed text name themselves openly, authorship even there is far from simple, since the caster frequently

incorporates the text of an investiture order bestowed, usually with other gifts, by a king or other political superior. That is, the origin of the text lies not in a single act of literary composition but in a complicated social interaction reminiscent of the casting of the nine cauldrons. In many compositions, the value of the text derives both from the status of the giver and from

the prestige gained by the recipient. | All chapters of the Shangshu, along with most Shi poems, are strictly — anonymous compositions in the sense that they include no internal claims of

authorship. The text is narrated in the third person by an unknown observer; no one will ever be able to name the person who wrote “The king spoke to the effect .. .” (wang ruo yue) at the opening of a Shangshu speech. Yet many of the earliest of these texts resemble the bronze inscriptions in

that they are associated with figures of enormous political and cultural prestige. The speech that follows the framing words is far from anonymous. At the minimum the tradition is prepared to assert that it was uttered by an unnamed king, and historical details in the speech often make it possible for

later readers to determine which king is meant.” Some chapters name speakers other than the ruler; the most prominent of these in the earliest chapters are the Duke of Shao (referred to as Taibao, the Grand Protector) and the Duke of Zhou, both of whom are also credited with certain Shi poems.” Only gradually does the exegetical tradition come to include authori-

tative identifications of the speaker and the historical occasion of each speech. As with the Shi and the Yi Zhoushu, these identifications take the

form of prefaces to the individual sections of the text.”” | A few of the Shi poems do seem to name their own authors.” But such claims are rare, and the persons who identify themselves as singers or authors are in most cases otherwise unknown to us. Most of the Shi poems

Wen and the Meaning of Verbal Art 71 got their authors after the fact, from a readership that seemingly could not tolerate the tradition’s silence on the matter. The Zuozhuan and Guoyu explain the circumstances under which several of the poems were composed and name groups or individuals as authors. A Shangshu chapter likely written during the Warring States period gives another attribution, and other pre-

Qin texts provide a few more.” To the small extent that it has been explored, the question of orality in early China is a vexed one, but at least in this respect comparative evidence from other oral literatures is relevant.” In the milieu of oral performance and transmission, there is no “author” in the literate world’s sense of the word. No single individual is identifiable as the sole originator of a given text, which is performed—and recomposed in performance—by successive transmitters. If an authored text is the legacy of a creator, an oral text is a different sort of possession, one that owes its existence to the inherent interest of its subject and to the care of its many owners. Not all such texts are attributed to a particular author, since they can circulate without a legend of authorship. When the later tradition does attribute a text to a particular individual, often decades or centuries after the first appearance of the text itself, that individual is generally a figure who has won enough cultural prestige for his non-literary endeavors to warrant the attribution.” The particular characteristics of authorship matter because they reflect the historiographers’ conceptions of intellectual property and its circulation. A

literate model of authorship, including the one that prevailed in China start- | ing in the Western Han, ensures that texts are for the most part read with reference to their authors and the historical occasion of composition. Although it is beyond the scope of this study to investigate the relative importance of

orality and writing in the transmission of texts during the Spring and , Autumn period and after, the way these compositions were acquired and used, their character as possessions, sets them apart from texts that originated with historical authors in a literate age.” As I note above, many of the texts that would later become the Confucian canon were, according to the Zuozhuan and the Guoyu, a major part of the curriculum for any formal education during the Spring and Autumn period. Patterns of citation from the texts do.

complicate the picture, but historiography leads its readers to believe that court officials of the period were, almost without exception, so well versed in the texts that they could recite portions of them from memory and could expect their listeners to understand the most oblique references to them.”

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

Artifacts of the Zhou: Citing Shi and Shangshu Beigong Wenzi's speech shows how citations from the Shi and other texts could be woven together with more general principles and with observed particulars (like the Chu representative's weiyi) to form a fabric in which rhetorical elegance itself constituted a claim to validity. ‘The nature of cited texts as common property partly explains the status they acquire in speeches, where by rhetorical or historiographical convention their authority is sheltered from challenges. But it is a mistake to assume that the speakers are equally familiar with all parts of the inherited texts, or that all the principles that might be implicit in passages from those works are defended in the speeches. Citation, like rhetorical speech itself, is a tendentious practice, a way of molding and delimiting the meaning of the received text, The historiographers work through the speakers to uphold the authority of the classic-

to-be, but they do so on their own terms. , The inherited text that holds the greatest rhetorical and cultural value for speakers in historiography is the Shi, which they put to two related uses.

Speakers frequently cite short passages to bolster their arguments; as Beigong Wenzi'’s remarks on weiyi showed, speeches seem in some cases to

Wen and the Meaning of Verbal Art 73 have been composed for the sake of reasoning through such passages, ‘They also use complete poems or excerpted stanzas in recitations delivered on _ diplomatic occasions, usually as part of ritual feasting. As a social and aesthetic practice, recitation is a subject properly reserved for Chapter 7. Here I focus on citation, a technique that is intrinsic to the verbal art of historiography and that implicates the Shi in the construction of knowledge in rhe-

torical contexts.” ,

The available data do not permit the precise dating of any act of citation, which may owe as much to the practices of historiographers themselves as to habits of Spring and Autumn period speakers. But it is clear that citation was influential both for its concrete contributions to knowledge and for the

way it exemplified formal techniques of precedent-based argument. As noted above, citations operated within and to some extent determined the shape of speeches, which become important models for prose writing in later

periods. The creation of diverse fields of knowledge in historiographical speeches is the subject of the next chapter. In the present chapter, I consider the overall rhetorical utility of the Shi. What do patterns of citation tell us about speakers’ and historiographers’ conception of the Shi?

Underlying both citation and recitation is the assumption that to quote a Shi poem lends authority to one’s speech in one of two ways.” On the one hand, quotation is a historicist enterprise, an attempt to introduce into present discourse authentic tokens of past excellence. The scattered attributions to named authors ground the poems in eras of good government or of just censure; the Mao school’s “Great Preface,” with its theory of the “changed odes” (bianfeng), belongs to this line of thought. On the other hand, to the extent that they become vessels for contemporary expressions of heartfelt determination or intent (zhi), poems cited or recited are liberated from the occasion of their composition.” Yet the value of the poems as common property rests on their ties to originary occasions, and the tradition predictably includes defenses against free decontextualization. The Qi nobleman Lupu Gui attempts to excuse an incestuous marriage by comparing it to uses of the Shi in recitation: “As in reciting the poems we break off stanzas (fushi duanzhang), I have taken what I wanted.” Certainly reciters did just

that, and the Lupu Gui’s comparison may mean that the practice was | thought unobjectionable.” But the narrative may imply that Lupu Gui'’s attitude toward recitation is as wanton as his choice of a wife and that danger accompanies certain kinds of literary activity.” When Mencius rebukes his

74, Wen and the Meaning of Verbal Art disciple Xiangiu Meng for what he perceives as a harmful reading, the trouble arises from a contradiction between the words of the poem (“To all the edges of the earth, there is no one who is not a subject of the king”) and a normative view of history in which the sage-king Shun cannot be said to have ruled over his father.” Such evidence of tensions reminds us that historicism and free application are hardly independent aspects of Shi reception, but go hand in hand. The theatricality of a recitation and the rhetorical force

of citation originate in the stretch between a shared, revered past and the

contemporary aims of individuals. : Speakers and historiographers do not invoke the example of the past indiscriminately. The Shi is valuable to them for its embodiment of one era, the early Zhou, and for one example above all others, that of King Wen.” Speakers cite “King Wen” (Mao 235) more often than any other poem or inherited text.” They also frequently cite other poems that either mention King Wen or can be interpreted as relating to him.*® When speakers weave Shi lines into the fabric of a speech, they sometimes fashion a connection between the citation and King Wen.” By contrast, speakers in the Zuozhuan and the Guoyu neglect Shi poems concerning other important pre-dynastic Zhou heroes. Hou Ji is mentioned a number of times, but the poem that describes his miraculous birth is never cited, and speakers refer to him somewhat vaguely as a Zhou ancestor and the recipient of sacrifices.” Another hero, Gong Liu, is not so much as mentioned, and the poem bearing his name is never cited.” As matters of common knowledge, the legends about the early Zhou may have been beneath citation. But the deeds of King Wen and his contemporaries must also have been familiar, and the question remains why citations of the poems connected with him, rather than with

other heroes, carried such rhetorical weight. | The answer lies in the way King Wen is characterized in the Zuozhuan and Guoyu. Although numerous other individuals are presented as exemplars of virtue and good sense, King Wen stands at the center of the mimetic system as the object of imitation par excellence.” In Chapter 8, I will argue in connection with narrative that the historiographers conceived of historical change as the result of aberrations from ritual propriety, an order that, if maintained properly, would rule out the changes in political fortunes, mili-

tary confrontations and annexations, and civil strife that are the stuff of Spring and Autumn history. Li—ricual propriety—names an ideal order of mimesis in which prescribed social structures and procedures outlive the

Wen and the Meaning of Verbal Art 75 successive generations who use them. In the view of the historiographers, this order begins with a devotion to King Wen, and to act in conformity with it is both to honor the founder and to do what is right. By the conventions of the speakers’ favorite imagery, King Wen is so bright with de, “virtue,” “virtuous attainment,” or “inward power,” that he illuminates all around him. Wherever the light of his virtue reaches, in his own time or after, it draws people to him and causes them to re-form themselves in his image. When Duke Xiang of Song fails to take the capital of Cao after a

prolonged siege, a minister reminds him that King Wen, failing after thirty days to reduce Chong, retreated and “improved his teachings” (xiujiao). When

he renewed the siege, the people of Chong surrendered immediately. The minister cites lines from “Solemn” (“Siqi,” Mao 240) to show that King Wen exerted a virtuous influence by providing models of behavior to his wife, his brothers, his family, and the state.” Praising an official reward made by Duke Jing of Jin (r. 599-581), the Jin noble Yangshe Zhi compares the act to the bright virtue (mingde) and generosity of King Wen, who was (in the words of a citation from the “Zhoushu”) able to “use the useful and to respect the respectable.” By adhering to the model, one is assured of success: as Yangshe Zhi asks in the same speech, “If one follows this path, in what will one not succeed2””* But one who departs from this model faces difficulties. Whereas King Wen led all the rulers loyal to him in serving the Shang king, Jin has prematurely encouraged the state of Chen to break its ties with its powerful neighbor, Chu; King Wen understood timeliness, but “now that we have introduced a change, it is hard!””? The very rise of Zhou is understood as the result of an imitation of the excellence embodied by King Wen.” In his every virtuous action, King Wen is the central object of mimesis.” Speakers in the Guoyu often relate the historical King Wen to the quality he is understood to embody, wen as cultural accomplishment. Praising Sun Zhou, Duke Xiang of Shan makes an important transition by implying that the possessor of wen partakes in all that made King Wen successful and will himself succeed: “When warp and woof do not clash, it is the image of wen. King Wen was wen in his substance, and so Heaven blessed him with all under Heaven. Now this man has covered himself in it [wen] and is close in the order of generations: he can win his state.” The imagery of woven silk, which here completes the link between Sun Zhou’s eleven virtues and King Wen’s triumphs of wen, establishes a homology between cosmic order and human order and implicates Heaven itself in wen’s patterns.” Similarly, when Duke

76 Wen and the Meaning of Verbal Art Wen of Jin asks Xu Chen about a tutor for his son, Xu Chen answers with a

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

ae El + HELE ME - (a) PERL - (b] RABE: [a] Hac - [d] 58 BA ot $8 - [e(i] DRA - EIA - (gi) 52 UB oe bt - ChiJ[i.) fe 3 = + (j:) HB BE Hs - (ki) BES ae Hk ¢ (Lh) HE AF « (a2) BE Hill 38 EE - [b,] (3 IF FE FOE SE + (co) FR ee PA ELBA - [d.) Spe RAL EAR - [eee 4 EA

R&R - (LA SARAA - (gs) MAAR EIB: (hh) BS mMe ZA : [i] AS EK YB NC + [an-in) UPB A 4G - [jo] (ES PRB - (ko) RE Kik - (LIF HR

PAC EC Bw - UM BR - APRARM: : The Shi says:

There was King Wen: ,

The emperor above gave him discernment in his heart. (a,]

Wen and the Meaning of Verbal Art 77

Concordant was the news of his virtue, [b,] | And his virtue could shine. [c;] He could shine; he could be good; [dj] He could lead; he could rule. [e,][f,] He reigned over these great states, And could bring compliance and unity. [g,] They united with King Wen, [hj] [i] In whose virtue there was no cause for regret. [jj] Having received the blessings of the Lord, [kj] He bestowed them on his sons and grandsons. [l,] [a,) When:the heart can take its ordering principles from rightness, that is discernment; [bz] when virtue is correct and the response harmonious, that is concordance; [c.] radiating light down upon all in the four directions is shining; (d2] giving assiduously without concern for oneself is being good; [e2] teaching tirelessly is being a leader; (f,] by rewarding, congratulating, punishing, and inspiring awe, one is a ruler; [g.] when through kindness and gentle harmoniousness one brings general submission, that is compliance; [h,.] when one elects the good and follows it, that brings unity; (i,] establishing the warp and woof of Heaven and earth is wen. [a,-i,] Never erring in these nine virtues, [j.] one acts without bringing regrets; [k,] thus one wins rewards of Heaven [I,] upon which one’s sons and grandsons can rely.

effects.” |

Your appointments come close to this virtue of wen and will have far-reaching

Devotion to King Wen takes various forms in this passage. First, his name has perhaps replaced that of his father, which in the Mao edition of the Shi appears in the first line.’ The twelve lines here refer solely to King Wen and his moral and political virtues. Second, the rhetoric of good order has here produced a structure in which the twelve lines yield an equal number of terms for virtues and successes, which the speaker expounds as if they

arise naturally from the order of the cited text.’ As in the examples in Chapter 1, the joining of highly patterned prose (especially evident in the first nine lines of interpretation) with support from classical citations seems to have constituted a singularly compelling sort of proof. Finally, the speech reasserts the ubiquitous identification of the historical king with all the separate elements of the abstract wen.

As with the other principles found in speeches, the speakers or historiographers resist limiting wen or specifying its meaning closely; they develop its

truth value in conjunction with many particular concerns. The system of

78 Wen and the Meaning of Verbal Art nine virtues here attributed to King Wen, for instance, does not correspond in any systematic way with the eleven virtues related to wen in the encomium of Sun Zhou. Rather wen, which is a concept of cultural conformity and elegant accomplishment and at the same time tied to the historical individual

who most perfectly embodied it, is insinuated into the anecdotes and speeches of historiography by being adapted to the particular conditions of narrated moments. Kept flexible by constant use, wen serves the historiographers well in their efforts to extend the sway of Zhou values over as broad a field of phenomena as possible. The most carefully crafted speeches, the speeches that weave the most elegant tissue of prose around poetic citations, do not always mention King Wen or use the term wen. But there is a sense _in which all poetic citation, like all competent handling of citations within a deliberative or remonstrative speech, is a wen-informed activity; good speech, as I will show, is praised as wenci. Like the Shi, other inherited texts, including some that may not have cir-

culated in written form, become vehicles of what we might call, with the historiographers, “the order of the former kings” (xianwang zhi zhi). Although King Wen does not figure as prominently in these works as he does in the Shi, he nevertheless remains a focus of devotion and imitation. What is more significant, citations from these texts tend to support the mimetic imperative that is voiced most clearly in connection with King Wen. Good speakers lived in and defended the remnants of King Wen’s order, but they did not refrain from citing texts associated with the best periods of the Xia and Shang. Unlike Shi poems, many of these citations cannot refer to the particular relations of Zhou states. Instead, it is implied, they bespeak values

that all good kings have upheld. | More than half the passages cited from the Shangshu in speeches in the Zuozhuan and Guoyu are not to be found, even in variant form, in the extant text of the Shangshu.”® As has long been known, the Shangshu that circulated

in the Warring States period, when our historiographies were taking shape, contained much material that did not survive the Qin-Han transition. The substance of the citations, however, suggests that speakers and historiographers were not working with a larger set of written texts but may have cited as “writings” (shu) even texts they had not read but had instead heard. The fluidity that characterizes the historiographical use of certain types of inherited speech suggests that the Shangshu texts that people knew and cited when

Wen and the Meaning of Verbal Art 79 the histories were being written were far from fixed. Words attributed in one place to the Shangshu are elsewhere identified simply as sayings, as in the

Zuozhuan passage in which the famous Chu exile Wu Zixu advises King Fuchai of Wu (r. 495-477) not to grant the state of Yue a peace treaty but to annihilate it. He says, “I have heard, ‘In setting up one’s virtue, it is best to

be generous; in removing trouble, it is best to be thorough.” He then recounts the rise and fall of a famed Xia dynasty usurper.”” Yet one edition of the Zhanguoce identifies the saying as a citation from the Shu, and another attributes it to the Shi.”’ Such vacillation, which is not uncommon, perhaps

indicates that the speakers and writers who built inherited language into speeches during the Eastern Zhou were often uncertain of or indifferent to the provenance of that language.” Perhaps Wu Zixu, or the person who formulated his speech, merely puts the matter imprecisely, referring to a Shangshu passage as if it were an aphorism. More probably, Wu Zixu’s cita-

tion hints at the state of textual knowledge during the Warring States period. The extent of the “Writings” was for a long time unclear, with a great mass of inherited language, regularly circulated by word of mouth, capable of being classed either as Shu or as aphorism. Patterns in the citation of ancient texts contribute to the impression that writing was not the foremost medium of dissemination. Written versions of the Shangshu, the “Writings of Zheng” (“Zhengshu”), and numerous other little-known works cited by speakers may well have existed, even in numerous copies, but speakers in the Zuozhuan and Guoyu never mention that they

have read them.” The convention for introducing a quoted aphorism is “I have heard it said that” (chen wen zhi). Sayings of former worthies such as Zhong Hui, Zhou Ren, Jizi, or the Scribe Yi play the same role in speeches as Shi or Shangshu citations.» Speakers even recall the words of more recently

deceased wise men, such as Zifan of Jin or Zichan of Zheng.” Fragments from shadowy collections of historical records, maxims, and ritual proprieties are preserved here and there. When it is possible to compare speakers’ citations with counterparts in the extant Shangshu, the two versions often differ. In itself that is hardly surprising, given the likelihood that the Shangshu chapters circulated in many different versions, as did most early texts. Yet the citations in historiography

seem especially well suited to repetition from memory; they have been turned into aphorisms. The citations are often simpler and tidier than the

80 Wen and the Meaning of Verbal Art corresponding passages in the received text, and they often revise phrasings to create metrical regularity.” Rhyme, which may well be the quality that makes the Shi especially quotable, occurs with greater frequency in citations from the Shangshu than it does in the received text of the Shangshu itself."

Quoted passages do not come in equal proportion from all parts of the Shangshu; as Matsumoto Masaaki has noted, the largest number come from the “Kang gao.”” Certain passages are cited two or more times.” It is entirely understandable, given the technical inconveniences that attended early

writing, that the words of the Shangshu, always conceived of as written, would also circulate by word of mouth and would show traces of their oral existence as they were copied and recopied.””

Phrases and ideas that are stressed through repetition in the authentic chapters of the Shangshu tend to have mimetic themes. Speakers regularly enjoin one another to model their behavior on the best examples of the past. Citations of the Shangshu in historiography show a similar tendency, but the themes are adapted for new discursive surroundings. King Wen and wen as abstraction are again prominent, although less so than in the Shi citations. As one Guoyu speaker says, to follow the normative records of former times in helping a ruler is wen.” King Wen is held up as a model of action especially, but not exclusively, in the many citations from the “Kang gao.””” Even when he is not mentioned, accounts of the radiant virtue and generosity by which the best rulers attracted the obedience of their people recall his example above all others.” The order of ritual propriety founded by King Wen’s immediate successors is everywhere in historiography understood as the single legitimate standard for interactions of all sorts; citations from ritual texts stress the faithful reproduction of the old models. Citations from the most

| diverse sources not only are proposed as objects of study and emulation but themselves thematize the imitation of standards and exemplary rulers from the past, or show how a family’s decline and loss of political power result from its failure to adhere to the old models.’” Finally, despite a marked opposition to written law codes, speakers in historiography cite several codes, including one attributed to King Wen, which we are perhaps to understand

as unwritten bodies of legal principle.’ Beyond Shi citations lies a much larger category of inherited language, which is the vehicle of speakers’ and historiographers’ project of establishing mimesis as the basis of valid thought and successful political action.

Wen and the Meaning of Verbal Art 81

King Wen and Wenci Speakers refer to King Wen and the values associated with him even when reflecting on the decline of Zhou prestige and the rise of other powers. A visit of Jin ministers to the Zhou court of King Jiing (1. 544-520) becomes a dialogue on the various functions of wen.’ When the king asks why Jin does not present tribute vessels to the royal house, Ji Tan explains with stylized humility that Jin, in its remoteness from the capital, is beyond the reach of the king's blessings, and cannot submit gifts. Jin, they imply, lies outside the system of exchange that constitutes political affiliation. The king then rebukes them, recounting gifts Jin rulers have received from former kings, including King Wen: commemoration in historical records, lands, vessels, chariots, and flags (wenzhang). How is it, the king wonders, that Ji Tan, scion of one of two old scribal families in Jin, can have forgotten such clear evidence of gift exchanges?’ In an aside, the king correctly predicts that the Ji family will not last long, since Ji Tan claims to cite precedents but in fact has forgotten his ancestors’ vocation. ”” In his own aside Ji Tan foresees quite accurately that the king will not die

well, since he has feasted his guests and requested tribute from them at a time when he should be mourning for his heir and his queen.” It is ritually proper even for the king to wear mourning for three years, he says, and the king has now defied ritual, which is the “great warp-thread” (dajing) of the true king. “Speaking is for consulting the canons (dian), and canons are for recording (zhi) the warp-thread. When one forgets the warp-thread but talks a great deal, what use is it to cite (ju) the canons?” Both speakers cite historical evidence for their arguments. Ji Tan may have forgotten his ancestors’ vocation and neglected the facts of Jin’s relation with Zhou, but the king does greater damage, since he mimics propriety in speech while violating its basis in practice. Behind the sniping and predictions of doom lie the more basic questions of Zhou’s sway and the worth of Zhou values. Does Jin owe the royal house anything at a time when the system of gift exchange initiated by King Wen has broken down? Parallel to this question is a literary and philosophical question: Does a rhetorically impeccable speech replete with references to King Wen carry any persuasive force when the speaker and the occasion violate more fundamental ritual prescriptions? What is wen without the legacy of the king?

82 Wen and the Meaning of Verbal Art The Guoyu hints at an answer to these questions. The founder of Zheng, Duke Huan (r. 806-771), foresees the disaster of King You (r. 781-771) and

the fall of the Western Zhou and asks Scribe Bo about the future.” The Zhou will collapse, the scribe says, because the king has “discarded harmony (be) and adopted identity (tong),” that is, he prefers sycophants to ministers who will maintain a healthily critical perspective on his actions.” Without internal differences, nothing comes into being, since nothing can be differ-

entiated. “When the sound is one, there is nothing to be heard; when the material is one, there is no wen; when the flavor is one, there is no good taste.”

The relevance of this theory of productive difference to history is implicit

in Scribe Bo’s answer to the duke’s next question: Who among the Jisurnamed states, kin of the royal house, will rise if Zhou goes into decline? It

will be Jin, Scribe Bo predicts: it was King Wu who made King Wen’s achievements illustrious, and now that the line of King Wen is failing, it is to be expected that descendants of King Wu will rise. Power will not remain

with the Zhou royal house or with other lines that owe their origins and their ancestral sacrifices to King Wen, but will shift to one of the lines descended from King Wu. Among these, Jin, a state whose founder was a son of King Wu, is the best candidate. Scribe Bo’s first use of wen illuminates the second. If wen is a productive mixture, then even wen itself must enter into

combination with other terms. Here, as in many other texts, the proper match for wen is wu, “martial.””’” But the notion of mixture comes to explain the progress of history rather than a division of labor within a single admin-

istration. To return to the dispute between King Jiing and Ji Tan, wen survives the fall of King Wen’s line by becoming an abstraction that refers to ever larger phenomena of patterning in political affairs, cosmology, and art,

including verbal art. | ,

These reflections on the transformations of wen return us to the question of the meaning of rhetorical beauty. Despite the famous reservations about glib speech voiced by the Master of the Lunyu, perhaps echoed in one passage in the Zuozhuan,’ Confucius as he is depicted in historiography makes much of good speech and takes pains to establish its connections with wen. At one point, Zichan, whom Confucius praises on several occasions,’ presents prisoners from Chen at the Jin court. Jin challenges him, asking what crime Chen committed to deserve attack. Zichan responds by recounting the terms under which Chen was enfeoffed and the recent history of Chen’s

Wen and the Meaning of Verbal Art 83 relations with Zheng, justifying the attack both as a result of failed interstate obligations and as a service to ancestral spirits. Asked why Zheng should bully smaller states, he points out that the large states (Jin foremost among them) have grown far beyond their original proportions through successive annexation of smaller states. Jin finally asks why Zichan has worn his military uniform during the audience; Zichan cites orders given by Duke Wen of Jin after the great defeat of Chu at Chengpu. ‘The Jin questioner can think of no further challenge; as one of his colleagues says, “His words (ci) flow smoothly (shun), and it is inauspicious to oppose what flows smoothly.”

Zichan succeeds in presenting his captives and maintaining Zheng’s autonomous position in the Zhou order. Confucius’ comment follows.”

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Zhongni said, “The “Zhi’ has it: “The language is to be adequate to what is on the person's mind; And the wen is to be adequate to the language.’ If one did not use language, who would know what is on one’s mind? And if the language lacked wen, it would not go far. Zheng’s invasion of Chen during Jin’s hegemony would not have been any sort of accomplishment if it were not for words of wen.

Take care with words!” What precisely is the wen of Zichan’s speeches? Why are “words of wen”

(wenci) important? Zichan has remembered both the obligations among states and the basis of these obligations, he has defended an action that struck observers as improper by appealing to invincible standards of propriety, and he has stymied his challenger by hinting at Jin hypocrisy. Finally, and what is perhaps most significant, he has said that Zheng, which adheres

to the old orders of Duke Wen of Jin, “does not dare abandon the commands of the king.” What is referred to as “smooth” (shun) in Zichan’s words is also an “obedience” (also shun) to authoritative mandates. Chen has been punished because of its service to Chu and its neglect of obligations to

the Zhou center. Wen is not only the pattern that makes Zichan’s words elegant but also the cultural associations that make these words compel-

ling.” That eloquent speech is meaningful as a practice of wen and is properly termed wenci is also apparent in praise bestowed on good speakers elsewhere in the Zuozhuan and Guoyu. According to the Zuozhuan, Confucius was impressed by certain ritual procedures followed during a banquet preceding the

84 Wen and the Meaning of Verbal Art great treaty at Song in 546 B.c.E., “because he considered it to have an abundance of cultivated speech (wenci).”""° In a comment reminiscent of Ji Tan’s,

Min Mafu of Lu remarks on a long proclamation sent to local rulers by Zichao, a son of King Jiing of Zhou and a rival to King Jing (r. 519-476) for the throne: “Cultivated speech (wenci) is for implementing ritual propriety. _ Zichao has opposed the commands of King Jiing and kept Jin’s greatness at a distance so that he may devote himself to his own aims (zhi). As a failure of

ritual propriety, it is already excessive; what will cultivated words do?” Even as he rejects Zichao’s claims, Min Mafu acknowledges in his choice of the term wenci that the proclamation is exemplary for its archaic style and its citation of the most hallowed precedents of early Zhou history." The word wenci appears so rarely in pre-Qin documents that it is open to

| doubt whether it refers precisely to the rhetoric of good order. The modern scholar Qian Zhongshu argued that the Zuozhuan used the term to refer to public, official speech, whereas Warring States philosophical writers tended to use it in connection with private rhetorical skills.” In an example Qian does not cite, Han Fei recounts a conversation between an unspecified king of Chu and a certain Tian Jiu about the prose style of Mozi.”” Why, the king asks, are his words for the most part so inelegant (bu bian)?'” Tian Jiu recalls that Qin sent the duke of Jin a bride accompanied by seventy concubines dressed in adorned (wen) clothing; in Jin they welcomed the concubines but treated the bride poorly. On another occasion, a man from Chu

who wished to sell pearls in Zheng put them in a box carved of magnolia, scented with cassia and pepper, inlaid with pearls and jade, and decorated with red gemstones (wengui or mingui) and kingfisher feathers.’” His customer bought the box and returned the pearls. Mozi has learned the lesson of the anecdotes; fearing that rhetorical beauty (wen) might distract his audience from the utility of the message conveyed, he writes with deliberate plainness. “In discussions nowadays,” Tian Jiu notes, “everyone speaks with elegant discernment and words of wen (wenci); the ruler of men is dazzled by their wen and forgets their utility.” This attack on literary skill is itself an extraordinary display of literary skill. Tian Jiu’s two nonliterary analogies seem to present a contrast between distracting surface loveliness and putative interior value, but in each case Han Fei has included a sly allusion to wen (the costumes of the concubines, the gemstones) in the details of the anecdote. Rhetorical beauty of the sort favored by some speakers and writers is equivalent to the luxuriant and

Wen and the Meaning of Verbal Art 85 superfluous decorations Mozi regularly associates with Confucian ritual

practice. |

Neither Han Fei nor Mozi draws a connection between the literary quality that is wen and the name of the king. But Xunzi, whose philosophical

sympathies with the Zuozhuan are everywhere apparent, uses just such a connection in his defense of the Confucian tradition against the Mohists and other schools, including the intellectual forerunners of his student Han Fei. In the “Feixiang” chapter, just before he introduces his formal observations _ on rhetorical technique, he writes:””

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

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

86 Wen and the Meaning of Verbal Art other artifacts of elite culture and that it is among the inherited forms he defends.” Evidence from a century later reflects the semantic connections established around wenci during the Warring States period. Sima Qian’s use of the term confirms that among the literate classes of his age it denoted literary or rhetorical elegance, usually in the service of Confucian ideas. ‘The term is linked with Confucius and with his composition of the Chunqiu, in the writing of which the sage “made its words (ci) and wen concise”; the traditions connected with the Chungiu had at first to be transmitted orally be-

cause they contained “words of wen” (wenci) with explicit statements of praise and blame.’ One can expect to hear wenci from good speakers of the Confucian persuasion and, more generally, from anyone talented with words.” Finally, Sima Qian uses the word to describe a very formal set of official investiture decrees rich with resonances of Zhou models.’””

In the historiographers’ depiction of the world of the Spring and Autumn period, speaking well is the premier expression of cultural competence. In principle, any educated man or woman should have acquired the materials of eloquence, including the texts to be cited and the faith that their lessons were relevant. But in fact rhetorical mastery is unevenly distributed. Rulers seldom possess it, and it is even rarer among men with evil intentions. The powerful, with the exception of extraordinary characters like Zichao, speak beautifully only when their actions are as true to inherited practices as their words. Eloquence as a manifestation of cultivation is almost exclusively the property of that class of ministers whose duty it was, in the historiogra-

phers’ view, to uphold the mimetic order and to guard against the aberra- _ tions that would lead to ruin. That the Zuozhuan and Guoyu record the speeches of these ministers at such length is one sign of the historiographers’ sympathies; the way they assemble their narratives from discrete anecdotes

that foreground speeches is another sign.” It was the nature and perhaps the purpose of this historiography to commemorate acts of cultivated eloquence and the continual reinterpretation and reanimation of inherited texts in well-crafted speech. Historiography celebrates wen and is itself wen.

The Concert for Ji Zha | The order of wen and its aspirations inform the greatest episode of cultured

performance known from the Spring and Autumn period. In this performance and in the qualified observer's response to it, literary form becomes

, Wen and the Meaning of Verbal Art 87 the key to interpretation and action, and the order of a classic is understood

as the pattern of history. According to the Zuozhuan, Prince Zha of Wu (also known as Ji Zha), arriving in Lu in 544 B.c.z. during a tour of the central states, asked to view the canonical song, music, and dance of Zhou. The

guest, endowed with a kind of wisdom sometimes found or imagined in characters from the outlying regions, is entitled by his supposed distance from Zhou culture to review it in a kind of pageant, which has no precedent in normal ceremonial entertainment.’ Lu, as the fief of the Duke of Zhou and storehouse of the Zhou cultural legacy, is the place for such a review to take place.'”? Although Ji Zha’s responses to the performance are arguably the most important aesthetic criticism found anywhere in pre-Qin writings, scholars of early Chinese aesthetics and poetics have largely ignored the episode.’™ In the figure of Ji Zha, the historiographers represent an ideal of aesthetic judgment, and through his remarks on the performances, they give

voice to their image of the Shi as the perfect vehicle of cultivation.’ ”” The overall structure of the exhibition is determined according to generic differences and an implicit chronology. In the first half of the performance, _ singers, perhaps with instrumental accompaniment, perform melodies with words. These songs are collected in groups that correspond closely to the

text of the Shi as it survived into later ages. The airs of the states come

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He asked to observe the music of Zhou. When the musicians were made to sing for him the “South of Zhou” and “South of Shao,” he said, “How beautiful! They have begun to give it a foundation. It is not yet done, yet they are assiduous and un-

complaining.” .

When they sang the “Bei,” “Yong,” and “Wey” for him, he said, “How beautiful! How profound! These are anxious but not hindered by difficulties. I have heard that

88 Wen and the Meaning of Verbal Art the virtue of Kang Shu and Duke Wu of Wey was just so; these must be the airs of Wey!” When they sang the “Royal Domain” for him, he said, “How beautiful! They are thoughtful but unafraid; these would be from Zhou’s move to the east.” When they sang the “Zheng” for him, he said, “How beautiful! Already they are very trivial, and the people cannot bear it. Surely this will be the first to perish.”

east. ,

When they sang the “Qi” for him, he said, “How beautiful! How expansive! They are indeed great airs. It is one who faced the eastern sea—this would be the

Grand Duke. The state cannot yet be measured.” When they sang the “Bin” for him, he said, “How beautiful! How grandiose! They are joyous but not lascivious. These would be the Duke of Zhou’s move to the

When they sang the “Qin” for him, he said, “This is what is known as the grand

sound. What is capable of being grand is great, and these are the perfection of greatness: these would be from Zhou’s past.”

When they sang the “Wei” for him, he said, “How beautiful! How buoyant! They are great yet subtle, rugged yet easy to traverse. With virtue to support these things, there would be an enlightened ruler.”

When they sang the “Tang” for him, he said, “What profundity of thought! These would be the remaining scions of the Taotang line! Otherwise, how could _

pable of this?” |

their concern extend so far? If not the descendants of fine virtue, who would be ca-

When they sang the “Chen” for him, he said, “The state is without a master.

How can it last long?” For “Kuai” and the others, he made no remark.’

Although in the case of the Zheng airs, for instance, Ji Zha may distinguish the beauty of the music from the disaster it portends, the distinctions are not so clear elsewhere, and his remarks must be understood as applying equally to words, tunes, instrumentation, and dance.” Ji Zha’s genius is his ability to recognize in the music and words of each section of the “Airs of the States” (“Guofeng”) signs of place, of history, of moral quality, and of destiny. The narrative implies that he knew something about the regional differences within the “Airs.” But like the renowned Jin master of musicians, Shi Kuang, Ji Zha knows how to hear regional differences expressed in the medium of music, and his success in identifying each place of origin as the performance unfolds is an act of hermeneutic brilliance." The sounds of place as Ji Zha hears them always signify a historical period, namely, the moment when the region figured most prominently in the fortunes of the Zhou house. In other words, Ji Zha’s commentary repre-

Wen and the Meaning of Verbal Art 89 sents the “Airs” as something other than an anthology of songs from the several regions of the realm; for him, it is an anthology of the music of Zhou’s history in these regions. As elsewhere in historiography and other writings,

music functions as a tympanum sensitive to whatever is on the other side. What Ji Zha hears on the other side is the shape of Zhou history. In the first sections he hears the beginning of the Western Zhou, the assiduousness of the founding kings, and the devotion of the loyalists in a time of rebellion. Next he hears the transition to the Eastern Zhou and the founding of Zheng. In the “Qi,” “Bin,” and “Qin” sections, he hears echoes of Zhou’s greatness in the early period and at the same time recognizes in the regions of Qi and Qin the sound of a renewed grandeur. Similarly, the “Wey” and “Tang” airs signify to him the promising survival of ancient lines and inherited virtues. In “Chen,” however, he hears only the coming extinction of a

Zhou fief.’ In one sense Ji Zha historicizes the “Airs” by reading the individual sec-

tions against particular places and times that belong to a history of the Zhou. But at the same time he imposes on history and place the order of the text. The words and music assembled in the Shi are true not for the single moment of composition, but for all time, and nothing prevents Ji Zha from

reading the central states of his own day through texts inherited from an earlier period. As in citation of the Shi, as in wen activity of any sort, the inherited artifact is both linked to a time of origin and true for any moment of reading. With the “Airs” the canonical rereading of Chinese history has only begun. The musicians next sing the remaining sections of the Shi:

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| would be the waning of the Zhou’s virtue. There are still remaining adherents of the former kings there.”

When they sang the “Greater Elegantiae” for him, he said, “How broad! How resplendent! Although it turns, it has a straight basis. This would be the virtue of King Wen.”

90 Wen and the Meaning of Verbal Art When they sang the “Hymns” for him, he said, “Perfection is reached! Straight but unpresumptuous, turning but unbending; close but not intrusive, distant but not separated; moved but not lascivious; repeating but not tiresome; somber but not

melancholic, joyous but not dissipated; they are used but are not depleted, are spread abroad but do not make themselves conspicuous; they give generously without wasting and take without being greedy; they settle without becoming fixed and travel without wandering. The five notes are harmonious, the eight airs are even, the intervals are measured, and there is order in each position held. These are things that all moments of flourishing virtue have in common.”

Some of the remarks on the “Airs” suggest a loose chronological order in the text; it begins with the preliminary efforts of the early Zhou kings, proceeds

to the fall of the Western Zhou and the founding of Zheng, and ends with the prospects for Wei, Jin, and unlucky Chen. In the second half of the Shi performance, sections of the text are organized in reverse chronological order but in order of increasing virtue. This part of the text begins, as Ji Zha understands it, with the decline of Zhou virtue (“Lesser Elegantiae”), then proceeds to the virtue of King Wen (“Greater Elegantiae”), and finally to perfected virtue (“Hymns”), which as a common possession may transcend period distinctions and unite the founders of the three dynasties with successors still to come.

Ji Zha again comments on several aspects of the performance at once, simultaneously appraising the music he has heard, the words he has understood, the dance he has seen, and the moral moment he has found embodied in the performed work. His remarks consequently have a marked vagueness of reference, and hover above all the particular objects of appreciation. But, as is especially clear in the final section, on the “Hymns,” his comments are unified by a figure of moderation. Each four-character phrase describes a trait stopped short of excess, and the phrases are for the most part arranged in pairs (e.g., “somber but not melancholic, joyous but not ecstatic’). Although this figure appears in other well-known passages of aesthetic com-

ment, it is never used so extensively as in this passage.” The most conspicuous formal effects in Ji Zha’s remarks are reserved for the most exalted section of the Shi.

Although we cannot know if Ji Zha is responding to the music, the words, the dance, or the total performance in his comment on the “Hymns,” his judgments presume a familiar conception of musical harmony as a figure

for stability in the political hierarchy.’ Before reaching the “Hymns,” Ji Zha has related texts to specific moments in the history of Zhou’s virtue.

Wen and the Meaning of Verbal Art QI But now, perhaps because the “Hymns” includes not only Zhou hymns to deities and ancestors but also hymns for the Shang and even for Lu, Ji Zha hears in the songs a representation of perfected political relations and of the behavior proper to any position in the hierarchy, whether king or minister. Everyone, king or commoner, serves both particular superiors (ancestors, kings, feudal lords, noble families) and the hierarchy itself. Any of the de- — scriptions in Ji Zha’s comment can be taken as an ethical prescription. Like much early Chinese aesthetic criticism, Ji Zha’s commentary discovers the meaning of a work of art in its political suggestiveness. Unlike readers in the Mao tradition of Shi exegesis, however, he emphasizes not coded political critiques but the utopian embodiment of political ideals in a perfect literary

work,” Last in the performance are the dances of the great rulers:

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The Zhou at its height was like this!” When he had seen the dancers of the “Shaohu,” he said, “This is the grandeur of the sage, but there is still a flaw in the virtue: the difficulties of the sage.” When he had seen the dancers of the “Great Xia,” he said, “How beautiful! It is assiduous but does not hold sway by its virtue. If not Yu, then who could have composed it?”

When he had seen the dancing of the “Shao Pipes,” he said, “Virtue has reached its perfection: how great it is! It is like Heaven in that it covers all; it is like earth in that it supports all. Even a virtue that flourished luxuriantly would have nothing to add to this. Here my observation has come to an end. If there is any other music, I dare not request it.”"””

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

92 Wen and the Meaning of Verbal Art back to its acme (as described in the encomium on the “Shao Pipes”) but also shows the lineaments of historical periodization. King Wen and King Wu are taken together as founders of Zhou culture and power; they are followed by the founder of the Yin, the unwitting founder of the Xia, and one of the three pre-dynastic sage-kings. What Ji Zha outlines in his comments is and is not history: it is literary history. How can the irreducibility of time be preserved in the structure of a canonical collection whose implied goal is the promulgation of a virtue not dependent on time? The different moments in which the pieces were com-

posed are reactivated in the concentrated present of performance. Music, and by extension poetry and dance, has the power to represent qualities of the distant past accurately in the present. The musical canon as a whole, then, permits the concentration by proxy, in a single performance space, of many times (the history of civilized peoples from the earliest times to the present day) and places (the territory brought under civilization’s sway).

But other rationales rule the ordering of the canon: it is based on a known chronology but does not make the preservation or justification of this chronology its end. Instead, the canon (in Ji Zha’s authoritative judgment) returns again and again to de, “virtue,” a word that appears with some frequency in his remarks and a concept that is implicit in most of them. The beauty (mei) he first perceives and remarks is everywhere matched with a de, a quality both of moral and of political power that is embodied, for instance, in the Zhou’s move to the east or in the region of Zhou’s predynastic adolescence. Ji Zha thus defines beauty as the correspondence of a work to the conditions of moral and political dominion in which that work originated.

Instead of the familiar hermeneutic of personality, which in Confucian thought and in Shi criticism makes the song correspond to the interior state of the singer, Ji Zha’s is a more sweeping version that encompasses the more limited version and makes it possible.” This grander hermeneutic accounts entirely for the judgments of beauty in this scene, which are dependent on learning in general and on the special ability to identify the present work with the distant object of correspondence—be it a composer, an age, or a region. This aesthetic also functions in anecdotes and circumstances that do not overtly concern aesthetics. In the fine remonstrance, which the ruler must decode and take to heart, and in the well-crafted anecdote, for which the reader must puzzle out a judgment, the same hermeneutic competence is presumed and the same aesthetic pleasure recommended. *

| Wen and the Meaning of Verbal Art 93 Aesthetic claims hold the structure together. The pleasure that the qualified observer feels, and that he expresses in his repeated “beautiful,” belongs equally to each part of the corpus. But his most eloquent judgments and his most intense pleasure come at the ends of the two halves of the performance. Both the commentary on song and the commentary on dance culminate in shengde, “flourishing virtue” or “virtue at its height,” which in the one case

belongs to the “Hymns” section of the Shi and in the other to the “Shao Pipes” dance of Shun. In these passages, virtue’s heights are matched by the extraordinary stylization of the prose itself; as in other speeches, literary patterning signifies the presence of cultivation, wen. And both passages propose an idealized synaesthesia in which performances of every sort offer immediate aesthetic pleasures (they are beautiful) but refer necessarily, as if through the very language of appreciation, to precedents of harmonious political order.

It would seem that in Ji Zha’s view, and in the view of the historiographers, political relations themselves are to be brought within the purview of aesthetics and that aesthetics acquires from this political dimension an interest in appropriateness, hierarchical regulation, and moderation.” In fact, this moderation is the epitome of the historiographical aesthetic. As I will argue in my discussion of the narratives of historiography, genuine pleasure is always pleasure restrained in accordance with rules, and this restraint originates outside the aesthetic object itself, in the Confucian moral program, in the condemnation of luxury for its own sake, and in the stories that connect subsequent ruin with prior aesthetic excess. But comments like Ji Zha’s derive restraint from within pleasure and purport to explain beauty as the acme of balanced virtue embodied in art. Thus, free judgments of taste must always imply corresponding (Confucian) judgments about historical : events and their moral mechanics. Here is what all ages of perfect virtue hold in common; here is the end of Ji Zha’s viewing of the performance, the point

of aesthetic and historical culmination beyond which no audience should

wish to go ( guanzhi). :

When Ji Zha leaves Lu, he travels to Qi, Zheng, Wey, and Jin. Figuratively, he travels in the historical moment of 544 B.c.g., and each of his encounters seems designed to show the place of a particular state or noble line on its own historical curve. The implied construction of the interstate system and the synchronic historical moment echoes that of the Shi, and Ji Zha’s tour again allows him to witness a series of performances and to judge

94 Wen and the Meaning of Verbal Art | them wisely. In every state he visits, he meets the governing elite and responds to them and comments upon them as if they were another movement of music or dance. With the best of them he is “pleased” (yue), and for all he has prescient advice on coming perils and triumphs. In Jin he is even made to foresee, in his liking for the heads of the Zhao, Hann, and Wei lineages, the coming division of the state among them.’ Ji Zha’s visit to Lu is an enactment, in narrative, of the conceptions of inherited speech that were examined in the first parts of the chapter. As the adornment of an inherited cultural artifact, wen always signaled that the artifact was implicated somehow in the mimetic reproduction of a cultural or- | der. More generally, wen patterning signified the presence of signification itself, with its separation between a surface (the patterns visible or audible in the artifact) and a remote point of reference. For most examples of wen in historiography, this point of reference was the inherited social order, with its clearly marked hierarchy. In an extended sense, however, wen was any sur-

face patterning that could be read for information about truths behind the surface, whether these were facts about remote places and times or psychological and moral facts about an individual. ‘Texts can be described as wen because they partake of these more general qualities. As historiographical uses of the most artifactual of the early texts, the Zhouyi, show, citation of texts in speeches presumed the possibility of interpreting the particular events of historical experience with reference to inherited language. ‘This was a way of making knowledge that sought to accommodate the world to wen. In the case of citations from the Shi, from Shangshu, and other texts, the spirit

of the premier Zhou culture hero, King Wen, presides over this textual work. Finally, in the term wenci, eloquence itself—the rhetoric of good order described in the previous chapter—is associated with the king and with the

~ moral and political meanings of beauty. |

What made Ji Zha a good reader of the songs and the dances, his ability to discern historical origins and moral potential in performance, also makes him an authoritative appraiser of persons, and in that sense a peer to certain

eminent characters in historiography and to the Confucius of both the Zuozhuan and the Lunyu. Speeches, with their continual recontextualization and reperformance of inherited wisdom, do not fail to affect the narratives that frame them. Ji Zha’s tour bridges the gap between the recuperation of the Classics in speeches and the legitimation of the Classics in narratives about the world. As I will argue in the next two chapters, the historiogra-

Wen and the Meaning of Verbal Art 95 phers used the remembered speeches of Spring and Autumn period characters as rhetorical and intellectual laboratories for a wide variety of theories. But these theoretical explorations never lose their connection to the authority of the Classics. And as my account of the narrative habits of historiography will demonstrate, an aesthetics of the sort exemplified in Ji Zha’s com- _ ments remains one of the historiographers’ favorite themes.

THREE Intelligibility in the Extra-human World

Although speakers in historiography do much of their reasoning through citation and application of the Shi and other texts, they also call on many types of knowledge beyond the reach of inherited language. The Zuozhuan and Guoyu show a more sustained interest in the workings of the natural and supernatural worlds than any extant earlier works and go well beyond early Zhou texts in reasoning about the cosmos and its principles. When speeches incorporate this sort of knowledge, they put it to political and moral use, if only because the position defined for speeches within this system requires such use. In doing so, speeches formally acknowledge the existence of causes outside human influence or control, and they grant this extra-human realm a partial independence, a regularity that guarantees the value of morality in the

human world by being amoral.’ It is true that Heaven and earth work for moral balance, but they, having no higher standard to preserve or to undo, are not moral but regular.”

Although historiographers’ investigations of the world’s rules are dispersed in scores of individual speeches, these draw their principles of regularity from a limited number of distinct areas of knowledge and may be loosely categorized according to subject matter and type of principle adduced. There are, for example, speeches in which specific judgments are substantiated with astronomical principles, and others that assert rules based on geological events. Yin and yang and the Five Phases (wu xing) provide still

other forms of regularity, as do music and the physical world. Although

7 Intelligibility in the Extra-human World 97 these speeches do sometimes codify truths about the extra-human world in inherited language, traditionality and the obligation to preserve the human achievements of the past are here pushed into the background. These are the regularities of a proto-scientific discourse, and even though they are, like all abstract knowledge in historiography, applied to the interpretation of the particular and temporal, they pretend to eternal truth. As they appear in historiographical speeches, theories about the natural world reveal both underlying unities and unique qualities that account for the rhetorical utility of each type of knowledge. The most important unity among these theories is the semiotic assumption everywhere apparent in the narratives of this historiography: the certainty that the natural world has meaning, that phenomena in the world can and should be correctly interpretable. As a consequence of this assumption, predictions and policy recommendations, the two main types of judgment substantiated in speeches, become aspects of a single activity, the production of signs. The ruler, like Heaven and earth, produces signs; the problem for the ruler is to produce signs that conform to moral regularity. The details of this imperative will become clearer as we examine various discourses. The examination of narratives in subsequent chapters will show further that storytelling, like governing, draws its energy from revelation and visibility. Beyond the unities surrounding sign production, theories differ in the way they conceive of the production of signs and in the habits of knowing they reveal. Rather than explaining the objective knowledge Warring States historians had obtained concerning the physical world, I focus here on the habits of mind and discourse that their techniques reveal and that may inform the whole field of historical knowing. Theories about the natural world emerge in this historiography only as they contribute to its discursive regularities. As with other forms of knowledge, they identify what is explicable in the world and offer techniques of explanation. At the same time, every theory, at least as it is expressed rhetorically, resists a totalizing interpretation.

Despite the references in any given speech to an independently existing realm of truth and to a theory that makes that truth accessible, the various representations of a single theory (astronomy, for instance) in separate speeches do not necessarily add up to a coherent body of knowledge. System is held in abeyance for the sake of local rhetorical force.

98 Intelligibility in the Extra-human World

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

Intelligibility in the Extra-human World 99 human plane make it possible to draw parallels between events on the two planes and to extend to the human some of the cyclical predictability of the heavenly.”

Some exemplary instances of astronomical prediction are found in the anecdotes surrounding the fall, restoration, and final extinction of the state of Chen. Chen was annexed by Chu in the year corresponding to 534 B.C.E., had a fire in 533, was restored in 529, and was ultimately swallowed up in

478. Chen first fell when the Chu army, summoned as an ally by a contender for the ducal succession, instead annexed the state in 534 B.c.B. At this point, Duke Ping of Jin asks his scribe Zhao if Chen has now disappeared forever. Zhao answers in the negative, beginning with an astronomical observation:*

BR MTA CR RK: EWU AW RAIS SEK E + it 18 FA Chen belongs to the line of Zhuanxu. It was when the year-planet was in Chunhuo that he perished, and Chen will be the same. Now (the year-planet] is at the ford of

Ximu: [Chen] will be restored.’ :

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

Be KB Ae adth MPAA SAM AR ESHER 1 tA: MAAS RARBA:- MARC BRAS KZ

1th: MA A+om#-

Chen belongs to water. Fire is the counterpart of water and is what Chu serves. Now, at the appearance of fire, there is a fire in Chen: Chu is expelled and Chen established. I say five years because counterparts are completed by fives. When the year-planet comes around to Chunhuo five times, Chen will finally perish and Chu will annex it, as is the way of Heaven; thus I say it will be fifty-two years.

The speech-maker generates meaning in the human and extra-human world by connecting a set of memories and observations. (1) Chen was conquered but was restored five years later and finally perished fifty-two years after

that; (2) there was a fire in Chen the year after the first Chu conquest; (3) Chen belongs to the line of Zhuanxu, who died when Jupiter was in Chunhuo;” (4) Chen is associated with water, as Chu is with fire. An ad hoc science is born as these givens are manipulated according to the habits of

100 Intelligibility in the Extra-human World rhetoric. Since Chen’s extinction occurred in a Chunhuo year, the historiog-

raphers remember, promote, or invent the legend that Zhuanxu died in a Chunhuo year. Turning then to the earlier five-year occupation of Chen, they insert a prediction in two parts at the beginning of that period. The first part is merely negative: the initial annexation of Chen cannot be permanent because it has not begun in a Chunhuo year. ‘The second part must account for the end of the occupation and for the exact length of the restoration, The theory of the Five Phases, which is, as we shall see, a rich generator

of correspondences, supplies the required intermediate steps. “At the appearance of fire” indicates the time of year, early summer. The function of the term “counterpart” ( fei) and the source of the number five are more obscure, but the point is that the five is needed to explain both the length of the occupation and the number of times Jupiter will pass through Chunhuo before Chen’s final extinction.

The pair of predictions exhibits a mode of reasoning that claims general validity even as it is weighted in favor of local requirements. Necessity in this case begins not in a progression through the terms of a syllogism but in the frame of historical truth and in the assumption that the universe displays meaningful signs. Speeches like the ones concerning Chen imply a strong, though entirely incidental, confirmation of the accuracy of some aspects of Eastern Zhou historical accounts: the contrived nature and extreme adaptability of theoretical explanation are the best evidence that certain facts were stubborn and could not be changed or made up at will. Had the facts been negotiable, then they would presumably have yielded to theory, allowing symmetry, system, and perfectly stable abstractions. But the events and their chronology were apparently givens. The transmitters of these events, perhaps wishing to make them as readable from the beginning as they are from the end, seized on the tools of astronomical correspondence and supple-

mented them with the much more adaptable connective tissue of Five Phases theory. This bricolage is a feature of rhetorical and quasi-scientific method in historiography and has a certain utility. The heavenly and the human are part of the same order; stellar periodicity and human historical contingency can make a single sense. Like other astronomical phenomena, eclipses are treated as readable signs that refer to specific human events. Yet the theory of eclipses is subtler than

certain other theories in that it admits the possibility of insignificance. The Chungiu records a total of thirty-seven solar eclipses (two of them incor-

Intelligibility in the Extra-human World 101

rectly); the Zuozhuan remarks on only ten of these, five of which prompt predictions. The predictive mechanism is again flexible. In four of the five eclipse predictions, it is apparent that an eclipse has been matched with subsequent events to generate significance. By refusing all advice on the proper ritual responses to an eclipse, for instance, the Lu nobleman Ji Pingzi signifies to a canny observer, his colleague Shusun Zhaozi, that he will come to dominate the lord of Lu.” In another case, the use of an eclipse and of ritual in the crafting of the prediction is more ingenious. Asked by Duke Zhao what a particular eclipse signifies, Zi Shen of Lu remarks that eclipses falling on the solstices and the equinoxes betoken no disaster at all, since these are

the days when the sun and the moon take the same path or pass each other.’? What would be unnatural and disastrous in other months is acceptable on these days. Even though theoretical understanding appears to have forestalled the interpretation of this eclipse, as well as the attendant prediction, signification creeps in at the end of the anecdote. A certain Shu Zhe, not privy to Zi Shen’s explanation, weeps ritually in appeasement of the heavens; his death, predicted immediately by Shusun Zhaozi, comes in the next month.’° The pattern is one we will see repeated in various forms. Theoretical understanding of a phenomenon appears at first to replace or limit moral interpretation, but in what follows it becomes clear that the amoral theoretical reading is being subordinated to the moral lesson. This particular eclipse signifies nothing, but it is not thereby excluded from the general system of ritual responses. The deadliness of Shu Zhe’s mistake

shows that ritual prescribes even the non-action that theoretical understanding can make advisable; this establishes ritual’s power on a very high level. Ritual will in fact finally be revealed as the basis and end of all learning,

the theory that underlies all theories.’ Comets are treated in the manner of eclipses. Of the four comets whose appearances are recorded in the Chungiu and Zuozhuan, one is noted without comment, two are used for straightforward predictions, and one becomes the occasion for another subordination of theory to virtue.” The first of the predictions is presented without theoretical justification or the rhetorical connective tissue that joins such justification to the facts.” The second—a prediction of disastrous fires in four states, discussed below—employs both astronomical and Five Phases theory.” The last of the Zuozhuan’s remarks on comets, like Zi Shen’s explanation of the limits of eclipse interpretation, emphasizes not a theoretical or mantic

102 Intelligibility in the Extra-human World

understanding of astronomical phenomena but the place of these phenomena within a cosmic system responsive to virtue. A comet has become visible in Qi, and when Duke Jing (r. 547-490) prepares a ritual response, his famous advisor Yanzi tells him that supplication will do no good. Heaven does not change its orders, even in response to prayer; a comet is Heaven's way of sweeping away filth and is no cause for worry for the ruler whose de (here “moral status” rather than “virtue”) is not filthy. He then cites six lines from the Shi poem “Daming” (Mao 236) to show that it was King Wen’s moral status that brought him sovereignty. He closes with four lines from an otherwise unattested poem on losing one’s people by failing to use the mirror of Xia and Shang, Pleased, the duke abandons his plans for supplication.” No comet is recorded in the Chungiu for this year, and it is difficult to understand why a comet would be visible in Qi alone among the states.” It would seem, in fact, that the text is affording Yanzi an opportunity to deliver a speech on the primacy of earthly virtue. The astronomical event, itself perhaps a fiction, is the pretext for a set piece on virtue, a confection of relatively long poetic citations and connecting rhetorical extensions like the ones examined in Chapter 1. Prediction, and the theory that goes with it, is not ruled out, but the last word on comets in the Zuozhuan belongs to the order of virtue, which promises not just an understanding of comets but a defense against their implications. The theory of earthquakes and landslides is much less developed in historiography than are theories of Heaven. Of five earthquakes reported in the Chungiu, only one receives further comment in the Zuozhuan.” The sudden death of King Jiing of Zhou has sparked a succession struggle pitting Prince Chao (Wangzi Chao), who is for a time called the Western King, against the future King Jing, here referred to as the Eastern King.”* When the earth

moves in the territory of one of Wangzi Chao’s adherents, the eminent minister and supporter of the future legitimate king, Chang Hong, bids one of his companions take heart, since the portent promises success: “When Zhou fell, there were earthquakes among the three rivers. Now there is an earthquake in the territory of one of the Western King’s great ministers: Heaven is abandoning him, and the Eastern King is certain to win a great victory.” The end of the Western Zhou period and the failure of King You were presaged by earthquakes, as is the failure of the new Western King. - This is theory at its barest: an earthquake in a particular location means ruin for the holders of that place, and the meaning of the phenomenon observed

Intelligibility in the Extra-human World 103 is determined by precedent. For certain rhetorical purposes, the historiographers assume that the history of the earth and its significations, like that of the strictly human world, repeats itself. For a fuller account of the theory behind earthquake prognostication, one must turn to the Guoyu, in which the omens Chang Hong spoke of are re-

counted in a separate anecdote. The response to the omens is set in their own time, the reign of King You, and includes a speech of interpretation.” According to the Zhou minister Bo Yangfu, disorder in the gi (essence) of Heaven and earth arises only because of human irregularities. When these cause the yang to be trapped beneath an oppressive yin force, they give rise to earthquakes. The resulting obstructions of the sources of rivers are a further omen of the fall of a state, since when water and earth do not interact properly, there is a shortage of resources for the people of the state, and the state falls. Despite the appeal to yin-yang and Five Phases theory here, historical precedent still has force: the story of the femme fatale Bao Si and her domination of King You may well determine the details of the yin-yang analysis, and the speaker refers to dry rivers that foretold the falls of Xia and Shang.” Theoretical elaboration does not so much displace reasoning on the basis of precedent as supplement it.” One of the Zuozhuan's two landslides is handled quite simply: a Jin di-

viner predicts without explanation a disaster the following year that will nearly destroy the country.” The other landslide, however, elicits a telling renunciation of interpretation. The place is again Jin; there has been a landslide on Mount Liang, and Duke Jing of Jin sends for his minister Bo Zong by express chariot. As he rushes to court, Bo Zong encounters a wise commoner:”

(ARE - ARE BA GK: Tae CRW: RAAT Al HMA

ie He@se-A- Riles ARBRE ARACH- A uAN em Ba OT (ATs Bd Ew Jl AC LU I AO Be Oe RK

1 SS OK PRR: Ratmo: eam: AZ: {A ma eC PO RAS MRS:

Bo Zong came to a heavy cart, which he ordered out of the way, saying, “Make way

for the express chariot!” The carter said, “It would be quicker for you to take another route than to wait for me to move.” [Bo Zong] asked him where he lived. He said, “I’m from Jiang.” [Bo Zong] asked for the news from Jiang. He said, “There's been a landslide on Mount Liang, and Bo Zong is to be summoned for consultations about it.” [Bo Zong] asked what should be done.

104 —_Intelligibility in the Extra-human World He said, “Mountains erode and have landslides: what is there that one could do about it? A state makes its mountains and rivers its support. Thus when a mountain has a landslide or a river runs dry, the ruler desists from feasting, decreases the splendor of his clothing, rides in a plain chariot, stops court music, and lodges apart. The priests present sacrificial goods, while the scribes pronounce words for the ritual. That is all chat is done. Even if Bo Zong should be there, what could he do?”

Bo Zong asked to present him to court, but he would not permit it. So [Bo Zong] reported what he had said, and it was followed.”

Attracted by the frank good sense shown by the commoner in their first exchange, Bo Zong slows his pace long enough to ask for news and more general advice. The carter responds with a description of a ritual response in which impeccable verbal order (the series of parallel two-character phrases) corresponds to orderly public acts on the part of the court. As in other anecdotes concerning wise commoners, the energy in this passage derives from the unexpected reassertion of the traditional.” The theoretical explanation of landslides—here a simple recognition of their physical causes—does not expose the ritual response as mere superstition. Instead, it becomes a part of the common sense that prescribes the ruler’s actions. This common sense, which also contains virtue (de) and ritual (li) as general categories, emerges in its distinction from the Jin court’s haste and confusion.

As the speeches on eclipses, comets, and other phenomena indicate, Heaven and earth were sources of regularity and signification. The historiographers read stellar, solar, and terrestrial phenomena against historical events but always in the context of speeches, which impose their own rhetorical conditions on the elaboration of theory. By appealing to the natural world in the speeches, the historiographers founded their vision of human

order on evidence that was more than human. , The Five Phases and Yin-yang Some of the examples cited above have shown how yin-yang and the Five Phases (wu xing, wu cai) were used in the construction of speeches.” In his prediction about Sun Zhou, Duke Xiang of Shan (see Chapter 1) was perhaps referring to the Five Phases when he spoke of “five for earth.” Pi Zao of Zheng, foretelling Chen's impending doom, spoke of fire as the counterpart of water. And the Guoyu speech on the Zhou earthquakes explained them in the terms of both systems, as the result of oppressed yang and as signs of a failure in the interaction of water and earth. These theories provide a set of

Intelligibility in the Extra-human World 105

terms for manipulation in the speeches’ rhetorical algebra. Loosely determined and adaptable, they are nevertheless relatively limited terminologies to which historical contingencies of all kinds can be assimilated. Theory and rhetoric work together: once the particulars of an event are interpreted in terms of a particular theoretical system, they are easily accommodated to the order of rhetorical structures favored in the speeches.

The formalization of Five Phases theory is credited to Zou Yan (late fourth-third century), a scholar active mainly in the state of Qi, where for a time he participated in the philosophical discussions that were supported by the king at Jixia.”* Historiography does show evidence of a rather fully developed theory of the phases and their workings, but this theory obeys the rhetorical proprieties to which all theories in historiography are subject, and autonomous systematization of the sort Zou Yan seems to have introduced is forestalled. In the Zuozhuan and Guoyu, the Five Phases only rarely appear as a com-

plete set, whether listed together or summed up in a name. Rather than mobilizing the whole theory—whatever it was—in the construction of speeches, speech-makers ordinarily chose the one or two terms they needed for a particular occasion, exploiting the privileged status that wood, fire, metal, water, and soil had begun to acquire. Thus fire, which seems to show up more regularly than the other phases, can stand alone or in combination with one of the others. When there is a fire in the state of Song, Duke Dao of Jin tells his minister Shi Ruo that he has heard that the fire demonstrates the existence of the Way of Heaven (tiandao), and he asks for an explanation.” Shi Ruo’s answer includes some of the lore discussed in connection

with the annexation of Chen. He explains how in very ancient times the ministers for fire (huozheng) received their sacrifices and the spring plowing began, at the first appearance above the horizon of either the Heart (xin) or the Beak (zhou) asterism.” The stars determined when farmers were to use fires in the open (for burning fields) or indoors (for kilns). For this reason,

both asterisms were identified with the stations of Jupiter named for fire: Heart with Dahuo and Beak with Chunhuo. Later the fire minister of ‘Taotang (better known as Yao) sacrificed to Dahuo and designed the calendar according to its movements. According to Shi Ruo, Shang’s astronomers

followed this practice, and it was noted early on that Shang’s disasters tended to be conflagrations. Song, as keeper of Shang’s legacy in the Zhou | period, may be expected to share Shang’s vulnerability to fire, and the most

106 Intelligibility in the Extra-human World recent conflagration, by demonstrating that vulnerability, confirms the connections established between the Shang order and celestial and earthly fires. Although fire in the heavens and fire in Five Phases theory are normally kept separate, passages like this suggest a unified approach, with fire linking the regularity of the heavens, human religious and political history, and the

real flames that destroy cities.” As in theoretical remarks on comets and landslides, the theoretical order that the Zuozhuan attaches as a commentary to the Song fire is immediately subordinated to moral order. When Duke

Dao asks if this tendency for Shang disasters to originate in fire can be treated as a necessity (ke bi bu), Shi Ruo reasserts the priority of political or-

der. “It is a matter of the way. When the state is in disorder, there are no signs (xiang), and one cannot know.” That is, some states have so departed from the Way that it is impossible to determine the significances of an omen, which may indicate temporary troubles or final destruction.” As in any semiotic system, only the stability of the system itself allows individual

signs to be interpreted. Without political intelligibility, there can be no

, mantic certainty. When fire is joined with another of the Five Phases in the theoretical portion of a speech, it becomes even clearer that the interpretation of the phases, as privileged terms of analysis, is flexible, and that this flexibility is logically prior to the systematic interrelations of full-fledged Five Phases theory. In the year before the great fires in Song, Wey, Chen, and Zheng,

the appearance of a comet near the star Dachen (also known as Dahuo) prompts a flurry of prediction, as the resources of astronomy, mythology, and Five Phases theory are mobilized to connect the fact of the comet with the fact of the widespread fires.” The passage again shows how the makers of historiography did their finest work in speeches attributed to contemporary observers of recorded facts. The comet appears in a part of the sky thar, as we have seen, is associated with Shang and its Song descendants;” be-

cause Chen and Zheng are associated with the early rulers Taihao and Zhurong, respectively, and because these rulers are associated with fire, these states will also be affected.” Wey poses a special problem, since nothing in astronomy or mythology links it with fire. But by moving into the ce-

lestial River Han, the Milky Way, the comet opened a connection with water. That water is the counterpart of fire has been demonstrated under other rhetorical circumstances, and Wey’s terrestrial location corresponds to stellar features linked with water.” Five Phases terminology further allows one

Intelligibility in the Extra-human World 107 speaker, Zi Shen of Lu, to propose two days on which the fires might occur: bingzi and renwu. The fires occur on the renwu day of the fifth month of the

next year." ,

As conceptualized components of the physical world, the Five Phases are

joined not only with astronomical wisdom, mythological lore, and the sexagesimal cycle but also, and quite powerfully, with the system of the Zhouyi. In the Zuozhuan account of the divination concerning the newborn

Shusun Bao, discussed in Chapter 2, fire was one of the terms the interpreter used to justify his prediction. The Guoyu account of the Ducal Son Chong’er’s return to Jin includes a divination and interpretation that make use of two more of the Five Phases.” While still in Qin, Chong’er divines with the milfoil stalks, asking if he will gain possession of Jin. He gets the hexagrams Zhun and Yu, a result that the attending diviners judge inauspicious.” One of Chong’er’s own men, however, cites the Zhouyi hexagram statements for these hexagrams, which in both cases include the sentence “It is beneficial to install a ruler.” He proves his point through a manipulation of the hexagrams themselves. As noted in Chapter 2, each trigram is associated by convention with images or objects in the material world. In Zhun, the lower trigram (‘Zhen) is the carriage (che), while the upper (Kan) is water (shui); in Yu, the lower (Kun) is soil (tu), while the upper is again the Zhen carriage.” Zhun is richness or abundance, and Yu is pleasure. Since the carriage appears in both the inner and the outer (i.e., the lower and upper) parts of the two hexagrams and is moved and nourished by water and soil, success is certain. ‘The presence of the thunderous carriages indicates military prowess (wu), and water stands for the flowing compliance of the masses, which is wen. Wen and wu taken together are the “abundance” associated with the hexagram Zhun. The “pleasure” of Yu, meanwhile, results from the pairing of an elderly mother (the Kun trigram) with a strong eldest son (Zhen). As the analysis continues, it encompasses the virtues of the hexagrams themselves; the speaker justifies citations from the Zhouyi in terms of the phases associated with the trigrams and finally repeats the prediction of success.” In the interpretation of Chong’er’s hexagrams, certain of the phases and a few objects become metaphorical middle terms that allow the speaker to link events in the physical and historical world with the well-wrought order of

theory. That such interpretive situations do not display the Five Phases as a : closed system of complementary terms probably indicates that the formalizing efforts of Zou Yan and others had not yet gained -urrency when the

108 Intelligibility in the Extra-human World

| speech-makers were remembering history.” It would seem that despite the occasional use of collective terms for the Five Phases in the Zuozhuan and Guoyu,”” the value of the terms derives as much from their use in a specific context as from their systematic order. Thus one or two of the phases show up in a speech when rhetorical requirements of the sort we have examined make them useful. Sometimes there are six rather than five terms in the set, sometimes only four.” The aim of historiographical speeches is the elegance of rhetoric, not of science, and beyond that the vindication of an overarching moral order manifested in historical events; the material world and the Five Phases must be accommodated to that aim.”

Although the Five Phases and their theoretical possibilities are most useful to historiography in partial applications, the complete system is not, as some have claimed, entirely unattested in the Zuochuan and Guoyu.” By far the most impressive treatment of the Five Phases (here referred to as wu xing) is a Zuozhuan passage that begins with the following notice, absent from the Chungiu for this year: “In the fall, a dragon appeared on the outskirts of Jiang.””* Jiang was the capital of Jin, and Wei Xianzi, the chief minister of that state, asks Cai Mo (also known as the Scribe Mo) if it is true that dragons, which cannot be captured alive, are the wisest of all creatures.

No, says Cai Mo, it is not that dragons are wise, but that humans are no longer wise; in days of yore states had hereditary ranks devoted to dragon husbandry. Cai Mo’s lengthy explanation of the early history of dragons and bureaucracies amounts to a historical justification of the Five Phases system.

Under Shun and the rulers of the Xia dynasty, the Huanlong (Dragonraising) and Yulong (Dragon-rearing) families were named for their knowledge of the care and feeding of dragons. The last of these adepts fed the Xia ruler the pickled meat of a female dragon (one of four sent by Heaven) that had died; when the lord demanded more of the delicacy, the dragon warden departed, and founded the Fan line (forebears of the Fan family of Jin nobles). When Wei Xianzi asks about the disappearance of this bureaucratic

order, Cai Mo returns the Zuozhuan’s most complete vision of the Five Phases and their place in the world:

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ih - AMWAZTAR RE SEU ELRZABIRE:-ABmUR “Each material thing had its officer. These officers perfected their methods, thinking on them day and night. If for one day they gave up their duties, then death came to them; one who had given up his office did not eat. When the officer remained in his duties, then the material thing with which he was concerned would emerge. If he

abandoned his duties, then the material thing would hide away, becoming obstructed and infertile.

“Thus there were the officers of the Five Phases, known as the Five Officers, who were granted hereditary titles and surnames, enfeoffed as the highest nobles, and sacrificed to as the most esteemed spirits. At the altars of earth and grain and in the five sacrifices, these are the ones who are revered and exalted. The officer for wood was known as Goumang; the officer for fire was known as Zhurong; the officer for metal was known as Rushou; the officer for water was known as Xuanming; the officer for soil was known as Houtu. “The dragon is a material thing of the water. Since the office of water has been abandoned, dragons are no longer taken alive. . . .”” If (dragons) did not appear day and night, who could have thus treated them as material things?” Xianzi asked, “At the altars of earth and grain and the five sacrifices, to what hereditary lines do the five officers belong?” He replied, “In the time of Shaohao there were four men, named Chong, Gai, Xiu, and Xi, who were talented with metal, wood, and water. He made Chong the

| Goumang (wood officer), Gai the Rushou (metal officer), and Xiu and Xi the Xuanming (water officers); through generations, by never giving up their office, they preserved Qiongsang, These account for three of the sacrifices. “Zhuanxu had a son named Li, who was the Zhurong (fire officer). Gonggong had a son named Goulong, who was the Houtu (soil officer). These account for the other two sacrifices. “Houtu (the soil officer) is the altar of earth, while the altar of grain is for the of-

ficer of fields. Zhu, a son of the Lieshan rulers, was in charge of the altar of grain , and was sacrificed to until the Xia. Qi of Zhou was also in charge of the altar of grain and has been sacrificed to since the Shang.””°

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

10 Intelligibility in the Extra-human World of factual particulars on the rhetoric of the speech, the occasion here looks like the merest pretext. Unless we imagine that some other creature was mistaken for a dragon, this is an event that never happened and that, moreover, is not attested in the Chungiu, where some part of the factual framework of each year's anecdotes is established.” But in a larger sense, the occasion of the speech is the same occasion that generally controls the use of theory in rhetoric. Like other forms of regularity in the world, the Five Phases, even as they display their conceptual force, must put that force at the disposal of a moral vision of human history. The Five are an absolute system, but their theoretical truth is demonstrated only by the cultural achievements of early dynasts. The disappearance of living dragons from the world proves a point that is not so much theoretical as moral and historical: the contemporary order, which falls short of the standards of the ancients in many ways, also fails in lacking the office of water. Aetiology here ascribes to the Five Phases a priority that thinkers like Zou Yan would have found useful, but it subordinates them to history by noting the moments of their entrance on (and, in the case of water, exit from) the historical stage of political and cultural institutions. Zou Yan's theory of ages keyed to the different phases, on the other hand, would subordinate history to Five Phases theory, something that the Zuozhuan and Guoyu never do.”

Despite its close association with the Five Phases in later Chinese thought, the yin-yang dichotomy is one of the lesser theoretical tools in histo-

tiographical speeches.” The terms can be used for a quick prediction, as when an eclipse prompts a prediction of flooding from Zi Shen of Lu and a refutation by Shusun Zhaozi: “It will be a drought. If even after the equinox the yang still does not prevail, it must be excessive when it does finally prevail. How could there not be a drought? Since the yang is not prevailing over the dark, it will accumulate.” The Chungiu notes a sacrifice for rain directly after the eclipse itself; yin-yang theory seems to have provided a handy means of relating the two details of the historical record, and the drama of false interpretation and correction lends to the authority of the theory.” Yin-yang can provide a rationalistic explanation of prodigies, as when five stones fall from the sky and six birds fly backward in the state of Song. Asked by Duke Xiang of Song what the omens mean, a visitor correctly predicts deaths in Lu, turmoil in Qi, and mixed milicary success for Song.” But afterward he denies that the strange events were interpretable: “This was a matter of yin and yang, not a cause for good or ill auspices; good and ill auspices arise from

Intelligibility in the Extra-human World II humans.” The Zuozhuan has it both ways. The natural world, understood by means of theory, is independent of humans. But like anything that produces visible signs, it still makes correct interpretations possible, largely because any rumor of omens indicates unrest among the people, whose dissatisfac-

tion is the true source of trouble for an unjust ruler.” , As a dichotomy, yin-yang lends itself especially to circumstances that favor

the thematization of balance. The ailing Duke Ping of Jin consults a Qin doctor about his illness after Zichan of Zheng has given an immensely erudite but apparently unhelpful diagnosis. The doctor explains the use of balance in music and in other number-based discourses. Excess in any single term invites disaster, and it is the duke’s passionate devotion to his concubines that has brought on his fever.” In one of the several Guoyu speeches on

music in its relation to political and cosmic order (more on which subject below), the orderly workings of yin and yang are among the effects of the right sort of music, and the excess represented by the king's new bells will result in obstruction and disorder.” In the natural world, yin and yang wax and wane in constant complementarity, with occasional excesses on one side or

danger of excess.” |

the other; in analyses of human behavior, the emphasis seems to be on the

In a speech probably written later than most others, the Guoyu ascribes to the Yue King Goujian’s (r. 496-465) famous advisor Fan Lia yin-yang theory of military engagement.” On Fan Li’s advice, Goujian has invaded Wu and then refused a definitive battle. Fan Li interprets the situation on the basis of ancient precedents. The Wu forces’ willingness to come out for a battle indicates steely strength and a remnant of yang force that must be exhausted before Yue can seek to destroy the state. To conquer Wu, Yue must, like the ancients, balance aggression and defense, yang and yin, in accordance with the natural constants of the world.”

Yin-yang and the Five Phases, like the regularities of the heavens, are in theory prior to human culture and are integrated into human understanding through gradual cultural advancement. In their role as signifiers, especially in predictive speeches, these aspects of the universe are required to be responsive to successes and failures in human virtue, but part of their value always derives from their more-than-human orderliness. One may therefore distinguish in the rhetorical application of these theories two distinct modes of signification. First, there is the complete system (the Five Phases taken together, for instance), which can always furnish a model of the order to which

112 Intelligibility in the Extra-human World the human political realm must aspire. Cosmic order, in which observational insight is combined with projected ideals of political order, signifies an overall regularity that human activity should, but usually does not, reproduce. Second, there are individual elements (comet, eclipse, fire, water), which are borrowed from their respective systems for the occasional purposes of rhetoric and are used to endow particular events in the human world with significance. The receptivity of these elements, their metaphorical openness to all sorts of signification, allows easy transitions from historical particular to theoretical order and thence to specific prediction or policy recommendation. But whether a speaker expounds cosmic regularity or merely adduces it to facilitate the connection of observation with prediction or counsel, the cosmic provides the speech with its infallible signs by being more than human and by not changing in response to human effort or failure. In these

theories, human thought has postulated an order that is exemplary in its regularity precisely because it is not human. Historiographical speeches also apply a number of theories that acquire

their regularity from action in the human realm. These are not yet the political and cultural precepts that the majority of speeches appeal to, but they do take us one step closer to the unique order of the human world.

Theories of the Human: Music, War, and the Responsive Universe Some cosmic regularities would remain unknown if it were not for the human activities that evoke them. On a general level, observation, interpretation, and rhetoric are themselves activities that reveal unseen order, and the theories we

have examined so far are attempts to reveal and apply hidden truths. But endeavors other than theorizing also engage these extra-human truths; the difference is that theory follows human activity and is not only knowledge of the world but also knowledge of the human. Although historiography, as it subordinates all forms of knowledge to certain central tenets concerning virtue and tradition, gives prescriptive wisdom (political precepts and the like) a theoretical status equal to that of descriptive knowledge, there are nevertheless certain areas of prescription in which described cosmic order is presented as being more directly effective. The structure and balance of cosmic forces may be a common metaphor for political order, but in music, war, and a few other areas, the relevance of these forces is more than metaphorical.

Intelligibility in the Extra-human World 113

Music, like the discourses examined in the previous section, is a source both of comprehensive models and of isolated terms adapted to occasional use. There was, beyond and above these texts, a musicology that had its own technical coherence.” My concern here is, however, to show the form theories of music took when adapted for presentation in the context of historiographical rhetoric. Eastern Zhou historiography’s greatest systematic expositions of the regularities of music can be found in two grand Guoyu passages, one of which has already been mentioned in connection with yin-yang theory.” King Jiing

of Zhou is preparing to cast a great bell array, known as the Wuyi.” Three speeches of remonstrance follow, each focusing on a different aspect of music’s centrality in the universal order. The first speech, by the king’s noble advisor Duke Mu of Shan, makes aesthesis, or perception, its theme. The new bell set, whose sound exceeds the capacity of human ears, outstrips aesthesis; the bell whose sound is too great to hear institutes an unknowable and therefore useless harmony, betraying music’s raison d’étre. Further, as the proper judgment of properly limited beauty, aesthesis should be the beginning of a lord’s good public image. When he hears and sees clearly, he wins the adherence of the people, and music becomes the beginning of successful government. By violating these aesthetic standards, the great bell instead becomes a cause of excessive aesthesis, impure taste, and disharmony; government fails as the people lose faith in what they hear.” The king does not heed this first warning, but does ask his musician (ling) Zhoujiu about the matter.” The latter repeats what he has heard concerning the proper tonal sizes and ranges of various types of instruments and explains a fundamental principle of economy. The sages made their musical instruments in such a way as to conserve resources, reserving the heavier and more expensive instruments, including bells, for relatively minor harmonic and rhythmic roles. Although Zhoujiu, unlike Duke Mu, speaks here of music in its own terms, his justification of musical practice necessarily takes him outside the system itself to a realm that is, perhaps inevitably, political. In the next section the interpenetration of the musical and the political becomes more emphatic. “Administration,” says Zhoujiu, “makes a model of music;’* music derives from harmony, and harmony derives from even tonality. The tones are what give music its harmony, and the pitch-standards

are what make tones even” 7 BX SR E+ SEE A FI HE BLA A sk. (B fy) 34. When the musical instruments, along with lyrics (shi) and

114 Intelligibility in the Extra-human World

singing (ge) and all the other components of the performance, are handled correctly, the result is a perfection that can bring about the eight airs (ba

feng); whether these airs are simply the winds of the eight directions or something more surely tied to music is uncertain, but the effect extends

without question to nature:””

Re mike - RB - BB KR: BMRB BERL: ARR Rll + 7) ts tt Seo LE PA BE HE SIE And then there is neither obstructed yin nor scattered yang in the qi; yin and yang proceed in order, winds and rain come at the appropriate times, there is fine growth and abundant blessings, the people are harmonious and prosperous, nothing is missing and music is complete, and neither the rulers nor the subjects are fatigued. Thus it is said that the music is proper.

Now, however, with the improper casting of bells that the traditional music

system cannot justify, the proper is obstructed and resources are squandered. These failures in turn mean that the bells will provide no musical pleasure. Further, the character of the new bells’ sound will permit neither harmony nor evenness of tone.

In his peroration, Zhoujiu connects the musical and economic characteristics of the proper bells with the most revered concepts of the inherited mimetic order. When music is harmonious and even in tone (heping), resources multiply and the virtue and sound of the center (zhongde, zhongyin)

lead the way. “Virtue and sound do not err, and spirits and humans are brought together; spirits are at peace because of this, and the people are

heedful because of this” #8 GP - AHA Hes RSL. The alternative to this incantatory vision of perfection, with its echoes of the Shi, is waste, fatigue, excess, dissonance, the alienation of the people, and

the rage of the spirits. This, says Zhoujiu, is something of which he has not heard; that is, it is not part of the inherited learning for which he is responsible. The rhetorical outlines of the speech should be clear even in paraphrase. After explaining proper instrumentation and harmony on the basis of traditional authority (chen wen zhi, “I have heard”), Zhoujiu introduces and substantiates the likeness between a government and the music it produces. The terms most prominent in the thematics and structure of the speech are harmony (he), even tonality (ping) and, to a lesser extent, pleasure/music (le/yue,

both written #%). The double meaning of this latter term dominates the middle section of the speech. When the instruments are used correctly, the

| Intelligibility in the Extra-human World 115 result is a perfect pleasure and music (le/yue ji) embodied in the harmonic responsion of sounds to one another and in their even gradation. This perfection brings about all the excellent results—cosmic order, fruitful harvests,

popular contentment—that constitute pleasure and music being correct (le/yue zheng). By the end of the passage, music is more than itself. As long as it is correct, it is a guarantor of the continuation of pleasure, its own shadow signification.”

The significance of harmony and tonal evenness extends from music to the political realm. As Shakespeare put the matter, “Government, though

high and low and lower,/ Put into parts, doth keep in one consent, / Congreeing in a full and natural close, / Like music.” In the Chinese context, the relation is not only metaphorical, but (in a Confucian ideal) real. Harmony, as the “mutual responsion and preservation of sounds” (sheng ying xiangbao), and tonal evenness, as the “non-transgression of small and great” (xida buyu), combine musical and political meanings: harmony is both the juxtaposition of tones separated by given intervals and, as often in historiog-

raphy, the healthy difference of opinions in a court where words circulate freely.’ Evenness is the musical and political tuning by which givens (do, re, mi, lord, minister, commoner) maintain their identity in a stable hierarchy. The speech is not finally about music theory, although in certain sections it accurately reflects musical notions current at the time of its composition. Musical knowledge is displayed to figure forth and support a vision of virtu-

ous government. , The final speech on the Wuyi bells,” also put in the mouth of Zhoujiu, , first matches the twelve pitch standards (ld) with cosmic, political, and moral functions: Huangzhong, for instance, which is the first of the twelve and tonic, is “that by which the six airs (liu qi) and the nine virtues (jiu de) are broadcast and cultivated.” According to Wei Zhao, the numbered sets include, in the case of the six airs, yin-yang, wind, rain, dark and light, and, in

the case of the nine virtues, the Five Phases plus grain, virtue, prosperity, and fertility.” This passage is of interest to musicologists and in fact conforms with non-historiographical, non-rhetorical written evidence on War-

ring States music.” ,

What follows relates to music’s rhetorical uses. After Zhoujiu has restated the rule, here attributed to the former kings, that the greater instruments are to be reserved for lesser rhythmic and harmonic elements of the music, the king asks what the seven pitch-standards (li) are. These have

116 Intelligibility in the Extra-human World

been identified as the seven pitches that defined the Chinese heptatonic scale.” Zhoujiu explains their origins in history and in observed astronomical phenomena. He recalls the positions of Jupiter, the moon, the sun, the conjunction of the sun’s and moon’s paths, and Mercury at the moment of King Wu's conquest of the Shang; these he names the “five positions” (wu wei). He then establishes “three placings” (san suo) specific to Zhou, its history, and its territory. One aspect of the celestial configuration refers to the Duke of Feng, a nephew of the Zhou ancestress Tai Jiang. Another, marked by Jupiter, is the heavenly region that corresponds to Zhou’s earthly homeland. Still another refers to farming, the specialty of the ancestor Hou Ji and all his descendants. According to Zhoujiu, King Wu observed these five positions and three placings; wishing to make use of them, he measured the celestial distance among various of the observed positions and obtained the number seven, which then became the basis for his seven pitch standards.” Finally, Zhoujiu recounts the famous morning of the battle itself, matching four distinct types of music with the military uses to which they were put:

one for the pre-dawn marshaling of the troops, another for whetting the valor of the troops, another for broadcasting the virtue of the Zhou and the crimes of the Shang, and another for demonstrating generosity to the victo-

rious troops. .

Zhoujiu’s speech is an extreme example of the regulative functions assigned to theories of nature in rhetorical circumstances. Music, although it originates in human culture, depends on extra-human laws of mathematical proportion. Perhaps because of the way it crosses the frontier between the human and the cosmic, music became a master metaphor, with an indeterminacy and adaptability that facilitated correspondences in several intellectual realms and innumerable rhetorical situations. The numerical specifics of musicology, adduced in speeches, acquired a rhetorical usefulness that was no less important than music itself as a component of the culture of the time. Similarly, musical terms with built-in political overtones, like he and ping, generally reveal less about music itself than about the methods and obsessions of rhetoric; music, more than any of the other realms of theoretical knowledge, permits a detailed and extensive regulative reflection on politics. Finally, since it is not only a matter of inherited propriety but also an object of every ruler’s personal taste, music becomes applicable to personal conduct, where most theories of the natural world rarely reach. King Jiing dies two

years after the casting of his Wuyi bells, which then go out of tune. One

Intelligibility in the Extra-human World 117

cannot help but imagine that the importance accorded to the bell in the Guoyu and Zuozhuan derives not so much from contemporary (whether sixth century or later) strictures on music as from the wide range of regularities that music and the coincidence of the king's death could bring to rhetoric. Both because of music’s rhetorical possibilities and because of the status accorded to musical skills in the societies that produced the texts, officials with musical duties are remarkable characters in historiography. As keepers of music’s regularities, these shi “masters of musicians” are the human perso-

nae through which music's metaphysical truths express themselves. Most famous among them is Shi Kuang of Jin, whose expertise in musical and related fields is the subject of several anecdotes. His career as glimpsed in these anecdotes outlines the range and character of music’s importance in the soci-

ety that historiography commemorates.” | |

Shi Kuang strikes the reader of the Zuozhuan and the Guoyu first as one gifted with an ear for sounds natural and human, a talented listener. All music is for Shi Kuang what the Shi and traditional dances were for Ji Zha of

Wu, a medium in which the learned listener can hear truths about other places and times. Accompanying Duke Ping of Jin on a military campaign against Qi, he announces what the narrator has just confirmed, the retreat of the Qi army: “The sound of the crows is delighted; the Qi army will withdraw.” If nature does not provide the interpretable sound, he can make it himself, as he does in the same year as the Qi campaign. When Chu attacks Jin’s ally Zheng, Shi Kuang promises his Jin comrades that the Chu army will not pose a great threat: “I sang northern airs several times and then sang southern airs. The southern airs were not vigorous (bu jing), and included many dead sounds (sisheng). Chu will not achieve anything.” The interest of

Shi Kuang’s remark lies not only in its exploitation of a correspondence between musical nomenclature and the map but also in the handy term sisheng, which means both “dead sounds” and “the sound of death” and thus becomes the crux of the prediction. Typically, Shi Kuang’s theoretical determination is not made to stand alone; it is first supplemented with an as-

tronomical prediction” and then subordinated to virtue. Shu Xiang, chief minister of Jin, gets the final word: “It is all a matter of the ruler’s virtue.” In a passage I have discussed elsewhere, Shi Kuang gives his most com-

prehensive explanation of the social order established under the sage-kings and of the place of musical practice within that order.” Having enumerated the ranks of the hierarchy from king to commoner, he then focuses on the

118 Intelligibility in the Extra-human World circulation of information toward the center. Among the figures responsible for submitting the news and opinions of the periphery are the blind musicians, the gu, who present new or traditional songs. Shi Kuang’s competence to remark on general matters of political and social organization seems to derive in part from his official duties, especially his responsibility for the feng (“wind” or “air”), which is to be understood in this connection as the primary medium for the circulation of information in both geographical and social space. This notion of feng was implicit in Shi Kuang’s use of the pitch-pipes

to learn from their timbre the likely outcome of Chu’s attack on Zheng. Criticizing the Jin Duke Ping’s liking for the new music, Shi Kuang fills out the concept of feng as a medium of circulation:

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Music is that by which the airs of the mountains and rivers are laid open and that by

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

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

he remarks that the replacement of virtuous competition by open power struggles bodes ill for the ducal house.” Shi Kuang wins explicit praise for

| Intelligibility in the Extra-human World 119 his good sense and good speech when stones have been heard to speak in a certain part of Jin. Asked by Duke Ping why the stones would speak, Shi Kuang answers:”

ASRS MBB AR RPE DE RMZA- STE - CR TR HAF SZUMsS SHERE- ROWE - RM: RR Hit- He - DMEF: Stones cannot speak. They may be possessed by something, or, if not, then the people’s hearing may have exceeded itself. I have also heard: “When one is untimely in attending to affairs, grudges and enmities stir among the people, and mute things speak.” Now your palace is lofty and luxuriant, but the strength of the people is exhausted; grudges and enmity arise together and nothing maintains its original nature. Is it not appropriate that the stones should speak?

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

, 120 Intelligibility in the Extra-human World that the man was born in the year that the Lu nobleman Shuzhong Huibo (Shu Pengsheng) met with Xi Chengzi (Xi Que) of Jin; it was in that year that another Lu nobleman, Shusun Zhuangshu (Shusun Dechen), defeated a Di tribe, naming three of his sons after vanquished Di warriors; the man is thus seventy-three years old.” Other ministers determine through multiplication the number of days the man has lived, and he is given an honorary po-

sition in the local government.” When the news of this incident is carried back to Lu, it impresses the chief minister Ji Wuzi, who declares that Jin cannot yet be treated lightly, since its court includes so many learned gentlemen (junzi); Shi Kuang himself is one to whom the court can turn for advice and standards (zidu). This anecdote, the only one in the Zuozhuan to fo-

cus such attention on the problems of calculation, once again establishes theoretical aptitude as an adjunct to political and moral order. By virtue of its connections with the regularities of nature and with the

proprieties of human cultural organization, music brings to the histo_ riographical speeches a set of metaphors that serve finally to ground the political order in the natural order. Harmony, the steps of the scale, the delight of listening, and sound itself all become metaphors for administration, and administration is figured as a public performance in which the sound of the ruler’s and ministers’ music reaches the ultimate audience, the people. The regularities of the universe underlie the pleasures of aesthesis, which can last only if it is appropriately limited. With music and its theory, historiography creates a means of extending a moralizing understanding of the universe beyond mere prescription of action; the nascent Confucian discipline now dictates pleasures. Like music, war involves both human action and larger principles of the universe.” Whereas musical principles are normally adduced in rhetorical circumstances that favor themes of social harmony, personal restraint, and the circulation of information in the world, different sorts of principles are appropriate to the military situation. Deliberative and predictive speeches uttered before or during battles emphasize that the world works on behalf of virtue and tends toward equilibrium. These principles are reconciled in the theme of excess, which explains how the virtuous may avoid the cycle of complacency and decay that brings the powerful down and restores equilibrium over time. Demonstrated in dozens of anecdotes, the historiographical view of impersonal moral forces in the world alters the conception of an active Heaven presented in Shangshu speeches, making Heaven impersonal but

Intelligibility in the Extra-human World 121 no less powerful, and extends its workings to events of less epochal importance than the rise of the Zhou.

The principle of equilibrium is equally effective in the military and the moral realms of behavior. When Duke Zhuang of Qi plans a sneak attack on Jin, his minister Cui Zhu warns against the move, citing a saying: “A small state that takes advantage of a great state's difficulties to do it harm must incur blame as a result.” The idea shows up frequently and amounts to an injunction against foolhardy attacks on the most powerful states. Depending on the historical context, small states’ victories can even be interpreted as harbingers of coming defeat rather than signs of superior virtue. When Duke Xiang of Zheng (r. 604-587) manages to defeat the Chu army, one of his ministers recognizes the victory as a disaster for the small country; looming just three years ahead in the historical record is the battle of Bi, at which Jin and her allies, including Zheng, will be routed by Chu.” At least when virtue is left out of the calculations, the triumph of the small over the great violates common wisdom and must mark a temporary excess that will in time be corrected.” Excesses in other areas of military action invite similar interpretations. During a Jin invasion of Qi, Duke Ling of Qi (r. 581-554) prepares to flee, but his heir and the minister Guo Rong seize the reins of his horses and explain that the Jin army will stop short of occupation: “The army is moving quickly and hastily: this is pillaging, and they are going to retreat. What are you afraid off” A law of retribution allows the extension of this physics of equilibrium into

the moral realm. When the evil prevail, it is sometimes enough to let them prevail, since continued success will lead to excess and reversal. So it is when Red Di (Chi Di) tribes attack Jin and the minister Xun Linfu counsels Duke Cheng (r. 606-600) not to meet the attack: “Let them tire their people out and thus fill up their measure (guan); then they can be destroyed.” The “measure” is the cord on which money or cowries are strung,” In this vivid metaphor of excess, every new battle endangers all past gains, which will fall away like beads from a broken string. That the people as exhausted warriors are the medium by which equilibrium is re-established is in keeping with historiography’s hedging of its bets concerning the extra-human. Xun Linfu's certainty about the workings of universal balance on the battlefield is vindicated nine years later, when he and Duke Jing destroy one whole tribe of Red Di. The force that re-establishes moral equilibrium is observed and predicted with as much regularity in the individuals who direct armies as in the armies

122 Intelligibility in the Extra-human World themselves. Given a suitable narrative context, a series of perfect tactical suc-

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

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In this lie the beginnings of Chu’s disaster. He summoned the allies and they came; he attacked walled cities and prevailed; he built walls at the border and no one defied him. When nothing goes against the king’s desires, will the people take their ease? If the people do not abide by it, then who will be able to bear it? When the commands of the king cannot be borne, then there is disaster and turmoil.

Looming behind the prediction is the king’s suicide nine years later, after rebellious former allies attack the Chu capital and kill the heir. Although this culminating event likely accounts for the prediction, it does not diminish the significance of the terms in which the prediction is framed. Unchecked success is the beginning of imbalance, which, when it affects an individual as powerful as a king, arouses counterbalancing forces that work through the

people. |

These latter examples show that the world’s counterbalancing tendency supports the moral order even though it originates beyond that order. By one principle of equilibrium, the victory of the small state over the large bodes ill, and the swift march of an army indicates that it will not advance far. The principle, duly substantiated in narrative, has nothing to do with the moral rectitude of the actors involved. But the same principle extends into the human realm, where imbalance is treated as a moral matter. As a matter of principle, variance from inherited norms of behavior, especially ducal behavior, is an individual, human version of imbalance and is subject to the counteracting forces of the world. So it is that the world in this historiography works on behalf of virtue, both in military confrontations and in all other interactions among people. As with other theoretical principles, a link is established between the extra-human world and the realm of human behavior, in which individuals are to control themselves in accordance with

Intelligibility in the Extra-human World 123

norms. The theory of virtue and excess enunciated in speeches is borne out in the workings of narrative, as examples in Chapter 6 will show. Because the world works in favor of the virtuous, a great deal of military counsel is based on assessments of the relative morality of the combatants.

Just before the battle of Bi, where Jin and its allies are to be routed by the Chu army under King Zhuang, the Jin minister Shi Hui counsels against battle in a long and carefully constructed speech.” One cannot, he says, successfully attack a state that does not err in the areas of virtue, punishment, administration, occupations, regulations, and rituals. Chu has achieved perfection in each of these areas, as Shi Hui demonstrates with detailed evidence of Chu practices. Further, as two Shi citations show, it was the practice of the Zhou founding sages to attack not the morally competent but the disorderly and depraved. An abundance of human factors, both in Shi Hui’s speech and in the whole battle narrative, may draw our attention

| away from the moral bias of the world. Running an administration in accordance with the norms entails actions that would likely increase efficiency and

troop morale. We have noted already that the people, especially as they are affected by the circulation of images, can become the instrument of the world’s moral forces. But behind these certainties and behind Shi Hui'’s judgment on the situation lies the much more basic conviction that the world will not let a state as well-ordered as Chu fail. Again, historical context means everything. Whatever deliberations were remembered from before the battle of Bi, it fell to later transmitters of the tale to explain the Jin allies’ loss and to make it support rather than undermine the promises of inherited moral norms. How could Chu defeat Jin? Because at that moment Chu was morally and administratively superior. That is how the

world works.” |

The notion that the world can respond to virtue in any area, not only on the battlefield, is a guide to action in many of the deliberative speeches of historiography. At the same time, it is the assumption that makes many of the predictions in these texts possible. The world’s intelligibility, its whole availability as a source of infallible signs for the rhetorical treatment of human action, is informed by the assumption that it works for virtue and that it is readable on the basis of training in traditional knowledge. Thus portents and theoretical manipulations of the natural world are placed in a framework of moral meaning. Discussions of the heavens, earth, the Five Phases

124 Intelligibility in the Extra-human World and yin-yang, music, and war are peripheral in that they extend to the world from a center that is human, public, and political. Although these realms of knowledge are made in some cases to provide a quasi-scientific, extra-human basis for what is right in the human world, they regularly return to the practical considerations of human behavior in society. At the center of the world are inherited human norms that guide the organization of states, societies, courts, and individual selves. Wisdom concerning the organization of the

human realm is the single most important source of principles in historiographical speeches and reveals more about the historiographical system than any other area of knowledge. We turn now to the heart of the histori-

ographers’ teachings. |

FOUR ~ Order in the Human World

In the perspective of the Zuozhuan and Guoyu, the known world is a space _ cleared in the wilderness by culture. Culture, which is both a system of prescriptions and the legitimizing account of their origins, establishes the distinctions that define the human world. This world is bounded on one fron-

tier by the spirit world and on the other by the non-Chinese world. It is organized internally according to nested structures of kinship and obligation, which are made to account for geography and fealty. And it finds

itself, in the times recounted by historiography, in a consciously late Zhou moment. Although the norms established or sanctioned by the dynastic founders still guide both the behavior of actors in the world and correct interpretations of the world itself, they are now being extended to account for deviations and anti-Zhou alternatives. The cultural principles by which the human world is to be organized and understood assume a perfect clarity about place and time: these are the central states under Zhou rule. But this clarity is established in opposition to the surrounding uncertainties

of cultural otherness and historical change. The principles advanced in speeches prescribe cultural practices of religion, politics, and morality in the

central realm and also begin to describe events beyond its edges. What unites the many specific principles of human relations is a flexible and encompassing concept of ritual propriety (li). In the hands of the historiographers, this concept was the key to interpretation of the world and narration

of its history. |

126 Order in the Human World

Spirits and Ancestors : In five major speeches and many shorter passages, the Zuozhuan and Guoyu establish the principles that guide the relations between humans and spirits (shen)." As might be expected, these principles have largely to do with the proper rituals for sacrifice. The sacrificial commerce by which humans ren-

der spirits their due for past and future benefits establishes a connection between the well-understood human center and the half-unknown spirit world.” Because it commemorates benefits bestowed on humans in past times, whether by spirits or by human forebears, sacrifice locates the worshipper in a particular historical moment and in a particular lineage.” Since this commerce takes different forms depending on the time and place of sacrifice and the identities of worshipper and recipient, it is possible to match the overall order of sacrifices with the social hierarchy and thus to establish an extra-human basis for human relations of power.’ Although every sacrifice has a historical justification, the total system of sacrifices and its corresponding social hierarchy is presented as complete.’ History is woven into the fabric of the perfect society in the form of constitutive obligations, but this society itself is for the most part represented as immune to historical change. Finally, sacrifice is justified not only as a preservation of tradition and an obligatory recognition of spiritual aid but also as a public act with di-

rect benefits in the human world. The theme of effective public images, which we have encountered before, turns up regularly as a justification of principles of order in the human world. A speech in the Guoyu includes an account of the beginning of all sacrifice and reveals fundamental assumptions about the commerce between humans and spirits. King Zhao of Chu (r. 515-489) asks his minister Guan Shefu what is meant in the passage in the “Writings of Zhou” (“Zhoushu”) that says that Chong and Li blocked communication between Heaven and earth.° Could humans once have climbed to Heaven? No, says Guan Shefu: in ancient times, the people and the spirits did not mix. Appropriately qualified people were chosen as mediums (xi and wu), as priests (zhu), and as lineage priests (zong). Heaven, earth, spirits, ancestors, and certain of the things in their world thus had their proper officials; these were the five officials, and they did not interfere with each other.’ Later, during the disorder that at-

tended the decline of Shaohao, this rigid specialization was thrown into confusion as people took upon themselves sacrifices they should have left to

Order in the Human World 127 the competent officials, and sacrifices ceased to bring the desired results. __ Zhuanxu restored order by making Chong, his officer of the south, responsible for Heaven and spirits, and Li, his officer of fire, for earth and ancestors. This distinction between spiritual and ancestral sacrifices was retained through the Zhou, when the Sima family, descendants of the competent officials, inflated the claims of tradition to make it seem that Chong and Li had separated Heaven and earth. The interest of this speech lies in the particular form it assigns the crisis that challenges the sacrificial order. Unlike the literal krisis (decision) by which the Greek sacrificial order is established in the Hesiodic aetiology,” the work of Chong and Li is not the separation of humans from the recipi-

ents of their worship or the apportioning of sacrificial offerings. In the Guoyu, such separations are assumed as the achieved ideal of an indefinitely early time. The crisis comes when the distinctions by which the sacrificial

, system works—the distinctions among the various officials and their duties—break down, allowing chaotic mingling, usurpation, and evasion of obligation. Both human ancestors and spirits are the rightful recipients of sacrifice, but these sacrifices must be performed by separate, specially qualified

individuals in the human world. Although the distinguishing of spiritual and , ancestral sacrifices is not especially prominent among the principles of sacrifice elsewhere in Eastern Zhou historiography, the theme of rigid distinction and the abhorrence of chaotic innovation are important. The crisis of Chong and Li teaches not a particular distinction but the general necessity of maintaining distinctions in the religious and political spheres. Insofar as the sacrifices performed by an individual or a state are determined by history, the maintenance of proper sacrifices serves to reinforce the

inherited order and its distinctions. Under the sage-kings, according to Zhan Qin of Lu, the only proper recipients of sacrifice were those who had established law for the people, died in service, brought order to the people, prevented disasters, or eliminated evils; all the great founding heroes and certain others are included (among them Gun, Yu's father and failed predecessor as water manager). Through sacrifices, humanity recognizes and repays (bao) the services of these heroes.” Although this structure itself remains the same over time, there is no universal or timeless devotion. The Zhou, unlike any of the preceding royal lineages, sacrifices to the legendary Lord Ku (Di Ku) and to Kings Wen and Wu, who are its own benefactors. One does not sacrifice outside the historically defined obliga-

128 Order in the Human World tions of one’s lineage. One does not sacrifice to strange seabirds, as did the man rebuked by Zhan Qin.” One does not sacrifice to the demonic spirits worshipped by barbarians or even to recognized heroes who are not of one’s own lineage.” States like Jin, however, which gain power and territory, may acquire new religious duties shed by the moribund Zhou or by annexed

states.” |

Both among states and within states, religious behavior makes historically

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

Order in the Human World 129 sacrifice, like all ritual, is a performance and confirmation of social divisions. | Although it is only one of many practical expressions of hierarchy, it gains extra force because it concerns the nature of the human as well as certain responsive aspects of the extra-human world. Like all elements of the inherited order, sacrifice is supposed to be preserved unchanged, since change may threaten the social and historical distinctions sacrifice expresses. According to the Zuozhuan and Guoyu, no substitution of victims is permissible.” Human sacrifice is entirely unacceptable, since sacrifice is done for the sake of humans, and no spirit will relish a human victim.” Less menacing changes in sacrificial practice are also forbidden. Personal taste cannot determine the details of sacrifice.” Nor is a ruler

free to choose which sacrifices he will attend.” Finally, capricious change in the system is a violation of principle.” The emphasis here is on the strict preservation of an inherited order. All the speeches on sacrificial regularity pose alternatives as foils for that order and for perfect devotion to it.

The public aspect of worship is a central theme in the principles that guide sacrifice and the treatment of spirits. Although it is a fundamental assumption that the ruler of a state is always in the public eye and must always calculate the effect of his actions on the populace, which is bound to imitate him, the theme of effective public imagery is intensified when the spiritual audience is added to the human audience. Duke Xian of Wey (r. 576-559,

547-544), driven out of his country, plans to pray to his ancestors at the border and to claim, falsely, that no crime of his own led to his expulsion. The wife of the former duke reminds him that there is no point in lying: if spirits do not exist, then prayer is useless; if they do exist, they cannot be deceived. Implicit in these principles and in her litany of the crimes Duke Xian has committed. is the notion that the spirits serve as a sort of exaggerated,

omniscient figuration of the people's ubiquitous observation.” The ailing Duke Jing of Qi looks favorably on a plan to punish his priests and scribes in

order to demonstrate to his allies that his illness is not the result of some failure of his own in sacrificial duties. Yanzi responds to this blinkered anxi-

ety about interstate reputation by offering a vision of true virtue and the benefits of an excellent reputation among the people of one’s own state. When the state is well managed, the priests can report the truth to the spirits and share in the bounties thus secured. When the state is poorly run and the ruler exploits his people, the spirits will know, and the priests cannot expect to deceive them. The only remedy for the current situation is to ease

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

Cultural Others Just as the human world is bounded by the spirit world, the cultural world created by the achievements of the three dynasties and their predecessors is

bounded by territory and societies in which, according to one line of thought, those achievements have not yet been accepted.” Although these “barbarians” have their own languages, in the historiographers’ representation of them they for the most part speak the lingua franca of the central states flawlessly.” As Herrlee Creel pointed out, the primary distinction is cultural; the Rong, Di, and other groups that surround and in some cases live among the Chinese do not fully accept the inherited values and institutions that the historiographers say the central states should devote themselves to preserving,” This ethnic and cultural otherness makes the nonChinese world doubly useful to historiography. On the one hand, successes in battle against non-Chinese groups demonstrate the superiority of Chinese values and the bestial privation of the barbarians.” On the other hand, instances of wisdom and moral betterment among peripheral groups reveal the decadence of central culture under the late Zhou. In the case of the state of Chu, which is never quite Chinese and never quite barbarian, the doubleness of the historiographers’ depiction leads to a lesson in the universal utility of Chinese culture and of Zhou culture in particular. Disputes across the frontiers of Chinese political and cultural sway bring out commonplaces about internal cohesion. Diplomatic and military engagements with the non-Chinese world tend to produce speeches on brotherhood among the Chinese. One must help a Chinese state against a non-

Order in the Human World 131 Chinese state and may not do the opposite. The proper targets of military action are barbarian tribes, not Chinese states, as the Zhou king reminds a duke of Jin when he attempts to present Qi prisoners of war at court.” The Chinese states are bound by real and figurative family relations, which must prevail over the claims of non-Chinese groups. When King Xiang of Zhou (r. 652-619)” wishes to send a Di army against the state of Zheng in retaliation for certain offenses, the king’s minister Fu Chen remonstrates at length, detailing the whole familial basis of the Zhou polity: founded by sons of King Wen and King Wu, the states are bound in a brotherhood; the traditional sanction for this brotherhood is crystallized in the poem “The Wild Plum” (“Changdi,” Mao 164), composed by Duke Mu of Shao; and nothing can justify the use of military forces from outside this community against a __ member. As often, a use of power that is not supported by tradition or that originates outside traditional structures provides a pretext for an embattled defense of the inherited system. Alienation from central culture means a general privation that, in certain rhetorical situations, calls into question the very humanity of non-Chinese groups. On at least two occasions, these groups are described as or compared to beasts (ginshou).”” Their ignorance of Zhou values and distinctions accounts for their lack of both virtue and power. Fu Chen, for instance, after listing four virtuous accomplishments of Zheng, lists four moral failings on

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

The implications of cultural privation are boundless in this presentation. _ The Di not only lack the avowedly cultural values of virtue, right, and so on but fail even in the fundamental skills of perception. In grand depictions of the world, which tend to give it the form of a series of concentric zones focused around the Zhou king, non-Chinese groups oc-

cupy the outermost orbits, there to send their tribute and to respond, if slowly, to the moral radiance of the royal center.” A Zhou minister, the Zhai duke Moufu, remonstrates with King Mu of Zhou against plans for an

132 Order in the Human World attack on a certain Rong tribe and notes that the former kings secured the loyalty and tribute of their feudal dependents and of the outlying regions through proper use of virtue and military punishment. The Rong, who, with the Di, reside farthest from the center, beyond even the Man and the Yi, have consistently sent proper tribute and maintained their own position in the system of circulation that gives the world its structure. An attack will not serve Zhou interests. King Mu carries out the attack and returns with booty, but from that time on the periphery sends no tribute to the center.” By the tribute goods that they send, the most distant non-Chinese tribes

acknowledge their position in the world order. Confucius, asked about a strange arrow brought to the Chen duke’s court by a wounded hawk, identi-

fies it as belonging to the Sushen tribe of the far north and says that the Chen treasury contains a similar arrow, which the Sushen presented to the former kings. With its provenance inscribed on its shaft, it was given to Chen by the Zhou kings, who distributed tribute gifts from afar among feudal lords not of the Zhou blood to remind them of their tributary status.” In this way the kings made the obedience of the most distant groups an object lesson for nearer powers. The Zuozhuan and the Guoyu treat peripheral and culturally different groups less as subjects of interest in themselves than as foils for Zhou culture. Incidents involving non-Chinese groups serve as pretexts for celebra-

tions of inherited culture and the brotherhood of the Zhou states. This centripetal significance takes a more surprising form when the Zhou’s nonChinese neighbors rebuke the Chinese with an image of what they should be or once were. The wise barbarian is as common a figure as the wise commoner and serves some of the same purposes.”” It is a Rong leader who gives historiography’s most explicit account of the

differences between the Chinese and non-Chinese peoples.” When Jin gathers its allies to make a treaty against Chu on behalf of Wu, Jin prepares to place the leader of a Rong group that lives in Jin territory under arrest, accusing him of weakening Jin by revealing its secrets to the allies. The Rong

ruler, Gouzhi, reminds the Jin administrators that his tribe, long ago expelled by Qin, was granted territory in the wilderness by a Jin duke who rec-

ognized them as descendants of Siyue, Four Peaks, a ruler or rulers who lived under Yao.”* The Rong have served Jin faithfully in many battles; Jin’s weakness must be the result of some deficiency in its own forces. After all,

Order in the Human World 133

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

With that he withdraws, reciting the poem “Green Fly” (“Qingying,” Mao 219), apparently for its lines on the gentleman who does not believe slander. The text does not explain how Gouzhi is able, despite the purported absence of every sort of cultural commerce between the Chinese and the Rong, to deliver this rhetorically perfect speech and to cap it with the appropriate act of recitation. What his speech and the anecdote achieve, however, is a confirmation of central values that would have been impossible for any other speaker. Despite the disjunction of the two cultural worlds, Gouzhi subscribes to, and insists that his Jin audience subscribe to, the values of good faith, recognition of good service, and the strength of historical precedent. These are values that historiography upholds under the most diverse circumstances and that gain universality in the process. The figure of the virtuous barbarian ruler reappears when the leader of the state of Tan visits Lu.” Asked why the ancestor of his people, Shaohao, used the names of birds as titles for his officials, the Tan ruler explains that the appearance of a phoenix marked the beginning of his ancestors’ ascendancy, and that similar auspices—clouds, fire, water, and dragons—provided official titles for the same reason under the lines of the Yellow Emperor (Huangdi), Yandi, Gonggong, and Taihao. He also explains why the practice has fallen into desuetude. Confucius is so impressed by reports of the interview that he arranges to meet and study with the ‘Tan ruler.” Af, terward, Confucius comments: “I have heard that ‘when the Son of Heaven has allowed official ranks to lapse, learning about official ranks remains among the barbarians of the four quarters.’ It would appear to be true.” &

BAS KEARE + FP SEO - $45." Confucius makes the case even more forcefully than Gouzhi did. It is not merely that non-Chinese may share in and uphold certain Chinese values, which then become universal. When such values have disappeared from the center, the periphery may be the only place where one can find their traces.” Dividing the attributes of the bestial and the sagely barbarian, the state of

134. Order in the Human World Chu becomes a living exhibit in the Zuozhuan’s and Guoyu's case for universalized Zhou values. On the one hand, certain speakers see Chu as originally

and essentially barbaric.” On the other hand, although the state preserves certain institutions that distinguish it from the central states, its officials are sometimes represented as being fully versed in Zhou culture.“ Archaeological investigations have shown that Chu elites shared many of the cultural practices of its northern neighbors.” The historiographers appear to have used that fact in their defense of Zhou values. Chu ministers show the same ready knowledge of central values and inherited speech as did the Rong ruler Gouzhi, and their mastery of these cultural skills brings them benefits. As Shi Hui argued before Jin’s disastrous engagement of Chu at Bi, Chu’s handling of all aspects of administration, including the two crucial areas of virtue and ritual, at times makes it militarily invincible. As a rule—a rule of narra-

tive sense—Chu’s power increases in proportion to its adherence to Zhou values. This power sometimes leaves behind its basis in virtue and is revealed in all its raw ugliness as the grasping of outsiders for the goods of the center.

Chu kings want the Zhou treasures that signify political power: they want the cauldrons (ding). But one of the two men who longs for Zhou cauldrons, King Zhuang, is told that they will not move until the Zhou has lost its mandate, and the other, King Ling, is so lacking in administrative virtue that a rebellion in his own state forces him to commit suicide after he expresses his desire for the treasures.” Only when Chu’s power is supported by the continuing exercise of virtue, the historiographers imply, can it hope to win out over Jin and the other central states. To the extent that it is possible, Chu does win out. Composed before the resolution of the Warring States power struggle, the Zuozhuan and Guoyu see Chu’s final victory as a distinct possibility. Although in the days of King Cheng of Zhou, Chu could do no more than provide menial service at trea-

ties among the feudal lords and could not itself take part, it has risen through virtue’s force to the verge of absolute precedence, and sacrifices even before Jin at the treaty of Song in 546 B.C.E.”” There is at times an implicit comparison between the Zhou sage-kings and the contemporary Chu kings; King Wen of Zhou is a model for every ruler’s imitation, and it sometimes

seems that Chu hopes to use this model to win a new mandate and thus to replace the Zhou by imitating it. From a contemporary point of view, the hope was not vain. Although speakers generally recognize that power has accrued to Jin in Zhou's decline, one passage looks to Chu as the successor to

Order in the Human World 135 Zhou's royal power.” Historiographical speeches were composed in an era when Chu was still a power. Yet these speeches manage to make these facts signs of the universal relevance of the Zhou sages’ virtue rather than indications of its irrelevance.”

The Royal Center The principles that operate at the center of the Zhou order and govern interstate relations complement the principles expressed at the frontiers. The king is defined not as an individual endowed with power but as the occupant of a special position within an inherited hierarchy. As in the transactions commemorated in bronze inscriptions, the king is the center of political and economic circulation. From the plural, the peripheral, and the inferior flow tribute, words, service, and fealty; receiving these, the king returns gifts, recognition, model behavior, good administration, and the light of virtue. Continuing circulation both depends on and contributes to the structural integ-

rity of the system.” But there is, in historiographers’ utter devotion to the idea of devotion, a recognition that it will be impossible to support the Zhou order as such, since the royal house is in decline. In this area, as in many others, the historiographers succeed in extending the force of principles beyond their particular origins and casting values as universal. As suggested in speeches on the non-Chinese world, the geography of the

royal order is permeated by ties of kinship, loyalty, and historical obligation.” The fantasy of a world built of concentric zones of allegiance, elaborated at greatest length in Moufu’s remonstrance with King Mu,” lies behind the dead metaphor that makes of the feudal lords a hedge or fence (fan) dividing the royal house from the wilderness. In remonstrating with King Xiang when he plans to use a Di army against Zheng, Fu Chen recalls that the early Zhou kings enfeoffed their relatives to serve as hedges to the

Zhou.” |

More remarkably, when people from Jin and people from the royal domain contend over a piece of land, King Jiing is able to present, through a messenger, a principled vision of the world that prevails even though it describes the actual situation very poorly.” The messenger begins by listing the territories the Zhou house has occupied in the four directions during the long course of its rise. The enfeoffment of brothers of the first kings as hedges to the Zhou did not constitute an alienation of territory. The former kings exiled criminals from the center to the periphery, where they were to

136 Order in the Human World hold the frontier against the demonic forces beyond;” it was Duke Hui of Jin (r. 650-637) who allowed the barbaric descendants of one of these crimi- | nals to occupy territory near the Zhou capital. Jin must recognize that the royal house is to Jin as a cap is to clothing, the root to the tree, the source to the stream, or the leader to the people. These are the loftiest principles the historiographers know: the moral imperative that all civilized people must recognize the truths contained in early Zhou precedents, and the doctrine that acceptance of that imperative brings real political power. In his response, the Jin minister Shu Xiang accepts the king’s principles,

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Shu Xiang said to Xuanzi (Han Qi), “When Duke Wen was hegemon, could even he make changes in practices? He aided and supported the Son of Heaven and showed him added reverence. Since the times of Wen, our virtue has declined with each generation, and we have treated Ancestral Zhou with violence and despite, publicizing our excessiveness. Is it not appropriate that our allies are disloyal? And the king’s words are sensible. Please consider it.”””

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

Order in the Human World 137 cause of the real prestige and power that the royal center possessed. Although that power has long since disappeared, and the principles of early Zhou rule now survive mainly as effective memories, as handy justifications for current practice, and as pretexts for aggression on the part of the hegemon, the historicity of the founding moment plays a powerful role in historiographical speeches. Any action that has a precedent in the measures of the kings from Wen to Kang can be justified; that moment of the past is sacro-

sanct, the temporal equivalent of the royal center itself. An unstated but omnipresent principle of these speeches insists that right action seeks—even in trivial ways or without hope of success—to return the world to the early

Zhou status quo. |

This devotion to origins manifests itself most commonly in the metaphor of brotherhood, which seems to have come to historiography from the Shi. According to this metaphor, the contemporary rulers of states carry on the familial commitments of the founders of the states; the kinship relations by which the early kings built their hedges against the barbarian world remain in force in the rhetoric of diplomacy. In remonstrating with the Zhou king who planned to use Di forces against Zheng, for instance, Fu Chen cites two passages from the Shi that speak of brothers’ devotion to one another.” The historiographers have little to say about relations among real brothers, and evocations of brotherly love occur most commonly in figurative circumstances like the ones described here, where an affection assumed to be natural among children of the same parents is asserted as a force of unity among the states. As heir to his rank, the king is, in principle, the acme of the world’s hierarchy and the holder of certain exclusive prerogatives. When Duke Yin of Lu is preparing to have the Wan dance performed, he asks one of his ministers how many rows of feather-holding dancers he should have. The minister recalls the rule: the Son of Heaven uses eight, the feudal lords six, higher ministers four, and lower ministers two.” Similar orderly proportions govern the size of armies and territorial holdings.” The royal position is fundamental to these structural ideals in that it is the basis of proportionality and of a mathematical vision of the world’s order. In principle, every king is heir to a set of numbers that define his place at the top of the interstate hierarchy and prescribe the usages of all his subordinates. And because prerogative is measurable, so is presumption.” Every king inherits the reverence owed by subordinates to his rank itself and to the whole order it supports. The key factor in the Jin Duke Wen’s

138 Order in the Human World

rise to the hegemony is his respect for the king's orders, as King Xiang’s minister, the “Inner Scribe” (neishi) Xing, suggests when he reports to the king after a visit to Jin: “Jin must be treated well; its ruler will certainly

become hegemon, since he receives the orders of the king reverently and _ serves ritual and rightness completely.”"" When King Jing, beset by war with the usurper Prince Chao, asks Jin to wall his city, he recalls the services that

Duke Wen and the earlier Marquis Wen (r. 780-746) performed for Zhou in times of trouble. Jin ministers agree to the plan, acknowledging obedience to the king’s command as their duty.” Reverence is the proper attitude of all who surround the king in the interstate arena; it is an attentiveness both to the individual who now occupies the throne and to the cultural order he represents. In principle the king is the focus of the world’s attention, a model of behavior and a source of magically effective public images, who can change the world for the better or for the worse. In this sense, the king, like rulers of the various states, inherits not power per se but a set of duties and limitations. He can establish harmony throughout the world by conforming to protocol or endanger all of civilization by resisting. When Fu Chen urges King Xiang to recall his brother, Prince Dai, who has fled to Qi after an abortive coup attempt, he first cites lines from the poem “The First Month” (“Zhengyue,” Mao 192) and then reads them as a statement of principle: “If we brothers do

not get along, how can we complain that the lords of the states do not remain close to us?” Even real familial affection is valuable, in the king’s case, for its inevitable public effect. Perhaps the grandest vision of the king’s role as a model for human action comes in the schematic description of the royal

plowing ritual.” By correctly managing all the arrangements surrounding this ritual and by plowing the first row himself, the king demonstrates attitudes and actions that are to be imitated by all below him. Like him, his ministers, who also plow their rows, will act without thought of profit, and the people in their turn will perform their agricultural labor without cause for resentment. Once the king has animated the entire system by accepting his role in it, the system ensures the compliance of its other human components. As the pinnacle of the interstate system and the center of public scrutiny, the king is above all a preserver of inherited norms. Recall the words of Ji

Tan after his visit to King Jiing of Zhou: “Ritual is the king's great warpthread (jing); if in a single action he abandons two ritual requirements, he

Order in the Human World 139 lacks this warp-thread.””* The force of the condemnation derives from the systemic imperatives that surround the king. Although no individual, even the king, is above the system, the king comes closest to embodying its power. Born to the royal blood, he is the living instantiation of the continuity of tradition denoted by the “warp-thread,” and the position he occupies is the crown of the whole system of ritual. Even more than the feudal lords, the king endangers himself by failing in his duties to tradition and ritual.” The king appears to uphold inherited norms in the style of his speech, which on some occasions differs quite markedly from that of other speakers. It is an unstated principle of the king's speech (and a function of his office) that he is privileged to use an archaic, highly balanced phraseology with echoes of canonical texts. When Guan Zhong of Qi declines extraordinary ritual honors offered him by King Ling, the latter enjoins him in royal language marked by four-character phrases and archaic diction: “Scion of my mother’s line: I exalt your achievement, rewarding your excellent virtue. It is deemed proper and not to be forgotten. Go, carry out the duties of your position, and do not disobey my command” 53 FR + 42 54 75 Bi) - FE 75 58 tS + GS AR ES + TE BETS BR - FESR HR.” In one instance, the king is able to speak in the language of the Shi without marking the words as citations. Asking Jin to wall his city against the rival Prince Chao, King Jing speaks of his feudal lords as “not having had the leisure to rest” (bu huang gichu) for ten years, and refers to his enemy as “vermin” (maozei), in both cases alluding silently to the

Shi.’ As I have shown in my discussion of citation practice, inherited language carries with it an unquestionable authority, and citations are usually carefully marked and matched with the points of a speaker's argument. King Jing’s direct use of canonical language is quite unusual and is imitated in

other speeches only during highly formal diplomatic audiences.” In his speech, as in all his actions, the king plays a role with lines partly scripted by tradition. In principle, only a successful performance elicits the proper response from nobles and commoners alike and maintains peace and prosperity throughout the Zhou world.

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

140 Order in the Human World the court becomes increasingly irrelevant in interstate events and is dependent on subordinates for enforcement whenever it does assert its relevance. The first among these subordinates is sometimes recognized by the king as ba—conventionally translated “hegemon”—or, in typically familial terms, “elder uncle” (bo).’* Ambiguity surrounds the position. On the one hand, the principles adduced in historiographical speeches insist that a ruler can win and maintain the hegemony only through virtue, that is, through reverence for the king and conformity to the moral norms of the interstate system. On the other hand, the might of the hegemon always threatens to exceed the standards of right. Hegemons use their power to oppress the other states and are fully capable of making their position in the royal order a pretext for self-interested aggression. The double possibility inherent in the hegemony gives it a function similar to that of the state of Chu. Whereas in Chu the historiographers see central culture being tested against the barbaric otherness it replaces, the hegemony pits the morality of the royal system against raw power. Because they have at their disposal both prescriptive principles that insist on the morality of the hegemon and descriptive principles that show how power can threaten that morality, the historiographers are able to tell all sorts of stories about hegemonic power without relinquishing their central thesis that Zhou values confer strength. Although they maintain a distinction between the moral and the powerful, the historiographers do not oppose the hegemonic to the royal as texts like the Mengzi do; rather, they adopt a view similar to that of the Xunzi.” As a matter of principle, the way of the hegemon is part of the royal way, established through the recognition of the king and solely concerned with

the preservation of Zhou allegiances throughout the world. Both Duke Huan of Qi and Duke Wen of Jin have their hegemony confirmed in audiences with King Xiang or one of his representatives, receiving from him gifts that demonstrate the king’s recognition of their achievements.” The king's words to Duke Wen, presented as a formal command to be “leader of the lords” (houbo), are especially interesting: “Reverently obey the commands of the king in order to pacify the states of the four quarters; correct and govern those who err against the king” i Ak E fy > DAR VY B+ 4 Kk + BR. Because the hegemon is endowed by the king, he and his state have a duty to protect the king, not only by policing the other states but also by contribut- ing direct military aid when it is needed.” The words and rituals of hegemons’ and other local rulers’ encounters with the king promote a fiction of

Order in the Human World 141 fealty based on the king’s recognition of service and the local ruler’s grateful receipt of ceremonial rewards. In speeches, a concept of recompense (bao) that will prove important in historiographical narratives provides overt justification for the relations between the center and the periphery. Only rarely does the hegemonic state find itself supporting the king di-

rectly with military force. Most of its activities bring it into contact with other states, with whom it exchanges treaties and visits, meeting at covenant sites and on battlefields. In principle, the hegemon is leader of an alliance of the states that belong to the Zhou order, and the enemy is ordinarily Chu.” But the mustering of power requires power, and much of the speech-making surrounding the hegemony focuses on the moral restraints that should prevent abuse of power. Bullying is a constant danger, and one to which the historiographers respond by elaborating the moral strictures binding the hegemonic state, foremost among them the strictures that guide its relations with its treaty partners. Although the absence of a leader for the states can lead to chaotic uses of power, the hegemonic state is itself frequently the source of misdirected force.”

Because of the potential for abuse, historiography regularly emphasizes principles that make the hegemon’s success dependent on virtue and ritual propriety. Although the hegemony usually belongs to the state with the largest army, speech-makers present this power as evidence for a worldview in which right justifies might. As a Jin minister says in arguing that Jin should return confiscated lands to Wey, “Without virtue, how will we act as leader of treaties?” As always, virtue has its real effect on an observing public, which in the case of the hegemon is the states of the alliance. As for ritual propriety, I have already noted the royal audiences with which the careers of Duke Huan of Qi and Duke Wen of Jin culminated; the frequent disputes between Zheng and Jin also concern matters prescribed by ritual. In one instance of ritual necessity, a Chen ambassador dies while en route to Wu. The Wu king Fuchai sends a man to turn the embassy back, but the survivors remind the Wu messenger that ritual means serving the dead like the living; if the corpse is not accepted as an ambassador, Wu will have abandoned ritual and will not be able to lead the allies. Fuchai relents.” Ritual both limits the hegemon and furnishes the formal means by which he establishes his position. When King Ling of Chu gathers the allies for a treaty, one of his ministers reminds him how many different ritual precedents exist for this event, including examples from the Xia, the Shang, three early Zhou

142 Order in the Human World

kings, and Dukes Huan of Qi and Wen of Jin. Deciding to use Duke Huan’s form, the king gets the details from two of his northern visitors.”” Whether it is conceived of as the result of exceptional virtue in a ruler or as an effect of power that must somehow be made to accept the constraints of virtue, hegemony appears to have fascinated the historiographers as the end point of a grand political Bildung. Dukes Huan and Wen represent the two poles of this Bildung. As depicted in the Qi section of the Guoyu (the “Qi

yu’), which is devoted entirely to his rise, Duke Huan, aided by his wise counselor Guan Zhong, wins hegemony through excellent management of the material and popular resources of his country. Although virtue always matters, the narrative places greater emphasis on administrative means.” In Duke Wen’s case, however, personal moral scrupulousness plays a greater part.’ One can discern in the speeches surrounding these two rulers and others, like Kings Fuchai of Wu and Goujian of Yue, some of the forces that molded historiography during the last centuries before the Qin conquest. As tales of how power is accrued and managed, anecdotes about the hegemons must have appealed to politicians of every rank. But as the substance of a

tradition that depended for its transmission on an educated rather than a purely powerful class, these anecdotes were also the site of a moralizing vision of power. Especially in the speeches made to and about the leaders of the allies, Zhou values are rescued from the decline of Zhou prestige and made to account for power of every sort.”

Interstate Relations The relations between the hegemonic state and its treaty partners are a special subset of interstate relations.”’ Some of the principles that guide these relations have already been mentioned: the influence of the historical moment of the early Zhou dynasty, the geographic conceptions by which the Chinese states are distinguished from the groups surrounding them, and, above all, the model of brotherhood. Most of the anecdotes in the Zuozhuan and Guoyu concern either the relations among states or the internal administration of individual states. The diplomatic and domestic policy speeches

that result apply a vast body of inherited and practical principles to the myriad problems facing rulers. Since these principles and variations on them were also the main concern of non-historiographical writers of the Warring States period, a full account of politics within and among states in historiography would require extended comparison with contemporary political phi-

Order in the Human World 143 losophy, a comparison that is not feasible here. One pattern, however, seems

to guide the application of political principles in historiographical speeches | and also characterizes much non-historiographical Confucian thought on the problems of governance. In the view promoted by the Zuozhuan and Guoyu, the interstate and domestic system of ritual propriety is ar all times on the brink of collapse but still defensible. It is forever failing and being restored as local, temporary crises allow irruptions of power, immoral caprice, and greed. Ritual propriety flickers; the principles argued in speeches and the moral contentions encoded in anecdotes seem designed to keep it alight. Ritual propriety is invoked everywhere in deliberations over the relations among states, especially in connection with three activities: visiting, mourning, and lending aid.” The visits that Chong’er, future Duke Wen of Jin, pays to various states during his long return from exile occasion several speeches on the rituals of interstate entertainment. Where he is not treated _ appropriately, local ministers remonstrate with their rulers on their obligations to the Jin exile and on the danger of abandoning ritual. Ning Zhuangzi of Wey tells his duke that “ritual propriety is the ordering principle of the state; mutual affection is what keeps people close; goodness is what establishes virtue.” He goes on to develop these three points and to show that Chong’er, who is likely to succeed as duke of Jin (itself the most powerful state in the Zhou realm), must be treated correctly.” Similar speeches are delivered in Cao and Zheng, and in Song, a minister's speech on li convinces the duke to treat Chong’er well.’ At least as these speeches are recounted in the Guoyu, they make genealogy the basis of the ritual imperative. Because of Jin’s historical origins in the royal house and because of their own connec-

tions with such origins, other Zhou states owe the Jin exile proper treatment. This pattern of thought resembles the one that underlies another area of ritual, sacrificial practice. History is a treasury of obligation, the sum of data that explain who owes what to whom and why; ritual is designed for the acknowledgment and repayment of debts. We have already touched on certain aspects of the ritual of visiting. According to the historiographers’ principles, the former kings had a set schedule for various types of visits and meetings among the states, and visits outside the ritual system are suspect and dangerous.” A state's treatment of its visitors is limited by a ritual propriety every bit as fearsome as the xenia, or “guest-friendship,” that binds hosts and guests in Homeric epic. The eloquent Zichan of Zheng, who visits Jin with a delegation presenting tribute

| 14.4 Order in the Human World to the hegemon, is kept waiting for a time. When he tears down the walls of the diplomatic hostel and moves his horses and chariots inside, the Jin minister takes him to task. No time has been set for Zheng’s audience with the Jin duke, Zichan explains, and since the humble guest quarters provide no protection against bandits who might steal Zheng’s tribute goods, he had no choice but to do what he did. Jin apologizes to Zheng for its deficient virtue and builds better inns for its visiting allies.” Another confirmation of the obligations of the host comes in response to an abomination contemplated by King Ling of Chu. When Jin sends two of its great ministers, Han Qi and Shu Xiang, to escort a bride to the king, the king considers humiliating Jin by cutting off Han Qi’s feet, castrating Shu Xiang, and making them both household slaves. He reasons that such actions would allow Chu to have its way with Jin in the future. Upon hearing

this proposal, the Chu ministers are at first stunned and cannot respond. One of them, Wei Qigiang, finally answers with a speech that re-establishes

the value of ritual and defuses the suggestion that political goals might best | be accomplished through trickery and expediency. The plan will work, says Wei Qigiang, provided the king is prepared to face the consequences of humiliating an opponent. Historical precedents show that the state that lacks li fails. Jin has treated Chu with perfect propriety, even to the point of permitting this marriage. The two ministers in question are well connected, and Jin will muster all its forces to win a well-justified revenge. Thus the king must be prepared. The king desists.”” In this speech, a fine irony serves as a foil for the hallowed message of virtue’s power. Historiography does occasionally emphasize the importance of preparation against enemy attack, but preparation without virtue is never a sufficient defense.” In this argument for adherence to li, the world’s bias in favor of virtue blends with mundane considerations, including the rage of the humiliated enemy.”

States have specific duties to each other during periods of mourning. When the Zheng minister You Ji explains the ritual conventions of interstate mourning during a visit to Jin for the burial of Duke Qing (r. 525-512), he cites the “system of the former kings” (xianwang zhi zhi): “For the deaths of state rulers, officers mourn, and lower ministers attend the funeral; only for court meetings, visits and banquets, and inilitary affairs is a high minister sent.”” An unusually long quote from the shadowy early figure Scribe Yi prescribes mourning as one of the duties brothers owe each other: “Brothers bestow fine things and help in times of need; they congratulate excellence and commiser-

Order in the Human World 145 | ate over hardships; they sacrifice reverently and mourn sorrowfully. It is true that the feelings involved differ, but their affection is never interrupted. That is the way of kinship.” Mourning for a deceased ruler keeps a state from undertaking military actions of most types, but one anecdote justifies attacks if the target state failed to send a mourning delegation.” That mourning for noble deaths in other states was as important to the practice of historiography as it is in speeches is shown by the many passages that simply record a mourning visit and judge it ritually correct.” Since funeral visits allow the formalized —

confirmation of quasi-familial ties among the states, they are important enough that their propriety is defended both through the explicit rhetoric of speeches and through the evidence of well-crafted anecdotes.

The substantive aid that states lend each other is normally military power, which gathers around the hegemonic state.” But states trade in other soits of aid too, as anecdotes concerning grain purchases show. When famine strikes Lu, Zang Wenzhong convinces Duke Zhuang that it is proper, according to the “system of old,” to buy grain from Qi; all states are bound by an imperative to help their neighbors, to establish ties through marriage,

and to maintain these ties with treaties.’ In the years leading up to Chong’er's triumphant return to his state, Qin agrees to sell grain to faminestricken Jin because it knows it cannot lose. Either Jin will reciprocate when Qin needs grain or Jin will refuse (as it does in the next year), and Heaven and the people will destroy Duke Hui of Jin for his impudence.’”” As the grain speeches suggest, interstate relations are a matter of obligations remembered and acted on, asserted and denied. The mimetic preser-

vation of the old order against extinction seems to depend both on the commemoration of historical moments in which affiliations were established

and services rendered and on the continual circulation of recognition and reciprocation. In receiving an official visitor from Qin, the Lu host speaks of how the Qin duke “does not forget the ties of our former rulers, bestows a

visit upon the state of Lu, and brings stability to its altars.” In this and other examples, military and diplomatic encounters involve a rhetorical or narrative performance of Zhou unity, a reassertion of old mimetic themes, and a demonstration of the continued viability of tradition. But memory retains more than the successes of the early Zhou. Impor-

tant diplomatic communications between states often include litanies of service. Perhaps the best example of this rhetorical form comes in the famous letter written by Li Xiang of Jin to sever that state’s relations with

146 Order in the Human World Qin.” He begins with the friendly relations between Dukes Xian of Jin (r. 676-651) and Mu of Qin, then recounts in order services exchanged, es-

| pecially under Duke Wen of Jin, and the battles fought, after his death, at | Yao, Linghu, the Yellow River bend (hequ), and several other sites. Starting with Duke Mu, Qin rulers have continually taken steps to reduce Jin’s power. Now Chu, disgusted with Qin’s perfidy, has told Jin that Qin is seeking allies against Jin despite a recent treaty. By assembling such a mass of

historical detail, Lii Xiang shows that Qin has fallen short of standards of reciprocity, leaving Jin with the preponderance of moral credit; in every state's relation with every other state, such accounts are kept with great care. The letter is an ultimatum, and when Qin refuses to accept a new treaty, Jin and its allies attack and defeat Qin soundly.

For interstate relations, as for the hegemony and other components in the world’s structure, the historiographers supplement the tenets of ritual propriety with more hardheaded principles of cunning, self-defense, and Realpolitik. These are generally vindicated in the anecdotes in which they are enunciated, even though they seem to represent a departure from strict observance of ritual. Small states, for instance, face a constant threat of bullying and even annexation by large states, and scattered speeches in historiography present a sort of mirror of diplomacy for the ruler of a small state. As noted in the preceding chapter, the world’s tendency toward equilibrium can make it dangerous for a small state to defeat a large one unless the latter’s moral

laxity invites punishment.’ The small state is more dependent than the large one on the maintenance of the moral order and the suppression of violence. Meng Xianzi of Lu convinces Duke Xuan that Lu should pay a ritual visit to Chu, whose forces have recently defeated the Jin alliance and are now besieging the state of Song. Speaking of the visits that states exchange, he explains the function of the tribute gifts—the “fine appearances and colorful displays (caizhang)” are the means by which the small state protects itself. Although the historiographers represent Chu’s achievements under King

Zhuang as the results of virtuous policy, Meng Xianzi does not concern himself here with what virtue requires. Currying favor is good policy, a policy informed by the principle of effective images. Lu’s gifts and the loyalty they represent are to shine in the powerful state’s treasury as a reminder that Lu does not need to be attacked. ‘The loveliness of the objects and the openness of court visits will restrain aggression, given the uncertain applicability

of Zhou ritual restraints.” |

Order in the Human World 14.7 Zichan of Zheng is frequently depicted defending the interests of his small state against pressures from its powerful neighbors, Jin and Chu. The

resoluteness of his administration during various crises suggests a set of principles for the management of beleaguered smaller states, as do some of his own speeches." One speech in which the distinction of small and large states is made central is Zichan’s justification of his decision not to build an altar during an official visit to Chu. A servant remarks that this move is unprecedented; Zheng has always built altars when visiting other states. But Zichan argues that building an altar is appropriate only when a greater state visits a smaller state, since the greater state thus makes a monument to its achievement in teaching and aiding the smaller state. But when the smaller state visits the greater state, it is apologizing, pleading, presenting tribute, or receiving orders, and it has nothing it should wish to publicize with an altar or to commemorate for future generations.” Again, considerations of the effective image remain when Zhou standards of behavior do not prescribe a

specific course of action. | One final aspect of interstate relations in which principles of power rather than of ritual propriety generally obtain is in ordinary states’ relations with very small polities. Historical precedent has established the principle that states grow only through the annexation of smaller states. Asked by Jin why Zheng has attacked the somewhat smaller state of Chen, Zichan recalls that the early kings’ scheme of the world gave each of the local rulers a territory one-tenth the size of that of the royal house; decline (shuai) began from this ideal proportionality. That the great states are now several times larger than the original royal realm is the result of innumerable annexations of smaller states.’ When the widow of Duke Dao of Jin, a woman from the little state of Qii, criticizes a Jin ambassador for allowing Lu to keep Qii territory it has annexed, the ambassador recalls the many states that Jin swal-

lowed up as it expanded, even though their rulers bore the royal Ji sur-

name.” Although self-serving arguments from expediency are often overruled in speeches and in anecdotes through a reassertion of Zhou values, the historiographers appear to make certain allowances, especially for smaller states like Zheng and Lu. The principles of the sage-kings should and do make the interstate system work, but good speaking and the clever use of historical precedent can in some cases win an argument even without the support of moral principles. The handling by small states of the double rhetoric of vir-

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

Internal Administration Within states, the historiographers assume a fundamental analogy between the local ruler and the Zhou king. The state is its ruler’s version of a king-

dom."”? But the analogy depends upon certain much-stressed points of similarity and leaves others unclear. Like the king, the ruler of a state is a model for the behavior of all his subordinates, who surround him like an audience. As the center of his own state’s li system and living embodiment of its traditions, the ruler is the object of all service within a state. In return for this service, he grants ministers and members of the ducal and other noble families lands from which to draw their sustenance. A miniature system of circulation of goods, services, and words mimics the large scheme according to which the world is idealized. But the concentric geography of the king’s

realm is not reproduced within states, whose borders are marked not only against the non-Chinese world, but also against the frontier towns of their Chinese neighbors. And there are local traditions, determined by the particular genealogy and history of each state, that have no parallels in the

Zhou order. |

One effect of the analogy of king and duke is a continuity of normative values in all levels of society and in all types of anecdote. It is easy to conceive

of a worldview in which, say, obedience and good faith are owed the king, whereas lesser rulers merit no similar commitments. One could, in other words, imagine a version of the Chinese hierarchy that does not insist on a single attitude of attention and control informing every social inferior’s service to his or her immediate superior. But, as I show at the end of this chapter, Chinese thought as formulated in historiography and other texts has favored a model of analogous commitments linked in hierarchical chains,” with the result that all the enunciated values of Confucianism—good faith (xin), loyalty (zhong), humaneness (ren), ritual propriety (li), and a host of lesser virtues adduced as the situation requires—are as valid in relations among commoners as they are in relations between the king and his ministers. The analogy of king and duke, by which the state is established in a sort of political autonomy that separates it from the king's direct say, nevertheless establishes a unity on the level of values. This is not to say that all who

Order in the Human World 149 lived during the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods held the same values; nor do all the figures represented in historiography hold the same values. Rather, the historiographers did what they could to make these values the center of contention and the key to success for everyone whose story they told. The traditional definition of his rank binds the ruler of a state, like the king, in reciprocal relations with the spirits above, with the people below, and especially with the ministers who deliberate for him and remonstrate with him when he errs. And like the royal system, the organization of a state works not only because the extra-human world favors its workings but also because the public effect of images enlists the opinion of nobles and commoners alike as a controlling and correcting force. Since the Zuozhuan and Guoyu are concerned far more with the workings of government within states and with the breakdown of that government than they are with the theory of royal government, the speeches made in response to internal crises present these texts’ most important explicit principles of political philosophy. Here more than anywhere else historiography articulates and defends traditional structures and values against the forces that are destroying them and, by its depiction of the conflict, embodies a conservatism that would become extremely influential.

According to principles enunciated in speeches, the ruler of a state is re- _ sponsible simultaneously to the spirit world peculiar to his state (e.g., ducal ancestors, the spirits of mountains, rivers, and local shrines) and to his subordinates, especially the mass of commoners—farmers, merchants, and artisans.” The spirits and the populace not only favor the same policy of good management and moral correctness but also work in concert, so that each group represents the will of the other. Again, a form of omniscience by way of public images lies at the heart of the portrayal. Any failure on the duke’s part in his ritual duties to the spirits will inspire seditious thoughts that can lead the commons to avenge the wrong done to the spirits; inefficient or exploitative management of the commons automatically comes to the attention of the spirits, who may punish the duke either directly, by illness, or indirectly, through the people.” The duke’s every action places him between the spirits and the people.

Asked about the Chu army's prospects for victory when it sets out against Jin, a Chu nobleman, the wise Shu Shi of Shen, describes the scrupulous administration of Jin, which makes the state invincible:

150 Order in the Human World

LAH Ct RRR RS RERE- AAD RAED E

fn SELAH ° CER AT be th -

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

Despite the division between them and the constraints placed on direct communication (which must ordinarily take place through sacrifice), the people and the spirits form a single audience for the duke’s actions and act together to maintain each new duke in adherence to the practices established by his predecessors. The spirits and the people together are, at least in the theory implied by historiography, the source of the violence that preserves the old structures of rule and standards of behavior.” The most intense relations depicted in historiography are those binding the duke and his ministers.""° An important aetiology of the official order has it that ministers were placed around the duke by Heaven to prevent him from overstepping the inherited standards.’ On the stage that is the court, the duke is at all times observed by his ministers, whose duty it is to comment on his performance. In turn, ministers can perform a remonstrance for the duke as audience. What they act out in one another's presence is devotion to the inherited structure. Obedience to the duke’s orders is as much a

matter of principle for ministers as receptivity to remonstrance is for the duke.* And in the closely watched space of the court, where the distinctions of status supplied by the inherited hierarchical structure are continually expressed in words and actions, difference and its dangers cannot be de-

nied. Instead, they are exalted and subjected to attempts at regulation. As Yanzi contends in a long and carefully crafted speech whose themes are echoed in many other texts, the ideal relation between the views of the ruler and those of his ministers is not identity (tong)—since that would mean that no error on the part of the duke would be corrected—but harmony (he), which provides for the transcendence of differences in an underlying unity, as when sounds or flavors are blended skillfully.”

Although the ruler owes the minister recognition for his services,” the minister, idealized as an upholder of traditional standards and structures, may refuse rewards, particularly when accepting them would mean usurping unsanctioned privileges. Xiang Xu of Song, declining a city that Jin has

Order in the Human World 151 taken by siege in order to present to him as a reward for good service, says it should instead be given to his lord, Duke Ping of Song (r. 575-532): “If you give it to me alone, then I would have called out the allies for the purpose of enfeoffing myself; what crime could be greater than that?” Such virtuous speeches of refusal carry a special force of principle, especially in the context of the later years of Spring and Autumn period history as it is narrated here. Even as these ministers were renouncing privilege, others in Lu, Qi, Jin, and elsewhere were seeking it and overturning traditional hierarchies to get it.” Together, the duke and his ministers are required by ritual propriety to maintain order in the state according to inherited standards and practices. In the aggregate, speeches imply that tradition prescribes every type of administrative action. In practice, however, speeches and their political principles cluster around a few problems that were likely sites of real political tension in the states of the Spring and Autumn period and that also made for especially strong literary tests and demonstrations of received values. One such problem is the choice of a successor, whether as head of the ruling line (and hence of the state) or as head of another leading family. ‘The guiding principle, departures from which generally bring trouble, is that the heir should be _ selected on the basis of primogeniture and moral excellence.” Instances of conflict between the two criteria do exist, of course, but it is the ruler’s mis- _

guided selection of a younger and worse son as his heir that gives rises to speeches." The famous beguiling of Duke Xian of Jin by his Di concubine, Li Ji, leads to the neglect and wrongful death of a suitable heir, Shensheng; the several principled speeches the latter makes during the course of his martyrdom prove his worthiness as a successor.” In speeches made during succession debates, the historiographers demonstrate that the tradition of primogeniture need not conflict with the imperative to choose an heir for his fine observance of traditional morals.’”°

Another aspect of local rule that receives extraordinary attention in historiographical speeches is orderly administration, which, as we have already

noted, is strongly sanctioned by the spirits and the people. Although the theme of proper governmental order is ubiquitous, certain speeches and speech-like passages in the voice of the anonymous narrator present principles of administration in a language whose extreme formal symmetry reflects the perfection of the imagined order. The commoner who advises Bo Zong on the proper reaction to a landslide at Mount Liang, for instance, sums up policy in five phrases of two characters each: the ruler “desists from feasting,

152 Order in the Human World decreases the splendor of his clothing, rides in a plain chariot, stops court music, and lodges apart” 7. # + BE HR + Fe HS + SB ° ye. ’?” When the states of Song, Zheng, and Lu suffer disastrous fires, carefully crafted descriptions of the measures taken in response show that principles of order in states, which in speeches tend to be rendered in orderly, symmetrical language, can have a similar effect on the text that surrounds speeches. In narrative as in speech, patterned language signals the realization of wen as controlled and orderly behavior in accordance with models given by prede- —

cessors..” | |

Public images are as important in the proper administration of the state as they are in other affairs of the world. Like the king, the duke is a model of proper behavior for all his subordinates; given the assumption that certain virtues transcend social hierarchy, the ruler may always be imitated. More

often than not, mimesis becomes an issue when the duke has somehow failed. When Duke Ling of Chen (r. 613-599) and certain of his ministers carry on an outrageous affair with a noble lady and even take to wearing certain articles of her clothing at court, a minister remonstrates: “When the duke and high ministers make their lasciviousness (yin) known far and wide, the people have nothing that they may imitate (xiao), and they will not heed their orders. Hide that [clothing].”” As argued in Chapter 2, the prerogatives of rank make social stratification visible, and the populace takes its moral cues from the propriety or impropriety that diffuses downward to it from its superiors. The ruler uses specified articles of clothing, caparison, fabrics and patterns, colors, bells, and flags as elements in a comprehensive system for expressing hierarchy and keeping his officials in an attentive state of unchanging discipline. No problems arise as long as this system is in place, since the officials make it their model.’”” But when the ruler places an illegitimate gift in the ancestral temple or wears his lover's clothing in court, the transgression is publicized and imitated, just as hierarchical orderliness is, and trouble results. This prospect of social upheaval is the most consistent argument for preserving clearly defined ranks and the sumptuary restrictions that make them visible.

In the nested hierarchy of structures, the next level beneath the state is the family.” Since historiography is concerned largely with public affairs, the Zuozhuan and the Guoyu have relatively little to say about relations within families. Succession is, as I have noted, a theme of many speeches and anecdotes, and we are occasionally afforded other glimpses of life in the lin-

Order in the Human World _—_ 153

eage and the household. For the most part, however, the historiographers assume solidarity in a family when it acts publicly and do not concern themselves with domestic details. An exception to this tendency is the treatment accorded female characters. In her examination of Warring States and Han representations of women, Lisa Raphals has identified the major topoi that | informed narratives about women.” Women in the Zuozhuan and Guoyu (and in the Lieniizhuan, Raphals’s focus) tend to be represented either as wise

advisors or as dangerous beauties. That is, they appear in historiography only as their characters and deeds affect public life. As wise advisors, their image is barely affected by their gender, except in the sense that their movements outside the home are on the whole more constrained than those of men.” Although their gender seems often (but not always) to limit their access to public discourse, the wisdom that they present to their husbands and other sanctioned channels does not differ overtly from the wisdom attributed to male speakers, and their rhetoric is of a piece with that of their male counterparts. It is in speeches and anecdotes concerning dangerous beauties that historiography marks women as gendered.” Even here, however, the quality of gender is elusive. The longest single speech concerning women, a listing of the blessings and disasters that marriage brought various historical rulers, indicates that the reason beloved consorts have ruined so many rulers is that they seek to benefit not their husband’s house but their birth family.’*° Women of the aristocracy (and the historiographers pay little attention to’ women of any other class) can be dangerous because of the role they fulfill in diplomatic exchanges; as permanent guests of the court or family they marry into, they may, like other guests, have suspect loyalties,”’ Only rarely, as in the case of the Chen beauty Xia Ji, are women represented as being fundamentally different from men; and in the case of Xia Ji, gender matters far less than historiography’s aesthetic strictures.” The Zuozhuan and Guoyu are so profoundly public-minded, so concerned with the ruling classes and so androcentric, that it is impossible to reconstruct from them more than a sketch of gender principles, not to speak of an idea of women’s lives. As the abundance of speeches specifying principles of administration indicates, the old system by which states were governed was being threatened. As it is defended in scores of speeches, this system takes on an elegant and systematic form that is as much a reflection of the idealism, practical intellectual involvements, and literary habits of its latter-day exponents as it is an

154 Order in the Human World accurate depiction of actual historical mechanisms of power. Despite the rhetorical work devoted to formulating the principles of the old order and showing their relevance to the materials of history, alternative principles also emerge to explain the failure of that order, the shift of power away from the symbolic heads of hierarchies, and the rise of ministerial families as powers

threatening ducal control in various states. Once again, historiographical speeches develop principles that account for the other side of a dichotomy. Just as the state of Chu and the institution of the hegemony allowed for the extension of certain traditional values—ultimately to be known as Confucian values—into the uncouth realms of barbarism and power, the rise of the ministerial families became a means for these values to prove themselves in the context of local power struggles.

The Confucian Virtues To complete this account of the principles underlying the depiction of the human world in historiographical speeches, it is necessary to review, however briefly, the meanings assigned in these speeches to the several terms that were, by the Warring States period, the mainstays of the Confucian ethical vocabulary: yi (rightness), xin (good faith), zhong (loyalty), ren (humaneness), zhi (knowledge),’” de (virtue), dao (the way), and li (ritual propriety). One

might easily add other terms to the list.” These, however, are the terms | that were most important to the historiographers and that have most occupied recent interpreters of Confucian thought. Historiographical speeches present challenges to the project of characterizing early Confucian ethics, which has normally proceeded through attempts to expound and defend systems grounded in the Lunyu and the Mencius.""’ The speakers and the historiographers quite apparently valued the terms not only for their definitive and systematic value but also for their vagueness. They used the terms much as they used citations from the Shi, that is, as authoritative inheritances whose significance was in part determined in the context of particular applications. In this respect the historiographers resembled the Confucius of the Lunyu, whose multifarious and sometimes contradictory remarks on such subjects as humaneness have often frustrated systematizing commentators. What the historiographers and Confucius gained from their cultivation of terminology was a flexibility that fostered precisely the sorts of highly patterned rhetorical structures discussed in Chapter 1. The ethical terms were ready-made interpretive tools; provided with the right kinds of prose

Order in the Human World 155 links, they helped speakers and readers assign value to the historical phenomena discussed in a speech. It is significant that these terms almost never appear in rhetorically unmarked contexts in historiography, as we might expect if the historiographers were concerned primarily with the propagation of an ethical system; instead, they almost always appear in symmetrical or parallelistic structures that recall the value of wen. Speakers rarely adduce a single ethical term in isolation from all the oth-

ers. For the sake of rhetorical symmetry or out of a conviction that the virtues were compatible, or for both reasons, the historiographers for the most part include speeches in which two or more terms work together. In the most impressive speeches, the speaker musters a grand set of virtues for a highly patterned analysis of a single event. When Duke Xiang of Shan predicts greatness for Sun Zhou of Jin, he organizes his speech around eleven terms, including most of the terms listed above.” Few speeches are as long

_ or as intricate as his, but even speakers who use only two or three of the terms tend to make them the basis of patterned constructions. Although each single virtue matters for its content and for the specific injunctions it conveys, each also functions as part of a manifold. As it is used in historiography, this set of virtues has less to do with private behavior and personal cultivation—key concerns in the Lunyu and other collections of philosophical anecdotes—than with the guidance of social and political behavior. Ultimately, all the terms are subordinated to one term, the highly reified version of ritual propriety that governs most narration and interpretation in the

Zuozhuan and Guoyu. | Other than the words li and de, discussed below, the most frequently used of the ethical terms is yi, “rightness.” Historiographical speeches generally support A. C. Graham's definition of yi as “the conduct fitting to one’s role

or status.’ More specifically, yi in the speeches is the attitude of devotion that binds a person to his or her assigned place in the ritual-governed hierarchy. By extension, it is the aggregate of all individual attitudes of devotion, a

putatively objective standard of “rightness” against which deeds can be judged.” As an evaluative standard, yi allowed the historiographers to establish continuities between their own activities and those of the characters whose deeds they remembered. Like their predecessors, they appealed to yi as the most overtly juridical of the ethical terms. Characters in historiography use yi when they justify penalties and when they decry attempts to depict crimes as acts of rightness; the historiographers imply that their own

156 Order in the Human World investigations were motivated in part by the need to discern the yi in past

events.” Like the other virtues, yi is appropriate to discussions of interactions within the royal court, between states, within states, and within homes; the historiographers presume that a single set of moral standards unites all spheres of experience. Speakers refer to the yi that binds states, rulers, ministers, commoners, fathers, husbands, mothers, and wives to their roles; yi pertains mainly, but not exclusively, to people's relations with their superiors.” Like all moral standards, yi implies a tension between untrained inclinations and moral standards and is normally achieved through renunciation of the former.’” This renunciation is often justified as a way of securing ultimate gains, partly because the proper functioning of the hierarchy facilitates the flow of goods within and among states; speeches in historiography

regularly draw connections between yi and li, “benefit” or “profit.” The connection with material gain and the support of family or state in no way contradicts the subordination of yi to the ritual system, toward which all the individual virtues are oriented.” As a component of the inherited system, yi

is rooted both in inherited texts and in the structure of the extra-human

world,” Like yi, xin (good faith) is at bottom an aspect of any moral agent’s commitment to the inherited order and its preservation. Whereas yi designates the subordination of individuals to their superiors and to the hierarchy itself, xin governs the use of language in accordance with the requirements of the system. Guided by patterns of usage in the Lunyu, discussions of xin as a Confucian virtue have generally focused on the problem of trustworthiness. What the historiographical speeches reveal is the larger discursive context behind the Lunyu’s discussions of xin. In keeping with the hermeneutic orientations of historiography and with the assumption that all words and acts must eventually become public, xin promotes the subordination of actions to the words of promise, command, and covenant that precede them.’*? Rulers who can keep their own promises and follow their own commands win the

trust of the people they govern; ministers earn the trust of their rulers by following orders and making good on their verbal commitments.’ Xin binds states with their allies, both through normal relations and through the religious procedure designed to secure xin, the covenant.” Underlying this quotidian matching of deeds and words—but neglected in many later considerations of xin—is the prominence of the term in dis-

, Order in the Human World 157 cussions of mimetic continuity. To be xin is to be true to the past, both in giving accounts of it and in acting according to its prescriptions. As a tool of critique, xin designates the truth of certain types of historical lore; on a few occasions, characters wonder if a particular anecdote they have heard is “true.”’” In a larger sense, however, xin is a correct orientation to inherited principles. Individual promises and commands are local versions of the

isters have a duty to uphold.’” much larger verbal legacy that, in the historiographers’ view, rulers and min-

Closely linked to xin in the vocabulary of historiography is the term zhong, “loyalty.” The two words frequently appear in the same speeches, often in the compound zhongxin. Speakers in the Zuozhuan tend to differentiate the terms clearly when using them together; one owes xin to the spirits or to the ruler above and zhong to the people below.’”* These distinctions rarely

| attend zhongxin in the Guoyu, where the compound is something of a cliché.’” As the Zuozhuan's differentiation implies, zhong is an unspoken commitment that complements the verbal statements made in the presence of the ruler or the spirits. This may be a commitment to upholding the interests of the people one rules; it may also be a commitment to the interests of the ruler one serves or, more generally, of the other individuals and states with which one is related in the ritual and political structure.” For the historiographers zhong was not simply loyalty to one’s superior, but the most strenuous aspects of renouncing private good in favor of public duty.’” Even yi is not so markedly a term for self-sacrificing moral behavior. ‘The historiographers regularly demonstrate, however, that renunciations bring rewards. Like yi, zhong frequently figures in deliberations about punishments, but it tends to be implicated in lessons of reciprocity: remembered loyalty is a reason for pardoning an offender.’®* Renunciation, and the reasonable expectation of recognition and reward, are indispensable elements in the ritual sys-

tem.” Ren, the ethical term that has most consistently eluded definition, resembles zhong in that it, too, designates a willingness to give of oneself for the

benefit of another person or group. What is emphasized in the term ren, however, is neither the difficulty of sacrifice nor the necessity of submitting to some superior entity (whether spirits, ruler, or people). Instead, individuals are typically called ren when voluntarily, and outside the constraints of any stated commitment, they act generously; that is, to draw on parallels in the etymologies of ren and of “generous,” they give in a way that bespeaks

158 Order in the Human World noble birth."°* This formulation resolves certain apparent contradictions in the use of the word. On some occasions to be ren is to remember and act on the interests of one’s own group, whether family or state." In many more cases, to be ren is to set aside such interests for the good of some other person or group.” What unites the two sorts of acts is the display of generosity; in every case the ren act is the one that requires most of the giver. Thus ren as a political virtue is a ruler’s willing mindfulness of the interests of governed and dependent people and states./”” It is also forbearance in situations where punishment might be justified or practical." At the same time, however, ren rules out inappropriate giving and lax government; only the man characterized by ren knows where giving must end and punishment begin.” As an element of the ritual system, ren is the suppression of self—that is, of greed and whim—that allows one to enter into relations with others on the

basis of li.” | |

Knowledge (zhi) is the faculty that allows rulers and ministers to understand and predict events within the ritual system and at its edges. In this sense zhi designates the hermeneutic skills that the historiographers prize both in their characters and in historical investigation itself. Both rulers and ministers are praised for knowing other people, that is, for understanding the characters and motivations of the people they observe.” Typically their knowledge is based on a measurement of the observed individual against inherited standards, including li, and li itself is often mentioned as the object of

laudable knowledge.” The wise also know words (yan, ci) and the art of speaking well; they know Heaven (tian) and its ways; they know what is decreed (ming) for them by their position and by the mechanics of events; in

subtleties (wei) they know how to see the future.” Although the term is often used to designate a practical savvy of the sort that preserves its possessor on the battlefield and in court disputes, this savvy derives, at least ideally, from sanctioned knowledge and discernment.’ As the intellectual capacity by which one comes to comprehend and adopt the other virtues, zhi represents wit properly subordinated to Confucian values.” The historiographers use a number of different words when referring to

the virtues in groups or as a complete system. They refer to them as elements of de—a term that by the early Warring States period had acquired the primary meaning of “virtue” rather than “power” or “gift’—and in so doing imply that the path to political power of the sort the former kings en-

joyed lies in moral behavior." Through terms like dao (the way) and jing

Order in the Human World 159 (the warp-thread), they link the individual virtues to the ancient mimetic vocabulary discussed in Chapter 2. But de, dao, jing, and similar terms are less important in historiography than li, “ritual propriety.” Li is the only term that appears in definitions and discussions of all the virtues. To generalize, each of the ethical terms names an orientation that is necessary to maintain the give and take of the li system. Yi determines how much an individual or state must give, and how much it is entitled to receive. Xin describes both

the continuity of the system itself and the surety that a particular performance will match the relevant prescriptions. Zhong describes the giving that requires some extraordinary effort on the part of the giver, and ren relates to the noble character of liberal giving. As scholars since the Han have observed, li is the central philosophical concept in the Zuozhuan and in the large portions of the Guoyu that correspond to the Zuozhuan.’”” In several major speeches and countless shorter remarks, characters develop the notion of li as a system that organizes human behavior and links it to the natural workings of the cosmos.” Taken together, the speeches suggest an extension of li’s meaning, a profitable abstraction from the primary meaning—li as specific rite—to the more famil-

iar Confucian abstraction, li as a commitment to ritual propriety.” Once linked to all the particular virtues as a context and justification for them, li is no longer a guide only to ritual performance. It attends all human behavior as a standard both for action and for interpretation. At the edges of the human realm and at its center, and in any part of any hierarchy, the proprieties

of exchange that operate within li determine the unfolding of events and open the future to the view of the skilled observer. Li was the one term by which the historiographers could name all the principles of conservatism they advanced in the speeches of their characters. In their prescriptions for sacrifice, for relations with non-Chinese groups, and for royal, hegemonic, and ducal government, they suggested that no human activity and no historical event stood outside the jurisdiction of [i.*° All of the subjects discussed in this chapter—sacrifice and the realm of

the spirits, interactions with cultural others, royal and hegemonic power, relations among and within states, and the language of virtue that speakers employ—play a part in the historiographers’ defense of li. Their transformation of li from a strictly defined religious term into one of the master concepts of Confucian thought results from the work accomplished in the hun-

dreds of speeches they record. Remarks on religious practice emphasize

160 Order in the Human World adherence to ritual and the ill consequences of departure from it. Depictions of the barbaric other, whether as depraved or noble, make li the key to any

sort of cultural success. Principles guiding the king’s relations with the states, and the states’ relations among themselves, are at base elaborations of the notion that such relations are based on ritual and should be maintained in accordance with tradition. Ritual has the same weight in relations among individuals, and the ethical terminology that the speeches deploy is united around assumptions intrinsic to li, Even as speakers recognize li as a source of prescriptions in every area of public life, they enlarge it, while making it a principle of ideological consistency. The world created by the narratives and speeches of the Zuozhuan and Guoyu is, above all else, a world informed by devotion to and anxiety about li.

The triumph of li in the historiographical representation of the world does not come about solely through the pronouncements of characters. In large part it depends on the techniques of narrative, which are the subject of the next chapters. The exposition of principle that goes on in speeches concerning extra-human and human principles puts historical change in brackets, emphasizing instead a continuity between the principles’ orderliness and

the patterned connections immanent within language. Narrative, on the other hand, is possible only when language accounts for the passage of time and renders it meaningful.” Of all the virtues the historiographers name, li is the only one they assign a central role in their construction and explanation of narratives. None of their other terms has so much to do with time,

with the expected and unexpected, and with devotion to the past. As the pinnacle of the system of principles expounded in speeches, li is also the constant that underlies the historiographers’ practice of narrative and interpretation of historical events.

PART II Narrative and Justice

BLANK PAGE

FIVE The Anecdotal History

Historical knowledge can take many forms, but historical understanding always requires narration.’ A text such as the Chungiu, with its dates and facts, does not so much convey understanding as assume it. The Zuozbuan and the Guoyu, in contrast, explain known or alleged facts of the Spring and Autumn ; period by recording them in the context of narratives. Although premodern critics of the Zuozhuan as a commentary on the Chungiu sometimes ranked it behind the Gongyang and Guliang commentaries, with their more direct articulations of the sage’s judgments, there have always been readers who recognized that without the narratives of events (shi) that the Zuozhuan provides, the Chungiu would yield little in the way of moral significance.” In the Zuozhuan and Guoyu, actions have consequences and events have causes; names, dates, and events derive their significance from the rules of narration. Historiography teaches its readers much more than facts: it teaches them how to see beyond facts, to penetrate what is hidden, to observe and predict, and to understand beginnings, consequences, and ends. It teaches them how to read. It does so in the service of a particular ideology, but the pleasure and the intelligibility of its narratives are such that the reader may at times forget the interests they represent. A naturalized consensus on causation and con-

sequence impresses itself: this is how it happened; this is how the world works; about this at least, none of us has cause to disagree, and the one who disagrees will have to learn a new way to recall the past. The historians de-

termined the intelligibility of historical events as they recorded what for

164 The Anecdotal History them were intelligible narratives about these events. To understand how Warring States scholars thought about history, we must understand how they put together their narratives about history.” For the narratives of historiography, as for the speeches, there is a long

tradition of critical reception and commentary. The aim of much of the work in this tradition has been to explain how the Zuozhuan (and to a lesser extent the Guoyu) writes moral judgments into narratives, putting literary skill in the service of Confucian teaching. After reviewing some of the work in that tradition, I address the basic unit of narrative in the Zuozhuan and Guoyu, the anecdote, by first establishing its formal characteristics and then,

| in readings of several examples, considering some of the assumptions that inform such narratives. To the extent that the habits of narrative are less visible than the principles defended in speeches, they are subtler—and therefore more powerful—ways of explaining the world.

Readings of Historiographical Narrative The question of moral signification has shadowed readings of narrative in the Zuozhuan and Guoyu since before the time of Sima Qian. The founding myth of Chungiu exegesis held that Confucius had encoded in the words of the chronicle his judgment of the events recounted there. Perhaps even before the Western Han, the Zuozhuan was understood as a narrative guide to the decoding of Confucius’ judgments; by the Eastern Han, the Guoyu was considered an additional guide.” This co-opting of China’s earliest large collections of anecdotes in the project of Chungiu hermeneutics established cer-

tain givens for the reading and writing of narrative, both historical and fictional, in later ages. On the one hand, narrative was secondary and supplementary; in principle, it was read not for its own sake but as part of an approach to principles expressed otherwise (whether indirectly, as in the Chungiu, or more directly, as in Lunyu).’ For the Spring and Autumn period, there was a sort of bottleneck in the reading of history and of narrative: a reader must always return from the material of history to judgments of particular events and, more generally, to the moral philosophy of a single ob_ server. On the other hand, anecdotes about the Spring and Autumn period had thrived before the attachment of the Zuozhuan and Guoyu to Chungiu . studies, and narrative had developed its own topoi, its own techniques, and its own mechanisms of moral signification, some of which are described below. After these texts were put into the service of Confucianism, their

The Anecdotal History 165 congruence with the sorts of views expressed in Ruist philosophical texts was forced and incomplete and sometimes even deceptive. This was not without its benefits, however. The pretext that it was substantiating the classic gave historiographical narrative an alibi for incorporating whole worlds of oddities and allurements, of perversions and unaccountable moti_ vations.” Chinese narrative evolved in the space established by the Zuozhuan and Guoyu: secondary and excusable from the perspective of officially held tenets, it developed its own substance and its own principles, not all of which could be dictated from above.’

Premodern Chinese literary criticism, when it touched on narrative in the Zuozhuan or the Guoyu, tended toward appreciation rather than theorization. Evaluations have taken two forms. The first is a free-standing essay of praise, a cataloguing of the text's virtues presented in an elevated style. Ulktimately such essays trace their lineage to the Zuozhuan’s own comments on the Chungiu.® Among the more important examples are the remarks of Liu

Zhiji, who held that “in the well-crafted narrative, succinctness is of the greatest importance” and praised the Zuozhuan in particular for the skill with which its narrative style mimics the feelings appropriate to the events recorded: “When it recounts the movements of an army, documenting all that fills one’s view, it is clangorous and seething. When it discusses measures taken against a fire, dissecting what is before one’s eyes, it is carefully cultivated, lofty, and correct. When it speaks of victory and the seizing of captives, the gains are described completely. When it records rout and defeat, disorder lies spread out before one.” As is clear from the history of anthologies discussed in Chapter 1, the narratives of the Zuozhuan gradually came to overshadow the speeches as examples of literary excellence, especially in the eyes of scholars associated with the Tongcheng school. Of the twenty-eight passages Zeng Guofan selected from the Zuozhuan for his Jingshi baijia zachao (Various transcriptions from the Classics, the histories, and the Hundred Schools), nineteen were narratives, all of them accounts of battles or civil disorders. A plurality of Li Shuchang’s twenty-two excerpts were battle narratives. Although Fang Bao did not include passages from historiography in his Guwen yuexuan, in his preface to that work and in several other essays he identified the narratives of the Zuozhuan as the purest examples of the Tongcheng school’s highest literary value, the incorporation of a “system of meaning” (yifa).”

166 The Anecdotal History The Tongcheng school also registered its admiration for Zuozhuan narratives in “evaluated and punctuated” (pingdian) editions. In Ming and Qing pingdian commentaries, the structure, style, and moral meaning of whole works or selected passages were subjected to extensive analysis. The method

was the same whether the work under consideration was prose fiction, drama, or one of the Confucian classics.” Tongcheng adherents wrote dozens of pingdian works on the Classics, including several on Zuozhuan and Guoyu.” The most accessible examples are the Zuozhuan ping (A critique of Zuozhuan) of Wang Yuan (style-named Kunsheng, 1648-1710), the Zuoxiu (The embroidered Zuozhuan, preface 1720) of Feng Lihua (dates unknown) and Lu Hao (dates unknown), and the Zuozhuan wei (Subtleties of Zuozhuan) of Wu Kaisheng (1877-1949). Wang Yuan was a 1693 provincial graduate who for several years was employed as an editor of the Ming history;'* Fang Bao made his acquaintance in the capital and placed him first in his “Biographies of Four Gentlemen” (“Si junzi zhuan”).”” In the statement of editorial principles (fanli) for Zuozhuan

ping, Wang emphasized that his concern was to show the excellence of the writing (wen). To that end he selected discrete passages (zhang), each of them corresponding to a single incident or event (shi), and, disregarding the moral status of the events described, considered only matters of style. He further adapted the tools of pingdian criticism to his own purposes. For each of his 144

selections, he offered evaluations both in the midst of the text (in doublecolumn interlineal comments) and at the end, registered major and minor paragraph breaks, and, by means of various marks placed to the right of the vertical lines of characters, highlighted five types of passages.” The author of a 1910 preface to the Zuozhuan ping noted that of the several pingdian editions of the Zuozhuan that circulated in Wang's time, Fang Bao’s Zuoshi pingdian (Critique and punctuation of the Zuo) was the best. Although Wang's work could not match that of the Tongcheng school’s founding ancestor, it would nonetheless contribute to readers’ understanding of the Zuozhuan’s yifa.””

Although it was common to excerpt or rearrange the Zuozhuan for the purposes of literary commentary, the Zuoxiu of Feng Lihua and Lu Hao incorporates the whole text, in its traditional order, with the standard commentaries of Du Yu and Lu Deming (556-627) and portions of the twelfthcentury Song literatus Lin Yaosou’s commentary. The eyebrow section, in

| this case occupying more than a third of each page, is set aside for remarks

The Anecdotal History 167 on the style of narrative and speech; Feng and Li found something remarkable on almost every page.» Like other pingdian commentators, Feng and Lu begin their work with a statement on principles and procedures (liyan), in which they explain why they have chosen to reprint the work with commentaries, how they have marked notable passages, and what other literary commentaries they have consulted. They present their view of the Zuozhuan's unique literary characteristics in several pages of “disjointed remarks”

(zhiyan). For them, the Zuozhuan is the perfection of wen. Every choice of diction and taxis is a calculated expression of stylistic wisdom; many choices also express moral judgment. The text supports interpretation at every point and on every level; nowhere is it stylistically neutral,” Few readers today would share Feng’s and Lu’s faith in the comprehensive literary design of the Zuozhuan. But many of their observations are still convincing. The anecdotes are constructed with extraordinary economy and demand of readers that they interpret not only speech and narration but silence itself. Parallels and contrasts on the level of plot and character, which establish the conditions for coherence in many anecdotes, are never pointed out by the narrators. Like the best tropes, they work on readers even when they pass unnoticed and are most artful where they seem most natural,” The Zuoxiu proposes to make every trope, deliberate or not, fully visible. Wu Kaisheng, like his father, Wu Rulun, is listed among the adherents

| of the Tongcheng school.” His marking system is less elaborate than that of Wang Yuan, and he organizes his text somewhat differently. In a letter printed with the front matter of the Zuozhuan wei, he writes of having come across an edition of the Zuozhuan in which anecdotes had been removed

from their separate years (where they had been placed early in the text's history in the interest of Chungiu exegesis) and reassembled as consecutive

narratives. This edition—which may well have been Ma Su’s (1621-73) Zuozhuan shiwei (Zuozhuan rearranged by event) or Gao Shigi’s (1645-1704) Zuozhuan jishi benmo (Zuozhuan accounts of events, arranged as discrete nar-

ratives) —disappointed Wu by the shallowness of its literary analysis but inspired him to produce his own commentaries on 107 reintegrated narratives. For each of these, Wu identifies the main subject and then gives an interlinear appreciation of the writer's craft, noting such effects as foreshadowing, irony, effective changes in diction and narrative pacing, surprises, and

implicit praise and blame. |

168 The Anecdotal History In a long letter concerning his work, Wu emphasizes the subtlety with which the Zuozhuan encodes its moral judgments and finds fault with Fang Bao’s and Yao Nai's efforts to explain its “system of meaning.” He identifies four techniques of narrative indirection: foreshadowing (nishe), in which “the auspicious or inauspicious result has not yet arrived, yet the signs of failure are revealed in advance”; interruption and linking (hengje), in which “given

an unchangeable tendency of affairs, with unavoidable consequences, the meaning of what is said never departs from the path,” even in describing apparently unrelated matters; seeping at the edges (pangyi), in which minor details help to reveal aspects of character and event; and contrastive reflection (fanshe), in which the admirable behavior of one character serves as a foil for the failures of another.” For Wu, reading the Zuozhuan is a matter of identifying these and other tropes, in which the author of the work, like the editor of the Chungiu, has hidden connections and judgments that could not

| be proclaimed openly. Twentieth-century literary analyses of the Zuozhuan and Guoyu have for the most part continued the work of the pingdian commentators. Zhang Gaoping, who has published more than any other scholar on the literary characteristics and value of the Zuozhuan, takes the Tongcheng view of the work as his starting point and organizes some of his discussions around a _ vocabulary of tropes borrowed largely from traditional criticism.”* Other readers have refined the view, already commonplace for Tongcheng readers, that Zuozhuan narratives convey, sometimes very subtly, moral judgments of

the men and women who act in them, and that the task of the reader is to learn to read these judgments. Burton Watson, for instance, describes the Zuozhuan as “a handbook of moral cause and effect, a system of divination based not upon numbers or omens, but upon the more complex, but infinitely more trustworthy, moral patterns discernible in actual human history.” He further recognizes that the mainspring of narrative in the work is ritual propriety, which is made the basis both of characters’ fortunes and of observers’ prophecies. The contribution of John C. Y. Wang, who sets out to understand Zuozhuan narrative through the basic terms of structuralist narratology—namely plot, character, point of view, and meaning—is perhaps to defamiliarize and foreground certain quasi-natural characteristics of historiographical narrative. His observations hold not only for the Zuozhuan but for most works of early Chinese historical and anecdotal writing. As he

The Anecdotal History 169 points out, it is for the most part true that characters are stable and rarely

, change in response to circumstances and that the narratorial point of view, normally objective, has little access to characters’ interior lives.”° Ronald Egan, who eschews the more mechanical categorizations of classic

structuralist narratology, builds a clear and convincing account of the form and meaning of Zuozhuan narratives around examples from the great battle scenes and other episodes. His epitome of the meaning of the narratives is more specific than Watson's or Wang's: “The abiding lesson .. . is that rulers who are wise and who are dedicated to their people's welfare prosper, while those who are evil or foolish come to a bad end.”” Given the anonymity and reticence of its narrator, Egan argues, the Zuozhuan most often establishes the meaning of the events it describes through the speeches characters are made to deliver. With little explicit help from the narrator, readers must sometimes judge from the outcome of events which speech was most laudable. ‘The need to substantiate expressions of moral meaning (which I will term “judgments”) explains the proliferation of predictions and other morally charged speeches in the anecdotes immediately preceding a battle. Incidents that are narrated without speech, or with shorter passages of dialogue, also point to the moral meaning of events, although these typically demand interpretation on the part of the reader. Although discrete passages of narrative are for the most part organized into larger groupings like the battle narratives, these larger units admit of interruptions from various kinds of heterogeneous materials: flashbacks, moralizing summaries, and selfcontained episodes that contribute little to the meaning of the whole. Finally, Egan sees in the anecdotal form of Zuozhuan narrative, and in its similarities to the Guoyu, evidence that these works derived from “a tradition of didactic historical anecdote.” The formal difference that makes Zuozhuan narrative so singularly effective is the combination of discrete anecdotes into

continuous narratives, a literary and intellectual task that the authors or compilers of the Guoyu did not undertake. The books of Sun Liiyi and Zhang Suging stand out among the most recent work on Zuozhuan narrative. Sun Liiyi, whose goal is to establish the importance of the Zuozhuan in the history of Chinese fiction (xiaoshuo), begins by reviewing the characteristics of its narratives: the objectivity of the narratorial voice, the use of folkloric and supernatural details, the revelation

, of character through action, and the care devoted to representing both dia-

170 The Anecdotal History logues and extended speeches. In Sun’s view the Zuozhuan’s influence on later Chinese narrative is apparent in the ubiquity of these and other shared characteristics in both classical and vernacular fiction.” Zhang, in her Xushi yu jieshi (Narrative and exegesis), addresses the old charge that the Zuozhuan

is not a commentary on the Chungiu, a claim advanced by Han critics who saw the form of exegesis found in the Gongyang and Guliang commen-

taries a better guide to Confucius’ practice of historical judgment. For Zhang, narrative itself is a form of commentary on the Classic, and the anecdotes of the Zuozhuan are best read for the way they illuminate the moral meaning of Chungiu entries; the Zuozhuan is, as stated in the “Jingjie” chapter of the Liji, a work that “matches words to events” (zhuci bishi) in order to ex-

plain the classic.” This argument ignores the view, now accepted by most scholars, that much of what became the Zuozhuan was not originally linked with the Chungiu and joined the latter as commentary only after a long process of compilation and editing. Yet it is useful to be reminded that for many readers of the Zuozhuan, decoding the narratives was a matter of discerning a moral meaning consonant with the judgments encoded by Confucius in his editing of the Chungiu. As I will argue below, moral judgment, although it does not necessarily lie behind the writing of the Chungiu, does provide the

motive energy both for Zuozhuan narratives and for traditional ways of reading them. In the narratives that are most characteristic of the Zuozhuan and Guoyu, form is the best evidence for function. Both the basic narrative unit, the an-

ecdote, and larger series of anecdotes put narrative in the service of judgments about historical events, which may be expressed or left implicit. Both texts enshrine a principle of recompense (bao) that is continuous with, but more encompassing than, the ideology of ritual propriety. Reward, revenge, recognition, and payback of all kinds supply these narratives with their energy and explanatory power. The exchanges that take place within the single anecdote account for many of the other features of historiographical narrative discussed in the following chapters. Recompense governs the collection of anecdotes into complete, unified series with recognizable ends. Issues of prerogative, possession, and reward bring aesthetic questions to the fore, and

narratives of excess and error train readers in a form of judgment that encompasses both aesthetics and morality. Even the historiographers’ relation with their subject is, as I will show in the final chapter, conceptualized as a matter of compensatory judgment. The morphology and dynamics of the

The Anecdotal History 171 anecdote inform historiographical narrative in all of its uses and all of its self-justifications.

Form and Judgment Scholars have traditionally drawn a sharp formal distinction between the Zuozhuan'’s accounts and the Guoyu’s. As Wei Zhao (d. 273) put it in the preface to his commentary on the Guoyu, the work is devoted to “fine phrases and good speeches” (jiayan shanyu).”* Cui Shu (1740-1816), denying

that the two works could have come from a single author, wrote that in contrast to the Zuozhuan, “the Guoyu is by some later person who took the incidents of the ancients and imitated them in his writing; that is why its incidents are few and its speeches many. What the Zuozhuan can encompass in a single phrase, the Guoyu has not finished with after heaping up paragraphs. Therefore its name is “The Words of the States’; the genre of ‘words’ (yu) differs from the recording of incidents in that it is devoted to speaking.” It is true that the Guoyu devotes more space to speeches and only occasionally gives long passages of third-person narrative like those found in the Zuozhuan. But the works have in common a treatment of speech and narra-

tive as interdependent in the production of meaning, No speech in the Guoyu is presented without a narrative frame, and the Zuozhuan, like the Guoyu, tends to allow the terms of interpretation advanced in speeches to find vindication in narrated events. In the Guoyu, consequences are often narrated directly after the speech, whereas the arrangement of material in the Zuozhuan means that there is a delay, sometimes of many years and many pages of text, between enunciation of a moral judgment and narration of the events that realize it. In either case, moral interpretation originates with the speaker. Received classifications exaggerate the differences between the two works and obscure their affinities with other early writings. The model presented here, although it is designed primarily to account for the workings of the Zuozhuan and the Guoyu, would with minor changes apply to much of the rest of early Chinese narrative, including the anecdotal illustrations adduced by Warring States and Han philosophers and the materials collected by Sima Qian. To characterize the narrative techniques of historiography is to epitomize a pervasive and durable way of making meaning. In the Zuozhuan and the Guoyu, as in much of subsequent philosophical and historical discourse, the basic unit of narrative is one best described as the anecdote. In the history of literary forms and in the classifications of nar-

172 The Anecdotal History | ratologists, the anecdote is closely associated with the exemplum and differentiated from other short narrative forms like the joke.” Monika Fludernik defers any attempt to distinguish anecdote from exemplum or parable. Her outline of the structure of the anecdote is nonetheless useful for the analysis of early Chinese anecdotes. Following Joel Fineman, she argues that the anecdote is a primary means of projecting the illusion of the real and the particular within the historical text. She goes beyond Fineman to suggest that the anecdote owes its status as token of the real to its fundamentally oral character; it projects “the illusion of unfeigned, spontaneous storytelling, an illusion of historical immediacy.” It therefore stands at the threshold of orality and writing.” Fineman’s article reminds readers of Chinese historiography of a startling and fundamental difference between his material and ours. Whereas the anecdote in Fineman’s examples from Thucydides is a brief, discrete narrative contained within a larger scientific or teleological exposition of the lawfulness of history's grand récit, in the Zuozhuan and the Guoyu, the anecdote dominates, displacing or obviating almost all non-anecdotal material, including any overarching authorial explanation of history's unfolding.” More than Western historical texts, these works engage the reader in the production of meanings, constantly modeling correct terms of judgment and encouraging the reader to adopt these for himself or herself.”° In their original

milieu, the anecdotes may often have been transmitted by teachers who carefully guided their students’ readings or may have been presented as part of persuasions that used the anecdote for didactic purposes. Nonetheless, the playful use of Spring and Autumn period anecdotes by philosophers of all orientations suggests that no scholastic orthodoxy succeeded in controlling interpretation. Only with the Shiji of Sima Qian would Chinese historiography have a major work in which the authoritative voice of a historian combined generalizing narratives of history's progress with substantiating anecdotes. The anecdote in the Zuozhuan and Guoyu is a brief narration (typically no

longer than a few hundred characters) of interactions among historical agents that substantiates a particular judgment, expressed or implied, about the characters or about the event itself. Although any anecdote can stand alone as a complete narrative, many anecdotes in the Zuozhuan and in certain sections of the Guoyu are best read in the context of larger series of anecdotes, which bring together several events involving the same individual or

The Anecdotal History 173 state, often over a period of years, again to substantiate a judgment. Both the anecdote and the anecdote series have consistent morphological features that

offer clues to the meaning of historical narration itself. Anecdotes normally begin by introducing a new time, place, and set of actors. [he arrangement of the Guoyu foregrounds this habit. The three fascicles concerning the royal domain of Zhou, for instance, recount incidents from the time of King Mu through the tenth year of King Jing (510 B.c.E.). Each discrete entry begins with the posthumous name of a king and the year in which the incident occurred. Redundant information is omitted when the

incidents of subsequent entries occur under the same king or in the same year. Thus the beginnings of three successive entries are: first, “In the twenty-first year of King Jiing”; next, “In the twenty-third year”; and finally simply “The king.”” Throughout the Guoyu, the date marks the beginning of a section of narration and allows an initial dissection of the text. Because of the annalistic organization of the Zuozhuan, reference to the year is necessary only at the beginning of each year’s material. Still, anecdotes have the same characteristic opening reference to place, time, and event as in the Guoyu;

quite frequently this statement corresponds to a notation in the Chungiu.” Even the battle scenes, which Egan and many others have seen as China's earliest and best long narratives, are made up of anecdotes, as is evident from

the introductory sentences that shift the scene from place to place on the battlefield in the course of the larger account. The typical Guoyu anecdote also has the basic elements of narrative form as found throughout both works. It defines a time and a place, introduces a small group of actors, establishes a pretext for speaking, records the words of one or more speeches, sometimes with shorter passages of dialogue, and narrates the effect (sometimes none at all) of these speeches, which permits an evaluation of their importance.” In the Guoyu's first anecdote, for instance, the time is the reign of King Mu; the place is, implicitly, the Zhou court; the actors are King Mu and the Zhai Duke Moufu; and the pretext for speaking

is the king's planned attack on the Quan Rong tribe, a measure against which Moufu feels called to remonstrate. Moufu’s remonstrance is the only speech, and the conclusion of the entry tells how the king, failing to heed Moufu’s advice, brought upon himself exactly the sorts of trouble his minister predicted: “The king did not listen and attacked them. Having obtained four white wolves and four white deer, he returned. From this time forward, the furthest frontier reaches did not come to bring tribute.” Judgment and

174 The Anecdotal History closure are implied in the final sentence: the king's ill-considered deed has alienated former allies and contributed to the breakdown of the ideal early Zhou order. The words that follow introduce the time and place of the next anecdote: “When King Gong traveled by the Jing river.” Of course, not everything in the Zuozhuan and the Guoyu can be classed as

anecdote, but everything contributes to narratives, which are at base anecdotal. ‘The closest thing to an exception is the comments on the wording of the Chungiu, some examples of which are given below. These passages, which are probably not part of the original anecdotal materials of the Zuozhuan, explain how judgments of events have been written into the Chungiu's choice of words, and closely resemble passages of Chungiu exegesis in the Gongyang and Guliang commentaries.” In the Zuozhuan, they appear side by side with narratives and contribute an additional level of judgment that guides the reading of narratives, especially when the anonymous Chungiu exegete seems to have

forced an interpretation that runs contrary to the implications of an anecdote.” On the other hand, Chungiu exegesis is largely dependent on narratives of the sort collected in the Zuozhuan; without these we would know neither the names of actors nor the events that reveal their moral status. Although Chungiu exegesis is itself non-narrative, it is parasitic on narrative. Marked judgments, also discussed below, lie at the margins of anecdotes without themselves constituting anecdotes. They are distinguished from the latter by their lack of a temporal setting and named actors. As I will argue,

the anonymity and indefinite time of the “gentleman” (junzi) who judges events afford him and the views he represents an unusual mastery over history's meaning. Yet his authority is ultimately dependent on the narratives that support his judgments. There is in the Zuozhuan, below the level of the anecdote with its organizing judgment, a smaller, dependent unit, a simple entry of details with only the barest indication of their importance. “In the spring of the ninth year [of Duke Zhao of Lu], Shu Gong [of Lu], Hua Hai of Song, You Ji of Zheng, and Zhao Yan of Wey met with the ruler of Chu in Chen.” These details bear a special relation to the Chungiu, in which uninterpreted entries are the rule. The note just translated, for example, corresponds to a Chungiu entry that says, “In the spring of the ninth year, Shu Gong met with the ruler of Chu in Chen.” Throughout the Zuozhuan are notes that are little more than expansions of sentences given in the Chungiu. Like most of the material in the Guliang and Gongyang commentaries on the Chungiu, these notes are

The Anecdotal History 175 designed to show how the detail recorded in the chronicle is significant. But the Zuozhuan’s interest in the Chunqiu is not focused solely on authorial intent or the editor’s hidden judgment; by adding clarifying details to Chungiu notations, the Zuozhuan accommodates them to larger series of anecdotes. Even when they do not explain a Chungiu entry, Zuozhuan entries do sometimes remain at the level of details and, by giving neither judgment nor basis for judgment, amount to less than full-scale anecdotes. But in such cases the entries are followed rather closely by longer passages that incorpo-

| rate them into complete anecdotes. The entry of mere details is most common at the end of a year, when events in the final months begin a process that gets full treatment in the next year.” These splits most likely result from Du Yu's editorial work on the Zuozhuan.” Because he was concerned to match the chronicle and the commentary year by year and to file narrative details in their proper temporal spot, he divided some anecdotes, producing the odd-looking truncated entries that come near the end of so many years. In the tenth month of Zhao 3 (539 B.c.z.), Zichan accompanies his lord to Chu. They are feasted by the king, who recites the hunting song “Auspicious Day” (“Jiri,” Mao 180). Zichan prepares the hunting equipment, and the king

hunts.” The only pretext for judgment here is Zichan’s correct interpretation of the king’s recitation as a sign that he is going to hunt. But even this reading is hardly remarkable, given the words of the poem, and does little to relieve the flat quality of the details recounted. Only when the hunting scene continues in the next year does that earlier entry take its place in a wellformed anecdote. From his hunting grounds, the king sends an envoy to Jin to ask for permission to host a meeting of the allies, that is, to demonstrate Chu’s precedence among the states. While Jin deliberates and finally decides to permit the move (more on this decision below), King Ling discusses his prospects with Zichan and is warned that he will succeed only as long as he

strives for the same things that others want.” The previous year's entry serves largely to set the stage for the king's conversation with Zichan. Occasionally an anecdote is split within a year, as happens when the Chu king arranges to take a bride from Jin. The first half recounts the king's deci-

sion and the progress of the Chu and Zheng bridal escort; the second half follows the bride and her two noble Jin escorts as far as the Chu court.” There, in a passage discussed in Chapter 4 (p. 144), the king contemplates maiming the ambassadors to shame Jin but is finally persuaded that ritual propriety can be violated only if one is prepared to face the violence that will

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

The Anecdotal History 177

bring his death: | :

the Zuozhuan account introduces the doomed man and the gift thar will

AMBER RBA APfRATRAR- FO? BiEM- UmtT

KR A fA Rit VSR: RA BRIBE BAMA: 2H

L° TRUS: RAKKE BTAMHRE- FOR: Riga: SB LM OR KRFRE FoOBFREC* TRA BE: Ble R 2° Mina: RHSR: FREMRG: BME: The people of Chu presented Duke Ling of Zheng with a turtle. The Ducal Son Song [Zigong] and Zijia [the Ducal Son Guisheng] were about to have an audience, when Zigong’s eating-finger moved. He showed it to Zijia and said, “On other days

when I have been like this, I always got to taste some exotic flavor.” When they went in, the chef was about to butcher the turtle. The two men looked at each other and smiled. The duke asked about it, and Zijia told him. When it came time to treat the ministers to the turtle, (the duke) called Zigong forward but did not give him any of it. Angry, Zigong dipped his finger in the cauldron, tasted it, and exited. Enraged, the duke wanted to kill Zigong. Zigong and Zijia plotted to take action first. Zijia said, “Even when a domestic beast is aged, one is afraid to kill it. How much more in the case of one’s ruler?” [Zigong] responded by [threatening to] incriminate Zijia. Afraid, Zijia went along with him. In the summer, they killed Duke Ling.”

The gift of the turtle announces a new narrative, distinguishing what follows from preceding material concerning the state of Lu. At the same time it sets the scene in the Zheng court and initiates the course of events that will lead

: to the duke’s assassination. As in the great majority of narratives in the Zuozhuan, the Guoyu, and much of later historiography, the setting for this incident is the court, which, as I have already suggested, is always represented as a sort of theater. An audience of ministers surrounds every ruler, and a vaster audience of ancestors, spirits, commoners, and peers surrounds every court. On occasions of ritual diplomacy and war the audience is even larger. Everyone watches what happens in court; whatever one does there,

the narrative implies, is ultimately public and subject to interpretation, judgment, and reaction. Here the event in court inspires a sort of clairvoyance, and although news of the gift has not yet been announced, the tremor in Zigong’s index finger hints at something good to come. As it happens, it

is an index of a butchery more exotic than that of the turtle. | The plot of the anecdote, the event it recounts, grows out of the litrle fragment of separate knowledge Zigong has gained. Perhaps for reasons

178 The Anecdotal History having to do with the dynamics of the gift, the duke does not like the smile Zigong and Zijia share; out of caprice or jealousy, he frustrates expecta-

tions.” Instead of extending the expected generosity and confirming Zigong'’s premonition, he attempts to deny him his share of the gift. In stealing it instead, Zigong fulfills his own prediction and makes an open display of insubordination in court. Everything that follows is murderous plot-

ting, a contest that the duke loses. In a beautiful touch, Zijia’s last remark reinvokes the image of the slaughtered animal, now not the Chu turtle but | the duke himself, whose sacrifice returns the Zheng court to stability. The beginning of the anecdote establishes the place, the actors, and a phenomenon requiring response, in this case the gift. In the middle of the anecdote, appearances—the omen of the trembling finger—undergo interpretation, which is recorded in the words of the interpreter, Zigong. Interpretations imply expectations and actions. Zigong’s prediction leads to his own expectations, to the duke’s rejection, and, at the end of the anecdote, to the murder. In this way the incident of the stewed turtle, for all its strangeness, represents a general truth of anecdotes in the Zuozhuan and the Guoyu. An event as recorded in these works is a phenomenon in the radical sense of the word: it comes into view, presents itself as an appearance, and prompts interpretation.” The latter usually takes place within the plot. As I will argue below, the anecdote is complete when a sort of physics of reaction has run its course, and when all the implications of appearance and interpreta-

tion have been worked out. For the duke of Zheng and his enemies, the valuable gift is the source of energy in the anecdote. Its appearance in court,

followed by the appearance of the trembling finger and the two nobles’ knowing smile, leads to the interpretations and reactions that bring the duke’s death. Since nothing else has been opened to interpretation, the original energy is exhausted, and the anecdote is over. The final component of the anecdote, and the end toward which the narrative is directed, is the judgment. At its most explicit, as in our example, the judgment is given full expression after the conclusion of the narrative:

SBAMBATRERRAR- HER ECH- ATA-CMAH- MEF

GW HRA BA AR: BE - BE:

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

The Anecdotal History 179 referred to by name, then the ruler was without the Way; if the subjects are referred to by name, then it was the subjects’ offense.”

In this most formal type of judgment, the Zuozhuan authors, like their counterparts in the Gongyang and Guliang commentaries, justify the wording of the Chungiu notation, reading it as a condemnation of Guisheng for his weakness in colluding with Zigong. The closing lines of the passage enunciate a principle of composition (introduced by fan, “in all cases”), according to which the Chungiu allegedly follows consistent practice in representing blame. Much of the scholarship on the Chungiu in imperial China would be devoted to attempts to determine and refine such principles of composition (li) and, by so doing, to comprehend the sage-editor’s standards of judgment.” The fanli remarks were likely fairly late additions to the Zuozhuan com-

| posite.” Of greater significance for the reading of Zuozhuan narratives is the marked judgment, which introduces into the narrative a named or unnamed character who comments on events without participating in them.” As in the remarks on Zheng’s troubles, the judging figure is usually referred to as the junzi, “gentleman,” especially in the earlier years of the Zuozhuan, where anecdotes often end with a remark from him praising or excoriating a character or evaluating an incident.” In the second half of the work, in the material recorded for the years of Dukes Xiang, Zhao, Ding, and Ai, the judging figure is quite frequently named; when he is named, he is almost always Confucius, called either Zhongni or Kongzi.” The role of the sage in this narrative is a subject for a later chapter, but it should be noted here that he, more than any other named individual, is a model of correct historical judgment in the Zuozhuan as in the larger ideology of Chungiu hermeneutics.” Moreover, even though Confucius lives through many of the events of this part of the work, dying shortly before the narratives of the text end, in his

comments he is normally as uninvolved in the events in question as the anonymous junzi.

Marked judgment always has about it a temporal ambiguity. One does not know if the speaker was a contemporary of the judged events or lived in some later time. His authority may derive from autopsy or from the high ground of retrospection.”’ The same problems attach to the narrative voice itself, which speaks from some unspecified moment later than the time of the narrated events. The historiographers of the Zuozhuan abstain almost completely from commenting on material in their own voices. They narrate

180 The Anecdotal History events and record statements about those events uttered by historical participants and observers, but they rarely claim to offer their own explanations. When they speak through the sage or the junzi, the judgments, like this one, normally explain the event in terms favored by the Confucians.”’ In anecdotes that do not include a comment from the gentleman or from Confucius, the way to judgment is often shown by a speaker, who has at his or her disposal all the rhetorical techniques and ways of knowledge discussed in the preceding chapters. If, for example, a minister remonstrates against a

particular course of action, as Moufu did, the speech itself establishes the relevant terms of judgment. As King Mu prepares his attack against the Quan Rong, Moufu explains that the plan is ill-advised because the Quan Rong have fulfilled all their duties under the governmental system of the an-

| cients; they will have the military preparedness of virtue, and the king's cam-

paign will only demonstrate his carelessness about virtuous government. As | we saw above, the few sentences of narrative that follow Moufu’s remon-

strance do nothing more than confirm that his predictions were fulfilled. His speech determines the reader’s interpretation of the narrative, even as the narrative and its ending tend to prove the validity of his interpretive

scheme. , |

When no gentleman or speaker comes forward to specify the terms of a judgment, the task of interpreting the anecdote is left to the reader. This interpretive imperative is partly a matter of style and has to do with a preference for concision. Narrative prose in the Zuozhuan differs quite markedly from the rhetorical technique employed in speeches. As is clear from examples discussed in the previous chapters, speakers (or the historiographers who scripted their words) strive for, and often achieve, effects of symmetry, parallelism, and balance. Between speeches, however, the narrators generally avoid all effects of balance, favoring a succinct, lapidary style that has appealed to some readers more than the marked patterns of the speeches.” Under these stylistic conditions, even a literal understanding of the text requires real interpretive talent on the part of the reader and of the annotator, whose services are indispensable. Not only individual passages but whole anecdotes tax the reader's learning and hermeneutic skill. Some anecdotes are so compressed and so bare of clues to judgment that they remain enigmatic for commentators and readers.” Because judgment is an articulation of the principle thought to underlie both events and the narration of those events, obstacles to judgment are obstacles to readability; the reader who cannot

The Anecdotal History 181 make a judgment cannot tell what holds a series of events together as a narrative. Reading comes to resemble listening to a joke and not getting it. Zuozhuan narratives train readers by teaching interpretive skills.” Many readers, including the critics discussed above, have expressed admiration for the reticence of the Zuozhuan’s style;” its economies and silences exercise the reader's ability to draw connections, putting him or her in the position of a contemporary of the events narrated. Anecdotes model interpretive talent by making heroes of good observers and by recording their correct judgments beside the matters they judge. Even without openly performed acts of judgment, the narratives constitute a training in the reading both of historical texts—the Zuozhuan itself and the Chungiu—and of the interpretable, textlike phenomena on which the plots of so many anecdotes turn. Not every fact yields immediate judgment. There is a surplus of detail and incident quirkily selected and deployed; there is a subtle narrative memory at work, a voice fond of understatement, and an eye for every surface peculiarity that conceals a dangerous truth. But the ubiquitous pattern of explicit judgment — and narrative vindication establishes an atmosphere of such hermeneutic intensity that any narrative detail seems capable of rising into significance. A gesture, an expression, or a piece of clothing may set a scene or determine the course of events. Mere facts, the material of objective historiography as we know it, are absent. The judgment, even when it is left implicit, is the anecdote’s raison d’étre.

As Hayden White has argued, “the demand for closure in the historical story is a demand ... for moral meaning, a demand that sequences of real events be assessed as to their significance as elements of a moral drama.” It is

impossible, he suggests, to make narratives without moralizing,”” As the term itself implies, the judgment in a historiographical anecdote is fundamentally moralizing. Its function is to integrate the narrative of the anec-

dote, drawing together the smallest originating causes and the public, memorable events that result.” It puts into words the principles underlying events. When it is not stated, the habits of reading prompt readers to enunciate the judgment for themselves.

An aura of certainty accompanies explicit judgments as expressed in , speeches, especially predictions and remonstrances, although the speakers are of course represented as speaking before the events they foresee. Speakers have been given surreptitious access to the ends of their stories; in this way they become proxies for the authors, who, in White's view, would be

182 The Anecdotal History the source of moral authority in the narrative. The sense of inevitability speakers convey originates in the narrators’ assumption that phenomena in

the world do indeed harbor interpretable meaning and that the good observer should be able to see it even before it has been declared outright in actions and events. As if against the view advanced by Wilhelm Dilthey and others, who held that historical understanding differs fundamentally from scientific knowledge, inasmuch as historical events are not repeatable and thus not subject to experimentation, early Chinese historiography implies a continuity between the theoretical interpretation discussed in Chapter 3 and the regular observation and judgment practiced in the daily course

of court life. |

This continuity is far deeper than that envisioned by “scientific” historians in the tradition of Thucydides and Polybius. Events are not simply likely to recur at some time in human history.” They are repeatable: under given circumstances, a given sign reveals something specific about hidden intentions or consequences, and such sequences of signification and fulfillment can be expected to repeat themselves. What prepares an observer to see history’s repeatability is a knowledge both of past events and of various systems of knowledge. Most prominent among these systems is ritual propriety. The single most relevant code in a historiography overwhelmingly concerned with political life, ritual propriety is also intrinsically a system of public signification and thus lends itself well to the repeated dynamic of observation and interpretation. The historiographers have created a fictional class of historical scientists who, through their knowledge of history and ritual propriety, understand the laws of signification, interpretation, and event so well that they can see the future.” It is an index of the historiographers’ preferences as compilers and authors that when these scientist-speakers judge what they observe, and when they explain the events that are about to occur, they express their laws in Confucian terms. To summarize, the anecdote, the basic unit of all narrative in the Zuozhuan and Guoyu, always includes three readily identifiable formal features. The introductory sentence or sentences establish a new temporal and spatial setting and name individuals whose actions will make the plot of the anecdote. This opening passage may also introduce an event (in our examples, a king's plan and a gift) that has consequences. The middle of the anecdote is devoted to those consequences and often incorporates dialogue (such as Zi-

jias and Zigong’s conversation) or long speeches (like Moufu’s remon-

The Anecdotal History 183 strance) that are meant to influence the course of events. The anecdote ends with an invitation to judgment, which may take any of several forms. The narrators may dictate this judgment by recounting the remarks of the gentleman or Confucius, they may narrate events that confirm a judgment presented in a character's speech, or they may leave the problem of judgment to the well-trained reader.

Experiments in Vision | _ The most familiar narratives of the Zuozhuan and Guoyu suggest how consistently the intent to judge determines the selection and presentation of material. The introductory sentences set the stage for interpretable events; the middle of the anecdote recounts actions and reactions, some of them interpretive; and the ending upholds one interpretation. Coherence in the anecdote derives ultimately from the judgment, but it is typically introduced into the texture of the anecdote itself by being attributed to a perceptive character, an individual who both participates in the events of the narrative and embodies the historiographers’ ideological sympathies. In this respect, anecdotes are experiments in vision: every event allows a new testing of Confucian values against the particularities of historical experience. Predictably, certain difficulties attend the experiments. The first complete narrative in the Zuozhuan, the famous tale of Duke Zhuang of Zheng, is known to the anthologizing tradition under the title (taken from the Chungiu notation for this event) “The Earl of Zheng defeated Duan at Yan.””* The narrative in fact consists of two separate anecdotes, the first concerning the duke’s conflict with his brother and the sec-

ond his reconciliation with his mother. An introductory passage of orientation (opening with chu, “in the beginning, formerly”) gives the context

for the brothers’ conflict: their mother, who has hated the duke since his difficult birth, has plotted to depose him in favor of his brother Duan. In the middle of the anecdote, as Duan’s power grows, the duke repeatedly rejects a minister's advice to forestall the coming conflict. Instead, the duke attacks

his brother only when the latter has planned an invasion of the capital. In the end, the duke prevails and forces his brother into exile. Judgment follows, as the habits of anecdotal form indicate it should. According to the Zuozhuan's exegesis of the Chungiu entry, the phrasing of the notation represents a condemnation both of Duan for his insubordination and of the duke for his failure to teach his brother well. Later readers, connecting this pas-

184 The Anecdotal History sage with the comment from the junzi given at the end of the second anecdote, have read his refusal to act early against a brother as evidence of his moral failings, including unfiliality (bu xiao).””

But judgment here is complicated as nowhere else in the Zuozhuan. Despite the patent excellence of the minister's warnings, well furnished with allusions to the old ways of government, the narrative experience readers acquire in the course of the Zuozhuan and the Guoyu points to the duke as the moral and hermeneutic hero of this episode. He is the one who is patient enough to wait and who trusts that his brother will be brought down by his own unprincipled acts,” By issuing the order to attack only when Duan is preparing an armed campaign, the duke signals his own resistance to violence and his willingness to give his brother the benefit of the doubt. To the minister who urges him to take early action, he responds in terms that, unless they are more cynical than anything else in this historiography, are unexceptionable: a mother cannot lightly be opposed, and the rebel will bring himself down by his unrighteous deeds. The explicit judgment found in the passage of Chungiu exegesis runs against the grain of readerly training, which would recognize in the duke a blameless savvy.” The possibility that the anecdote is narrated for the sake of one judgment (in favor of the duke) and

| followed by a contesting judgment, perhaps from a different source, points to the heterogeneities in the text and to a struggle over its meaning, but it ultimately confirms the importance of judgment as the telos of narration.” The anecdote that makes up the second half of Duke Zhuang’s narrative begins when the duke punishes his mother by vowing never to see her again during their lifetimes: “As long as we have not come to the Yellow Springs (the underworld], I will not see her” 7. 7x Ha IR > HE FE FH th. He immediately regrets the vow. But there is recourse, and recourse that depends for its effectiveness on the interplay of private knowledge and public display.

BSA RBECHA- HZ: AMARA OGHZE RAA- OA: H A-e)ABH- BSB)AZBER KREAZE BOUBZ- CAMA

RR BREE BERD RAM w- AmeCM- BeZB:H

BEF gO |

A- An@as - AwWitkR- Mma - BRHARRA- AR? BAM

Rh ABZH- Ht em BunmMmR- ABCH- HRA AR Kaoshu of Ying was a border warden at Yinggu. He heard of [the affair] and came to pay tribute to the duke. The duke invited him to dine.

The Anecdotal History 185 As he ate, he put aside the meat, and the duke asked about it. He replied, “My mother is still alive, and she gets a taste of everything I eat. She has never tasted the lord’s stew: I would like to give some to her.” The duke said, “You have a mother to give it to, and I do not!”

Kaoshu of Ying said, “May I ask what you mean?” | The duke explained the matter and even told him that he regretted it. He replied, “Why worry about this? If you dig down in the earth until you reach water, then make a tunnel and meet her there, who will be able to claim that you have not

done what you said?” |

The duke followed his advice. Entering the tunnel, the duke chanted, “Inside the great tunnel: Joy is concentrated.” Exiting the tunnel, Lady Jiang chanted, “Outside

the great tunnel: Joy is spread abroad.” Then they were mother and son, as at the beginning.”

To hear, to see, to know: these are the important verbs in this narrative. Everyone in the state has heard the exact terms of the duke’s vow; Kaoshu has heard of his regret. The duke builds seeing into the terms of the vow: he will not see his mother again until both of them have reached the Yellow Springs. Coming to court with his plan ready, Kaoshu uses the business of the meat to get the duke to tell his story and in this way repairs the discrepancy between private knowledge and the semi-public knowledge of gossip. Knowing the story, he shows that he also knows (and has known all along) the solution, which lies in a new interpretation of the words of the vow. As often, the force of the anecdote derives from an act of rereading. Finally, acting out the audience (the “seeing,” jian) that was supposed to take place after death, the duke and his mother adhere rigorously to the let-

ter of the vow. The structure of the tunnel permits both of them to reach the groundwaters without so much as catching a glimpse of each other. There in the tunnel the duke speaks of their joy of reunion as an emotion contained and concentrated by the walls around them (rongrong). As mother and son emerge from the tunnel, their restored affection now visible to the observers of the state, Lady Jiang speaks of the same joy as a thing to be

broadcast (xiexie), Perception itself is linked to the general presumptive unity of the state as audience. By playing on polysemous terms like jian, “to see,” and wen, “to hear,” by making problems and solutions dependent on these terms, the narrative puts the truth of the world’s order beyond question. Kaoshu’s plot shows the power of the observer, who reflects on events and words and masters their significations.

186 The Anecdotal History | An explicit judgment follows:

MM He Za: ,

AfA-HeM- Heatn-BAR- HREA HA-4fTFE- KD The gentleman says, “Kaoshu of Ying was filial in the purest way. Loving his mother, he imparted [this love] to Duke Zhuang. When the Shi says, “The filial son shall not lack; forever shall gifts be bestowed upon your kind,’ it is surely referring to this (filial behavior].”

Although the duke, like other rulers who condescend to accept advice from the humble, earns the implicit praise of the narrators, the judgment that ties the anecdote together has more to do with Kaoshu. Playing the familiar role of the indirect remonstrator, a literary type found in Zuozhuan and numerous other early works, he uses a right-minded cunning to restore the duke to proper intimacy with his mother. If there is any tension between the explicit judgment and the judgment implied by the narration itself, it lies in the emphasis on xiao, a virtue less central in Zuozhuan and Guoyu than in writings of the later Warring States and Han.”? Without the gentleman's remark, the judgment suggested by the anecdote might state, a little less specifically, that Kaoshu is to be lauded for his ingenuity in negotiating a way between the highly public vow and the duke’s regret. A smart minister, if heeded, can make things right.” An example of morphology and function can be found in another famous

anecdote, also from near the beginning of the Zuozhuan. Cao Gui was a commoner who lived in Lu during the reign of Duke Zhuang:

+ ER + PRK: CUR: Awl - RMA - ARBHZ: Mf HB MA ARGab- Raw: DAR - AAR - AA: KEA A eM BMOAOA HA )RRie RAR W- OA REE ‘A MIN: BOO HA -WFRE MBM AAsNAZS

fR- HER GER - OO - HE-B2Bw: Ve He: ow

ZR BRRYU- OR: MA RY-RAHTR-RMA- aR. Sen

Ke Oe? RMA RU - F ReR- SRM SZ- A WR: Ss SB: Br CnMBK- HA- RR: BAW: REM: Me: =

Mise RBKA KHZ KAM HED BAKE SHAM le BARR MAS: In the ({duke’s}] tenth year (684 B.c.z.], Qi attacked us. The duke was going to do battle. Cao Gui asked for an audience. The people of his village said, “When the meat-eaters are planning about it, how are you going to get involved in it?” Gui said, “The meat-eaters are uncouth and cannot plan things far ahead.”

The Anecdotal History 187 He went for his audience and asked what wherewithal (the duke] had for doing battle. The duke said, “I do not dare hoard the food and clothes that give me ease but always share them with others.” He replied, “Such a small favor does not reach everyone. The people will not

follow you.” The duke said, “I do not dare increase my sacrificial animals, jades, and brocades but always maintain them faithfully.” He replied, “Such a small faith is not inclusive. The spirits will not bless you.” The duke said, “In litigations small and great, although I be unable to determine the details, I always rule according to the circumstances.” He replied, “That is a sort of loyalty. With it you can fight one battle. Permit me to accompany you in battle.”

The duke had him ride along with him. The battle took place at Changshao. The duke was ready to drum for an advance. Gui said, “Not yet.” The Qi army drummed three times. Gui said, “Now.” The Qi army was routed. The duke was ready to gallop after them. Gui said, “Not yet.” He disembarked, examined the wheel tracks, climbed the chariot rail and looked after them, then said, “Now.” Then

they pursued the Qi army. After the victory, the duke asked him the reason for his actions. He replied,

“Battle is a matter of courageous spirit. With the first drum beats the spirit is - aroused, with the second it is on the wane, and with the third it is exhausted. When they were exhausted, we were filled up, so we defeated them. Great states are unpredictable, and you have to worry about ambushes from them. As I examined their wagon tracks, I saw how chaotic they were; as I looked after them, I saw how their flags trailed low. So we pursued them.”

Like many of the commoners depicted in these works, Cao Gui is one whose words the ruler would ignore only at his peril. The anecdote begins with an

exchange of the epigrammatic sort that serves to mark the difference between Cao Gui's village-based wisdom and the flightiness of the nobles, who are characterized as overfed and dim-witted.** Cao Gui’s conversations with

the duke will overcome the various distances that open up in these remarks. In Wang Yuan’s analysis of the anecdote, all of Cao’s questions have to do with “planning things far ahead,” the nobles’ weakness.” Cao's farsightedness allows him to plan both for battle and for a principled transformation of the nobles themselves. He collapses social distances by overturning the ascriptive hierarchy and by replacing it—if only temporarily—with a hierar-

chy of wisdom. The same certainty of vision that first compels him to offer his help also, in the end, allows him to see through the physical distances of the battlefield.

188 The Anecdotal History Under questioning, the duke shows that he understands that battle is not a matter of superior forces but of the moral unity of leader and people. Still, the generosity on which he bases his faith in his army's morale falls far short of the broad diffusion of benefits that Cao Gui has in mind. The duke’s adherence to ritual prescriptions is also compromised, and not likely to secure the help of the spirits. Only the duke’s attitude toward the resolution of legal disputes among his people wins Cao Gui's approval. Whether because as judge the duke restores the harmony of his people, or because in hearing evidence and delivering judgments the duke realizes an ideal dialogue between center and periphery, or because (as in Wang Yuan’s view) the duke is here most perspicacious in his planning, the legal relation with his people is, in Cao Gui's judgment, the one that will underwrite the duke’s campaign. As Qian Zhongshu notes, Cao Gui's actions during and after the battle follow a formulaic sequence.’ Wordless action—the enemy's drumming, — the duke’s intent to charge, Cao Gui’s inspection—is followed by words— “Not yet” (wei ke), “Now” (ke yi)—and then by further words of interpretation. In these texts, certain categories of phenomena, including natural occurrences and the physical appearance, actions, and utterances of people in the world, are eligible for recounting as long as they carry with them their interpretability. In a case like Cao Gui's, reported speech first results from

mute action and is as obscure as that action; one should not know, at the outset, why Gui first forbids and later permits the charge.”’ Despite the un-

| certainty of their motivation, however, Gui’s commands are heeded and thus eliminate the barrier between his exclusive understanding and the actions of the army. Speech, as long as it is guaranteed by the promise of interpretability, may carry authority even before it is understood. Finally, obscurity is dispelled and authority justified in an outline of a theory of military action, which Gui presents in response to the duke’s question. The formal features of the narratives in the Zuozhuan and Guoyu raise questions about the uses to which these narratives were put. Narrative itself may

be a universal phenomenon, but its particular forms respond to specific needs shared by tellers and audiences. Genres respond to occasions and, when occasions have become extinct, become monuments to them.** Who would now doubt that the formulaicism of the Homeric epics has to do with their origins in improvisatory performance or that type-scenes in the Hebrew Bible reflect storytellers’ erstwhile possession of sacred historiography,

The Anecdotal History 189 or—to consider narratives of a very different sort—that such features as the style indirect libre and experimentations with time in the novel depend in part on literacy and print culture? As the basic unit of early Chinese narrative and

the only unit from which longer accounts could be built, the anecdote as form recalls the world of uses and practices in which it flourished.

First, the anecdote suggests orality. I have already cited Monica Fludernik’s claim that the anecdote is a fundamentally oral form. Several scholars have recognized the importance of orally transmitted sayings and anecdotes in the formation of early Chinese historical writing.” The terminology for the passing on of knowledge and for the citation of knowledge in debate bespeaks oral rather than literate avenues of transmission.” Second, the anecdote implies a performative context that, when we look for it in the early sources, is to be found everywhere. Genuine references to

the composition and use of written historical records are quite rare in histo- , riography. As I showed in Chapter 2, however, the historiographers frequently depict the use of historical knowledge as a rhetorical tool well adapted to the purposes of court deliberation. Speakers who draw on the authority of history do not, for the most part, adduce complete anecdotes, but instead cite fragments of inherited language and details from common knowledge of the past. Passages in which speakers recount events of the Spring and Autumn period make it clear that the anecdote was useful as an interested account of one individual's, family’s, or state's relations with others. As such, it functioned within an economy of bao, as a tally of services rendered and debts owed.” It is easy to see how the anecdotal genre of the Zuozhuan and the Guoyu would have thrived in the courts, the homes, and

even the villages of the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods. _ The organization of the elements of the anecdote around discovery and justification of a judgment and the thematic preoccupation with visibility and interpretation serve the purposes of public justice both by preserving the memory of specific deeds and by exemplifying a particular way of evaluating those deeds. In one sense, then, the Zuozhuan and Guoyu are compilations of knowledge useful in public debate.

Finally, Warring States court deliberations, persuasions, and debates between thinkers of different schools would have been appropriate places for lessons drawn from events of the Spring and Autumn period. As brief as the

rhetorical prescriptions of Xunzi and Han Feizi are, they suggest that the ability to use anecdotes well was a prized rhetorical skill.” Certainly Han

190 The Anecdotal History | Feizi valued the anecdotal material he accumulated, much of which closely resembles the anecdotes of the Zuozhuan and Guoyu, not for the historical

truths it contained but for the arguments it would substantiate. It is conceivable, then, that the anecdote was in early China typically adapted to polemical uses and that many of the anecdotes that have come down to us were

retold for the sake of the arguments they supported and were shaped by their use in these arguments. Attempts to read the Zuozhuan and Guoyu as histories and thus as intrinsically different from anecdote collections made by writers like Han Feizi may require a distinction of categories where there was originally no such distinction. Historiography is philosophical polemic with its overt principles and classifications stripped way, or submerged, or simply left unwritten; left to stand by themselves, the anecdotes came in time to resemble disinterested accounts. The anecdote in the Zuozhuan and Guoyu is narrative specially adapted to substantiate certain kinds of judgments. That an aura of interpretability surrounds actions and objects in these works is partly the result of their association with the Chungiu; praise for the chronicle’s subtlety in conveying hid-

den meanings tended to affect the reception of the anecdotal works connected with it. In a deeper sense, however, Chungiu hermeneutics, with

its assumption that words mean something other (and something more plainly judgmental) rhan what they say, is rooted in the habits of the anecdote. The latter, after all, derives most of its energy from the movement

| from secrecy to openness and replays the drama of successful interpretation many hundreds of times over. What attracted commentators and anthologists to the historiographical works was the play of clarity and obscurity in the narratives and the prospect of a historical writing in which every word embodied moral authority. ‘The morphology and thematics of the anecdote suggest that such concerns were shared by the first users of the form. In retelling anecdotes that were constructed around opportunities for judgment and in favoring themes of vision, the historiographers made the world and its history a laboratory for their own notions of ritual.

SIX

Narrative and Recompense

The anecdote cannot easily accommodate multiple plot lines. It is well adapted for the narration of events involving a limited cast of characters and a single set of consequences, but when a narrative involves many characters or groups, with varying motivations, acting in different times and places, the anecdote falls short. For more complex chains of events, the historiographers of the Zuozhuan and Guoyu combined anecdotes into series, building largescale narratives that are nonetheless fundamentally anecdotal in character. The anecdote series merits study for its role as a shaper of historical memory: it is the narrative genre in which the most important and memorable events of the Spring and Autumn period are recounted. Anecdote series share certain formal characteristics and themes with the anecdotes from which they are constructed. Judgment, the telos of short and long narratives alike, again accounts for much of the manner and content of

narration. Interpretive acumen allows certain adepts to see in other individuals the ambitions and weaknesses that will give rise to events. In the culminating anecdotes of a series, which form the climax of the narrative, the predictions of observing adepts are fulfilled, and the reader (helped along by the narrators and certain commenting characters) is drawn to judge both the

actors and the events that have transpired. Underlying the aggregation of events and anecdotes in the series is a principle of recompense, or bao. The anecdote of the Chu turtle exemplified ways of conserving and redirecting energy typical of many narratives in the Zuozhuan and Guoyu. Gifts, services,

offenses, and moral successes and failures have consequences, which the

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

The Anecdote Series The fairly simple principles by which the anecdotes in the Guoyu are organized have already been described. The compilers ordered their material first

by the state in which an event occurred or was relevant and then, within each of these sections, by chronology. Since there is no attempt to narrate events for every year or to coordinate the histories of separate states, chronology is more loosely packed than it is in the annalistic arrangement of the Zuozhuan. Nevertheless, this organizational scheme favors the anecdote series, higher-order narratives in which the events narrated in several individual anecdotes (and the force of these anecdotes’ judgments) are gathered together in the single outcome that is common to them all. To put it another way, a single event—an important battle, the death of a king, or the like—is related to its causes, and these causes are themselves events that are narrated as anecdotes. Familiar examples of the anecdote series in the Guoyu are the story of events in Jin between the time of Duke Xian and the rise of Duke Wen, and the three accounts of Yue’s triumph over Wu. The distribution of material by states in the Guoyu perhaps reflects a desire to preserve the unity of anecdote series, which in many cases have as their characters the nobles of a single state. The Zuozhuan's annalistic organization complicates the treatment of anecdote series. When all material is narrated in the year in which an event occurred or became relevant, and when the unfolding chronology of months and years takes precedence over any other source of unity, anecdote series

occur in counterpoint with unattached anecdotes and with other series. Recognition of higher-order unity becomes another test and another source of training for the reader. The brief entries of the Chungiu provide a sort of framework for the reader, as they perhaps did for the compilers of the Zuozhuan, and anecdote series serve both to flesh out the discrete events noted in the Chungiu and to bring them into relation with one another.” Although the annalistic style regularly forces the reader to draw together the events of different years, it also, and not entirely incidentally, encourages the reader to trace connections among objectively unrelated events taking place in several states in a single year. By distributing anecdotes along a time line, the com-

Narrative and Recompense 193 pilers of the Zuozhuan established time as a fundamental ordering principle

and forced readers to pay constant attention to the unities of subject and meaning that can emerge over several years or within a single year. The Zuozhuan defers meaning more effectively and more stubbornly than the Guoyu does. In the Guoyu, the consequences of an action are quite frequently narrated at the end of the anecdote. In the Zuozhuan, one waits for the full-

ness of time and then, as often as not, does for oneself the work of drawing

together beginning and end." , The anecdote series, like the anecdote itself, presumes certain conditions that are necessities in any plot: continuity in time and place, intelligible relations among characters, a beginning and an end with some transformation in between. But what makes both narrative forms live, what rules over all their disparate parts, is the judgment, which can be made explicit in the utterance of a character or be left up to the reader. Because characters so consistently model judgment for us and thus demonstrate that making judgments is the justification for observing and retelling details of events, we are trained in our | reading to expect judgment, if not from the characters then from ourselves. With this learned habit, we negotiate the complicated texture of the Zuozhuan, registering the rhythm of its judgments as they accumulate in successive anecdotes and in anecdote series. At the same time we learn both to look for unmarked opportunities for judgment and to recognize tensions between the overt claims of speech and the implicit meaning of narrated details. A series of anecdotes recounting the rise and fall of King Ling of Chu during the years corresponding to 547-529 B.c.£. illustrates these propositions and points up some of the most common characteristics of the anec-

dote series.’ The series is extraordinary, perhaps, in its length and in the amount of proleptic introductory material it presents, but in form it is entirely typical. A moment of violence (here the suicide of the king after a massive rebellion)® casts its long shadow back over incidents presented in anec- | dotes in previous years, gathering them around a single, unifying judgment, which itself is never fully expressed. Moments of violence within or among

states are privileged incidents that inspire predictions and interpretations and transform series of anecdotes into loosely articulated large-scale narratives. More rarely, moments of concord within or among states perform the same function. The confrontation, whether it is a clash or a celebration, is

itself accorded significance (of a type examined in the next chapter) and lends significance to all the incidents related to it.

194 Narrative and Recompense Anecdote series incorporate three types of stories. First among them are proleptic anecdotes. A formal feature especially prominent in the series concerning King Ling is a kind of narrative forebalancing, in which the beginning of the tale consists of repeated announcements of its end. This forebalancing is most apparent in the grand arrays of proleptic anecdotes, usually with explicit predictions, that begin King Ling’s story and many of the other great anecdote series.’ Broadly speaking, the more traumatic the event, the further into the past its effect has been projected and the more predictions it has accrued.” Vast numbers of anecdotes in the Zuozhuan are purely proleptic and serve to announce well in advance the coming of a great disaster. This narrative habit has several implications. First, the longer narratives take on their characteristic balance. Predictions gather around a person or a state in a long series and are redeemed together in a great fulfillment that brings the narrative to an end. Much of the drama of the narrative is shifted forward, to the work of observation and interpretation that makes prediction possible; and this drama of foresight matches in intensity the drama of the momentous event itself. Second, all observable events are imbued with a quality of foreordination. The retrospective habit that ensures that only true predictions are recounted also imports into the past a sure but coy knowledge of the future. Observable details in general take on an ominous quality, and the keys to interpretation are in the hands of the narrators. Third, forebalancing, by which the one who remembers puts a whole series of anecdotes in order around a single great event, represents a mastery of the past by the present: the present narrator's principles explain what happened then. But since the narrator builds anecdotes as predictions and puts the words of the predictions into the mouths of the ministers of that time, he disguises his own mastery of the past as their mastery of their present. If, as the evidence indicates, the Zuozhuan originated in a ministerial class, such representations of ministerial wisdom would serve clear interests. As Wu Kaisheng noted, King Ling’s story is massively counterbalanced

with a series of observation-and-prediction anecdotes. First, before he usurps control over Chu, come eight predictions having largely to do with his coming success. When delegations from other states visit Chu for the funeral of King Kang (r. 559-545), a Zheng diplomat observes Prince Wei (now lingyin, or chief minister) with the new king, Jia’ao, and predicts prosperity for the prince, who cuts the more impressive figure; as the Zheng man puts it, grass does not grow well beneath a pine tree. A Chu envoy to Lu

Narrative and Recompense 195 -efuses to answer a Lu minister’s questions about Prince Wei; that minister deduces that the envoy is concealing his intention to join the prince in some “great undertaking” (dashi).’*

The next two predictions look beyond usurpation to final disaster. When Prince Wei kills the Chu master of horse (sima) and confiscates his property, another official foretells ruin in a brief formal speech: the prince will not escape disaster, since instead of fostering good men he is harming them and thus bringing trouble to the state; the master of horse is as vital to the chief minister and king as limbs are to the human body; such destructiveness makes trouble inevitable.’ Then, in a much longer, brilliantly composed speech already discussed in Chapter 1 (pp. 30-34), Beigong Wenzi of Wey, accompanying his duke on a visit to Chu, draws conclusions from the prince's behavior. The prince has taken on the “dignity and deportment” (weiyi) appropriate to a lord and will soon wish to be a lord; he will succeed for a time but will finally meet his demise. Questioned, Beigong Wenzi supports his case with several citations and finally defines the proper weiyi around the ideal figure of King Wen of Zhou. Prince Wei personifies defiance of the code of King Wen. The predictions continue until the moment of the usurpation itself, when the prince finally strangles the king in his sickbed.” After the prince has made himself king, the interest of the predictions shifts to his ambition and, more important, to his coming downfall. His main aim, it turns out, is to establish Chu’s leading position by calling a meeting of the states, a move that is both foreseen and seen beyond.”° After the triumphant meeting, observers look forward only to the king’s fall. There are at least ten predictions, ranging from the perfectly explicit to the merely suggested.’ The backbone of the unified narrative, in fact, is the series of predictions, which account for most of the textual space occupied by the narrative and largely dictate the selection of incidents and details that are narrated. This special form of historical narration is perhaps predominant in the Zuozhuan: the interest of incident, observation, and recollection derives from

the interpretability inherent in all human action. The historiographical imagination frequently engages with the past not for its own sake but for the way it presages some later point in the past. Even if the preserved details have historical value—and we may choose to believe, for instance, that Prince Wei did indeed use the regalia of the king before it was proper for him to do so— they also directly serve the interests of plot making, the joining of anecdotes into balanced series. Relatively few anecdotes in the whole text of the Zuo-

196 Narrative and Recompense | zhuan stand alone; most look forward to climaxes of some sort, whether vio-

lent confrontations or more peaceful forms of success. These culminations © themselves look backward, to the long trains of signifying moments that the narrator has gathered behind them. Prediction and fulfillment, along with the regular rhythm of judgments recorded or implied, are the aspects of Zuozhuan narrative that make it more than an enumeration of anecdotes. A second type of anecdote found in anecdote series might be termed the “amplifying anecdote.” Unlike the proleptic anecdote, it does not look for-

ward explicitly to the coming culmination. Still, the confirmation of the judgment implied in this sort of anecdote is ultimately dependent on the end of the whole course of events recounted in the series. Even without the proleptic anecdote’s familiar combination of observation and prediction, the events described in the amplifying anecdote are valued for the way they reveal the hidden meanings of character and event. King Ling’s encounter with the Qi rebel Qing Feng is a good example:**

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~ In autumn, in the seventh month [of 538 s.c.z.], the ruler of Chu attacked Wu with the allied forces; the Song heir and the ruler of Zheng had returned beforehand, but Hua Feisui of Song and certain Zheng ministers went on the campaign. [The king] had Qu Shen surround Zhufang, which was reduced on the jiashen day of the eighth month. Qing Feng of Qi was captured and his entire clan exterminated.

, As [the king] was preparing to execute Qing Feng, [the Chu minister] Jiao Ju said, “I have heard that only one who is himself without stain can execute a man. It was because Qing Feng defied orders that he ended up here; how is it possible that he will obediently submit to execution? What is the good of broadcasting things to

the allies?””” |

Jiao Ju, who knows exactly what sort of public execution the king has in mind, gives an elliptical warning, and for good reason: he must avoid committing the offense that he expects from Qing Feng. But the king, willful or uncomprehending, insists on proceeding, and the consequences show exactly what it was that Jiao Ju feared:

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Narrative and Recompense 197 The king paid him no attention, and made [Qing Feng] shoulder a great axe and go around to all the allied forces to say, “Let no man do what Qing Feng of Qi did, killing his ruler and enfeebling the heir to make treaties with the ministers!” But Qing Feng said, “Let no man do what Wei, a lesser son of King Gong of Chu, did, killing his ruler—his elder brother’s son Jun—and taking his place to make treaties with the allies.”

The king hurriedly had him killed. | | The anecdote supports some simple judgments about the characters of the men involved: Jiao Ju is wise, the king obstinate, and Qing Feng quite similarly obstinate. The king is overly confident in his ability to impose his will on Qing Feng and force him to confess his crimes before the allies. When Qing Feng instead indicts the king for the same crimes, he unwittingly affirms the value of ministerial advice and with it a certain inevitability in the triumph of ritual propriety over private ambition. The king’s offense against his predecessor is still living in public memory, still awaiting the compensation that will come when the king falls. Beyond assessments of individual characters, the judgment implied by the whole anecdote is that the ruler who has sullied himself by public violation of ritual propriety has cut _ himself off from the very mechanism by which power is exerted; he cannot punish even a man who richly deserves punishment. The failure of the king

here represents in miniature the causes and course of his final fall. _ Distinct anecdote series often become intertwined with one another. When King Ling invites Duke Zhao of Lu to celebrate with him the completion of his extravagant architectural undertaking, the Zhanghua complex, the resulting anecdote contributes as much to the unfolding narrative of the feckless duke’s life as it does to the drama of the king’s rise and fall. The king at first gives the duke a famous bow known as the “Daqu,” but soon comes to regret the gesture. His minister Wei Qigiang, hearing of the matter, visits the duke and congratulates him. “Why do you congratulate me?” asks the duke.”

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

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

198 Narrative and Recompense | and, more directly, to the narrative of Duke Zhao’s visit to Chu. But those loose links are overshadowed by the central pleasure of the anecdote, which lies in Wei Qigiang’s artful use of ceremony to undo the regrettable effects of ceremony. Duke Zhao perhaps accepted the gift carelessly, but Qigiang fills the gift and the exchange with a significance that terrifies the duke.

Valuable now not as a weapon but as a treasure, the bow resumes, in Qigiang’s words, some of the original meaning that made bows good ceremonial gifts: it turns the recipient into a defender and proxy of the donor.” Perhaps the incident illuminates Duke Zhao’s shortsightedness and pusillanimity, or King Ling’s wavering greed, but the focus, as in a great many other anecdotes, is on one minister's know-how and verbal skill; we will return to this theme of cunning shortly. Here interpretation, which is left up to us, leads not to greater integration with the series of anecdotes, but to the isolated appreciation of a single act. The final type of anecdote found in the anecdote series is the culmination, in which narrative debts are paid off as predictions are fulfilled, wisdom and folly have their consequences, and characters get their just deserts. In the culmination, the reader and selected individuals within the narrative acquire the ability to understand the anecdote series as a whole and to reflect on the relevance ofa final judgment to the mass of discrete incidents. Paul Ricoeur, who calls this act of narrative sense-making “grasping together,” has analyzed it in Aristotelian terms and relates it finally to Kant’s understanding of judgment, including aesthetic judgment.” The aesthetic, both as a category of experience and as a special type of judgment, is immensely important to the historiographers of the Zuozhuan and the Guoyu, as I will show in the next chapter; they tend to build both supporting anecdotes and culminations on aesthetic events and continually treat the possessions, gestures, and words of characters as objects of a critical observation that is fundamentally aesthetic. The whole anecdote series can be viewed from the perspective of the culmination, as a matter

of extending the reach of the narrative backward into the past to gather together the first interpretable hints of causation.” The culmination of King Ling’s tale has two parts: the first establishes the moral terms of his fall, and the second completes the narration of the fall. The second, the fall itself, is the simpler of the two anecdotes. The king has committed a series of offenses against other nobles of Chu and allied states. A rebellion instigated in the annexed state of Cai by the clever aide of a Cai loyalist comes to involve contenders for the Chu throne, who march

Narrative and Recompense 199

into the capital of Chu. King Ling, tarrying on the winter hunt at Ganxi, cannot oppose them, and they dissolve his army by proclaiming that any soldier who delays in joining them in the capital will have his nose sliced off. The king’s collapse comes when they kill his sons:

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His attendant said, “Even more. When commoners grow old without sons, they know that they will end up being rolled into a ditch.” The king said, “I have killed the sons of many. Could I have avoided coming to this?”

The minister of the right Zige said, “Please wait on the outskirts [of the capital] to obey the people of the state.”

The king said, “One must not provoke the anger of the mob.” [Zige] said, “What if you enter one of your dependent states and ask for military forces from the other states?” The king said, “[The dependents] have all rebelled.” [Zige] said, “And if you go into exile in the other states and permit some great state to plan on your behalf?” The king said, “Great blessings are not repeated. I would only be disgracing myself.”

So Ran Dan [Zige] went back to Chu, while the king went along the Xia River, intending to go to the city of Yan. Shen Hai, a son of the livestock minister Wuyu, said, “My father twice violated the orders of the king, but the king did not put him to death. What kindness could be greater than that? A ruler cannot be treated with cruelty, and kindnesses cannot be forgotten. I will look for the king.” So he sought. the king, finding him at the gate of Ji and taking him home from there. On the guibai day of the fifth month, the king hanged himself at the home of the livestock minister Shen Hai. Shen Hai sacrificed his two daughters to bury with

him.”° ,

The end of the king's story is told as an epiphany. After years of haughty and willful maltreatment of inferior states and individuals, he recognizes a

200 Narrative and Recompense kinship with his victims. The epiphany brings a total and, in realistic terms, unlikely transformation of the king, who is no longer willing to take even the most obvious steps to preserve his power.” His answers to his ministers resemble nothing more than the voice of tendentious historiographical explanation speaking through him: his ending was inevitable, blessings cannot be repeated, his enemies’ opposition is justified and invincible. The king surrenders to the logic of ritual offense and revenge that the historiographers have built into their narration. After his surrender, no one needs to assassi-

_ nate him; once he has given himself over to the judgment against him, he kills himself. Shen Hai’s treatment of him and his corpse restores in small measure the ritual honor due, not to the man, but to the king. The ground is prepared for the king’s epiphany in the first culminating anecdote, where a minister's cunning remonstrance-like performance fractures the king's complacency and turns his ambition against him. The king has gone on the winter hunt in the eastern part of his state, using the opportunity to send military forces to harass the state of Xu and its more powerful backer, Chu’s rival Wu; he establishes his camp at Ganxi:”

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Narrative and Recompense 201 There was a snowstorm, and the king dressed in a leather cap, a feathered coat from Qin, a kingfisher-blue cape, and leopard-skin boots, and went out holding a whip, accompanied by his attendant Xifu. Zige, the Minister of the Right, waited upon the king in the evening. When the king saw him, he removed his cap and cape and

put down his whip to chat with him. ,

He said, “In times past our former king Xiong Yi, together with Lu Ji [of Qi], Wangsun Mou [of Wey], Xie Fu [of Jin], and Qin Fu [of Lu], served King Kang [of Zhou]. All the other four states got their portions [of reward]; we alone did not. If we now send someone to Zhou to ask for the cauldron that is our portion, will

the king give it to us?” |

(‘Zige] answered, “He will give it to you, Your Highness! In times past our former king Xiong Yi was off in the wilds of Mount Jin. Riding in a cart of sticks and dressed in humble clothing, he lived in the grasses of the plain. He crossed mountains and rivers to serve the Son of Heaven, and all he had was a bow of peach wood and arrows of thorn to present as tribute to the royal court. “The Qi [founder] was an uncle to King [Cheng of Zhou]; Jin, Lu, and Wey were full brothers of the king. It was thus that Chu was without a portion, whereas the others all had theirs. Now Zhou and those four states all serve you, Your Highness, obeying only your command. How could they begrudge you your cauldron?” The king said, “In times past my ancestral uncle Kunwu dwelt in the old territory of Xuu. Now Zheng greedily exploits his fields and will not give them to us. If I ask for them, will [Zheng] give them to us?” [Zige] said, “They will give them to you, Your Highness! If Zhou will not begrudge a cauldron, how can Zheng begrudge these fields?” The king said, “In times past the allies thought of us as remote, while fearing Jin. But now we have built great walls in Chen, Cai, and [the two areas of] Bugeng and gotten a thousand chariots from each—you yourself had a part in this accomplish-

ness?” | |

ment. Certainly the allies will fear us now!” ,

(‘Zige] said, “They will fear you, Your Highness! These four states alone would

be formidable. When Chu is added to them, how could they not fear Your HighThe Director of Artisans Lu then presented a request, saying, “Your Highness has ordered that a jade tablet be carved for the decoration of an axe handle; I beg permission to seek orders from you.” The king went inside to look at it. Xifu said to Zige, “You, sir, are the great hope of the state of Chu. Now that you speak to the king like his own echo, what is the state to do?” Zige said, “I am ground sharp in preparation. When the king emerges, my blade

will cut him down.”

The king emerged, and they conversed again. The Scribe of the Left Yixiang

202 Narrative and Recompense hurried across the court, and the king said, “This is a good scribe—look well upon him. He is able to recite the “Three Barrows,’ the ‘Five Canons,’ the ‘Eight Guide-

lines,’ and the ‘Nine Mounds.’” |

(‘Zige] replied, “I once asked him a question. In times past King Mu wanted to give free rein to the desires of his heart and travel everywhere under Heaven, so that every place would show the tracks of his carriages and the hoofprints of his horses. The Zhai Duke Moufu composed the poem ‘Qizhao’ to still the king’s heart, and it was thus that the king managed to die in the Zhi Palace. I asked [the Scribe of the Left] about this poem, and he did not know it. If you ask him something at all ob-

scure, how can he possibly know it?” , The king said, “Can you recite it?”

(‘Zige] replied, “I can. The poem says: , | ‘Sonorous is the “Qizhao,”

Showing forth the sound of virtue. Think on our king's good order— Like chimestones, Like bells.

He makes the strength of the people his measure And has no heart for drunken satiety.’” The king saluted him and went in. He could neither eat nor sleep, and for several days he could not gain mastery of himself. And thus he came to grief.”

The narrative of King Ling is built around the character's equivocal relation to ritual propriety.” As we will see, a marked judgment from the most authoritative of all historical observers equates his extravagance and acquisitiveness with a departure from li. In this penultimate scene of King Ling’s reign, everyone on stage conspires to display the king’s failures in their worst light. At first the reader cannot know what Zige is doing. The unusual extended description of the king’s sumptuous clothing is perhaps a veiled dis-

approval of aesthetic excess. Yet when the king begins his questioning, there is little indication of irony in Zige’s fawning responses. His intentions are subtle enough to escape the king's personal attendant, who asks him how he can play along with these delusions. The axe metaphor of Zige’s answer resumes the aesthetic theme and adroitly incorporates the happenstance of the moment, the king’s temporary withdrawal from court to view a ceremonial axe that is being made for him.” This axe, like the axe with which the king had Qing Feng executed, is now turned against its owner; in the figurative sense opened up by Zige’s own trope, the two axes are identical. Haun Saussy has argued that the axe and axe handle in the Shi poem “Chopping

Narrative and Recompense 203 Trunks” (“Fa ke,” Mao 158) can be read as metaphors for the workings of mimetic reproduction in strong political interpretations of poetry.” King Ling’s axes are a confirmation. Mimesis functions not only to reproduce the right and the appropriate, as in “Fa ke,” but also to subject evildoers to the consequences of their deeds. The blade, both here and in the Shi example, is poetry. When the king returns, we watch to see how Zige will cut him down and find ourselves in the familiar (though here unmarked) territory of the remonstrance. Whether by arrangement with Zige or by the plotting of the narrator, the scribe Yixiang crosses the court, again providing Zige with just the terms he needs. The king will understand that this has not been idle chat, that his minister has been leading him on, and that the recondite bit of lore Zige displays is a precedent against which his own behavior can only be judged negatively.

Here the customary indirection of remonstrance accounts for its devastating force. The moment of peripeteia is left unnarrated and falls somewhere between the end of Zige’s poem and the king’s withdrawal. In this moment are many revolutions. The king’s attention is suddenly forced back from the remote reaches of time and from his own ambition, which extends not only to Zhou bronzes and Zheng lands but even to the possession of arcane texts

through the scribes in his employ. The ultimate object of ambition, the poem, is transformed from harmless curiosity into caustic antidote. King Mu, whom King Ling perhaps considered a peer, is revealed as a superior. From the point of view of the end of King Ling’s story, even King Mu's death is superior, since the poem has kept him (unlike King Ling) from venturing out to die beyond the frontier. Finally, Zige is no obsequious creature of the king and his ambitions but a voice of critique and advocate of the Zhou standard of right, shared by the members of the king’s court and its Zhou predecessors. This standard of right is also shared implicitly by the narrator and reader of the Zuozhuan, who must understand it in order to

make sense of this and other narratives. ‘The king is alone. Two more elements of anecdote series, both quite clearly marked by formulaic usage, confirm the importance of balance and judgment in the con-

struction of series and the conclusion of narratives. These features are marked judgment and analepsis. The marked judgment functions in the anecdote series as it does in individual anecdotes, as a non-narrative exposition of meaning, often attributed to an anonymous gentleman or to Confucius,

204 Narrative and Recompense attached at the end of a narrative. The only difference is that the stretch of narrative the judgment accounts for is now longer and more complicated. In this series, judgment is pronounced immediately after Zige’s recitation

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

As in the anecdote about Duke Zhuang, there is a tension between explicit judgment and the judgment implied by the anecdote itself. Although ritual

| propriety has played a role throughout the anecdote series, justifying the enmity that the king has aroused, this anecdote includes no direct reference to it. The temporal detachment of the judge from the details of the case, a common feature of the marked judgment, is underlined in this case by an ambiguity of reference. One of the last details narrated was the king’s inability to gain mastery of himself (zike) after hearing Zige’s account of the poem “Qizhao.” Is this the self-mastery Confucius has in mind? Or is he thinking of the extravagance and avarice the king has demonstrated so abundantly in this anecdote and elsewhere? This last loss of mastery is an odd one: it appears to result from Zige’s devastating citation of the poem thar stilled King

Mu’s heart. The king’s collapse is an unrestrained aesthetic or moral response, as unrestrained, it is suggested, as any of the king's many other departures from ritual propriety. For the king to return to himself from this distraction would be for him to resume his extravagant, unthinking ways, and would in no way be a restoration of li. Confucius speaks generally, from

after the fact and well out of context; that he refers to the king by his full posthumous title, “King Ling of Chu,” also contributes to the somewhat detached tone of the judgment. Like the anonymous gentleman, the sage judges from the position of summation, commenting on the whole career of the figure in question.” That does not mean that the terms of his judgment are irrelevant to the anecdote. Confucius’ maxim takes it as a given that dissoluteness—a lack of self-mastery—and departures from li are complementary moral failings. ‘The

king is similarly dissolute and unrestrained by ritual propriety in his reactions to every object of his desire, whether it is the stolen throne, the hegem- _

Narrative and Recompense 205 ony, or Zige's deadly citation. In the end, however, after acting in wanton contravention of all inherited standards, he is made to see through the illusions of power and to learn how far he is from propriety. Whatever the character does to repress it, ritual propriety always returns. Following the course of the anecdote and looking back over it from the vantage point of Confucius’ words, the reader, like the characters in the story, plays an ex- — tended hermeneutic game, testing surfaces, looking for categorical connections that belie those surfaces, learning the terms of the anecdote and then making them relevant to the categories learned in other anecdotes. The price for narrative and intellectual pleasure is a complicity, at least for the time of reading, in certain doctrinal presumptions, including the faith in li’s fundamental power. Like the marked judgment, analepsis establishes conditions for unity in the plot of an anecdote series. Analepsis is a pluperfect mode of narration: it recounts significant events that precede those of the main plot, in some cases by many years. Appearing in the midst of an anecdote series, it is normally used to set the scene for another anecdote narrated immediately after. But when an analepsis is inserted after the culmination of the series, it plays an especially important role. As a retrospective operation, it corresponds to the proleptic figures of prediction and foreshadowing.” Its function resembles

theirs in that it incorporates details observed at some earlier moment into the system of interpreted or revealed significance that surrounds the culminating point of a series of anecdotes. But since it is achieved both in complete anecdotes and in shorter non-narrative notes, analepsis differs from prolepsis in the degree of suspense it produces. Predictions announce, long before the fact, the ultimate arrival of some culmination. Although they sometimes immediately precede that culmination, they more often lead to it in long, intermittent stages, and one learns to keep track and to wait for summation. Analepsis, on the other hand, can contribute to the fullness of the culmination itself. Closely juxtaposed to the culminating anecdotes, it allows the narrator to show how this end was figured forth in interpretable details of moments long past. Analepsis reinforces the adequacy of that culmination to all its prefatory predictions. Usually, but not always, analepses are marked by the introductory word chu (“at an earlier time” or “in the beginning”), which interrupts the temporal progression of the anecdote series and returns the reader to the first causes of an event. King Ling’s story includes two marked analepses of this sort,

206 Narrative and Recompense both of them inserted immediately after his suicide and burial. The first tells how the king once (the time is not specified) divined about conquering the world:””

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That the event is narrated after the king’s fall is appropriate; it represents his ambition and his excess in the most general terms. He despises not only the

rulers of the other states and the precedents of the Zhou order but even Heaven itself. In accordance with the narrative and ideological preferences of the historiographers, the consequences of the king's sacrilege come not from divine retribution, as one might expect, but indirectly, through the effect of

his display on the watching populace. The anecdote series, with its characteristic components of prediction, amplification, culmination, marked judgment, and analepsis, is the only means of presenting long and complex narratives in the Zuozhuan and the _ Guoyu. Every narrative is episodic, and the narrators employ the tools at their disposal to create thematic and intellectual unity among the episodes. By far the most important of these tools is the general emphasis on hermeneutic skill on the part of both characters and readers. The constant rhythm of phenomenon, observation, interpretation, and prediction holds complex plots together and presents the reader with a sort of participative training in meaning making.

Linked to the hermeneutic themes of the narratives is the assumption, nowhere challenged, that the world has an intelligible way or ways and that human beings of a certain kind understand this way and can, on the basis of their understanding, divine future consequences of observed events. What

| the Zuozhuan and Guoyu uphold is not a single model of the world’s workings but a large set of related models, which are made explicit in the principles adduced in speeches. Narratives, and anecdote series in particular, take their rules of causation from these models. Finally, the two works employ a few general character types in their representation of human characters. These character types do not precede and determine plot; rather, they arise from plot. ‘Thus in a narrative concerning

Narrative and Recompense 207 repeated aberration and final retribution, like the story of King Ling, the king himself has the role of a willful violator of norms. Other character types

| we have encountered include the clever and loyal minister (Kaoshu of Ying), the resistant minister (Zigong of Zheng, Zige of Chu), and the wise commoner (Bo Zong’s carter) or barbarian (Ji Zha of Wu). We have yet to meet the virtuous ruler, who will be exemplified in the next section by Duke

Wen of Jin. | The history of the anecdote and its uses necessarily begins with the Zuozhuan and the Guoyu; there are no earlier instances of anecdotal history on such a grand scale. The formal features of the anecdote and the anecdote series, because they are the means of representation for all events recorded in these two works, necessarily affect the representation of the historical process itself. In the next section, we examine a set of themes that relate historical content to anecdotal form and guide the historiographers’ reconstruction of the meaning of past events.

Bao and the Economy of Narrative It is difficult to imagine a narrative that does not involve an exchange of some object of value. Like ordinary currency, the object itself and the nature

of its value are open to all the arbitrariness of human determination; although many familiar narratives have to do with money itself or with precious goods, narrative transactions expose all sorts of other concrete and ab-

stract possessions to the logic of exchange. Narrative draws its energy from | the value of the objects exchanged. As A. J. Greimas puts it, “The various displacements of objects are alone enough to account for the organization of story [sic], with the subjects being no more than the loci of their transfer.” The Zuozhuan and Guoyu, which constitute one historically and culturally grounded type of narrative, show a preference for particular types of exchange. These exchanges, properly called bao, operate even in narratives where they are not explicitly named and provide a single model for events involving gifts, services, offenses, and even judgments and predictions. The place of bao in the economy of historiographical narrative ultimately accounts for the historiographers’ habit of explaining historical events by reference to incidents of public aesthetic judgments. ” Anecdotes that turn on a gift and its consequences are common enough in the Zuozhuan and Guoyu. We have already seen how Chu’s gift of a turtle and a duke’s perverse distribution of that gift brought mayhem to Zheng”

208 Narrative and Recompense and how the cauldron of Gao, accepted as a gift or bribe (Iu), prompted a famous remonstrance from the Lu minister Zang Aibo.” In one of the incidents preceding the great defeat of Qi at An by Jin and its allies, a Wey man rescues a high minister of his state and is offered a city as a reward; when he

requests, and is granted, the bell array and caparison frontlets that are the

| prerogative of feudal lords, the event earns the retrospective disapproval of Confucius.” A virtuous minister like Xiang Xu of Song knows to refuse an

improper gift; Wei Jiang of Jin knows the same and declines very eloquently, but is finally forced to accept his ruler’s gift of musicians and bells. King Xiang of Zhou bestows gifts on Duke Wen of Jin in recognition of the

latter’s pre-eminent status after the battle of Chengpu,” but a later Zhou ruler, King Jiing, goes so far as to demand bronze vessels as gifts from dignitaries making visits of condolence to the royal court.” Gift giving, an important element of political protocol during the Zhou, is also a major theme in narratives about the Spring and Autumn period. When a Song minister rejects, accepts, and then returns a gift of jade, the value of the original gift undergoes some typical transformations:

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Fs BU PRGAR ES BEAMS A- DARE - Ha LAB - Wt Ls yeti FPR BARE (FRABCIKS +: BinaeHeHMM _ Someone in Song had obtained a jade, which he presented to Zihan. Zihan would not accept it. The one presenting the jade said, “I have shown it to the jade workers, and they believe that it is a treasure. Therefore I presume to present it to you.” Zihan said, “I consider not being greedy a treasure; you consider the jade a treasure. If you give it to me, both of us will lose our treasures. It would be better for each of us to keep our treasures.” The man bowed his head low and explained, “With this jade in my possession, I cannot cross out of the district. I am submitting this and pleading [to avoid] death.” Zihan lodged the man in his village and had the jade workers work [the jade] for him. Once the man had become rich, [‘Zihan] had him return to his original place.

As in the better-known tale of Bian He, a private citizen seeks to present an

uncut jade as a gift to a government official.” But unlike Bian He, who wished only to give his king a treasure (and who was punished when the king’s men doubted his sincerity), the man of Song has a practical problem and an ulterior motive. Too poor to have the jade worked or unwilling to face the danger of carrying it home with him, he determines instead to use it

Narrative and Recompense 209

_ to buy the favor of the minister. The ensuing refusal prompts a very clear valuation of Zihan’s uprightness, a treasure that cannot be bought for the price of a jade.” This moment could bring the end of the anecdote; the reader might be satisfied with this simple demonstration of the minister's integrity. But the value of the jade carries the narrative forward. Zihan’s solution of the traveler’s problem turns what could have been a loss for them both (the bribe) or an unsatisfying return (the refusal) into a shared profit. Zihan, repaying the visitor's attempted gift with a liberal gift of service, displays his utter lack of greed even as the jade workers make real and useful wealth of the stone. Real wealth, as opposed to simple possession of a valuable object, includes the means (especially guards and other personnel) to transport goods without fear of theft. The importance of this anecdote and others involving gifts lies in their relatively straightforward illustration of the logic of exchange as it is construed in this type of historiography. The gift, wherever and whenever it is given, threatens to impose obligations and thus to become something other than a gift. Thucydides’ Pericles said as much in a passing observation on the Athenian character.” In the words of Marcel Mauss, the aim of the gift “is to display generosity, freedom, and autonomous action, as well as greatness. Yet, all in all, ic is mechanisms of obligation, and even of obligation through things, that are called into play.”” For Derrida, the gift is simply impossible: “For there to be a gift, it is necessary [il faut] that the donee not give back, amortize, reimburse, acquit himself, enter into a contract, and that he never have contracted a debt. .. . I{t] is thus necessary, at the limit, that he not recognize the gift as gift.””” The gift is perhaps impossible. Or, to put the case more hopefully, the gift is a deliberately isolated gesture of disinteredness that at any moment can open again to the cycles of exchange surrounding it.

On the one hand, the central ideal of the gift—that it is “free,” made willingly and without expectation of recompense—has in the early Chinese context roughly the same place it has elsewhere. “Giving,” whether it is presenting to a superior (xian), bestowing on an inferior (si), or not marked as hierarchical, is different from paying. It does not, at least initially, arise from or establish any obligation; unlike wages, it merits special note in a history. On the other hand, established notions of bao in historiography legitimate the idea of return, at least in some of its forms. The problem under these circumstances is not to preserve the realm of freedom represented by the gift

210 Narrative and Recompense

but to control the channels by which it is reciprocated and converted into other sorts of wealth. Liberality is perhaps not essential to a system of bao, since what is required is objective performances of return rather than a subjective generosity on the part of participants. Yet a ghost of the freedom of the “free” gift hovers about exchanges as an index of givers’ and receivers’ commitment to the ideal of giving and to the system of exchange itself. Grudging participation or efforts to interfere with the objects and channels of exchange signal a greedy intention that threatens to explode the provisional space of generosity and to expose all exchanges—including those of

ritual propriety—as interested transactions. |

Every gift in the Zuozhuan and Guoyu seems to belong to a larger series of exchanges, and the unconnected act of pure generosity is unknown. The best

men and women convert their receipts into virtue. Zihan refuses a gift of jade and wins, in recompense for his refusal, a profit of public incorruptibility, which he then capitalizes on by rewarding the traveler with true wealth. Although direct exchange is obstructed, moral worth and material wealth are here coordinated as measures for each other. The coordination is entirely typical of this historiography.

No gift exists without divisions. In order to be “given,” an object must cross from possession here to possession there, and the distinction between here and there must be quite clear. Since any act of giving requires this line of demarcation between donor and recipient, patterns of giving are often constitutive of individual and group identity. As the gift makes manifest the precise nature of the differences between guest and host, superior and inferior, center and periphery, or the royal Ji lineage and its marriage partners from the Jiang lineage, it also goes a long way toward defining and displaying the essence of those entities.”

The machinery of narrative resembles the dynamic of the gift in that both are dependent on divisions. For Greimas, who argues that narratives concern the transference of values, the divisions across which objects are transferred | (and without which there can be no transference) are deep-seated and can be summarized in a combinatoire of logical contradictions and contraries, the semiotic square; they are not the divisions between named actors that operate on the surface level of narrative.” Divisions on the surface level of preQin historiographical narrative, although they echo deeper levels of cultural semiosis, are a part of the spectrum in which individual moral character, social hierarchy, and regional loyalties dominate. ‘These are the divisions across

Narrative and Recompense 211 which both interpretation and gift giving take place. In the anecdote of the Chu turtle, for instance, national differences play a small role, in that the gift must come from somewhere outside the court. More important, however, is the political hierarchy, which determines the ministers’ ignorance of the gift, allows them to be disgraced, and forces them to their final act of murder. As with Zihan’s jade, narrative originates with the gift and continues until the gift’s value has undergone a series of transformations. One might conceive of —

a gift as the addition of energy to a given situation; narratives trace the

| course of changes produced by this energy. As Greimas’s work suggests, gifts are not the only transfers of value in narratives. Material exchanges are a model for acquisitions, dispossessions, and trades of a more abstract sort. Although the story of King Ling’s epiphany involves no gift in the proper sense of the word, the more general form of exchange it embodies does closely resemble the dynamics of the gift. ‘The king prides himself on his possessions and is brought down by his intemperate lust for one further possession, the poisoned gift of King Mu’s poem. The divisions that function here include the usual distinction between ruler and subject, as well as the distinctions between obscurity and openness, ignorance and knowledge, known present and unknown future. The ambitious king stands in opposition both to the traditional order and to those among his ministers who uphold that order. Zige, with his hidden scheme and his hidden knowledge of the poem, stands in opposition to the king, Crossings among the opposed camps produce the narrative: the king sub-

mits to the traditional order as Zige’s song and scheme are revealed. With- , out divisions of some sort, there is no narrative; nothing can happen when all of the dramatis personae are the same in every way. Just as a valuable object that changes hands introduces transformative en-

ergy into a previously static situation, a gift in the more general form of service is in these narratives often understood to initiate a series of exchanges that constitutes a plot. An offense, which is a disservice, entails different ac-

tions and reactions, but also brings them about as a series of exchanges. Service and disservice alike become meaningful only when they take place across divisions.

| In the following scene, King Gong of Chu (r. 590-560) converses with a noble Jin prisoner who is about to be sent home:””

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Jin returned the Chu Ducal Son Guchen and the corpse of the lianyin Xiang Lao to Chu, asking to have Zhi Ying back. At this time Xun Shou [Zhi Ying’s father] was assisting in the [Jin] center army, and so Chu granted the request. As the king was seeing Zhi Ying off, he said, “Will you hold a grudge against

me?” ,

He replied, “Our two states went to war, and through my own lack of talent and failure to fulfill my duties, I was taken prisoner. It was by the good grace of your lordship that the officials did not use my blood to consecrate their drums and that instead I am being sent home to face my punishment there. Really, I am lacking in talent; against whom should I presume to hold a grudge?” The king said, “In that case, will you consider me a benefactor?” , He replied, “As our two states make plans for the sake of their altars and seek to give comfort to their people, each restrains its passions in such a way as to accommodate the other. Both sides undo the bonds of their prisoners to establish goodwill. Our two states are establishing goodwill; ic has nothing to do with me. Whom should I presume to consider a benefactor?” The king said, “When you reach home, how will you repay me?” He replied, “I was not fit to hold a grudge and you were not fit to be considered a benefactor. Without grudge or beneficence, I do not know what I should repay.” The king said, “That may be, but you must tell me.” _ He replied, “If, through your lordship’s magical blessing, this imprisoned minister should succeed in having his bones returned to Jin so that his own duke can execute him, he will not decay even in death. If by his duke’s grace, he should be par-

: doned and returned to the duke’s minister [Xun] Shou, and if Shou should get permission from the duke to execute him before the clan, then, too, he will not decay even in death. If that is not permitted, and I am made to succeed my father in hereditary office, there to undertake affairs after him, and then lead a part of the army to rectify the borders, if I should encounter your officials there, I will not dare to evade them. I will pour out my strength even unto death and never have a divided heart; so will I complete the ritual duties of a minister. With that I will repay you.”

Narrative and Recompense 213 The king said, “It is not yet possible to contend with Jin.” He treated the man with elaborate ritual propriety and sent him home.”

The anecdote revolves around the term bao, “to repay, reward, revenge, reply.” The king begins the interview with the assumption that Zhi Ying’s captivity in Chu and this final audience will have some consequences in events. Zhi Ying denies that he will hold a grudge or feel gratitude. Like many of the model ministers in Zuozhuan and Guoyu narratives, he ostentatiously renounces all claims as an individual distinct from his official duties, and he declares that he personally has suffered no offense and enjoyed no

benefit. No service or disservice has been done him. At this point the king | makes his real interest more obvious: he would like to know how he and Chu will be repaid (bao) for what they have done for the prisoner. Zhi Ying demurs. Forced to answer, with some threat of violence perhaps implied in the king’s “must” (bi), he offers to repay the king by doing exactly what he has done hitherto: by acting in accordance with his duties, which in this case may well require him to die in battle against Chu on some later occasion. There is no personal exchange here, he claims, only the ongoing exchange of friendship and military enmity between two powerful states. Why does the king end by proclaiming Jin’s invincibility and entertaining Zhi Ying with full ritual honors? Zhi Ying has reasserted a highly valued

form of exchange that the king had neglected in his questions. The king wrongly construes Chu’s capture and repatriation of Zhi Ying as personal offense and service. He expects that some exchange has taken place and that the prisoner must intend either to take revenge or to pay a reward. By denying that he will take either course, Zhi Ying frustrates the king’s expectations and threatens the narrative itself; if there has been nothing worthy of repayment, then the motive force behind ensuing events has perhaps disappeared. But the anecdote re-establishes the model of exchange on a higher level, as Zhi Ying rejects the private division (between king and prisoner, or between Chu and prisoner) and affirms a sanctioned public division (between Chu and Jin). Now it is the king’s interest in repayment that carries the narrative forward, eliciting as a response Zhi Ying’s decorous credo, which in turn earns the king’s final reward. Like other wise observers in the Zuozhuan, the king considers a well-ordered state militarily invulnerable. Jin must be such a state if it has ministers like Zhi Ying, who prizes his duties to public order and to family above all personal gain. Therefore Zhi Ying is rewarded, both for the intellectual values he embodies and for the value that

214 Narrative and Recompense

fine ritual treatment has in relations with a powerful state. A public exchange may have replaced a proposed private exchange, but it is still possible to make wise investments. The king’s second question (“Will you consider me a benefactor?”) shows that, in the context of bao exchanges, de refers specifically to generosity and the emotions generosity inspires in its beneficiaries. One who gives a gift or favor has a de that the recipient must recognize and repay, just as one who has suffered an injury must bear a grudge (yuan) and seek revenge. Zhi Ying

might argue that this sort of de is a superfluity; what matters is the functioning of the proper machinery of exchange, not the private feelings of individuals caught up in it. But it is as superfluity that the de of exchange joins with the “virtue,” “prestige,” and “charisma” that make up the more exalted end of de’s semantic range. At bottom, de is material possession, the power to

give, and the willingness to be recognized publicly as giver.” De is also a more rarified possession, a broadly defined virtue in which what is preserved and given to others is the model of the past, with its sanctioned systems of public exchange. In Zhi Ying’s refusal of a particularist exchange, the smaller de is a foil for the greater. And this greater virtue recalls the spirit of liberal-

ity that inhabits and defines the provisional space of the true gift. For the historiographers and other Confucian thinkers, the possessor of virtue is the one who, quite apart from any hope of gain, allows his responses to be dictated by an inherited system of rules for exchange and in this way gives himself freely.

As implied in the king’s questions, bao designates not only reward but also revenge, one party’s repayment for another's disservice.” A characteristic of the Zuozhuan that troubled some readers, its inclusion of several ghost stories, is perhaps best explained in terms of bao: the ghosts are revenants.” Narratives of offense and enmity trace series of exchanges, just as narratives of gifts and services do, but the nature of the narrated acts themselves natu-

rally differs. In a passage already mentioned, Wei Qigiang of Chu gives some examples of vengeful exchanges while dissuading King Ling from humiliating his Jin visitors. Having described the ritual paraphernalia and procedures of diplomatic visits, he shows how military disasters have resulted from failures of ritual propriety:””

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| Narrative and Recompense 215 When a state is defeated, it is because it has lost this way, so that disastrous accident and chaos have arisen. After the battle of Chengpu, Jin made no preparation against Chu and was defeated at Bi. After the battle of Bi, Chu made no preparation against Jin and was defeated at Yan. Since Yan, Jin has not given up its preparations, and has even added ritual propriety and supplemented that with close relations. That is why Chu has not been able to take revenge and has instead sought marriage rela-

tions. | . | 6)

For the historiographers, as for Wei Qiqiang, ritual propriety is the standard against which offenses are to be measured and revenge justified. The cycles of revenge that involve states in recurrent battles over the course of years are explainable on the model of a ritual reciprocity.”

Just as giving inevitably prompts a response and initiates an exchange, taking has its consequences as well. One may seize a neighboring state's city or default on treaty obligations or deprive a participant in ritual of some prerogative or deny someone his share of soup. In every case historical characters (and the narrators behind them) may invoke a law of bao to explain the resulting action. But just as in the Chu king's interview with Zhi Ying, exchanges of violence tend to be resolved, under the guidance of the narrators, in higher-order exchanges controlled by ritual propriety. For Wei Qiqiang, violence begets violence, but success in battle also begets, or tends to beget, a lack of preparation that leads to failure. The cyclical exchange of violence is impeded only by ritual propriety of the sort that Jin, like the sage-kings, has shown in the management of domestic affairs and interstate relations. Chu cannot take revenge because Jin has barricaded itself behind li. Although the

violence ends, the exchange does not; ritual propriety itself involves ex-

changes referred to as bao.” |

The pattern of exchange or bao that operates in the plots of anecdotes and anecdote series in no way conflicts with the formal features of narrative. The setting or initial orientation of the anecdote typically presents both participants in a particular act of exchange and in the place where their exchange is to take place. Someone has attempted to give a gift of jade; a prisoner is to be sent back to Jin; a king thinks of humiliating official visitors. Here the divisions that are to be relevant in the plot of the narrative are marked: minister and commoner, king and foreign nobles, state and state. The middle section of the anecdote traces the transformations brought about as the energy of the original act (a service or disservice) affects the participants. Judgment, for its part, enters into the exchange both as part of _

| 216 Narrative and Recompense | the plot and as a sort of meta-narratival comment on the exchanges that make up the plot. Especially when the judgment is pronounced by a participant in or observer of events, it is often presented as the point of the anecdote: a good or evil action wins recompense in the form of praise, a predic_ tion of doom, or some other intellectual construction. Recompense may also ~ come in other forms (as King Ling’s fall comes after numerous predictions),

_ but an anecdote can be complete with only a judgment to balance the accounts by showing that some sort of payback is inevitable. Judgment can complete an exchange without being explicit; it is left to the reader to understand that Zhi Ying has acted admirably in replacing a proposed private exchange with a venerable public exchange. Historical judgment on the part of

| commemoration.” | ,

the reader is part of Zhi Ying’s reward, a bao that is built into the act of

Oe In anecdote series, the role of bao as an engine of narrative progress is | quite clear and, in certain cases, is even enunciated by characters themselves. In one of the most famous anecdote series from the narratives of the Spring

and Autumn period, Chong’er of Jin—the future Duke Wen—resides in certain states and travels through others during a long period of exile. As Chong’er travels a great circle around Jin, from Di territory, to Wey, Qi, Cao, Song, Zheng, Chu, and finally Qin, he visits the ruling elite of each state and presents himself for ceremonial treatment as scion of the Jin house and potential heir to the throne.” His tour is an odyssey of ritual propriety and bao and brings him finally to control of his homeland and hegemony over the other Zhou states. In this tightly integrated narrative, the services and disservices he experiences in the states are retold as the initiations of ex-

changes that end in the great battle of Chengpu.” : The model of exchange and recompense is perfectly explicit in Chu. King

Cheng (r. 674-626) feasts Chong’er and then asks him the same question that King Gong would ask Zhi Ying years later, and with a similar insis-

tence.” How will Chong’er repay (bao) him for his hospitality once he has triumphantly returned to Jin? Chong’er protests that Chu already has in abundance every material gift he could possibly give. The king insists: “Be , that as it may, with what will you repay me?” Chong’er promises that if their two states should find themselves at war with each other, he will retreat by three days’ march before standing to do battle. The promise is redeemed five years later, just before Chengpu.” King Cheng’s demand is perhaps inappropriate in thar, like King Gong’s, it implies a private service and a private

Narrative and Recompense 217 reward. But Chong’er does not choose Zhi Ying’s rejection of private exchange. Instead, as if to recognize that benefactors like the king will transform him from private wanderer to public ruler, he mortgages a bit of the public good: in recognition of the king’s service, he will one day, should he get the chance, temporarily blunt the force of Jin’s armies. The king's question is uncouth only in that it exposes what is implicit in all contact, violent or peaceful, between states: actions, which are displays in the public realm of the court or the battlefield, have consequences, which are

deferred in time and which follow a fundamental principle of reciprocity. Like prediction and the habit of interpretation it encourages, bao points to the diachronic implications of phenomena and sets up prospective chains of historical causation. The function of interpretation and of the heroic perspicacity of the most admirable characters is to foresee the paths of bao and to explain them in relation to proper sorts of exchange, which are epitomized in ritual propriety. ‘The ideal of ritual propriety thus accompanies reciprocation at all times. At its most successful, it abolishes pure cycles of violent re-

venge and fosters the righteous exchange of gifts, visits, and brides. At its | weakest, it is still strong enough to explain why things have gone wrong and how they can be made right.

In the culmination of the series of anecdotes concerning the rise of Chong’er, as in the series on the fall of King Ling, bao determines the nature of narrative closure. Accounts are settled, whether by revenge or by reward,

and great events are understood as the precipitations of numerous small services and disservices. For the historiographers, this was how the world worked; for us, this is how the historiographers worked. A paragraph of preparation introducing the episode of King Ling’s death lists his numerous offenses and calculates the public debt he has incurred:

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When the ruler of Chu was chief minister, he killed the grand marshal Wei Yan and confiscated his property. After he had ascended the throne, he seized the fields of Wei Ju. He transported [the people of the state of] Xuu and held Wei of Xuu hostage. Wei of Cai was a favorite of the king whose father died when the king annexed Cai; but the king left him as one of the people in charge when he went off [to

218 Narrative and Recompense Ganxi]. During the meeting at Shen the minister from Yue [Changshou Guo] was insulted. The king took [the city of] Zhongchou away from Dou Weigui and then took cities away from Chengran and made him a suburban official; Chengran of

Man thus adhered to the Duke of Cai. . _ Thus the entire Wei clan along with Wei Ju, Wei of Xuu, Wei of Cai, and Chengran of Man had all met wich ritual impropriety from the king, With the help of the families of all those who had lost their official positions, they incited the Yue minister Changshou Guo to make trouble. He besieged Gucheng and reduced Xizhou, fortifying its walls and occupying it.”

The named men are the leaders of the rebellion against King Ling, and they will seize his capital and slaughter his sons. The king has invested in his own ruin both by offending his opponents personally and by misusing them in full view of the public, which in this historiography can always be expected

to support the virtuous and the generous against the depraved and the greedy. In the absence of any law governing the behavior of a ruler, the king is indicted for offenses against ritual propriety (li), a term that the narrators distort in this case by applying it to certain events for which there could have | been no ritual guidelines. The connection between bao and ritual propriety is such that the economy of returns that operates in narrative may automatically be conceived of as a matter of ritual, even when the exchanges in question have little to do with the content of li in the strictest sense of the word.

The strict reckoning of returns in the culmination of Chong’er’s tale demonstrates again the historiographers’ interest in seeing exchanges of services and disservices (bao), defined according to li, as the true events of history. Among the masterfully presented details of the battle of Chengpu and the events leading up to it, the historiographers uphold a principle of bao, narrating many of Jin’s moves as calculated repayments of outstanding debts. Every stop on Chong’er’s itinerary during his years of exile is understood as a test of ritual propriety and the beginning of an exchange. As a principle of narrative development, the rulers who treat Chong’er well win some reward for their good services. Among the Di and in Qi, Chong’er is given gifts and wives, treated well, and permitted to stay as long as he wishes. Indeed the comfort endangers his destiny, and his retainers drag him from Qi only by getting him so drunk that he passes out. ‘The ruler of Song gives him twenty teams of horses.’? After Chong’er’s return to Jin, the Di enjoy

close relations with the new duke and keep two of his sons with them.” When Qi is menaced and Song besieged by Chu, Jin fights on his northern benefactors’ behalf.”

Narrative and Recompense 219 Shabby treatment also has consequences in the culmination of the anecdote series. In Wey, Cao, and Zheng, the rulers deny Chong’er the ceremonial treatment he merits; their behavior is marked in each case as bu li or wuli,

“ritually improper” or “without ceremony.” No details are given of the Wey duke’s behavior, but we do learn specifics of the events in Cao and Zheng.

The Cao duke, curious about a reported deformity in the traveler's ribs, commits the offense of peeking at him in the bath. Although the Zheng duke does not treat Chong’er with such obvious disrespect, he does refuse him ritual entertainment and ignores a remonstrance from his minister Shu Zhan, who cites three clear signs that Chong’er is destined for success. Zheng ends up on the losing side at Chengpu and has to make peace with Jin after the battle; Duke Wen later besieges the state for its discourtesy.”” Bao operates inexorably in the case of each of these states: every early breach of ritual propriety implies a later punishment that both chastens the wrong-

doer and repairs the fabric of interstate li. In the special case of Chu, Chong’er scrupulously honors his promise to retreat by three days’ march before giving battle at Chengpu, where his defeat of the great southern rival establishes the conditions for Jin’s hegemony.

The events surrounding the battle of Chengpu thus respond point by point to the ritual tests various rulers undergo during Chong’er’s exile. Since a narrative can be constructed only from the privileged knowledge of hind-

sight, one might say that the ritual tests of the exile period are narrated in such a way as to prefigure and justify Duke Wen’s actions during the Chengpu period. Within the overall narrative of Chong’er’s rise to hegemony, every Chinese state has its own perfectly balanced subnarrative, which incorporates and naturalizes the principles of bao and the inevitability of the li order. In narratives constructed from chains of exchanged services and disservices, interpretive aptitude—the skill that, in the view of the historiographers, defines intellectual heroism—consists in seeing each link in advance. For Shu Zhan and other interpreters, who foresee Chong’er’s triumph and attempt to prepare their rulers for the inevitable consequences of their own behavior, it is as if the battle of Chengpu has already taken place. The shape of history, with all of its particular pairings of action and reaction, is already known. A list of offenses accompanied and in part explained the culmination of the tale of King Ling. A corresponding passage near the culmination of Duke Wen’s tale condenses several conversations and events in a single an- ,

| 220 + Narrative and Recompense ecdote, explaining the victory at Chengpu and the hegemony itself as results of the correct sorts of exchanges between ruler and people:”°

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| When the lord of Jin first returned to his state and began to teach his people, he wanted to use them after two years. Zifan said, “The people do not yet understand

the right and are not yet at ease in their homes.” So he went out to restore King

ease in their livelihood. , Xiang and, returning, worked to make the people prosper. And the people were at

_ He wished to use them, but Zifan said, “The people do not yet understand good faith and do not display their use of it.” So he campaigned against Yuan to show them good faith. Those of the people who were engaged in commerce did not seek great profits and gave clear guarantees for their promises. The duke said, “Is it possible now?” Zifan said, “The people do not yet understand ritual propriety and have not yet conceived respect [for their superiors].” So he conducted a grand military review to show them ritual propriety and established the administrator to put his official ranks in order. The people took their orders without consternation. Only then did he use them. He drove away the forces guarding Gu, he lifted the siege of Song, and with one battle he became hegemon. This was the teaching of Wen.”

What Duke Wen gives is the stuff of his posthumous name: instruction in the values identified with the Zhou—good faith, ritual propriety—and an example of actual assistance to the royal court. In a reflection of the material dimensions of de, he also arranges for the economic well-being of the people; his generosity distinguishes government by ritual propriety from the avarice and cruelty with which King Ling ruled.” What Duke Wen receives in return from his people is willing submission. One senses in the conversation between the duke and his minister, and in the consequences, the most utopian ideas the historiographers held. All characters willingly accept their positions in the hierarchy; criticism passes without resistance and is heeded; gifts, public displays, and teachings have the desired transformative effect;

and the whole makes for invincible and lasting military power. In Duke Wen’s tale, more markedly than in any other anecdote series, the coherence

Narrative and Recompense 221

to do. |

of the narrative (a unity on the level of wen) re-creates the idealized concord of the well-taught state. The historiographers did what it was in their power

That so many plots in the Zuozhuan and the Guoyu are constructed on the basis of exchanges of service or disservice, with ritual propriety regularly adduced as the explanatory principle underlying such exchanges, has important consequences for the selection and presentation of historical narratives. ‘The historiographers play favorites, both in the events they choose to narrate and in the explanations they offer for these events. Often enough, ritual propriety is mentioned as the basis of the judgments toward which narratives lead the reader, as when the narrator remarks of a certain deed that “it was ritually proper” (li ye). But such explicit references barely hint at the deeper effect of assumptions about ritual propriety on the construction of narratives. The historiographers, by connecting li with the mechanics of reciprocity that forms the armature of their narratives, naturalized li as a motive of action and standard of interpretation. They made the anecdote series, with its predictions and culminations, its balanced accounts of revenge and reward, the demonstration of li at work. In this way, they secured for an abstracted concept of li all the resources of received anecdotal history, and at the same time suggested a Confucian justification for that history.

SEVEN Aesthetics and Meaning

One could categorize narratives by the things they represent as objects of repression, which are always the same things they represent as irrepressible.

For example, Freud, the inventor of the notion of the “return of the repressed,” made unresolved childhood conflicts his focus; to defend his thesis, he wrote narratives in which these conflicts are the source of the energy that drives plots forward and disrupts patients’ sanity.’ For the narrators of the Zuozhuan and the Guoys, ritual propriety is the great object of repression and the continual revenant. With some consistency, they explain disasters as the

consequences of deviation from the ritual practices of former times and summon the past to haunt the events they narrate. In these haunted narratives, the dichotomy of propriety and impropriety is set in motion by the dynamics of bao and might be envisioned as a narrative machine. The particular facts of the case are submitted to the machine, which measures the observed divergence from propriety, identifies the reactions that constitute bao, and confirms execution of a punishment. Punishment may be real and immediate, as it was for the duke of Zheng who failed to apportion a soup properly. But often it is less direct: the first response to many improprieties is a judgmental speech by an observer, who notes the problem and predicts trouble. Since the trouble may follow years of predic-

tions, as it did in the case of King Ling, these opening observations and judgments are only tokens of the final penalty. Yet they make up much of the texture of history as these narrators tell it in accounts dominated by moralism and a sense of hovering, deferred justice.

Aesthetics and Meaning 223 Because they adopted ritual propriety as their standard of judgment and explained historical events as retribution (and, less frequently, as reward),

the historiographers emphasized certain themes in their stories. Chief among these is the theme of aesthetic propriety. A great deal of attention is

, devoted in the Zuozhuan and Guoyu to the proper and improper pleasures of the ruling classes; no doubt reflecting storytelling practices in the culture around them, the historiographers tended to explain events as the results of aesthetic choices. This aesthetic orientation and the effects it has on narration are discussed in the following pages. ‘The supreme aesthetic occasion in historiography, I argue, is the banquet, which is idealized as a synaesthetic performance of shared culture. The poetry recitation, discussed in the sec-

ond part of this chapter, is the element of the banquet performance that introduces explicit reflection on Zhou culture and its validity. In the final section of the chapter, I show that the banquet ideal has force even on the battlefield, where it affects how violence and the coming of peace are represented.

Pleasures and Consequences The concept of the public image implicit in historiographical narrative—the

notion that any narratable act can be widely known and judged, and that judgments have consequences—arises from an abiding interest in observation and interpretation. It also assumes that observers, commoner or elite, will judge acts according to the standards of ritual propriety, just as the historiographers themselves did. ‘The importance of the public image is reflected in the large number of narratives that have to do with the most conspicuous kind of image making, aesthetic enjoyment. This aestheticism is absent from the Chungiu itself, and it is missing for the most part from the archaic works that the historiographers valued.” But the tradition of historical anecdote was fascinated with the precious objects and the prerogatives of the truly powerful, as later Warring States and Han

versions of Spring and Autumn history demonstrate.’ Combined, in the Guoyu and especially in the Zuozhuan, with notions of ritual propriety and recompense, aesthetic evaluation acquired a compelling explanatory force, with scores of anecdotes serving as evidence. The historiographers shared both the notion of effective public imagery and the obsession with correct aesthesis with the philosophical Confucians, who would defend these ideas

by other means.* |

224 Aesthetics and Meaning In historiography, aesthetic pleasures, sanctioned or not, can occupy any of the senses. The aesthetic assumption is so strong that the earliest philosophical passages enumerating the five senses do so with direct reference to aesthesis as a matter of pleasure and not, as one might expect, with attention to the problems of perception.’ In the anecdotes of historiography, aberrant indulgence of the senses accounts for all kinds of historical events. Given the overriding interest in observation and interpretation, it is natural that anecdotes concerning the pleasures of vision should predominate. Clothing and regalia, portable signs of their bearers’ character, are a focus of interpretive energy for historical characters and historiographers alike. — When the famous usurper Qing Feng (the same man King Ling of Chu later executes with a troublesome display) visits Lu shortly before the events that bring him to power in Qi, the very beauty of his carriages is understood as a sign of his crime and his eventual bad end; the Lu minister Shusun Bao re_ marks, “I have heard it said that “When the beauty of one’s regalia is not fitting, one is bound to come to a bad end.’” Qing Feng’s lovely carriages are representative of all the fashionable follies men stoop to in these texts.

Tellers of historical anecdotes relished stories in which the fashionconscious came to grief. Was Zizang of Zheng killed by agents of his duke while in exile in Song? It served him right, since he was fond of collecting the

feathered caps (yuguan) of astronomers, a habit that angered the Zheng ruler.” That fondness (hao), a quirky personal interest in something, is usually dangerous. Ziyu of Chu would not give up a jeweled caparison at the dream-request of the Yellow River god and lost the battle at Chengpu for his covetousness. Both Duke Xian of Wey and King Ling of Chu appear before their men in the offensive luxury of leather caps, and both lose their states.’ A good observer can foresee the demise of the lecherous lovers of the

beautiful Xia Ji of Chen when they display her undergarments in court.’ When the Wey minister Liangfu dresses in notable fashion (purple overshirt and fox cape) for a drinking party with Duke Zhuang, who has set up a “tiger tent” (huwo) for the purpose, this perceived challenge to the duke’s splendor partly accounts for Liangfu’s immediate execution.” In hindsight, misused accessories account for the decline or destruction of a whole state. A Wey duke’s obsession with cranes, observed by his peo-

ple, leads to the temporary occupation of his state by the Di.’ During a treaty meeting, Zheng lends Jin certain ceremonial feathers; when an unnamed Jin minister appears at the meeting the next day using these feathers

Aesthetics and Meaning 225 as improper decorations for a flag, the narrator is quick to judge: “With this Jin lost the allied states.” In one incident, meaningful clothing is imposed rather than chosen. Shensheng, the ducal son of Jin whose father replaces him as heir with the son of the scheming beauty Li Ji, is given a ring with a gap in it as a waist pendant and a bizarre suit divided into left and right sides of different colors; a round of intense interpretation follows, but there is no doubt that the gifts signify the end of his father’s favor and the imminence of his own destruction.” Markings that have an effect on the characters in the world of the narrative have a central place in the explanatory system used by the makers of the narrative.

Like clothing, physical beauty is a visual pleasure and, in most cases, a sign of danger. Many of the women depicted in the Zuozhuan and the Guoyu are wise and virtuous speakers, and their beauty is not a matter of concern.” Women who are represented as beautiful and desirable possessions are, by the historiographers’ account, causes of ruin for their men. Li Ji is one example of the femme fatale; in fulfillment of a divination, her influence over Duke Xian of Jin leads to years of turmoil.” Almost as famous as Li Ji is Xia Ji, the Chen woman whose lovers, a duke and two high ministers, publicized their affairs with her. The duke is killed by the woman’s offended son, and the ministers flee the state.”

Xia Ji’s tale does not end here. Even after the murder of the duke, she continues both to exert a fatal attraction on men and to serve as an explanation of events for the historiographers. King Zhuang of Chu, invading Chen after the murder of the duke, wants to take her back to Chu. A high minister of the king, Wuchen of Shen, dissuades him with a formal speech: if he takes the woman, he will have used the military efforts of his allies to satisfy

his personal lust. Next another Chu minister wants her, but Wuchen lists several men she has destroyed and asks, “There are a lot of beauties in the world; why does it have to be her?” Wuchen then goes into exile and takes the woman for himself.” Although indulging his passion removes him from his proper loyalties and involves him in an elaborate deceit, he manages to survive with her and even to prosper. He has made enemies at home, however, who kill his kin and confiscate their possessions; in revenge, Wuchen establishes ties between Jin and Wu and turns the latter into a formidable rival to Chu.” The woman’s beauty has implications for later generations as well, When Shu Xiang, scion of the powerful Yangshe line of Jin, contemplates marrying Xia Ji’s daughter, his mother warns him against the move,

226 Aesthetics and Meaning recalling all the men she has led to their deaths and reminding him of Li Ji and of the seductive creatures (youwu) who have brought down dynasties.” Shu Xiang marries the woman, and the wolf-like child she bears grows up to cause the destruction of the lineage.” Music, the art corresponding to the sense of hearing, can be a dangerous indulgence when it exceeds either musical or ritual norms. As the remarks of Ji Zha and the talents of Shi Kuang showed, music acts as a tympanum, unfailingly reflecting its national or individual point of origin.” King Jiing of Zhou displayed his insatiability by casting the Wuyi bells, which exceeded both propriety and the limits of human hearing.” Music was for pleasure, but only proper pleasure. One could enjoy music at the wrong time; one could fail to enjoy it; one could enjoy it in some changed or perverted form. A banqueter sighs when the music starts, and an observer predicts troubles to come: “The Cao heir will have sorrows: this is not the place for sighs.” The sage-kings stilled their music when carrying out punishments,” but revelers in Zheng, Jin, and elsewhere take their pleasure even when the ritual of mourning and other conditions of sorrow forbid it.” Anecdotes in which music is made the key to events usually involve misuse of otherwise unobjectionable music, but for the Zuozhuan and Guoyu, as for Confucius in the Lunyu, certain types of music—the “new music” from Zheng, the music of Sanglin, and the music of Wey—are intrinsically dangerous.” As the case of Ji Zha suggests, correct appreciation of music attests to a man’s worthiness. After the policies of Wei Jiang of Jin bolster his state’s declining power, Duke Dao rewards him with bells and female musicians. He declines at first, citing a Shi poem and urging the duke himself to make proper use of music. “By taking comfort with virtue through pleasure; by residing in it with righteousness; by performing it with ritual; by protecting it with good faith; by encouraging it with benevolence: only thus can one ‘support the states’ and ‘share the blessings and rewards’ and bring people from afar. That is what we call music.” Wei Jiang is finally made to accept the gift.

| Perhaps in view of the eloquence of the speech they have attributed to him, the narrators pronounce the gift “ritually proper,” even though the possession of such musical equipment by a ministerial family would seem to violate ritual prerogatives.” The gift presages the rise of Wei’s line as one of the three families that will displace the Jin ducal house and divide the state.” Although the historiographers do not speak of the sense of touch as we

know it, they do attend to the general desire for physical comfort. Like

Aesthetics and Meaning 227 Xunzi, they thought of comfort as a function of dwelling places, and they were especially interested in the idiosyncratic architectural choices of ordinary men and the extravagant projects of powerful rulers.” In architecture as in everything else, sumptuary standards brook no individual creativity. One of the last recorded events in the life of Duke Zhuang of Lu is his decision, fruitlessly opposed by an eloquent carpenter, to paint the pillars of his predecessor's temple red and to carve the rafters.’ Another man, Zhao Wenzi of Jin, carves and polishes the rafters of his own mansion in a fashion

reserved by ritual for the king; rebuked for his presumption by a wise visitor, | he has the workers leave the job half done and makes of the mistake a

monument to his moral transformation.”

Grandiose construction schemes, which require large labor forces mustered from among the peasantry, always threaten to poison rulers’ public repute at home and abroad. Lu ministers manage to construct the Lang garden correctly, saving the work for winter and not urging the laborers on too harshly.” But other profligate rulers build for their own pleasure and ignore the bitterness of the conscripted workers.” Bad architectural decisions, like other kinds of aesthetic missteps, can in retrospect appear to be causes or signs of death. Duke Xiang of Lu builds a Chu-style palace in the last year of his life. Citing a Shangshu passage, a high minister takes this act as a sign that the duke desires to visit Chu and states that if he does not visit Chu, he must

die in this palace. The death is narrated directly after the speech.” When Zhi Bo builds a mansion that he considers beautiful, an observer fears that it will not bring comfort to its occupant (bu an ren). The final sentence of the anecdote asserts the relevance of the project: “Three years after the completion of the mansion, the Zhi family had perished.”” Poor architectural decisions can further signal the beginning of problems for a great state. When Shi Kuang explains why stones have been heard to speak in Jin, he turns the moment into a remonstrance against Duke Ping’s construction of the luxuriant Siqi Palace, and his colleague Shu Xiang (the man whose line will be ruined by the grandson of the beautiful Xia Ji) praises him for his vision, predicting correctly that the completion of the palace will cause Jin to lose the loyalty of its client states.” The Guoyu’s account of the Zhanghua Terrace, built by the doomed King Ling of Chu, includes a major consideration of the problem of beauty and is reminiscent of notions of socially responsible aesthesis promulgated by Mencius: “In this _ thing called ‘beauty,’ those who are superior and inferior, domestic and pub-

228 Aesthetics and Meaning lic, petty and grand, and near and far all suffer no harm. That is why the thing is called beautiful.” The gustatory and the olfactory are generally treated together. Although they are called on less frequently than the visual to explain the course of historical events, even these senses figure in episodes of effective public aes-

thesis.” Fragrance is the medium by which the spirits feed on sacrifices.” The moral connotations of scent, so prominent in the southern songs later collected in the Chuci, appear at least once in the Zuozhuan, in the language of an enigmatic prophecy.”’ Without Zigong’s twitchy index finger and his desire to taste an “exotic flavor” (yiwei), Duke Ling of Zheng might have died a natural death.” Exotic food and strong drink, especially when taken in excess or at the wrong time or under privately engineered circumstances, are as dangerous as any other sort of unsanctioned aesthetic indulgence. The historiographers’ account of flavor largely disappears into anecdotes demonstrating its perils. Bear's paw, something of a delicacy,” is a risky dish: King Cheng of Chu asks for a last meal of bear's paw before his son forces him to commit suicide,“ and Duke Ling of Jin has his chef murdered for undercooking a paw

stew.” Food substitutions are forbidden. The events that lead to Qing | Feng’s exile from Qi, where he had gained control of the government, begin when his chef substitutes duck for chicken in the meals served to ministers in court.” A dying man’s request that caltrop be included among the offerings to his spirit is contravened with much assertion of sacrificial propriety.” The good man restrains his taste for the exotic and the prestigious, denying himself food inappropriate to his status, as when Yue, Duke of Zhou, refuses certain dishes—pickled rush roots (changchu), white and black grain (bohei), and salt formed into tiger shapes (xingyan)—served to him during a diplomatic banquet in Lu.” Drink has always been addictive, and these texts regularly hold drinking and drinkers responsible for deteriorations of values and outbreaks of chaos. Drinking leaves an opening for one’s enemies to move against one.” Special arrangements made for sumptuous extracurricular drinking inevitably lead to disaster, or, more accurately, are frequently pointed to as causes. The passage that narrates the fall of the powerful Zheng minister Boyou begins: “Boyou of Zheng had a taste for drink, and he made an underground room where he would drink at night while having bells struck. When morning came and he still had not finished, official visitors would say, “Where is your

Aesthetics and Meaning 229 master?’ and his men would answer ‘My master is in his ravine.’” Attacked while drunk, he does not know he has been exiled until he sobers up.”

There is more to drinking than a taste for liquor. As the central act of consumption in formal gatherings on all levels of society, drinking, with its ritual and paraphernalia, is rich in symbolic and theatrical possibilities. Restrained and ordered by shared ritual propriety, drinking gives the banquet its fundamental structure, hierarchy, and opportunities for transgression. Typical is the anecdote in which Ji Wuzi, head of the most powerful family of Lu ministers, wishes to appoint a younger son as his heir:”*

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Ji Wuzi had no son by his wife. Gongchu was the elder (of his two sons by concubines), but he was fond of Daozi and wished to appoint him. ... He consulted with Zang He, who said, “Treat me to drinking, and I will appoint him for you.”

Ji treated the ministers to drink, with Zang He as guest of honor. After the toast, Zangsun [Zang He] directed that a mat of double thickness be set at the northern end and that a new goblet be washed clean for it. Summoning Daozi, he descended to greet him, while all of the ministers rose to their feet. When it came time for the general toasts, he summoned Gongchu and had him placed on a level with the others. Jisun [Ji Wuzi] went pale.”

Given the immutable structure of the drinking ritual and his own power as guest of honor, Zang He forces Gongchu to accept a position that he him-

self must understand is inferior to his younger brother's. The father blanches because he cannot be sure that Gongchu will comply; but he does, at least while the drinking lasts. Later he resents his demotion but accepts advice to suppress his feelings and to continue to demonstrate filial respect.

As a result, his father softens the blow, again through the symbolism of drinking:”

SRS - (HRKOM- MARE: HSB - MORE: XRWRCES Delighted, Jisun had [Gongchu] invite him for drinking. He went [to Gongchu’s place] with all of his [banqueting] implements and left them all there. Thus Gongchu became wealthy, and he also became steward of the left to the duke.

Jisun makes plain his continued affection for his son by proposing and accepting the invitation to join in the ceremony of drinking, At the same time

230 Aesthetics and Meaning he turns that ceremony to a new purpose by ceding to Gongchu a considerable wealth of cups, beakers, and other utensils. Behind the discourse of the individual senses, and of taste in particular,

lies the larger topic of the banquet.” Jisun’s manipulations of the drinking | | ceremony are a useful introduction because of their foregrounding of the ritual structure of drinking, which they share with the official entertainments of diplomatic relations. ‘The diplomatic rituals, interpreted with the help of aesthetic assumptions, make for moments of extraordinary philosophical and literary richness in the course of historical narrative. In banquets, the men of different states come together in accordance with li to consume prescribed food and drink, to perform and appreciate prescribed song, music, and dance, and in this way to take a normative pleasure bequeathed to them by their sagely forebears. In like manner, the banquet brings together the resources of historiographical narrative, rhetoric, metaphor, and philosophy. From the perspective of these utopian moments of community, other events look preliminary, anticlimactic, or merely incomplete. The importance of the banquet in historical narration depends partly on its usefulness as a source of metaphors for governing, which themselves de-

pend on the aestheticization of ritual. Within this ritual a multiplicity of mutually echoing sensory experiences points beyond the occasion of the banquet to an idealized image of relations within and among states. In a masterful speech made to Duke Jing of Qi, Yanzi (Yan Ying), the wise minister of Qi remembered as a philosopher, uses elements of the banquet as figures for political difference. The duke has just returned from hunting; Yanzi is attending him at the Chuan Terrace when a certain Lianggiu Ju, styled Ziyou, rushes to join them. The duke declares, “It is Ju alone who is in harmony with me!” ME $i Ba FX Al] x.”

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-Yanzi replied, “Ju is in fact the same [as you]. How can he attain to harmony?” The ruler said, “Are harmony and identity different2”

Yanzi said, “They are different. Harmony is like a stew. Water, fire, jerky, mincemeat, salt, and plum [vinegar] are used to cook fish and meat; they are cooked over firewood; the master chef harmonizes them, bringing them into equality with

seasonings, compensating for what is insufficient and diminishing what is too

strong. [he gentleman eats it and thus calms his heart. “With ruler and subject it is the same. When there is something unacceptable about what the ruler considers acceptable, the subject reports the unacceptable to perfect the acceptability. When there is something acceptable about what the ruler considers unacceptable, the subject reports the acceptable in order to eliminate the unacceptable. In this way administration is calm and without interference, and the people lack the desire to struggle. Thus the Shi says: “There is a harmonious stew. Weare careful and calm. We advance silently; There is no struggling.’ The former kings’ adjusting of the five flavors and harmonizing of the five tones was for the calming of hearts and the completion of administration. “Sounds are just like flavors. The single breath, the two forms, the three genres, the four materials, the five tones, the six pitches, the seven notes, the eight airs, the

nine songs: these are used to complete one another. The clear and the muddy, the small and the large, the short and the long, the presto and the adagio, the somber and the joyous, the hard and the soft, the delayed and the immediate, the high and the low, the going out and coming in, the united and separate: these are used to complement one another. The gentleman listens to it and thus calms his heart. “When the heart is calm, the virtue is in harmony. Thus the Shi says: “The sound of his virtue is unblemished.’

“Now Ju is not like this. What you, the ruler, consider acceptable, Ju also says is acceptable. What you consider unacceptable, Ju also says is unacceptable. If you were to complement water with water, who could eat it? If the zithers and dulcimers were to hold to a single sound, who could listen to it? This is how identity is unac-

ceptable.””° |

It is, by the rhetorical standards introduced at the beginning of this study, a virtuosic performance, featuring a deft numerical arrangement of musical terminology, the familiar balancing of opposed extremes, the naturalization

, 232 Aesthetics and Meaning of hierarchical difference in the example of food and music, and the implicit defense of critical oratory, in which exemplary characters like Yan Ying himself excel.

Synaesthesia, fundamental to the thematic of the banquet, here becomes | a principle of organization. Every person’s enjoyment of food and music or their metaphoric equivalent, government, depends on mixtures of qualities within the same objects. More important, the pleasure produced by good mixture in a single object is transferable to another object, whether by metaphor in the texture of the speech or by mysterious effect in the texture of government. This synaesthesia starts from Yan Ying's first Shi citation, where the peaceful cooperation of the worshippers and banqueters is a reflection of the “harmony” of the stew they have offered and will consume. The first half of Yanzi’s speech has perhaps been designed to make prosaic sense of these four lines.

The single line of citation that follows the section on music involves a similar synaesthesia, here based on the reanimation of a dead metaphor. “The sound of virtue” (deyin) means “reputation,” but placed at the end of Yanzi's analysis, it recovers its literal meaning and a corresponding distance from the metaphor of jade implicit in the term “unblemished” (bu xia).”” But the perfection of structure, in which hierarchically distinct elements combine peacefully, overcomes differences in object and medium. Even without a discussion of the quality of jades used in sacrifice or worn as ornaments, the total material and customary reality of the feast—the room, the seating arrangements, the clothing, the goblets and dishes, the music, the dancing, the toasting—is implicated in the speaker’s vision, with metaphorical connec-

tions extending beyond the feast to court and the government of state and empire.” These connections may also extend to the level of wen, where the composition of speeches and narratives—the historiographers’ own craft— involved the creation of verbal and musical harmonies.” Other discussions of the banquet idealize the political effectiveness of ritual divisions and synaesthesia. King Ding of Zhou explains why different

cuts of meat are used in the sacrifices accompanying banquets with Rong and Di tribes, with feudal lords, and with the ministers of states:

ARON ee RA BAHA- NMBICR he rIR- ARMAS: MRA: A

‘KAR Leib: Ae e- ARR: KYA: MA ee AA Oo) 34° HIE i ee -

Aesthetics and Meaning 233 Clothing and accoutrements exhibit achievements; colors and decorations display brightness; form and pattern together make images; ceremonial movements bring order to compliant gestures; appearance has its grandeur; dignity and deportment have their models; the five flavors give the spirit substance; the five colors make pure the heart; the five sounds illustrate virtuous attainment; and the five relations regulate appropriate behavior. When food and drink make for enjoyment of the feast, when harmony and unison can be remarked, and when resources and expenditures can be lauded, models are followed and virtuous attainment is established.

Here the perfection of li lies in the proper stimulation of the senses with specified objects and at designated times to maintain the signs of virtue and power: this is what was valued by “the ancients who exalted li.” In another case, Zitaishu of Zheng is called on to define li against mere

“deportment” (yi):

SUMBLAKF ED RM RLM WEA REGH Rik

Ce: MBA AKC AMWZeH- ERKR: RRDTI: ARB LR: BRAGA BRAB- GBGHBA- RABE - EMBL 2° BANB: AP SR. UBAR- BUMS AR: AS UAL

LE LS ES AR DRE.

I heard our former minister Zichan say that “ritual is the warp of Heaven, the rightness of the earth, and the conduct of the people.” It is the warp of Heaven and earth, and people do make it their model. Thus the illumination of Heaven, following on the innate qualities of earth, gives birth to the six ethers. Using their five phases, the ethers become the five flavors, are sent forth as the five colors, and are patterned as the five tones. With excess they become disordered and chaotic, and the people lose their innate qualities. Thus ritual was made to support them: there were the six domestic animals, the five victims, and the three sacrifices to support the five flavors. There were the nine weave-patterns, the six color-mixtures, and the five color-patterns to support the five colors. There were the nine songs, the eight airs, the seven tones, and the six pitches to support the five notes.”

The speech’s synaesthetic sweep and its artful comprehension of the several senses establish the banquet as the best example of li at ics height. The five flavors, the five colors, the five sounds, sacrificial animals and patterns in cloth, hierarchical relations and seasonal duties, are central to the li that operates in the state at large and preserves peace between the people and their rulers. But this vision of the state and of the place of li in its administration begins in the aesthetic experience of the banquet, where all the objects and

234 Aesthetics and Meaning senses are concentrated. In the banquet, aesthesis is at its most effective: every act and every actor is polysemous, representing distant regions, constituencies, times, and moral attainments in the pellucid visibility of the dining hall, where competence and bungling alike are sure to find qualified

the banquet.” ,

interpreters. The principle of effective imagery lies at the heart of the ideal of

Poetry Recitation Accounts of diplomatic and military encounters frequently include passages

of highly stylized speech; moments of drama among states, like crucial meetings within a state, are occasions for the most formal expressions and, at times, for the wittiest.™ Perhaps the most prestigious linguistic and aesthetic

activity associated with the banquet is the recitation of poetry. In the performance for Ji Zha, discussed in Chapter 2 (pp. 86-95), poetry, music, and dance were media for the expression of historical and regional temperaments. Compared with more typical scenes of recitation, however, that scene was a decontextualization. When rulers and ministers of the states recite poems from the Shi for one another on formal occasions of diplomatic entertainment, the significance of individual poems is determined not by gener-

alities of the sort Ji Zha proposed but by the particulars of historical circumstance.” Since the narratives ordinarily presume that the reader is as qualified an audience for the recitations as the participants are, the relevance of poems or stanzas chosen for recitation has been the subject of investigation in the commentarial tradition. If someone fails to understand the import of a recitation or if there are predictions to be made based on reciters’ performances, then there may be some comment within the text. But as often as not, only the fact of recitation is mentioned, without narrated consequences, and the titles of the poems are made to speak for themselves. For the purposes of Zuozhuan narrative, and perhaps in the minds of Warring States thinkers, the recitation of poetry was the most common and generally available expression of Zhou cultural unity. As one speaker puts it, commenting on the correct use of a recitation in a banquet, “The poem is that by which intentions are joined; the song is that by which the poem is

intoned” 24 AR DL ER - BP Dk Se th” By recitation, the representatives of separate states demonstrate their conviction that peaceful contacts between the states will always involve men who know both their poetry and

Aesthetics and Meaning 235 the hermeneutic conventions of ceremonial communication. Banquet recitations are designed as a game or a test: given the many things that divide individuals and states, and given the distance between the words of the poems and their referents in the here and now, each participant must establish an unspoken, shared understanding—a sensus communis—with the others. Bao, too, has its place in scenes of recitation, since participants normally recite in expectation of an appropriate response. But like other sorts of scenes, recitations take on a narrative aspect because of the built-in necessity of inter-

pretation and the judgment that results. Recitations can make for selfsupporting anecdotes, and they contribute to anecdote series, particularly when someone's performance occasions a prediction. Often they signify the

successful maintenance of ritually correct reciprocity between states. At times they come near the culmination of a series of anecdotes and bring an end to division and a reassertion of community among allied states.”

Two of the more interesting scenes of poetry recitation come after the meeting at Guo, an important diplomatic occasion to which we will return in the next chapter. At Guo, Jin allowed the treaty of Song to be renewed and for a second time yielded priority to Chu; here, too, several observers predicted that Prince Wei of Chu would soon make himself king. As often, the meeting of the states is an occasion for feasting and for poetry recitation. Zhao Meng (Zhao Wu, Zhao Wenzi), the representative of Jin and leading administrator of the northern alliance, is the focus of attention in the narra-

tive of the meeting, largely because of the drama that unfolds in the recitations.

In a first exchange of poems, the Chu prince recites the first stanza of “Great Brightness,” and Zhao Meng responds with “Diminutive.”” The prince's selection, the second in a set of poems associated with King Wen, tells of the birth of the king and of his son King Wu and ends with the morning of the decisive battle with Shang forces. The first stanza, without naming either of the kings, speaks of brightness here on earth and in Heaven above, notes the changeability of Heaven's mandate, and introduces the fall of the Shang. The ambition implicit in the prince’s choice is not lost on the

Jin delegation; when the ceremony is over, Zhao Meng’s colleague Shu Xiang, speaking of the recitation, delivers one of the Zuozhuan's many predictions of King Ling’s rise and fall. Zhao Meng, for his part, seems to have responded to the prince’s ambition in his own recitation. The second stanza of “Diminutive” reads:

236 Aesthetics and Meaning

KEE The man who is wise ar wa A oe Drinks spirits moderately and with restraint. qe ES AN El] He who is benighted and does not know

SMA Only gets drunk, and day by day grows more extravagant. & aN Bet (Fs Let every man respect his own deportment:

Kan XM Heaven’s command does not lend help.

The last lines speak directly to the prince’s contemplated usurpation, particularly because the word “deportment” (yi) recalls the long speech on weiyi

delivered by Beigong Wenzi, the Wey minister who had observed the prince’s improper use of certain royal emblems.” The other lines, too, may be taken as an indirect remark on the ambitions of the prince, who is characterized throughout as overreaching and extravagant.

The prediction guides our reading of the traded recitations. What is veiled in the plain narration of the recitation scene is made clear in the analy-

sis: not only does the prince take himself for a king, but he does so in violation of the conservative principles underlying recitation practice. His pre-

sumption in using this poem for recitation and in his adoption of other perquisites of the king is a sign both of his coming rise and of his ultimate fall. As judgment becomes prediction, however, the diplomatic function of banquet recitation is denied. The prince and the Jin minister communicate in the same ceremonial language of poetry, but they speak at cross-purposes, the prince proclaiming himself king and the minister urging him not to. No sensus communis is achieved, perhaps because the prince’s own trajectory is taking him toward an ignominious suicide and will never allow him to appear as a master of ritual. Immediately after this scene of unsatisfactory recitation, the Zuozhuan presents a vision of recitation as it should be. Zhao Meng and ministers from Lu and Cao are feasted by Duke Jian of Zheng (r. 565-530), in whose territory the treaty meeting was held. Although the thematization of coding and decoding is the same in this and the previous scene, recitation here is a

different sort of activity:” :

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RZB ORR RRR ARTEA- Reh RHR - JOA: iB HBAS GKRAE- EMM RR- HRA HA He MR e-A-/)\ABE- AN BamhMAZ HRB: +S RRP ate

| Aesthetics and Meaning 237 AS -HRRRR- BA - SREKUA- Cw ERK: BM. +R

RSKAB A. BURA) - HAARRR- RES: ha HAs BABI In summer, in the fourth month, Zhao Meng, Shusun Bao [of Lu], and a minister of Cao went into the Zheng [capital], where the lord of Zheng feasted them all together. Zipi [of Zheng] reported to Zhao Meng, who recited “Calabash Leaves.” Zipi then went to report to Mushu (Shusun Bao] and told him what had happened. Mushu said, “Zhao Meng wants only one toast. Do as he wishes.”

Zipi, “Do we dare?” |

Mushu said, “It is what he wants. Why should you not dare?” At the time of the feast, they readied the vessels for the five toasts behind a cur-

, tain. Zhao Meng declined them and privately told Zichan, “I have already made my request to the [Zheng] minister.” So they made only one toast. Zhao Meng acted as the guest. When the ceremony was over, they had the banquet. Mushu recited “Magpie’s Nest.” Zhao Meng said, “I am not worthy.”

(Mushu] then recited “Gathering Artemisia,” saying, “The small state is the artemisia. The great state uses it sparingly. Is this not the command?” Zipi recited the last stanza of “In the Wilds There Is a Dead Deer,” and Zhao Meng recited “The Wild Plum,” saying, “If we brothers join together for peace, then we can keep the dog from howling.” Mushu, Zipi, and the Cao minister rose, bowed, raised their goblets, and said, “The small states rely upon you and know that they will be delivered from violence.”

They drank the spirits and took their pleasure. When Zhao Meng exited, he said, “I will never do this again.”

The recitation begins before the banquet, as part of the preparations. That is, the privileged status of Shi poetry as an instrument of ceremonial communication is presumed to extend beyond the confines of the banquet hall itself. But Zipi’s failure of the test shows the tensions in the use of this special language. By reciting “Calabash Leaves,” Zhao Meng advises Zipi to prepare a banquet as humble as the one in the poem, in which gentlemen dine on gourd leaves and roasted rabbit while they drink. Instead of the large number of dishes and toasts that ritual might require on an occasion of this sort, Zhao Meng wants the very simplest sort of banquet. Although Mushu reads the recitation correctly, Zipi is torn between the official requirements of li and Zhao Meng’s own wishes. Prolonged until the time of the banquet itself, this uncertainty disrupts the perfect communication of the occasion. Zhao Meng must privately explain the import of his preliminary recitation.

238 Aesthetics and Meaning The need for explanation foregrounds the difficulty of poetic exchange; the meaning of singing is not self-evident but requires negotiation. Even among the central states and even at a moment of high ceremony, the cultural legacy is a challenge and a cause for care. Mushu of Lu begins the banquet recitation proper with “Magpie’s Nest,” a poem in three stanzas. As in many poems, the first stanza sets a pattern that is varied only in the rhyme words of the remaining stanzas:

ie He ES The magpie has a nest: WE ua Fe The pigeon occupies it.

ZF bs This child goes to her place BmAZw With a hundred carriages to meet her. The poem has been understood since before the Han as a celebration of a new bride. In the Mao tradition, the first two lines are taken as a xing, or “stimulus”: starting from the image of a bird that occupies a nest prepared by another bird, we are to reflect on the noble bride, who goes to fill the place

made for her by the virtuous lord.” However the first couplet is related to the second, the internal evidence of the Shi makes it likely that this poem was understood to have something to do with the bridal procession.”

What makes the poem suitable for Mushu’s recitation before Zhao Meng? Among the explanations commentators have proposed, the best notes that Zhao Meng has just pardoned Mushu for a crime that the state of Lu committed before the meeting. In his poem, then, Mushu figures Zhao Meng as a personal protector.” The terms of Zhao Meng’s rejection of the recitation suggest that this | reading is slightly better than the others. He speaks for himself only: “I, Wu, am not worthy.” In reciting poems, ministers communicate as representatives of their states, not as individuals sepa-

rate from their offices. Zhao Meng, who in the matter of the toasts and in | one other episode professes himself unworthy of the ceremony his office — merits, guards against any hint of aggrandizement for himself and rejects the poem that might allow such an interpretation.” The poem Mushu chooses instead is perhaps free of connotations of personal praise, and to make certain, Mushu adds a footnote of interpretation to his recitation.” The first stanza of “Gathering Artemisia” reads:

FDR Where do we gather the artemisia?

FB Fk In marshes, on islets. FDA Z Where do we use it? ANA HZ. In the business of dukes and lords.

Aesthetics and Meaning 239 The second stanza is similar, but the third and final stanza departs from the pattern: AN OZ. {ei fe With ample headdress, PA AL4EZ = Morning and night we are in [the service of] the duke. ARE SZ. TS TS With grand headdress,

je = ie Ba We return to our places.” For several reasons the poem is a suitable choice. In our version of the Shi, it comes directly after “Magpie’s Nest,” and there is reason to believe that the sequence of the poems has been stable since before the composition of the Zuozhuan.” The mention of gui, “going” or “returning” to one’s proper place,

preserves the notion of bridal returning that was introduced in “Magpie’s Nest” with the formulaic line “This child goes to her place.” Finally, the first two stanzas, with their simple depiction of the harvesting of plants to be used _ in sacrifice, guide the shared interpretation of this recitation and this banquet. Mushu determines the reception of his poem in the comment he makes after his recitation. By artemisia he means the small states, like his own state of Lu, and the great states who make frugal use of these resources are represented in the poem as dukes and lords with their own ritual business. This choice of poem and this constraint of interpretation rigorously exclude the

personal aspect in “Magpie’s Nest” that troubled Zhao Meng. Despite the typical openness of the Shi text, “Gathering Artemisia” cannot be made to refer to Zhao Meng’s service to Mushu. Nor, given Mushu’s exegesis, does it make any obvious reference to the current threat from Chu and Jin’s role as

protector. Instead, the text and the occasion of its recitation are abstracted from all but the most formalized version of current events: we are meeting here and now as small states should always meet with the great states that are their leaders.

The next stage of recitation affirms this abstraction. Zipi of Zheng chooses “In the Wilds There Is a Dead Deer,” a poem that appears to recount the presentation of a wooing gift—a deer wrapped in grass—to an eligible girl. He recites the last stanza: €> rity Het Ait Slowly, now, and go gently:

4HF Ja FY it ‘Don’t touch my sash.

fe (TZ 41, Don't make the dog howl. His choice makes for what is surely one of the strangest speech acts in the whole of the Zuozhuan.”’ The sexual mores of the newly betrothed are hardly

240 Aesthetics and Meaning

an issue in historiography, but this moment of direct address, when the bride-to-be restrains the passions of her wooer, at first seems somehow out of place at a formal banquet. On the other hand, that initial surprise seems to be the point of the gesture. It appears to have been part of the game of recitation to accept the challenge, to recognize the metaphorical possibilities in the recited lines, and to recuperate them for the propriety of the moment. Even wooing poems and the words of a maiden could be made to speak about the relations among the great states. Zhao Meng rises to the challenge, reciting “The Wild Plum” (Mao 164), a poem variously attributed to the Duke of Zhou or the later Duke Mu of Shao and frequently cited in Zuozhuan, always for its theme of brotherhood.** The comment he makes after finishing his recitation suggests that he is stressing the fourth and fifth of the seven stanzas: Of BB al FS Brothers wrangle within their own walls AN. 8 Et FE while warding off offense from without. +3 7 ES AA There may be fine friends 7 +1, HE FY who bring no help Be SL Ba Me After the trouble has settled,

By A ae when there is peace and tranquillity, me a bd oS Although there are brothers, AN A 7% FE they are not as good as friends.

These lines contrast the dependable affection of brothers with the fickle af-

| fection of friends, who cannot be relied on in times of trouble, even though | one seeks them out during times of peace. Zhao Meng takes up the notions of peace and fraternity, linking these with terms from Zipi's recitation: “If we brothers join together for peace, then we can keep the dog from howling”

EU IE LAE + 1B th 8) fe HE OK. With this pronouncement, the erotic imagery of Zipi's poem disappears into the theme of brotherhood, and the latter loses its specific familial meaning and becomes the customary metaphor for the relations among states. Zhao Meng translates the veiled intents of recitation into a single prosaic message, the result both of the shared recitation and of his own authoritative interpretation. This dissolution of various types of particularity in the general theme of political order is the point of this and other occasions of recitation. Like all meetings, this one has the purpose of reaffirming the separate states’ distinct places in a system of relations governed by li. Li is the inevitable endpoint of

Aesthetics and Meaning 241 the narrative progress, as Zhao Meng summarizes the recitations and the other ministers pledge to rely on the minister of Jin as a bulwark against violence. Despite this orientation toward li, the anecdote does not unfold without complication. Recitation depends on individual choice: for this part of the banquet, ritual prescribes the practice of recitation but not the exact content. Further, the message of recitation can be blocked or rejected, and it

sometimes needs restatement, interpretation, and combination with other , messages. Although they are performances of a culture that is supposed to be common to all possible reciters, recitations nevertheless require a marked self-consciousness, which tends to draw attention to the problem of a shared culture. Anecdotes of recitation, as a major genre of narratives concerning interstate diplomacy, are well represented in this example. What sets this recitation apart from others is its ending, which creates

complex connections with surrounding narratives. As strange as Zhao Meng’s rejection of the five toasts, ritual prerogatives of his office, is his final statement: “I will never do this again.” It is as if the accord of the ministers,

crystallized in Zhao Meng’s own statement on brotherhood, has been achieved in spite of the personal fate that awaits him. But the prediction itself is opaque: is he vowing never to undertake such an entertainment, or, as commentators suggest, does he not expect to live to enjoy this pleasure again? The latter reading is supported by ensuing anecdotes, which include

more than one prediction of Zhao Meng’s death. Zhao Meng bears the signs of his own doom, and they are visible to a representative of the king, to

a Qin minister in exile, to a Qin doctor, and to Zhao Meng himself.** At times these signs look like moral failings: certainly for Duke Ding of Liu, who feasts Zhao Meng at the king’s behest, the Jin minister's extreme selfdeprecation, along with his claim that he is unable even to plan from day to day for his state, betray a kind of resignation, an abandonment of his duties

to the spirits and the people. For the doctor who gives Zhao Meng the ultimate diagnosis, the case is more complicated. The doctor has been summoned from Qin not for Zhao Meng, who is not ill, but for the duke of Jin, who has been made sick by his passion for concubines of his own surname. The imbalance of the duke’s desires and the effects on his health are detailed in tour de force diagnostic speeches by Zichan of Zheng and by the doctor. As it turns out, the duke will not die for his improprieties, but the force of the sickness will strike down one of his good ministers:*’

242 Aesthetics and Meaning |

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Zhao Meng asked (the doctor), “Which good minister will it be who dies?” He replied, “Ie will be you, sir. You have been chief minister for Jin for eight years now. There is no turmoil in Jin, and none of the allies have failed you: that is what makes you good. “I have heard that the great ministers of a state glory in favor and emoluments and take responsibility for its great affairs. When some catastrophe arises, if they don’t make changes, then they must suffer the consequences. “Now the duke has become ill by plunging himself into lasciviousness and cannot consider the state's altars. What catastrophe could be greater? You, sir, have been unable to prevent it. That is why I say what I do.”

Zhao Meng dies at the end of the year.’ That he dies of the duke’s illness and that medical diagnosis can cross from the bodily to the political signify both the measuring of aesthetic enjoyment (the duke’s sexual life) against ritual requirements and the subordination of quasi-scientific knowledge to the order of ritual. In the doctor’s pronouncement, Zhao Meng’s personal characteristics are measured against and contrasted with the obligations of his office. As the treatment of aesthetic pleasure suggests, character in the Zuozhuan and Guoyu emerges from the contrast between individual predilection and external expectations. Poetry recitation, as a ritually prescribed choice of individual expression, is a normative way of revealing character. In the case of King Ling of

Chu, for instance, the effect of character was produced through the regular marking of the king’s flagrant violation of ritual restraints, and his presumptuous choice of “Great Brightness” on an occasion set aside for ritualized personal expression was in keeping with the other anecdotes told about him.

The strange circumstances surrounding Zhao Meng’s last poetry recitation also help to create a character who fits the known events of history. All things considered, Zhao Meng has been highly successful as administrative leader of the northern alliance: as the doctor says, he has presided over eight

| good years despite the power of Chu. Yet historiographical understanding required that the death of this man be intelligible and significant, and it is probable that the depiction of his character was guided by this requirement. In the midst of strenuously correct ritual performances, especially during the

banquet where the states perform their cultural kinship, the historiogra-

Aesthetics and Meaning 243 phers’ account would have inserted a flaw. Zhao Meng led the allies well and adhered to li, but the record now shows that in the last year of his life he lost his resolve and could neither correct his duke’s excesses nor fully perform

the ritual duties of his own office. The creation of the flawed character solves a conceptual problem. Why did the duke not die for his own sins, as other rulers did? Why, when his administration had been good, did the chief minister become a scapegoat? The insinuation of personal details into the accounts of ritual activity during this final year answers these questions. Character is created not for its own sake or for its own coherence but as an adjunct to the general project of narrative, which vindicates li. The pattern will be repeated in the narrators’ handling of the rising power of Chu and Wu. If aesthetic assumptions operate at so great a depth that they can in some

measure account for the ubiquitous theme of the effective image and for such specific type-scenes as poetry recitations, then it is not surprising that they enter into the combination of anecdotes and construction of narratives by which history is unfolded in writing. As a moment of synaesthetic and social fusion, the banquet is the most revealing image of the narrative concordance that brings the disparate elements of a story together and sets them off as a unit distinct from surrounding material.” In narratives of improper pleasure, the story is complete when the consequences of the misstep have been narrated in full; the plot is constructed from the destructive and dissociative effects of the impropriety. Narratives of proper pleasure, which are

on the whole much rarer, proceed from disunity to unity and sometimes culminate in feasting and recitation, the most exalted of all aesthetic activities. For both types of narratives, the banquet ideal sets the terms of concord by glorifying the shared cultural heritage of the central states and suppress-

ing differences among them. | War and the Utopian Gesture

The pervasiveness of Zhou cultural ideals is most apparent in battle narratives, for which the Zuozhuan is famous. Whereas banquets usually mark the end of a period of strife or signal the continuation of a period of concord, there are a few episodes in which the rich symbolism of the banquet embraces even the vicissitudes of political history, including war. The most striking dramatizations of the synaesthetic vision take place on the battle-

field.*” |

244 Aesthetics and Meaning

When the Jin minister Xi Zhi makes an official visit to Chu, he and his hosts have cause to examine in detail the relation between banqueting

and war: |

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Xi Zhi of Jin went to Chu on a diplomatic mission and to attend the making of a covenant. The Chu ruler [King Gong] feasted him, with Zifan [Prince Ce] assisting him. They had built an underground room with bell-racks in it. When Xi Zhi was about to climb the steps, the music of the metal [bells] sounded below, and he ran out In surprise. Zifan said, “It is late in the day and my lord is waiting. Please enter.” The guest said, “The lord does not forget the good relations between our former rulers but repays generously even this lowly minister, bestowing upon him a great ritual and adding to it full musical accompaniment. If by the blessing of Heaven our two rulers should meet, with what will we replace this? This lowly minister cannot

so presume. Zifan said, “If by Heaven's blessing our two rulers should meet, it will be for the sake of gracing each other with an arrow. What use will they have for music? My lord is waiting. Please enter.”

The guest said, “If they should entertain each other with an arrow, it will be a great disaster. In what sense will that be a blessing? In the administration of the world, the feudal lords pay court to one another in the leisure left after their duties to the Son of Heaven. For this purpose they have banquets and feasts. With banquets they inculcate reverence and frugality; with feasting they demonstrate kindness and generosity. With reverence and frugality they implement ritual, and with kindness and generosity they spread abroad their administrative control. Admin_ istration made complete by ritual: in this the people take their ease. The hundred

Aesthetics and Meaning 245 officials attend to their business, visiting court in the morning and not in the evening. And this is how the ruler of a state ‘defends and walls about’ his people. Thus the Shi says:

‘Robust is the warrior, . Rampart and wall to his lord.’

, “In chaotic times, the feudal lords, greedy and ambitious, brook no restraint to their desire for conquest, but fight over yard and cubit and thus exhaust their people. They choose their warriors and make them into their own vitals, limbs, claws, and teeth. Thus the Shi says: ‘Robust is the warrior, The vitals of his lord.’ When the world has the way, the rulers of states can ‘defend and wall about’ their people and put in place their ‘vitals.’ In chaos the opposite holds. “Now what you have said is the way of chaos, and cannot be taken as a norm. But you are the host; how should I presume not to comply?” Wich that he entered and completed the business. On returning, [Xi Zhi] related the matter to Fan Wenzi. Wenzi said, “Lacking

li, chey must eat their words. Our death might come any day!””” | As is often the case in diplomacy and war, the ceremonial language used here is oblique and metaphoric. War, always a possibility between these, the two greatest states of the period, is summed up in a single arrow (yi shi). In the image of the rulers presenting an arrow to each other as if it were a gift, Zifan means to say that since the rulers of these states will never meet except on the battlefield, they are entitled to confer the honor of full ritual enter-

tainment on the diplomatic substitutes they send back and forth. For the Chu minister, then, the accommodation of Chu king and Jin duke within a single banquet is inconceivable, and this physical manifestation of peaceful relations between the states must take place by proxy. But for Xi Zhi, whose longer last word identifies him as the authority in this anecdote, the possibility of that meeting is irrelevant, and the ritual appropriate to rulers is not transferable to men occupying lower positions in the hierarchy. Especially important is the transition he makes next, from the symbolic effectiveness of the banquet in governance to the organization of a centrally controlled army. This second half of the speech is less clearly ordered than other Zuozhuan speeches; the terms borrowed from the two cou-

plets seem to characterize both well-governed and chaotic ages, and the proper role of warriors is poorly defined. But Xi Zhi makes it certain enough that war, a result of territorial acquisitiveness, arises as an alternative

246 Aesthetics and Meaning | to li (and specifically to the li of banquets) when the latter has failed. The problem that underlies the whole speech is that of the suitability and status of the noble (minister or warrior) as a substitute for the ruler. The theme of the substitute, important in subtle ways throughout the texts, acquires greater intensity in passages that develop the common ground of feasting and warfare.” In the ideal principles of political organization, the world has not multiple governments but a single government, which is perfectly intelligible in its hierarchical order. Compatible structures take precedence over the individuals who embody them. Duke Wen of Jin prepares to boil alive a Zheng minister for the offenses his state committed against the

duke during his period of exile. Shu Zhan of Zheng, the minister who has volunteered as scapegoat, speaks from the cauldron. He first recalls how he counseled his ruler against mistreating Chong’er and then declares that the wisdom of his past advice is to be matched by his present loyalty, as he prepares to save his state by accepting death. Unmoved, Duke Wen starts the cauldron boiling, Only then does Shu Zhan prop himself on the lip of the

cauldron and condemn all good ministers to his own fate, shouting: “Henceforth let all who serve their lords with wisdom and loyalty be treated as I am now.” The duke frees him, treats him with generous ritual, and returns him to his home.” Shu Zhan has invoked the timeless and ubiquitous consistency of the official order, in which the duke’s treatment of powerless foreign ministers must affect his relations with his own ministers. Like other wise men turned

into the victims of perverse sacrifice, Shu Zhan wins by his words both his own release and victory over a more general danger. What he wins by his voluntary substitution is not rain—as in the folk-tale motif and in the practice of shamans—but a metaphorical transformation of rain: generous ritual treatment at the hands of the new hegemon.™” One suspects that in the imagination of the historiographers this generosity took the form of a banquet, in which the cauldrons would contain the normal cuts of meat and pleasures would not be vengeful. A similar scene is woven into the narrative of Jin’s victory over Qi at An. The highly ceremonial language of challenges and taunts sometimes takes on a kind of irony when violence is imminent, but there are a number of examples of truly gallant ceremony in the field, where language and gestures point to a future beyond battle. ‘The impetus for Jin’s campaign comes in this case

from the noble Xi Ke: during a visit he made to Qi, Duke Qing of Qi

| , Aesthetics and Meaning = 247 (r. 598-582) hid his mother behind a curtain at court and allowed her to snicker at Xi Ke’s lame gait.” Now, allied with Lu forces, the Jin army sweeps into Qi, pushing the Qi army back to An, where the decisive battle takes place. Here there is a chariot chase and an exemplary substitution:™

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Han Jue of Jin dreamed that Ziyu [his father] spoke to him, saying, “On the morrow beware the left and right!” So he stood in the center of the chariot as he drove in pursuit of the lord of Qi. Bing Xia [driver of the Qi duke’s chariot] said, “Shoot the one driving: he is a gentleman.” The duke said, “It would not be ritual propriety to recognize him as a gentleman and then to shoot him.” He shot the man on the left (of Han Jue’s chariot), who fell under the car. He shot the man on the right, who died in the car.

Qiwu Zhang [of Jin], having lost his own chariot, pursued Han Jue, saying, “Please allow me to ride with you.” When [Qiwu Zhang] stood on the left or the right, [Han Jue] elbowed him away, forcing him to stand behind him.

Han Jue bent down to secure [the dead man on] the right. [Just then,] Feng Choufu traded places with the [Qi] duke. Just as they were about to reach the spring of Hua, the trace horses got tangled in the brush and stopped. [Earlier,] | Choufu had been sleeping in an auxiliary cart when a snake appeared from beneath it and struck him on the arm. Injured, he had hidden the fact and was unable to push the [Qi duke’s] chariot; thus they were caught. Han Jue grasped the reins in front of the horses and bowed low twice, presenting a goblet with a jade disk in it. Advancing, he said, “Our lord, sending his ministers to make a request on behalf of Lu and Wey, said, ‘Let not your army stumble into the territory of the [Qi] lord.’ It was my ill fortune that when I faced the lines of battle, there was no place for me to flee and hide. I feared that by bolting and evading, I would bring disgrace to both lords. As a lowly soldier, I confess my obtuseness; I will take the place of your officer to replace what is lacking.”

248 Aesthetics and Meaning Choufu had the duke descend and go to the spring of Hua to get [water to] drink. Zhoufu of Zheng, driving an auxiliary chariot with Wan Fei on the right, carried the lord of Qi to safety.

Han Jue presented Choufu. When Xi Xianzi was about to execute him, [Choufu] cried out, “Henceforth there will be no man who will endure hardship as a substitute for his lord. There is one such man here: will you execute him?”

, Xi Zi said, “It would be inauspicious for me to execute a man who does not find it hard to die for his lord’s safety. I will pardon him to encourage those who serve their lords.” And with that he let him go.”

Starting with Han Jue’s dream and Bing Xia’s recognition, the narrative is built on the set positions of the chariot personnel and movements of individuals within that hierarchical structure; in this respect it resembles the tales of Jisun’s drinking arrangements. First, by taking for himself the central position of the driver, Han Jue would normally expose himself to danger; but it is because he occupies that position that Bing Xia recognizes him as a gentleman and the duke refuses to shoot him. The duke does not hesitate to

shoot the man on the left, the noblest position in the chariot hierarchy. Moral quality is visible, but it only comes to matter here because it is set off against (lowly) status. The historiographers’ fascination with visibility plays an even greater role in what follows. Both Han Jue, whose attention is momentarily diverted, and his passenger, whom he protectively forces to stand behind him, fail to observe that two of the men in the Qi chariot have traded places. Clothing does not help; the men are apparently in uniform. Thus for an unspecified

period, perhaps until the moment of his near-execution, Feng Choufu is treated as the duke of Qi. Han Jue delivers an elaborately courteous speech in which, even as he serves his own duke by taking the enemy prisoner, he symbolically offers himself as substitute for the Qi duke’s ministers. The battlefield confrontation is civilized not only by formal speech but also by the presentation of a goblet and a gift of jade, somewhat bare allusions to the

banquet situation that would normally bring a lord face to face with the ministers of another state. In his guise as duke, Choufu issues one order: he sends the true duke, disguised as the lowly right-hand man, to draw water

and in this way allows him to escape. Water was to have substituted for wine in this battlefield feast, and it may be the disguised duke’s failure to return that discloses Choufu’s ruse. Finally, Choufu wins his freedom as Shu

Zhan did, by asserting the identity of all who serve their rulers, substitute for them, and die for them.

Aesthetics and Meaning 249 Behind Choufu’s speech is a complex principle of substitution, one that no good ruler can challenge and that the Zuozhuan itself hereby reinforces.” First, ministers are identified with their own rulers corporally, as limbs are with the body they serve.” Second, because all local hierarchies ideally belong to the overall hierarchy of royal government, the sufferings of one such body will inevitably have effects, through public imagery and mimesis, on all other such bodies.” The way the duke of Jin treats the minister of Zheng or the way the general of the Jin army treats the minister of Qi must accord with the li governing relations within hierarchies, even though it crosses the political boundaries between hierarchies. Why must hierarchies be compatible? Why must the good man reconstruct them even across frontiers? Not only because of the glare of public scrutiny, but also because of the shine of virtue. The Qi driver is able to recognize Han Jue’s excellence and the Qi duke is able to spare it because of the foil his temporary lowly position in the hierarchy provides. Similarly, the Jin general halts Choufu’s execution when he sees that he is more than an impostor; he is a man capable of enunciating the values that civilize government in the states. In the year after the defeat at An, Duke Qing of Qi visits the victorious state. Here the proper end of substitution becomes clear:”

BRASS HRE- ORR EA MT ABMAZESH- BA

ARCH SREB R- BRAM BRA- Ami? - BR Fl Ake RS BRA - PC AME-BMRA CEM The lord of Qi attended court in Jin, where he was preparing to present a jade.” Xi Ke hurried forward and said, “This expedition was because of the insult you did by having the woman laugh. My lord dares not take responsibility for it.” The lord of Jin feasted the lord of Qi, who gazed at Han Jue. Han Jue said, “Do you recognize me?” The lord of Qi said, “Your clothing is different.”

Han Jue ascended, raised his cup, and said, “That I dared not begrudge even death was so that the two lords might be in this room.”

In Yang Bojun’s understanding of the passage, Xi Ke again uses the official apparatus inappropriately to express his personal resentment, but Han again mitigates the offense with a generous extension of respect." But Han is not

only responding to Xi Ke. Although they have changed armor for court robes and the battlefield for the banquet hall, the interaction begun in the midst of violence is now continued. The duke of Qi recognizes Han Jue, and this recognition echoes the recognition of Choufu. But here the principle of

250 Aesthetics and Meaning shared hierarchy is adduced out of harm’s way, since the violence of war has for the moment become the suppressed violence of political subordination. Some years later two more invocations of the banquet ceremonial on the battlefield demonstrate Jin warriors’ gallantry. This time Jin is defeating the allied forces of Chu and Zheng at Yanling:”

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5S A AS2RU- RACH E- ATU RARE RHE ~ MERE ABRAM A-ACMEBSEREBACKE- WA LE HRP AMA KRERS AmZle BS2Zn- Mee @° = FAH a Mm Three times Xi Zhi encountered the troops of the ruler of Chu. Seeing him, he would descend (from his chariot), remove his helmet, and hurry forward. The ruler of Chu sent Xiang, the overseer of artisans, to inquire after him, taking a bow as a gift. [Xiang] said, “Just now in the heat of the engagement there was a man in leggings of crimson leather. He was a gentleman. Since he hurries forward whenever he sees me, has he not suffered injury?” Receiving the guest [Xiang], Xi Zhi removed his helmet to accept the orders. He said, “I, Zhi, your lordship’s outland minister, in the train of my lord’s military campaign, do by spiritual potency of my lord don armor and helmet, and I dare not bow in response to your command. | do report that I am unhurt, by grace of your lordship's condescension. Because of the engagement at hand, I presume to salute the messenger.”

He saluted the messenger three times and withdrew.”

A similar courtesy is done elsewhere on the field that same day:

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Re Vet: AMA SMR: AKA MRR: Dime Ae Luan Zhen saw the flags of Zichong and made a request: “The Chu men say that this flag is the banner of Zichong. That must be Zichong. Some time ago, when I was on a mission to Chu, Zichong asked me about the valor of Jin, and I replied, ‘We are good at putting the troops in order.’ He said, ‘And what else?’ I replied, “We are good at taking leisure.’ Now that our two states are at war, and the runners are

Aesthetics and Meaning 251 not undertaking missions, that cannot be called ‘order.’ And if we eat our words in the midst of an engagement, that cannot be called ‘leisure.’ Grant that drinks may be presented to him on your behalf.” The duke granted permission, sending a runner with a covered vessel to present drinks. He reached Zichong and said, “My lord, lacking in messengers, has made [Luan] Zhen the spearman on his chariot. Thus he [the duke] has not been able to give comfort to these followers. He sends me to present drinks on his behalf.” Zichong said, “This man (Luan Zhen] once spoke with me in Chu. That must be why he does this. Indeed he remembers!” He accepted the vessel and drank, let the messenger go, and resumed drumming. The fighting began at dawn and had not ended when the stars were seen. ””

As fierce as the fighting is, recognition of worth and a commitment to the preservation of certain peacetime values still matter; bravado opens isolated spaces of banquet-style ritual on the field. Both scenes depend on recognitions of the same type that kept the Qi duke from shooting Han Jue: the Chu king sees that the man in crimson leggings is a gentleman, and Luan Zhen and Zichong remember and recognize each other as proper recipients of the gestures representing peace.” Here li, symbolized in simple by gift giving and drinking, maintains the continuities of tradition and concordant

government even when they are being tested by strife. : Warfare is also ritualized in the narrative of the battle at Chengpu, where the Jin alliance under Duke Wen defeated Chu. In the anecdotes leading up to the battle, ritual propriety serves as a standard of rightness and an implicit guarantee of victory for Jin.” But there is another aspect of ritual relevant to warfare, a customary exchange of words that comes before the exchange of blows in many of the Zuozhuan's great battle scenes. It represents violence as an activity like other diplomatic activities, one that allows participants to

perform the culture they share:'” .

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ICs BAKER RRSBAY - RAR BmMR:- MMKK: HOH f+ he He > ay A ASS + aa HHS Ee | Ziyu sent Dou Bo to ask for battle. He said, “We beg to sport with your warriors. Your lordship may lean on the railing of your chariot and observe; I, Dechen (‘Ziyu], will also direct my gaze there.” The lord of Jin had Luan Zhi respond, “My lord has heard your command. We are here because he has not dared forget the favor of the Chu lord. We retreated before a minister; how would we have presumed

252 Aesthetics and Meaning to face the lord [of Chu]? Since we did not get orders from you, we presume to trouble you to tell your generals: ‘Equip your chariots; show reverence for the affairs of your lord; on the morrow we shall meet.’ nh09

In Ziyu’s formulation, the battlefield is stage and playground, where fighters

enact aggression as commanders look on. In Duke Wen’s less playful response, battle is violence justified by the failure of respectful exchange. Jin has fulfilled the promise Chong’er made to repay Chu’s earlier ritual hospitality, but the minister Ziyu (acting against his own king’s explicit orders) has pursued the Jin duke and his army. In his declaration, Duke Wen formally marks the end of his obligation: he told King Cheng that he would do battle only “if he did not get orders” not to fight.” The minister Ziyu has expended his state’s surplus of good service and incurred a debt that now requires revenge.

Duke Wen’s closing words are both formulaic and highly formal. The diction and the tetrasyllabic rhythm of the phrases gives them an archaic ring reminiscent of the Shi and Shangshu. The second of the phrases, “Show reverence for the affairs of your lord” 4% fi 4 3H, closely resembles lines in the more ancient sections of the Shi."** In the final phrase, the unusual word for “tomorrow morning,” jiezhao, seems to be used only on the day before a battle; the whole phrase has a close parallel in the invitation to battle sent to Jin by the Qi duke before his rout at An.*” The act of formal challenge and invitation to battle is itself a customary part of warfare and a formulaic aspect of battle narratives.’ Before Qin de-

| feats Jin at Hann and before Jin defeats Qi at An, messengers are sent to conduct exchanges similar to the one at Chengpu.* At Bi, where Chu decimates the Jin army, the preliminary declarations are made more complex. First, an officer of Chu goes to offer humble apologies for the king’s lack of learning (“He is not capable of wen”) but reminds Jin that Chu is in Zheng on its own business; he ends by warning Jin not to tarry long. Shi Hui (Sui Ji, Sui Wuzi) of Jin sends a courteous but firm response:

BS PERRAAN RA > BE RHA - BRE: SaRE- BAH HE ae: SMSeiRA- MHA Tze In former times King Ping [of Zhou] commanded our former ruler, the Marquis Wen, saying, “With Zheng sustain the Zhou house; do not neglect the command of your king.” Now Zheng is not obeying, and our ruler has sent these several subjects to ask Zheng about it; how could we dare to insult you, the emissaries? We presume to bow in response when your ruler deigns to issue a command.

- Aesthetics and Meaning 253 Shi Hui explains that Jin’s obligations to the Zhou royal house require it to preserve Zheng’s loyalty. The final phrase, for all its ceremonial deference, contains the challenge: we are prepared to fight if you are. Another Jin minister, Xian Hu (styled Zhizi), who is in many ways responsible for his state's defeat, feels Shi Hui’s message is fawning and sends a revision after it:’”°

TAK: BARRE BAR Zaha - A SR BE ATA ih Our messenger spoke incorrectly. Our ruler sent us, his subjects, to remove the traces of your great state from Zheng, and said, “Do not avoid the enemy.” We will not in any way disobey his command."”’

Whereas his colleague cites the words of the Zhou king and thus allies himself with the most sanctioned vision of the Zhou order, Zhizi speaks only of the two combatants and of the force the Jin ruler expects to wield. At Bi, though not at Chengpu, another kind of ritual dialogue precedes the actual fighting. Even as arrangements for a treaty begin to take shape, several flyting expeditions by members of both armies bring the onset of combat. ‘I'he three men of a Chu chariot-team confer officiously about the traditions of formal provocation, then ride off across the field to the Jin lines, where the man on the left shoots his arrows and the man on the right beheads an enemy soldier, all as prescribed by precedent. As Jin chariots give chase, the Chu archer uses his last arrow to kill a stag, which his companion presents with great ceremony to the pursuers. The Jin officer lets them go,

saying, “The man on the left shoots well, and the man on the right speaks | well; they are gentlemen.” The act of recognition is immediately reciprocated, when a fleeing Jin provoker also kills a stag and presents it to his Chu pursuer, saying, “You have had military business. Perhaps your hunters have not provided you with enough fresh game? I presume to offer this to your followers.”*”

Although these missions initiate the violence of the battle, the Zuozhuan turns them to a pacific use, demonstrating how a conspicuous sort of ritual deference obtains even between enemies at the moment of combat. Spaces of diplomacy open on the battlefield. Pursuit ceases for the time it takes to exchange a gift and the respectful words that go with it. Of course, there is an element of mockery to these acts of bravado; the man who gives the gifts

risks capture and death to suggest that his enemies are too busy to keep themselves well fed.’ But recognition of excellence and ritual propriety

254 Aesthetics and Meaning overshadow mockery. Violence itself and the details of death on the battlefield are of relatively little interest to the narrators of the Zuozhuan. In their battle narratives, they are especially concerned with the way the proprieties

of ritual survive even in the midst of clashes. | The aesthetic and synaesthetic qualities of the banquet, with its associated

objects and actions, introduce a utopian element into the ongoing narration | of relations within and among the states. In the banquet, the excellence of tradition and hierarchy is grounded in the body, in perception, and, above all, in pleasure. These gatherings are the image of things as they should be; they are fleeting realizations of the timeless achievements of virtue that the inherited texts describe. Thus, as the ministers of the Spring and Autumn period recite these texts to one another, as they drink and eat and move and speak as li directs, among objects and in rooms made to specification, they | perform for one another, and for readers, a theater of unity and continuity. They display their wen and their preoccupation with li, and they demon-

, strate their faith in the ultimate triumph of the norms that bring them together. For a time they envision a halt to history: coherent and allencompassing, the government of the former kings forbids aberration. But then they part, and the ruinous pleasures of greed and aesthetic excess resume their erosion of the utopian vision. It is on the basis of these banquet scenes and the glow they lend to all other aesthetic behavior that we can speak of a sensus communis at work as an

ideal in historiography. When judgments of taste are made properly, they bring the subject into conformity with a universality that unites social strata, regions, and epochs.’”” The significance granted to determined form, associated as it is with wen and with the schematized arrangements of government, ensures that aesthetic appreciation never escapes its subordination to social utility. The features of an object that make it pleasing are the same ones that make it socially effective (for good or ill) by way of public perception. The hermeneutic habit of the narratives constitutes the objects they address, and any object, like any person, can be unfolded by the model interpreter to dis-

cover its meaning, which is a function of its conformity to (or departure from) codes that the interpreter brings to bear. Historiography’s hermeneutics are yoked to a philosophical program that represents pleasure as a potential means to the revival of Zhou values. As Confucian philosophers began to discuss problems of value in relative isolation from historical prece- |

Aesthetics and Meaning 255 dent, they took over the aspirations of this program, which celebrates a pro-

spective unanimity that would penetrate to all hearts in all places and all

times. , The banquet ideal, for all its power and beauty within historiography, does not necessarily win out even there. At a certain point, history gains the upper hand, and the symbolic value of the gatherings, stretched to its limit, becomes questionable. The value of the aesthetic vision itself, however, is by no means compromised in narratives of failure and decline. On the contrary, the Zuozhuan and Guoyu rely on aesthetic theory as they account for certain of the most important events and trends of the Spring and Autumn period.

EIGHT Writing and the Ends of History

To narrate is to encode an ideology. Fredric Jameson, applying an insight of

Lévi-Strauss to the study of narrative, has written that “ideology is not - something which informs or invests symbolic production; rather the aesthetic act is itself ideological, and the production of aesthetic or narrative form is to be seen as an ideological act in its own right, with the function of inventing imaginary or formal ‘solutions’ to unresolvable social contradic-

tions.” Both in selecting material and in setting the terms of its intelligibil- | ity, narrators uphold certain views on the workings of the world while rejecting others as wrong or irrelevant. The effective social contradictions normally remain implicit; like the zhi, or “intent,” that Chinese literary thought has seen as the wellspring of individual poetic expression, social re-

lations and resentments inform artistic manifestations but are not themselves opened to direct inspection. The Zuozhuan and Guoyu, like any other text, invite the modern reader to look beyond the decorated surface—the rhetorical and narrative techniques examined in the preceding chapters—

behind them. | |

and to speculate about the social and philosophical motivations that lie This effort is hindered by the antiquity of the texts. Jameson and other historicist critics can draw on a rich background of texts and historical information, including biographical information on authors. In general, only the most ascetic close reader could claim to understand a text without a context; most others assume that meaning has to do with historical environment, which is best understood through available documents. But stu-

Writing and the Ends of History 257

dents of early Chinese writings have much less material to work with and can rarely claim to have established with any precision the historical background of a text. The Zuozhuan and Guoyu are so early, and their provenance so uncertain, that they come to us largely without context; they are figures without a ground. The few surviving texts of equal age are themselves pat-

ently products of little-understood struggles within social and intellectual communities. Without more data than are currently available, it is impossible to develop a clear picture of the networks of relations in which the two works originated, a necessary step in understanding how the works serve ideological purposes.”

With the help of two assumptions, however, we may at least sketch the social position of the narrators and the conflicts that most concerned them. First, the previous chapters support the assumption that the narrators of the Zuozhuan and Guoyu considered themselves followers of Confucius. It would not be enough to note that their characters generally uphold values associated with Confucius’ name; narrators need not agree with their characters. But these narrators quote Confucius as an authority on several occasions and never openly challenge his judgments. They appear to construct their narratives as demonstrations of the truth of views closely related to his. Whatever their occasional differences with his philosophy, they saw its tenets as crucial to understanding the world and acting in it. Second, let us assume that the narrators saw themselves as men like Confucius in the social hierarchy. On the one hand, the education of the narrators would have prepared them, as it did their predecessors, for a role in the making of public policy. On the other hand, even if they found a position in court-—and the rise of groups like the early Mohists would indicate that many educated men did not—they, like their predecessors, would have had to struggle to convince decision-makers of the wisdom of Confucian policies. One might stop short of saying that the historiographers created the educated elite of the Spring and Autumn period in their own image; yet they could not have failed to recognize what they had in common with the men whose deeds they were commemorating. To complete this reading of the historiographical system of the Zuozhuan and the Guoyu, I turn now to the narrators’ representation of themselves and their relation to the events they retell. I argue first that the historiographers, although they conceal themselves behind their narratives, nonetheless reveal in those narratives their stake in the social struggles of their time. Clues to

258 Writing and the Ends of History their understanding of their own status and craft are to be found in their depictions of earlier historians, in their comments on the style of the Chungiu,

and in their way of handling speech acts. The implications of their selfperception can be traced throughout the narratives of the Zuozhuan, particularly in the narratives of the final decades of the Spring and Autumn period. In their handling of time—a matter that is definitive in any narrative genre—the ideas they develop are logical extensions of their habits of historical interpretation and their commitment to ritual. Their accounts of the ends of several states and of the rise of southern powers confirm their views about time, ritual, and aesthetic display. As they attack unsanctioned uses of writing in their accounts of the causes of some of the political failures of the era, they articulate a theory of writing that serves their own purposes. Fi-

nally, as they put a close to the Spring and Autumn period, they tie this historical ending with the death of an individual, Confucius, and hint at the social and intellectual origins of their own craft.

| The Invisible Authors Eastern Zhou writing is remarkable for the invisibility of its authors. Not only in the Zuozhuan and Guoyu, but in many other collections of philosophical and historical anecdotes and essays, neither writers nor compilers make any effort to identify themselves. This studied anonymity is in stark contrast to the precedent of authorship set for European historiography by Herodotus and Thucydides, both of whom announce themselves as authors in the opening words of their works. Yet the invisibility of the Chinese authors accords with the mode of transmission and possession that prevailed in their time. The historical anecdotes belonged not to individuals whose official or personal authority would certify their accuracy but to lineages and

communities that defined themselves in part by the texts they knew.’ The narrator of any given anecdote, who is as invisible as the historiographers, speaks as if he were giving a transparent and unbiased account of events. In- | visibility becomes ubiquity and incontestable authority. The possessors of the anecdotes inhabit them, speaking through them and forming them to their own purposes. When events invite explicit judgments, they cite the words of Confucius or retreat behind the persona of the anonymous junzi. They claim nonetheless to command the materials of history and to act as a conduit between historical knowledge and practical wisdom. Their choice of

Writing and the Ends of History 259

narratorial stance guides their representation of time and change in the Spring and Autumn period. Many of the historiographers’ narrative choices can be explained as results of an attitude that Nietzsche referred to as ressentiment, an animosity that jaundices a weaker group's view both of a dominant group and of its values. In On the Genealogy of Morals, ressentiment is characteristic of slave mo-

rality; for the nobility’s distinction of good and bad, this weak and stealthy resistance thinks to substitute a newly created distinction of good and evil, by which noble behavior of all sorts can be judged evil. Christian humility and European malaise are the results. A genealogy of Confucian morals might well begin with the study of historiography, where narrative itself accomplishes the transformation of values.’ In recounting the events of the Spring and Autumn period as a series of ritual aberrations and corrections, the historiographers separated themselves from a tendentiously characterized ruling class and identified themselves with a ministerial class depicted as steadfastly conservative, prescient, and eloquent. At the same time they represented their own work as an extension of the inevitable workings of bao in the realm not of practical politics but of literary activity; ressentiment implies a vengeful attitude, and the historiographers’ concept of bao was one of their means of getting revenge. Their ways of historical understanding and of nar-

ration belong to a specific moment in Chinese history and thought, a moment that emerges more clearly for us when we recognize that their intel-

ourselves.” |

lectual performances were directed to their contemporaries, not to A conversation between a Jin minister and a Lu ambassador hints at

some of the social tensions underlying historical commemoration: °

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VW HRRAWS HARB UZBAM- BRREZR- UTR 4h TEA RATE + FEE ZR CAG HUN In the spring of the twenty-fourth year [of Duke Xiang of Lu], Mushu [Shusun Bao] went to Jin. Fan Xuanzi [Fan Gai] went out to meet him and asked him, “The ancients had a saying, ‘He died and yet did not decay.’ To what does that refer?” Mushu had not yet answered when Xuanzi said, “In the past, my ancestors were the

260 Writing and the Ends of History Taotang family under Yu and before; under the Xia they were the Yulong family;

under the Shang they were the Shiwei family; under the Zhou they were the Tangdu family; and Jin, ruling over Xia, made covenant with us as the Fan family.

Surely this is what is referred to!” Mushu said, “According to what I have heard, this is what is known as hereditary emolumenr; it is not ‘not decaying.’ Lu had a minister in former times named Zang Wenzhong, whose words stood after he died; this is what is referred to! I have

heard that ‘At the very top there is setting up virtue; next there is setting up achievement; next there is setting up words.’ When these are not discarded, even after a long time, this is what is known as ‘not decaying.’ As for things like preserving a clan name and receiving a family name in such a way as to maintain one’s ancestral temple, with no interruptions in the sacrifices for generations—there is no state that lacks these. Great examples of emolument cannot be referred to as ‘not

decaying.’” |

The key question of the passage is that of the relative prestige of different forms of cultural immortality.’ Fan Xuanzi, who is scion of a powerful Jin noble house, is represented as asking his question in the confidence that his line, continuous since the earliest recorded times, merits the epithet “undecaying even in death” (si er bu xiu). Here and elsewhere in the Zuozhuan, the epithet designates a cultural immortality similar to the “glory never fading”

(kleon aphthiton) pursued by heroes in the Iliad; it is a name for the commemoration that literature itself—whether epic or historical discourse— makes possible.” It does not, at least according to the historiographers’ usage,

refer to the real genealogical and economic continuity of a family like Xuanzi’s; this position is the one that the anecdote is designed to refute. The anecdote makes Xuanzi’s boasting the foil for Mushu’s own exposition. The long lineage of a powerful family like Fan’s counts for little, he implies; only great virtues, great accomplishments, or memorable words win

the most treasured form of renown. His example is Zang Wenzhong, an eminent Lu noble of a previous generation whose words did indeed survive

to be quoted by speakers in the Zuozhuan and elsewhere.’ To be distinguished as immune to decay, it is not enough that one’s descendants succeed to one’s office; after all, the descendants are themselves mortal, and in this

case it is the emoluments that have some claim to immortality. Instead, one

must have performed some deed or uttered some word that survives in memory, and not only in the memory of a single family. One must have said or done something that in the cultural memory is continually made relevant.

Writing and the Ends of History 261 In the sense that it subordinates the nobility’s power of wealth and high

office to the educated stratum’s power of speaking and remembering, Mushu’s definition of posthumous glory can be considered an expression of

the interests of scholars. In comparison with the vocation of historical learning—the commemoration of all acts and utterances—the survival of family lines is made to seem almost negligible, little more than biological re-

production.” Discernible behind this transformation, which in certain respects recalls Nietzsche's account of the genealogy of Christian values, is the historiographers’ estimation of their own worth. As the keepers of the sayings of Zang Wenzhong, as users of the Shi and Shangshu, they control cul-

tural memory. Their historical knowledge makes them the arbiters of the undecaying. This is a power that they share with their most sympathetic characters, who generally resemble Mushu in their attitudes.

The passage does not require us to assume vast social distinctions between the nobility and the educated stratum. The sources tell us, after all, that education in the proto-classical texts was a defining prerogative of literate strata, including the nobility. But this curriculum, if it truly was shared as broadly as it is sometimes thought to have been, did not dissolve all conflicts. In Mushu’s argument, and in many of the narratives of historiography, there is a perceived split between those who attempt to put inherited learn-

ing into practice and those who merely hold power. The latter, the rulers themselves, are very often depicted in the Zuozhuan and elsewhere as resistant to education or as unwilling to practice the learning that ministerial characters more regularly defend. As if by convention, the ministers who profess traditional learning are embattled. This convention of representation likely has much to do with the realities of the historians’ position in fourthcentury society. Unlike the men they described, they appear to have been isolated from the exercise of political power.” In their anecdotes they staged the conflict between learning and power and resolved it in favor of learning. Even though the historiographers reveal next to nothing about their own

identity, methodology, sources, limitations, or strengths, narratives like the , story of Mushu do give some indication of their attitudes and aims. The hint of ressentiment discernible in that anecdote is also to be found in two famous stories of heroic historical writing, which are likely idealized visions of what the historiographers thought they themselves were doing.

The first scene emphasizes the heroism of the historian who records a

262 Writing and the Ends of History truth literally in the face of violent efforts to prevent accurate commemora-

tion. After Cui Zhu of Qi murders his ruler, Duke Zhuang, the question arises of how to record the event. The prerogative is apparently the scribe’s, but the murderer resists:””

AXSA- BPR RA- B2fRZ- HSMS- MetBAr-A-HBM # - J@2: SBPRMAPAM: WRU MEBR: ye: The Grand Scribe wrote, “Cui Zhu murdered his ruler.” Cui killed him. When [the scribe’s] younger brothers succeeded him and wrote [the same thing], two of them died. Another younger brother wrote it again, and [Cui] let him go. When Nanshi, the Scribe of the South, heard that all the Grand Scribes had died, he took up his bamboo slips and set out. When he heard that it had been written, he went home.”

The Chungiu corroborates the Zuozhuan’s report, adding a date and a name: “In summer, on the yihai day of the fifth month, Cui Zhu of Qi killed his

ruler Guan” BACK BGEYFRES?S 4¢."* The bureaucratic arrangements for the maintenance of chronicles in pre-Qin China are obscure, but the contents of the Chungiu and the Zhushu jinian, and scattered passages like this one, suggest that spirits of the ancestors were part of the intended audience of written reports presented at court.” If there is any truth in the details of the anecdote, then specific families held the post of grand scribe, but there were outside of court other individuals who considered record-

keeping their responsibility. In this context writing would be worth dying for because of its ritual and hereditary functions; Cui Zhu’s attempt to suppress writing would be the literary equivalent of his assassination of the duke. Accuracy is valuable not for its own sake, but because it demonstrates the survival of traditional practices under an arriviste tyranny. In a still more famous instance of historical recording, a scribe once again produces an accurate record over the objections of a powerful superior. But accuracy in this case is complicated; the scribe’s words are not to be read literally, but with a correct understanding of the distribution of responsibility and blame in cases of court strife. Writing, this scene implies, is a reliable medium only when accompanied by unwritten knowledge.

Backed by other Jin ministers, Zhao Chuan turns against his depraved duke and murders him. The family head, Zhao Dun, who is in charge of the administration at the time, flees court during the turmoil but fails to pass beyond the borders before returning to the capital."° The Grand Scribe (taishi) Dong Hu writes “Zhao Dun killed his ruler” #8 J& #{ HF and displays the notation at court.’’ Zhao Dun objects to the record but submits when

Writing and the Ends of History 263

Dong Hu explains that he is responsible since he neither left the state nor punished the murderer. Long afterward, Confucius commends both men for their adherence to propriety: “Dong Hu was a good scribe of ancient times; in the norms of his writing he concealed nothing. Zhao Xuanzi was a good minister of ancient times; for the sake of the norms (fa) he took incrimination upon himself. It is regrettable; had he crossed the frontier, he would have been spared,”"" Simple accuracy would not have sufficed; to write that Zhao Chuan killed his ruler would have let Zhao Dun off too easily. The literary conventions of the chronicle do not permit qualifications, and there is no way for Dong Hu to indicate that Zhao Chuan committed the crime with Zhao Dun’s complicity. ‘Thus Zhao Dun accepts the penalty on behalf of his family and his administration. He risks being remembered as a mur| derer; as Confucius suggests, this is an admirable sacrifice. But Confucius’ remark also implies that as long as readers of the Chungiu know the story behind this notation, Zhao Dun’s penalty will be light, since no one will really imagine that he himself murdered his ruler. Very possibly this episode is a product of Warring States Chungiu hermeneutics, in which reading against the grain of the text was regular practice. In this case such reading would have worked both for a powerful noble line

and for scholarly interests. If the Chungiu is literally true, and Zhao Dun really did murder Duke Ling of Jin in 607 8.c.z., his powerful descendants would nevertheless have had an interest in blaming the crime on Zhao Chuan and would have propagated a variant account of the events.” For their part, Confucius and the Zuozhuan historiographers, who also denied a literal reading, lost the simplicity of a straightforward indictment; in return they won a transformed Chungiu and a new model of reading. They opened depths behind the flat words of the chronicle; they made it a relevant, undecaying text and offered themselves as the initiates who knew how to read it.”

As initiates, they possessed both beneficial and dangerous knowledge, which they taught their students and displayed in their commentaries on the Chungiu. If they could see and solve the riddle in Dong Hu’s note and thus exonerate Zhao Dun, they also knew shameful secrets hidden elsewhere in the text. When Duke Wen of Jin gathered the feudal lords at Wen after his victory at Chengpu, he summoned King Xiang to the meeting. According to the Zuozhuan, Confucius remarked, “As a subject he summoned his lord: this could not be treated as a lesson. Thus it is written, ‘Heaven's king performed the winter hunt north of the He,’ which says that it was not the

264 Writing and the Ends of History

proper place for it and at the same time manifests virtue.” That is, the Chungqiu hides Duke Wen’s offense from the completely innocent reader, who is not prepared for the lesson the offense would teach. For the sophisticated reader, however, the Chungiu delivers a suspended sentence, alluding to the crime only to forgive it. If the anecdote behind the Chungiu note threat-

ens to perpetuate the bad example of Duke Wen’s deed, it does so only for readers whose education inoculates them against possible infection. As with the notations of the Qi scribes and Dong Hu of Jin, a Chungiu-style chroni-

cle cannot stand alone and can be understood properly only when read against the historical circumstances of its composition. It is significant for our understanding of the provenance of the Zuozhuan and Guoyu that these passages refer not to the transcription of words or the recording of anecdotes but to the crafting of brief entries like those found in

the Chungiu.” Notations of this sort are the one element of Eastern Zhou historiography generally agreed to have existed in written form as early as the Spring and Autumn period. The writing of history, these scenes imply, resembles Dong Hu’s or the Qi scribes’ single-sentence pronouncements. It is sometimes heroic and always public and permanent; it may require supplemental knowledge on the part of the reader; it fixes an authoritative judgment of events; and it constitutes one form of reward or punishment for a deed. As Mark Edward Lewis has remarked, “Ru writings on the Spring and Autumn period emphasized conduct contrary to the dictates of ritual _ and duty, so the historian acted as critic and judge.” Besides these two scenes, there are several other indications that the historiographers understood their own technique as an extension of Chungiu practices. First, throughout the Warring States period and into the Han, the name Chungiu was applied both to the Lu chronicle and to collections of anecdotes relating to the period covered by the chronicle.” To be sure, contemporary intellectuals understood the difference between a chronicle notation and the anecdotes that gave the full story behind it, but they did not use the term Chungiu to distinguish one form from the other. The result is that defenses of the style and function of the Chungiu (two of which are examined | below) may well have been understood to apply both to chronicle and to anecdotes. Any justification for the chronicle as a historical enterprise would naturally also benefit the expanded discourse. Second, although the encoding and decoding of Chungiu entries like those just discussed is a specifically literary or classicist activity, it is continuous

Writing and the Ends of History 265 with the interpretive patterns the Zuozhuan and Guoyu narrators have built into their narratives. Acting successfully in the world of the narrative, interpreting the Chungiu, and deducing correct judgments from an anecdote all depend on the same sort of acumen. The Zuozhuan especially, for all its stylistic differences from the Chungiu, fundamentally resembles the chronicle in that it seemed, to later ages at least, to prefer obscurity and to require decoding.

In a famous Zuozhuan comment on the style of the classic, the narrator explains the wording of a particular entry, and then quotes the junzi:””

# KZ AB GT BA TE OO RMA ABMS HE A + HERE TE Z °

The Chungiu’s references are subtle yet radiantly clear; they record facts but do so darkly; they express indirectly yet form complete patterns; they are exhaustive but never excessive; and they punish evil and encourage good. If not a sage, who could have prepared them?”

Many readers have noted that the Zuozhuan shares the quality of reticent clarity that it here attributes to the Chungiu. Du Yu wrote of the Zuozhuan that “its style is unhurried and its significance far-reaching; it aims to make the student trace matters to their sources and follow them to their ends, seeking out their stems and leaves and exhausting them completely.”” Other scholars have gone so far as to apply the terms of Chungiu appraisal directly

to Zuozhuan narrative.” Given the Warring States meaning of the term chungiu, it is conceivable that the authors of this passage meant it to refer quite literally both to the chronicle and the historical anecdotes connected with it.

Third, both the Chungiu and the Zuozhuan function as instruments of punishment.” The junzi’s appraisal of the Chungiu reappears later in the Zuozhuan, in a slightly modified version. This time it follows an explanation of naming and retribution in the Chungiu:

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266 Writing and the Ends of History

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“In the winter, Heigong of Zhu came in flight, bringing [the city of] Lan with him [as a gift].” Although he was lowly, his name was written so as to show the importance of the land.

The gentleman says, “This is why one must be careful about names. There are circumstances under which it is better not to have a name than to have a name. He committed treason, bringing land with him, and though he was lowly, the land had to be recorded in writing; thus the man himself was named. In the end his failure of rightness could not be erased. “Thus the gentleman ponders on ritual propriety whenever he acts and ponders on rightness whenever he moves. He does not deviate for the sake of profit and does not incur blame in matters of rightness. Some seek a name and do not achieve it; some wish to cover their names but see them made public. That is the punishment

for failures of rightness. |

“Qi Bao was the Wey overseer of security, an occupant of a hereditary office, but

once he had acted against rightness, he was written up as a ‘thug. Shuqi of Zhu, Mouyi of Ju, and Heigong of Zhu departed [their states] with land only to seek emoluments. They were not seeking names; yet even though they were lowly, [their

names] had to be written. ,

“These two methods [suppressing or revealing the name] are ways of punishing aberration and eliminating greed. If one who plunged himself into difficulties and

thus endangered better men were to win an illustrious name for ir, then all the braves who courted difficulty would run to him. If one who stole cities and betrayed his lord to win great profits did not get a name for it, the crowd of greedy adventur-

ers would devote their energies to such behavior. “Therefore the Chungiu writes up Qi Bao as a ‘thug,’ whereas the three betrayers are named. Punishing the unrighteous and rebuking the ritually improper, it is indeed an excellent record. “Thus it is said that the Chungiu’s notations are subtle yet radiantly clear and that they express indirectly yet with discrimination. The superior man can make them shine forth brightly so that the good are encouraged and the decadent are fearful. This is why the gentleman values [the Chungiu].””*

Commemoration in the chronicle and in anecdotes is a form of revenge or reward. We have seen how within the anecdotes, an observer's percipient judgment, perhaps joined to a prediction fulfilled in some later narrative, functions as one sort of bao. Historical writing, in the historiographers’ understanding of it, is the most perfect form of enunciated judgment. It survives beyond the reach of the judged individual and continues to reward or punish indefinitely,

Writing and the Ends of History 267 as “superior men” of successive generations continue to understand its judg-

ments and adopt them as their own.” Speakers in the Zuozhuan and the Guoyu hold out as a threat to malefactors the permanence of written historical records, in which their crimes will be preserved for everlasting condemnation.” Good men remain aware of the acts that they and their ancestors have committed to win rebuke in the records.” History writing is a weapon of justice wielded not by the possessors of power but by the distinct stratum that includes the scribes and the historiographers themselves.”

In both passages, the junzi balances moderated extremes against each other, doing for the written performance of the Chungiu what Ji Zha did for the performances he witnessed in Lu.” In every pair of extremes, the Chungiu is interpretable because of the way it mediates between intelligibility and obscurity. If Chungiu hermeneutics was misguided in seeing hidden messages in the chronicle, then phrases such as these are a means of ensuring that few readers will dare, as Wang Anshi did, to declare the records non-judgmental

and uninteresting.” Once interpretability was assumed, diction, grammar, inclusion, and omission all mattered, as did the fact of historical recording

itself; the encouragement of the good and the intimidation of the evil depended not only on the general possibility that their deeds would be remembered and broadcast in writing but also on the survival of an interpretive community capable of decoding the Classic. The remarks attributed to the junzi had an enormous influence on the reception of the Chungiu and on the understanding of textuality in general.” Texts demand extratextual knowledge, and the perfection of historical justice depended upon Confu-

cian readers. ,

Internal evidence, in the form of depictions of heroic historians and remarks on the style of the Chungiu, has much to tell us about the historiographers’ attitudes toward their own vocation. Another sort of internal evidence makes it possible to reconstruct some of their hopes for the reception of their works. For these writers, the emotional response to a verbal performance, written or spoken, is either pleasure or fear. Regardless of the intellectual complexities of interpretation required by the performance, the reception will have an emotional coloration and one that has historical significance. As the aesthetic of the banquet shows, verbal performances are the source of a certain kind of pleasure. This rule applies not only to the words

with music and dance that Ji Zha found beautiful but also to the poetry recitations that statesmen exchange at banquets.

268 Writing and the Ends of History Speeches and well-argued points bring pleasure to the one who knows how to respond to them. A well-crafted speech of remonstrance or planning “pleases” (yue) the duke or noble who hears it; the phrase “the duke was pleased” is so common as to mean little more than “the duke accepted the advice.”*’ In idealized depictions of government, enlightened rulers establish whole bureaucracies to present them continually with pleasing and righteous

speech.” Speeches that are said to produce pleasure generally employ the rhetorical techniques discussed in Chapter 2: citation, precedent (especially the precedent of King Wen), and recondite learning.” Only a few contain bad advice.” Ingenious military planning pleases the listener.” Such pleasure only rarely arises as something other than a direct response to a speech: one may be pleased by a person who shows some form of excellence; and an individual or group may seek to please another, as Lu might curry favor with Jin or a ducal aspirant might win over the people of the state.” Yue is especially likely to mark a sort of conversion, a moment when the ruler sees the error of his ways in the light of his minister's precedents and citations.

Other words for pleasure, none of them as consistently linked with speech as yue is, help to define yue's territory. If the ruler himself comments on the speech that has given him pleasure, he is likely to say that what he has heard is “excellent” (shan).” A lofty and reserved joy is signified by the word jia, whether the latter is spoken by the pleased party or about him; the connotations of this word reflect its use in the formal vocabulary of the Clas‘sics.” Rulers are “delighted” (xi) over instances of temporary good fortune; the word is rarely used to describe the response toa speech.” These are the terms that signify intellectual pleasure in the Zuozhuan and Guoyu and that are taken over by philosophers.” I have discussed two other important terms in previous chapters: hao, normally an illicit and doomed pleasure in some material object of desire; and le, the pleasure that in Confucian argumentation is so closely associated with music, yue.”” These patterns of usage indicate the special status of speech in the general depiction of aesthetic response. Writing, too, as a type of speech act, inspires

aesthetic and emotional responses that add their force to the intellectual content of the communication. Accurate historical writing, like upright speech, might inspire pleasure in the qualified reader. The two encomia of the Classic translated above convey some of the wonder and admiration such a reader would have felt in response to the Chungiu. Like the “superior man,”

Writing and the Ends of History 269 Confucian teachers and students were training themselves for the righteous

pleasure of seeing justice done. | There is, however, one important difference between written and oral speech acts. Only writing could afford the historians their characteristic invisibility. The minister who delivers a speech before a ruler in an anecdote belongs to a clearly delineated type; his rhetorical and moral obsessions are the stuff of his character. The historians disappear behind their material, inviting the reader to divine their attitudes and identities from the features of the text.” As a result, their performance lacks any specific determination of occasion. The historians certainly wrote for a specific audience and from specific intellectual motivations. In their writing, however, they obscure that situation of speech. They seem to speak not to a particular audience but to any readership that can assimilate itself to the demands of the telling. Although joy awaits the properly trained reader of the Chungqiu, the emo-

tional response that is most frequently mentioned in connection with historical writing is the fear alluded to in the second of the encomia. In the first

instance, this is the fear that the guilty party feels when his crime is recorded | for all to see. But as notions of the origin and purpose of historical writing

developed during the Warring States period, fear came to play a much greater role. To paraphrase the relevant passages, as the world declined, as perverse theories flourished, Kongzi became afraid and composed the Chungiu; when he was finished, disorderly ministers and violent men became afraid.” The Chungiu arose when the lingering glow of the kings burned out and their poetry perished.” For the young man who studies it, the Chunqiu encourages good ways and discourages bad; the records of old teach him reasons for and fear of dynastic rises and falls.” And even the written Chungiu could not dispel fear: as Kongzi’s seventy disciples transmitted his teachings about the text after his death, the Lu gentleman Zuo Qiuming feared that each would hold to his own opinions, grow complacent, and lose the true tradition; thus he composed his Zuoshi chungiu.” Writers and transmitters undertook their work out of one kind of fear; they trusted in the efficacy of their writings because of another kind of fear; and this fear, a double of the joy idealized in the aesthetics of the banquet, shaped their presentation of history.”° For all the joy rulers and ministers take in epiphanies of cultural value, fear shadows their gatherings; a peculiar resentment grows and new sources of authority emerge.

270 Writing and the Ends of History | With the Zuozhuan's observations on historians and acts of historical writing, the evidence on speech and emotional response helps to bring the invisible authors to light. They deny the value of what they lack—raw power—and proclaim the triumph of what they possess, historical learning, which they tie to heroic accounts of earlier historians’ achievements. In their

minimalist account of it, historical writing (whether their own or that of characters like Dong Hu) is a specially adapted version of the most common scene in their anecdotes, a minister's speech before his colleagues and his ruler. Writing lasts longer, and finds a more varied audience, but it becomes effective exactly as speech does: it moves its audience to pleasure or fear. That the justification of historical writing is in this way aesthetic in nature accords with the narrators’ privileging of aesthetic causes and consequences above all other explanations of events. The precise response to writing would of course be a function of the reader's qualifications, which the historiographers would have defined according to their own ressentiment. Fear was for

the powerful who had overstepped the bounds and whose offenses were committed to writing; pleasure was in theory for anyone who did not transgress but was especially for the masters of historical writing, the scholars.

Time and Narration The historians’ silence about their situation has implications for their representation of time and historical change. Like the junzi commentator, the im-

plied narrators maintain a pose of contemporaneity with respect to the events narrated. That is, even though the narrated events are necessarily in the past, it is unusual for the narrators to jump ahead by referring openly to subsequent events.” Characters’ predictions do betray the narrators’ knowledge of the future, but they function as predictions and as evidence of speakers’ prescience only because the narrators defer fulfillment of the predictions. The narrators can insert analepses, but only rarely do they use their thirdperson voice to generalize about causes, to relate events to moral categories, or to issue judgments.” Instead, they observe through the eyes of the characters, speak through their words, and pretend to have the same information about events as they do. This contemporaneity of vision affects the narrative in several important ways. It contributes to the theatrical staging of anecdotes, since phenomena are presented to us at the same moments as they appear to characters. Be-

| cause the time of the narrator has been bracketed, the time of reading is

Writing and the Ends of History 271 drawn together with the time of narrative. The narrators’ abstention focuses the reader's attention. How will this prediction come true? How is my own judgment of this episode to be vindicated as the text continues to unfold? How does this event pay off old debts or initiate new ones? The scruples of the narrators with regard to time shape the reader's experience of the text. By concealing the time in which the narrators speak, narrative contemporaneity also obscures the contemporary interests of the narrators. The historiographers systematically suppressed the distance between the time of nar-

ration and the time of narrated events and in this way disavowed any engagement in the ideological and intellectual battles of their times. Their disavowal had a strategic value. Concepts and rhetorical habits that clearly belonged to the fourth century are freely transposed to the seventh and even the eighth century, and the events of the Spring and Autumn period, their facticity guaranteed by annalistic records, are so informed by didactic ends that the anecdotes can be read as a series of exempla.”” Finally, contemporaneity permits a useful distribution of and variation in doctrinal knowledge; or, to make the point differently, it allows the historiographers to collect in the same work hundreds of anecdotes that have simi-

lar—but not identical—philosophical bases. The historiographers accomplished the same thing in their narratives as in their speeches: they kept definitive generalization at bay. Each occasion and each set of historical par-

ticulars inspired a slightly different enunciation of the central values. By developing their moral and political theories in the borrowed voices of historical individuals who lived and spoke over a period of more than two centuries, the historiographers afforded themselves a greater degree of flexibility than would have been possible had they expressed themselves in the essay or

some other genre of writing. A full picture of the concept of ritual propriety—or of rightness, or of good faith, or of reverence—emerges not from any single statement but from the assembled instances of its application. __ The same thing happens on the level of narrative, where the moral of the story is not a single, total lesson but the particular conditions of intelligibility operating in hundreds of individual anecdotes. In both the Zuozhuan and the Guoyu, the historiographers distribute similar lessons over long periods of time. Their lessons, which hold as true in the earliest decades of the period

as in the latest, come to govern the reader's understanding of historical change while themselves remaining immune to it; they are the results not of

particular historical conditions, the narrators imply, but of eternal ones.

272 Writing and the Ends of History Meanwhile, at least in the case of the Zuozhuan, the authors or compilers of

the text lay a claim to historical understanding of the entire Spring and Autumn period by narrating at least one anecdote for every year. No mention is made of omitted or lost material; everything significant, it is implied, has been remembered. The anecdotes of the Zuozhuan turn the period into an occupied territory, where historical particulars in every year are made to serve lessons imposed from without. The historiographers’ pose of contemporaneity accords with broader as-

| sumptions about time that they have built into their compilation of anecdotes. For them, as for all other narrators, “time becomes human to the ex-

| tent that it is articulated through a narrative mode, and narrative attains its full meaning when it becomes a condition of temporal existence.” Their handling of time as a historical and literary problem follows from the habitus established in their narratives and is related to themes examined in the preceding chapters. In a textual world of stable and unstable divisions, where classes and individuals must ideally see and maintain society's structure of differentiation, time is the constant and most fundamental medium of divi-

sion. Time, like social space, is the site of public imagery and its opposite, concealment. T’o the intricacies of synchronic, socially articulated vision, for example, in the tale of the Zheng duke’s reconciliation with his mother, we must add a temporal dimension in which the happy ending, hidden from the duke, is always visible to the wise Kaoshu of Ying. Prediction, fulfillment, requital, interpretation, recognition, all the most familiar habits of this type of narrative, derive their significance from time's distending effect and the manipulation of it by narrators, who can look back over past events and their consequences. With respect to temporal division as with respect to social division, the Zuozhuan represents one set of attitudes as correct and embodies these in the ministers who understand time's divisions well enough to see through them and make predictions across them. The wise know ritual time and the consequences of transgression against it. They also know the damage done over long spans of time and see the future of division. “Timeliness” (shi), the only explicitly formulated principle of time in the Zuozhuan, is an ideal of ritual temporality that sets time's divisions in accordance with the agricultural and ritual calendars. The principle connects ultimately with the themes of public imagery and the preservation of past standards through faithful mimetic reproduction. As Confucius says in the Lunyu, to administer a state successfully, one must maintain good faith, be

Writing and the Ends of History 273 frugal and kind, and “use the people at the proper time.” The Zuozhuan teflects a related doctrine in several passages explaining Chungiu entries. For

example, in response to the Chungiu entry, “In the summer, we walled Zhongqiu,” the Zuozhuan repeats the entry and adds, “It is written because it was not timely.” Such remarks normally relate to the untimely use of corvée labor; when the Chungiu records a public works project during any season but winter, it is (the Zuozhuan claims) censoring the Lu government for taking farmers from their fields. In two cases, the Zuozhuan notes problems

with ritual timing, once in a seasonal ceremony and once in posthumous honors for Duke Xi.” The principle also underlies a speech delivered to a Chu general about to be defeated by Jin commanders in the famous battle at _ Yanling; among the signs of the coming rout is Chu’s decision to muster an army during the summer, an interference with agricultural labor and a violation of ritual propriety.” In many places the Zuozhuan represents time as the basis of a repetitive rhythm, a schedule of political and religious commitments guided by ritual.” Time as an objective continuity, nature's accumulation of months and sea-

sons, should disappear behind the scrupulous maintenance of the ritual schedule. And in fact time does disappear, insofar as it becomes an explicit issue only when discrepancies arise. ‘The ruler who uses his laborers for state or personal projects when they should be left to tend their fields wrenches public activity out of its designated correspondence with natural cycles and is cited for untimeliness. Like other ritually aberrant acts, this one does its damage with the image it creates by spreading knowledge of the ruler’s im-

propriety through the population on which his power is founded. Good policy would never call attention to the problem of time, since the passage and return of moments would be marked only by the performance of the appropriate ritual. Writing would respond by recording the rituals in their proper places or, given nothing to record, by noting the date itself? one thinks of the numerous Chungiu entries that consist of the date alone: “The first year, spring, the king's first month.” The elimination of ritual aberrations and the complete ritualization of time would bring the end of history. No force could intervene to change hierarchical relations within and among states, and no line or individual could rise or fall. For the historiographers, who devote their energies primarily to the narration of ritual failure and its consequences, it is not enough to note,

again and again, that the ideal of repetition has failed. Over against the aspi- |

274 Writing and the Ends of History

ration to a cyclical, ritualized time and in keeping with the philosophy of fear, they propose a scheme of ascent and decline, according to which events of decades or centuries indicate the slow rise and fall of different lines’ for-

tunes. The three dynasties—Xia, Shang, and now Zhou—begin with a moment of virtue, a sort of radiance that fades with each passing generation. Renaissance is not unknown,” but the general curve points downward, toward the extinction of virtue and the rise of a virtuous alternative. Thus Jie of Xia gives way to Cheng Tang of Shang, and Zhou of Shang gives way to King Wu of Zhou. I have already discussed the famous scene in which King Zhuang of Chu betrays his dynastic ambitions by asking about the weight and size of the nine cauldrons that the Zhou house inherited from its predecessors. In his response, Wangsun Man of Zhou recounts the casting of the cauldrons under Yu, the bright beginnings of Xia and Shang, the slow decline of virtue, and the series of transfers that brought the cauldrons finally to the Zhou kings.” In two less familiar Guoyu passages, dynastic rise and fall acquire a numerical elegance. The Zhou house took fifteen generations to rise to complete virtue and royal power; after a plateau of several generations of stability, it went into decline and can be expected to suffer some disaster after

fifteen generations, Another speaker applies a similar pattern to the Xia and Shang.” Confucius, speaking of the devolution of royal and ducal power into the hands of ministerial families, also reckons the period of decline in generations.” Epochal events recall a concept of time that is never enunciated in the Zuozhuan or the Guoyu, but that perhaps grew out of the hermeneutic underlying historiographical narrative. As the “Patterned Words” (“Wenyan’) commentary on Kun, the second hexagram of the Zhouyi, puts it,”

BE ZK VAR BABE CR- VRRR- BREA SRE Se JE—-HE—- VY ZMH RAM: Families that have accumulated good works must have lingering good fortune, whereas families that have accumulated evil deeds must have lingering sorrows. When a subject murders his ruler, or a son murders his father, it is not a matter of a single morning or evening, Its origins are gradual.

The events mentioned in this passage—the rise and fall of families, the murders (shi) of rulers and fathers—are precisely the sorts of affairs historiography concerns itself with; the phrase “a subject murders his ruler” (chen

Writing and the Ends of History 275 shi gijun) echoes the regular language of Chunqiu entries and alludes openly to remarks on the Chungiu in the Mencius and elsewhere.”* If the author of the

“Wenyan” was indeed thinking of Chungiu lore (comprising the Zuozhuan and related texts), “the gradual” (jian) describes the temporal mode that prevails in that corpus of narratives. As observers read words and actions in the early anecdotes of a series and as they make their predictions, the conditions of the culmination are gradually assembled: one looks forward from isolated and minor acts of interpretation into the memorable future they portend. Or, with the “Patterned Words,” one looks backward from a crisis to the petty sins, mistakes, and revelations in which it originated.” Either way, the gradual designates the tension produced by time’s concealments in an era when temporal divisions are not determined entirely by ritual propriety. As modes of temporality, the gradual and the timely are complementary. On the one hand, historical events and the texts in which they are recorded can be read from the perspective of timeliness, that is, with attention to the ritually regulated rhythms of years and reigns. Here the focus is on the diverse places that share a single moment. Although each state has its own time line, which carries it further from its origins, the perspective of timeliness finds the intersections. This state’s duke came to power, or was expelled, or died, in the nth year of the reign of another state's duke; in a certain year the states traded official visits; there was a treaty or a war. By discursive convention, the narrators are attached to no particular point of view, and they excel at matching the discrepant calendars of the Chinese

| states with one another. Historical progression is not so much a line as a fabric. The Chungiu and the Zuozhuan take the years of the twelve Lu dukes as an axis of measurement; other states must use their own. Since neither the

reign of the Zhou king nor some shared year zero furnish a universal standard, common time emerges from the interweaving of the several states’ times.’” To recognize this sort of time and to manipulate it knowledgeably would have been difficult. Reading in the Zuozhuan would again have been a kind of training.” In the perspective of the gradual, the focus is on the single place and its diverse moments. Although the historiographers, like Confucius, recognize that li can vary with occasions and eras, they treat the li system of the Spring and Autumn period as a standard of behavior ideally immune to the real effects of time.” Epochal changes emerge against this ground, as royal and ducal houses become mere names and local families assume more real power

276 Writing and the Ends of History than their status should afford. The gradual is thus the order of falls and of rises. But rise and fall are not matched in any vision of the overall circularity

of long historical change. Instead, the diffusion of ritual propriety that seemed to follow Duke Wen’s investiture as hegemon is repeated on several local stages. The li order is subjected to distensions resulting from the dichotomy of real (political, military) power and the symbolic pre-eminence

assigned certain family lines. At times, as under Duke Wen, order is restored. But in the long run, the hierarchy—envisioned as a beautiful, ritualized proportion, perhaps in the shape of a pyramid—develops flaws that make its shape hard to recognize. It does not yet collapse, but it taxes the power of writing to keep it together.

The pose of contemporaneity helped to conceal the historiographers’ identities and motivations, whereas their conceptions of the timely and the gradual tended to expose them. Because they represented historical writing as an extension of remonstrance and other forms of courtly speech, they assimilated the structure of address to the idealized system of ritual and aesthetics articulated by their characters. This assimilation affected their narra-

tives at the most basic level, where the act of storytelling gives time its meaning. The temporal mode the historiographers embodied in their narratives, the gradual, emerges against the unattainable ideal of timeliness and repetition enshrined in their comments on the Chungiu and in their characters’ speeches. They wrote into their anecdote series a conception of time fundamentally linked to and contrasted with ritual repetition. History resulted from ritual failure; historical writing was a record of continual failure and rare success. In quotidian events the trained reader could identify and decode the signs of the gradual.

The Decline of the Zhou Order Despite their interest in ritual failure and its consequences, the historiographers did not stop at collecting negative exempla. They were not interested solely in narrating the disappearance of the li system; they had also to defend its continued importance in their own thought. The historiographers believed that the traditional li prescriptions had, by the end of Confucius’ life, ceased to guide most public interactions. But in their account of the final decades of the Spring and Autumn period, they created the conditions for li’s immortality even as they mourned its passing.

Writing and the Ends of History 277 Li was once, they imply, the aggregate of specific practices prescribed for sacrifices, diplomatic encounters, and hierarchical relations. This system of practices had by their time fallen to pieces and was the subject of historical memory and conjecture. In reified form, however, it flourished throughout their narratives, most especially in those having to do with the collapse of the order. Every defeat for the specific prescriptions of li becomes a victory for

the abstract idea of li, a flexible concept closely tied to privileged historiographical themes of bao and effective aesthetic display. Once li had been abstracted from the particular arrangements it prescribed, the historiographers could discern its ascendancy even in the most adverse conditions. Ducal families were replaced; states disintegrated; peripheral powers proclaimed hegemonies. But li, now primarily a tool of understanding rather than a body of practices, explained everything. One important implication of this reasoning for the historiographers was that the events of the end of Spring and

Autumn period history could be read as an aetiology of the historical en- 7 deavor itself.

In preparing for this end, as in compiling any anecdote series, the historiographers tended to speak through contemporary observers. One of these is Ji Zha, the Wu envoy whose remarks on the Shi performance in Lu demonstrated his acumen as a listener and a historical interpreter. Leaving Lu, he _ visits several other courts and assesses their ministers and prospects.” In Qi, he is “pleased with” (yue) Yanzi and advises him to turn over to the duke whatever cities and political power he controls: “The administration of Qi is going to settle ( gui) in a certain place, and until it settles there, there will be

- no end to the troubles.” The advice is a clear reference to coming strife among official families’ and to the Chens’ eventual replacement of the Qi ducal family. In Zheng, Ji Zha treats Zichan like an old acquaintance, exchanges gifts with him, and predicts that he will gain control of the government as long as he is careful about ritual propriety. In Wey, Ji Zha is pleased with several ministers: “Wey has many gentlemen, and will not yet suffer troubles.” He finishes his trip in Jin:

i S-aim eS: BREST. RAS O- SR RER ERS RM

Aw PMAA- BMC ABMAR- KKAGS RAE KR Be VRRAKEHe went to Jin, where he was pleased with Zhao Wenzi, Han Xuanzi, and Wei

Xianzi. He said, “The state of Jin will gather around these three clans.”

278 Writing and the Ends of History He was pleased with Shu Xiang, and before he departed he said to Shu Xiang, “Sir, you must exert yourself. The ruler is extravagant, and there are many good men; the ministers are all wealthy, and the administration will revert to their houses. You, Sir, love straightness and must bethink yourself of ways to escape trouble.”

Some thirty years later, apparently after his death, Shu Xiang’s clan is exterminated.” The ascendancy of the three clans culminates in the Warring States division of Jin. As I will demonstrate below, reified li accounts for

both events. Ji Zha’s remarks are typical of a whole class of predictions.” Almost all the Spring and Autumn period states lasted beyond the final entries of the Chungiu chronicle, although many of them seem not to have lasted long. ‘The historiographers endow a few late Spring and Autumn period characters, including Ji Zha, with the ability to foresee how things will stand in the states several decades into the Warring States period. The Guoys often fulfills such predictions in brief notations directly after the speeches containing them, but in the Zuozhuan they are for the most part left unfulfilled; they point to a time beyond the end of the text's period and initiate narratives that can be concluded only by the reader who knows what happened afterward. In Lu the power of the three Huan families, the noble lines descended from Duke Huan, will continue to grow at the expense of the ducal house. The rise of the nobles is predicted in various speeches, many built on aesthetic and ritual observations.” A Jin visitor foresees the exile of Duke Zhao from his own state during his later years, observing that the duke shows no proper grief during his mother’s funeral; another Jin minister notes that a ducal house must lose the state when the people of the state do not share its mourning,” Although it seems during one diplomatic encounter that Duke Zhao has saved himself by his ritual propriety, contemporary observers are made to argue that what he has mastered is not li but yi, “deportment.”” Ji Pingzi, head of the noble family that benefits most from the enfeeblement of the dukes, commits an irreparable violation of ritual propriety by using a human being as a sacrificial victim; as an observer points out, “Now the Duke of Zhou will not taste Lu’s sacrifices.” Zigong, the disciple of Confucius, predicts on ritual and aesthetic grounds the ends of Lu’s last two dukes of the period: Duke Ding reveals the imminence of his death when he stoops

| slightly while receiving a jade during a meeting with the ruler of Zhu, and Duke Ai shows that he will not die in Lu when he uses presumptuous diction in an ill-considered eulogy for Confucius.” (For further discussion of

Writing and the Ends of History 279

this eulogy, an important moment in the ending of the period, see the last

section of this chapter.) Although the state of Chen will perish, be restored, and finally perish again, a line of Chens will eventually displace the ducal house of Qi.” This revolution is predicted and explained in two important passages, both involving Yanzi, the famous advisor to Duke Jing of Qi. In the first, he visits

Jin to arrange for a marriage alliance between the two states. The rituals : completed, he speaks with Shu Xiang, who asks about the situation in Qi.

Yanzi explains that the ducal house is in decline and the Chen family is | likely to take power. Whereas the duke exploits the people, the Chens curry favor with them through generous marketing and taxation practices, which Yanzi describes in detail. Shu Xiang agrees with his analysis and predicts

similar changes in Jin. Alchough he does not specify which ministerial fami- | lies are benefiting from the Jin ducal house's decline, he insists that popular

alienation will bring the duke down? |

Some years later, Yanzi makes the same case before Duke Jing himself. As they sit together in the main chamber, the duke sighs and says, “Ah, what a beautiful room! I wonder who will have it after I am gone?” Yanzi asks

what he means. The duke says, “I take it to be a matter of virtue.” And Yanzi reveals what the future holds:””

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He replied, “In keeping with what you have said, it will be the Chen clan. Although the Chens are without great virtue, they are generous to the people. By measure of dou, of qu, of fu, and of zhong, they tax their cities sparingly and give to the people _ generously. You tax generously, and the Chens give generously; the people go to

them. The Shi says:

‘Although I have no virtuous attainment to share with you,

I will sing and dance.’ _ | The people sing and dance in response to the gifts of the Chen clan. If future generations are even slightly remiss, and the Chen clan does not perish, then the state

will be theirs.” ,

280 Writing and the Ends of History : The ruler said, “Excellent! What can we do about it?” Yanzi said, “Only ritual can bring an end to it. In ritual, the gifts of a house cannot equal those of the state; the people will not drift, farming will not move, crafts and commerce will not change, courtiers will not lose their places, officials will not be haughty, and ministers will not collect benefits owed to the duke.” © The ruler said, “Excellent! I am incapable of it. I have discovered only today that ritual can be used in the governing of a state.”””

Yanzi goes on to explain that li is coeval with Heaven and earth, and that it is what makes all relations—between lord and subjects, fathers and sons, elder and younger brothers, husbands and wives, and mothers and daughtersin-law—work smoothly. As Yanzi insists in somewhat hyperbolic terms, ritual propriety is the ordering principle by which the hierarchical society has always been maintained. It is also the form of exchange that, properly enforced, keeps private generosity from dividing the people's loyalties. And yet the Qi man who should be most conscious of the importance of ritual propriety has to learn it from his minister, who makes it into something more than the protocol inherited from the Zhou forebears. Ritual propriety is now the master principle. The theoretical principles examined in Chapter 3 were bounded by it and subordinated to it; historiography raises it above all the particular power arrangements of the remembered period and establishes it as a timeless law. As powerful as ritual propriety is, it must nonetheless be enacted by the person who is the focus of public attention and imitation, the duke himself. But he admits that he is incapable of it. The Chens, with their lesser virtue and their calculated cultivation of popular support, are shifting the attention of the state audience from its traditional focus on the ducal house. When new

actors take the stage of court—in Lu, in Qi, in Jin—the decline of the old order is nearly complete. But the failure of the old state hierarchies has not brought the death of mimetic values, as Yanzi proves. It has forced them to a new level of generality. In Jin, as Ji Zha was permitted to foresee, three families would win out

over their colleagues and the ducal line, eventually dividing the territory among themselves as the Warring States powers Wei, Hann, and Zhao. A readjustment in the paths of exchange within the state and a redistribution of power within the hierarchy raises these new ruling families, In a conversation with Yanzi, Shu Xiang reproduces the logic of his Qi counterpart:””

Writing and the Ends of History 281

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Even our ducal house is in its final age. The war horses are not harnessed; the high ministers participate in no military campaigns; the duke’s chariot has no riders; and the ranks are without officers. The common people are exhausted, and the temples and palaces are rich and luxurious. Corpses in the streets gaze at each other while the families of female favorites outdo themselves in excess. The people, hearing the commands of the duke, act as if they are fleeing marauders and enemies. Luan, Xi, Xu, Yuan, Hu, Xu, Qing, and Bo: now they have fallen among the menial classes. The administration is conducted from the gates of private houses, and the people have no one to whom they give their allegiance. Day after day, the ruler does not change but indulges in pleasures to while away his sorrow. Any day could bring the downfall of the ducal house. The inscription on the Chan cauldron says: “The early dawn was exceedingly brilliant, but later generations are still remiss.” How much worse when he does not change day after day? Can he last long?”

Like the singing and dancing that signify Chen influence in Qi, the index of historical change in Jin is an aesthetic one. The excesses of the ducal house are even more pronounced in Jin than in Qi. The duke has abandoned the military pursuits by which the populace of the state was once organized in favor of the sort of enjoyments that cannot last. The exhaustion of the people, the extravagance of architectural projects, the wealth of female favorites’

families, and the duke’s sybaritism are the desperate amusements of a doomed man.” Both the allied states and the people of Jin observe and suffer from the excesses of the ruling house. The allied states will throw off their allegiance to Jin when the Siqi Palace is complete, as Shi Kuang and Shu Xiang predict.” As for the people, few passages in the Zuozhuan attack aristocratic luxury and its ironies more bitterly than the lines on corpses and palaces. In Shu Xiang’s description, no family like the Chens stands ready to aid the people and win their favor. Rather, as I will show below, Jin attempts to control the people through an innovative use of writing, an effort that brings only renewed predictions of doom, this time from Confucius. The historiographers must explain not only why Jin’s power failed but also why the state fell into three parts. They accomplish this by recalling predictions concerning the three triumphant families and by finding reasons

282 Writing and the Ends of History | for the overthrow of other lines. Recounting the appointment of Bi Wan, ancestor of the Wei line, to a military post early in the Spring and Autumn period, they tell of a diviner’s prediction that Bi’s descendants would flourish

in Jin.” Ji Zha heard promising signs in the music of Wei and remarked, “With virtue to support these things, there would be an enlightened ruler.”””

When Han Xuanzi, visiting the Zhou court, shows by his correct use of ceremonial language that he has mastered ritual forms, the king himself predicts long prosperity for his line, which will found Hann: “In his words he

| does not give up what is ancient.” In a scene reminiscent of the Ji Zha predictions, a man who is perhaps from Wu makes a very strong prediction for

the Zhao line:” |

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Zhao Jianzi asked Zhuang Chici, “Who is most worthy among the scholar-retainers of the east?”

| Zhuang Chici bowed and said, “I presume to congratulate you!” Jianzi said, “You haven’t answered my question. Why are you congratulating me?”

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

The anecdote is especially telling in that it makes Jianzi’s humble interest in

scholar-retainers—the group in which the historiographers might have classed themselves—the sign of his line’s rise. According to the historiographers and according to the body of lore from which they culled their anecdotes, the ancestors of the most powerful noble

| lines of their day revealed in their appearances and gestures the signs of future greatness. In such passages the historiographers extend their control over the material of history by implying that their own preferred form of interpretation afforded contemporary observers a glimpse of the future. Mu Shu’s scholarly definition of the undecaying cannot entirely displace Fan Xuanzi’s aristocratic definition: the historiographers apparently cannot determine ex cathedra what is memorable and what is not. But in the predic-

| Writing and the Ends of History 283 tions they remember, each of which depends on the observer's ability to apply ritual and classical learning to the interpretation of real phenomena, the

historiographers accomplish a figurative subordination of one sort of power—the ruling lines’ reproduction of themselves over generations—to

the very different intellectual power of vision. | | The futures of Lu, Qi, and Jin mattered more to the historiographers than the futures of other states. Nevertheless, for all the major states they recount at least one prediction. Certain ministers’ lines will last long in Zheng, but the state itself will perish relatively early. Three predictions are made on the basis of poetry recitations, and others have to do with ritual performances and improper extravagance. Similar prophecies are remembered for Qin, Chu, Song, Cai, Wey, Cao, and Wu.” As for Zhou, in the speech on the nine cauldrons, discussed in Chapter 2 (pp. 60-61), Wangsun Man ties his prophecy (that the dynasty would last for seven hundred years

and thirty generations) to the most prestigious aesthetic objects in the realm.’ The Zuozhuan for the most part avoids explicit reference to the dynasty’s end, but the Guoyu quite freely entertains ideas about Zhou’s successor, naming Chu as an especially likely candidate. In the most extended passage of this sort, a Zhou official discusses with Scribe Bo the collapse of dynastic authority and the rise of regional power in the states of Chu and Jin; the official goes on to become the founder of Zheng, Duke Huan.” At some point the fact of Zhou’s decline was so commonly accepted that it could be depicted as the subject of a popular saying, as is shown during a conversation between ministers from Zheng and Jin:

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

In passages like this one, the theme of fear is expressed in the stylized impo-

tence of small states against disorders and decadence in the royal house.

284 Writing and the Ends of History Every rank has its proper concerns; even if small states are fearful, responsibility for re-establishing order belongs to the great state, Jin. Interesting here is the suggestion of widely recognized Zhou decline and the combination of such recognition with a defense of a ritually sanctioned hierarchical distribution of duties. Like Zitaishu, the Confucian thinkers of the early Warring States period could take refuge when necessary in the notion of restricted duties and prerogatives; like Yanzi, they might diagnose the illness and prescribe ritual as a cure. But ritual could also justify a substitution of under-

| standing for action. Holding to li in an individual life might mean watching the competent authorities allow it to disappear from political life. Again, as in Nietzsche's view, ressentiment could adduce impotence as proof of an exclusive sort of power.

The Rise of the South

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

of li. |

The triumph of Chu at Bi and the fall of King Ling at Ganxi are told as Confucian parables: Chu flourished when its kings adhered to li and failed when they did not. ° In narrating the events of treaty meetings during the period of Chu hegemony under King Ling, the historiographers wrote a subtler history, simultaneously admitting and denying the impotence of the central states. The Chungiu entries for the great treaty at Song in 546 B.c.E. give no hint of Jin weakness:'”

S- NAHB SBR PRB SORE. HOR. RILA BE dF A. BATA: In the summer, Shusun Bao [of Lu] met with Zhao Wu of Jin, Qu Jian of Chu, Gongsun Guisheng of Cai, Shi Wu of Wey, Kong Huan of Chen, Liang Xiao of Zheng, and men from Xuu and Cao at Song.

Writing and the Ends of History 285 The placement of Jin before Chu would ordinarily indicate that Jin enjoyed its customary priority in the covenant ceremony. The second entry on the event does nothing to disturb this impression:

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

But in this case, as in some others, the chronicle is flatly contradicted by the anecdotes that accompanied it. According to the Zuozhuan, it was at this meeting that Chu first took precedence over Jin in the ceremonial order of the covenant. What accounts for the contradiction?

When semi-civilized upstarts have their way with the allied states of China, including Jin, the upholders of the central states’ culture have cause for fear. But the tale is told in such a way as to assuage this fear. The proposal for the great treaty at Song, according to the narrator, comes neither from Chu nor from Jin, but from Xiang Xu of Song, who hopes to become famous by bringing an end to wars among the states.” When the pattici-

pants come together, Zhao Wu (Zhao Wenzi, here referred to as Zhao Meng) is disturbed to discover that the Chu representatives are wearing breastplates under their ceremonial clothing. A Chu minister, Bozhou Li, has already remonstrated with his commander, Qu Jian (Zimu), about the

cynic.” ,

importance of good faith (xin) and advised that the armed men be removed. Qu Jian has rejected this counsel on the grounds that Chu and Jin come together not for trust but for profit. Bozhou Li duly predicts disaster for the

With these anecdotes in the background, Chu motivations are already compromised when the narrative returns to the Jin side:

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Zhao Meng was worried about the Chu forces’ concealed armor and told Shu Xiang about it. Shu Xiang said, “What harm is that? It is impossible even for a commoner to commit one act in bad faith; he falls down dead. And if one commits an act of bad

faith while calling together the high ministers of the feudal lords, one will certainly

286 Writing and the Ends of History

, about them. _ |

not succeed. Those who eat their words are not a problem; you need not worry

“If this man summons people in the name of good faith and then completes the action with false presumption, no one will give in to him. How can he harm us? Moreover, we are following Song in order to contain this illness, and we are ready to sacrifice our lives. If with Song we should sacrifice our lives, then we would succeed even if Chu were twice as large. What are you afraid of? It will not come to that. If they summon the allies in order to stop wars and then marshal troops to harm us, we will get a lot of use out of that. This is not something to worry about.”"™”

_ Shu Xiang’s speech lacks the formal symmetries of the most impressive speeches, perhaps because he keeps returning to the subject of Zhao Meng’s fear. Why be afraid, he asks, when every violation of good faith brings certain retribution from forces beyond our control? And if they should take this opportunity to do us violence, all the better: every Chu misstep serves Jin interests.

Although it becomes increasingly difficult to see beyond the thickbrushed moral coloration of the anecdote, Chu remains the real power at Song. No amount of prediction and no failure in ritual attitude keeps the Chu representatives from demonstrating their dominance at the treaty ceremony itself:

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BES Sse: MRS CBR HHP Rw THe S56: ARR -/)\ RAMA PHSe-RPABAS HI: Ama - ee | A+ BRS - SAH: Jin and Chu struggled over precedence. The men of Jin said, “Jin is invariably the covenant-lord of the allies; there is no one who goes before Jin.”

| The men of Chu said, “You say that Jin and Chu are equals. If Jin always goes first, chat must mean that Chu is the weaker party. Moreover, Jin and Chu have for a long time taken turns hosting the covenants of the allies. Why should [precedence] be monopolized by Jin?” ‘Shu Xiang said to Zhao Meng, “The allied lords adhere to Jin’s virtue, not to its officiating at covenants. Do your duty to virtue and do not struggle to go first. Furthermore, when the allied lords make a covenant, there is always one among the , smaller states who officiates. Is it not acceptable for Chu to act this smaller part for

Jin?” ,

_ So they put Chu first. In the writing Jin comes first because Jin had good faith.

Writing and the Ends of History 287 Although it is true that Chu has presided at earlier covenants with the central states,” only an ambiguity in the ritual roles of the covenant ceremony allows Jin to save face during this meeting. Ostensibly, Chu will go first not because it is the most powerful state, but because it has been assigned the

role of the officiant. ”” :

In writing, as in the event itself, a manifest failure becomes a symbolic victory. As in Dong Hu’s record of the assassination of Duke Ling of Jin, a _ Zuozhuan narrative exposes an inaccuracy in the Chungiu and transforms it into a higher form of accuracy." Neither Chu’s real power nor its symbolic victory at Song matters, since Confucian values, here invoked through xin, good faith, are bound to triumph. Shu Xiang can afford his sangfroid because the historiographers have bestowed their own certainty about the ends of stories on him and because these stories have been shaped to fit the purpose. Shu Xiang can encourage Zhao Meng to proceed confidently, because nothing will come of the hidden Chu army; because Qu Jian will die the next year and will seem thus to suffer for his bad faith, as his own man predicts;

and because in the long run, after the violent rise of King Ling of Chu (which begins in just a few years), Chu will collapse resoundingly. Just as fear is cultivated in this historiography, so is it controlled, by the shaping of narratives that prove again and again, subtly and overtly, the validity of Confucian tenets. Five years later, the Song treaty is renewed at Guo and the trick of narration is repeated. Once again a Jin minister is fearful:"””

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Qi Wu said to Zhao Wenzi, “At the treaty at Song, Chu got its way with Jin. Now the Chu chief minister lacks good faith, and all of the allies have heard of it. If you do not take precautions, I fear that it will again happen as it did at Song. Zimu (Qu Jian] was famous among the allies for his good faith, and he still deceived Jin and bullied us. How much worse will it be with someone monstrous in his untrustworthiness? It will be a great shame for Jin if Chu twice gets its way with Jin. For seven

288 Writing and the Ends of History | years you have been chief minister to the state of Jin, which has been host of covenants. Twice you have called together the allied lords themselves and three times you have called together their ministers. You forced Qi and the Di into submission

and pacified the eastern region. You settled the disorder with Qin and walled Chunyu, and the armed forces were not fatigued. The state is not exhausted, the people do not speak ill [of their rulers], the allied lords do not complain, and Heaven sends no great disaster: all these are your achievements. To have such a good name and to end it with shame is something I myself would fear, and you too must take care.”

Wenzi said, “I accept what you have kindly bestowed. But at the treaty at Song, Zimu had in his heart the intention to harm others, and I had the intention to treat others humanely. That is why Chu was able to bully Jin. Now I still have the same intent, and Chu again acts presumptuously; it will not cause harm. I will take good faith as the basis and follow that in my actions.” "°

He concludes by comparing himself to the farmer who works patiently, knowing that in this way he will reap a rich harvest despite occasional years of famine. As it turns out, Chu does not have the whole covenant ceremony repeated. The text of the old treaty is read aloud and placed atop the sacrificial animal, but there is no smearing of blood and thus no renewed question of precedence. Chu remains first in the list that supports international peace, and Qi Wu's fears are realized. But lest these fears of humiliation preserve a lasting humiliation in the historical account of the incident,

Zhao Meng is given an opportunity to explain the anomaly: Jin cannot be shamed while it clings to good faith and humaneness. The powerful minister can accept humble dedication to abstract values when vindication is not far

off”

In some ways more disturbing than Chu’s power during these years is the

later rise of the state of Wu. Despite the legend that connected it with the Zhou house, Wu had been thought of as a strange and self-consciously barbaric entity in the watery reaches of the southeast.” Figures like Ji Zha are tourists and are better described by the stereotype of the virtuous barbarian

| than by the model of the high minister in the central states. Yet by the end of the Spring and Autumn period, under King Fuchai, Wu is calling and directing ceremonial gatherings. It helped the Zuozhuan storytellers (and many others who would follow) that Wu's ascendancy came to an end almost as soon as it had begun, when the Yue armies, under the patient direction of King Goujian and his minister Fan Li, swept into Wu while the king was away on hegemonic business. As the historiographers found a way to deal

Writing and the Ends of History 289

with the awkward matter of that rise and temporary triumph, they again played the end of the tale against its middle. Wu power, according to the Zuozhuan, originated in an act of vengeance. After Wuchen has left Chu with the notorious beauty Xia Ji, enemies of his

kill certain of his kin and confiscate their property. He writes them a brief letter: “You serve your lord with deception and greed and kill many who are not guilty. I am determined to make you die from exhaustion as you rush to

obey your orders.” He soon makes good on his threat. He obtains permission from the lord of Jin to go to Wu, where the ruler, Shoumeng, is “pleased” with him and sets up relations with Jin and in turn receives military support and training. The teachings are simple and the results immediate: “They gave them archers and charioteers; they taught Wu to ride in chariots; they taught them to fight in formation; and they taught them to rebel against Chu.” Swallowing up all the non-Chinese groups that had for- _ merly adhered to Chu in the southeast, Wu establishes its own relations with the central states.’ The historiographers believed that Wu owed its power and its relations with the civilized states to an emissary from the center.” Without this impetus and this teaching, it is implied, Wu would have remained in obscurity. The Wu challenge to Chu reaches its height when Wu armies occupy the Chu capital at Ying and force King Zhao to flee for his life.’*" The distribution of material in the Zuozhuan allows this achievement, as great as it is, to be overshadowed by largely ineffectual ceremonial doings in the central states. In the years before the invasion, Chu has grievously insulted the ruler of Cai by holding him prisoner.” In response to this affront, the Zhou noble Duke Wen of Liu calls together the rulers of Jin, Lu, Song, Cai, Wey, Chen, Zheng and several smaller states, along with a high minister of Qi, to plan an attack on Chu. The record of their meeting at Shaoling is domi-

nated by an erudite dispute over ritual precedence: in an extraordinary speech, a Wey minister adduces lengthy proofs that Wey must come before Cai. Chang Hong of Zhou is “pleased” with the speech and has the sacrificial sequence adjusted accordingly.” But very little comes of the meeting. Jin does have Cai attack Shenn, a state loyal to Chu, for its failure to attend the meeting, and Chu attacks Cai in its turn. But when the time comes for

real action, aid for Cai comes from Wu (through the diplomacy of Wu , Zixu), not from the participants in the Shaoling meeting. The absence of the central states during these episodes is notable.”

290 Writing and the Ends of History

Wu's strength becomes truly fearsome when it defeats its southern neighbor Yue, with which it has skirmished for years. In typical fashion, the Zuozhuan and Guoyu surround this moment with veiled consolations. Fuchai decides not to kill Goujian or annihilate Yue. Wu Zixu, arguing for complete destruction, presents a bitter remonstrance full of ancient precedents, but Fuchai does not heed him. Readers who have learned what they should from their reading will know that Fuchai has thus revealed his own miserable destiny. Zixu retreats and predicts Wu's collapse.’ In Chen and in Chu, wise ministers see the weakness in Wu's strength.” Some years later, while Jin is occupied with a Wey succession crisis and its influence with the northern states is in question, Duke Ai of Lu meets with Wu representatives. The account of the meeting does not obscure the fact that Wu demands and receives a more sumptuous sacrifice than any aspiring hegemon has ever received, but it embeds that fact in material that

| makes it seem irrelevant: ”

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In the summer, the duke met with Wu at Zeng. Wu [messengers] came to request one hundred full sacrifices. Zifu Jingbo [of Lu] replied, “The former kings never had such a thing.”

The Wu representative said, “Song entertained us with one hundred full sacrifices, and Lu cannot do less than Song, Moreover, Lu has entertained ministers from Jin with more than ten full sacrifices. Would it not be permissible for the Wu king to have one hundred?”

Jingbo said, “Fan Yang of Jin abandoned ritual propriety in his greed, and intimidated our small capital with [the powers of] a great stare. That is why we gave him eleven full sacrifices. If your ruler wishes to command the allied lords with ritual propriety, then there is a set number. If he will abandon ritual propriety, then he is going even further in his excess. In establishing ritual, the kings of the Zhou never went above the number twelve in their objects, since they considered that the great number of Heaven. Now you abandon the ritual of Zhou and say that you must have one hundred full sacrifices; this is the whim of your officers.”

Writing and the Ends of History 291 The men of Wu would not listen. Jingbo said, “Wu will perish. They abandon Heaven and turn their backs on their roots. If we do not give them [the one hundred full sacrifices], they will infect us with their illness.” So they gave [the sacrifices].'””

The episode, which does not affect the outcome of events at all, might ap-

pear to be little more than character exposition if the words put in Zifu Jingbo’s mouth did not so effectively assert Confucian ideas, Wu's presumption and Lu’s violation of ritual propriety in giving in to the outrageous request lose the terrifying significance they might have had when southern power was at its height. The Wu representatives’ refusal to listen to reason

becomes another demonstration of the effectiveness of ritual propriety. Hindsight endows the Lu minister with heroic complacency: Wu will perish, and tradition can show that its fall was caused by its abandonment of the standards that Zhou ritual had discovered and promulgated. For the historiographers, as for Jingbo, the precise number of sacrifices matters less than the caprice with which Wu hopes to manipulate a ritual display. The most devastating blow to Wu influence comes at the very moment of its greatest triumph. King Fuchai calls a meeting of the states, including Jin, at Huangchi (in modern-day Henan) in 482 B.c.z.; as Wu and Jin struggle over ritual precedence, the forces of Yue, long prepared for this moment, march into the Wu capital.’”° Although the calamity bears out naysayers’ warnings about Wu overreaching, no one really benefits from it. Circumstances in Jin under Duke Ding make it difficult for that state to seize the role of hegemon from Wu, especially since it was Fuchai who successfully

summoned the rulers to the meeting. According to the Guoyu and other sources, Wu did retain precedence despite its domestic troubles. But the Zuozhuan, supported by the Chungiu, claims that Jin performed the covenant

ceremony first. On the whole, accounts of the meeting at Huangchi are much more confused than accounts of the gatherings at Song and Guo, and the Guoyu version differs quite radically from the Zuozhuan version, dwelling on military details on the Wu side, including the use of canals for transportation of their contingent to the meeting site.

In one respect, the Zuozhuan version of events is quite familiar. As in the : episodes of Chu precedence, the threat from the south is an illusion and is dispelled by the steadfast ritualism and canny interpretation of a northern hero:’”

292 Writing and the Ends of History

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The covenant was made in the autumn, on the xinchou day of the seventh month. Wu and Jin contended for precedence. The men of Wu said, “We have seniority in the Zhou house.” The men of Jin said, “Among those having the Ji surname, we are the hegemon.”

Zhao Yang called to Yin, the [Jin] master of horse, and said, “That the day is growing late and we have not yet completed the great affair [of the covenant] is the

| fault of us two. Set up the drums; put the battle lines in order. We two will die for it, and then it will certainly be possible to see who is senior and who is junior.” He replied, “Let me first take a look at them.” He returned and said, “Meat eat-

ers should not look inky. Now the King of Wu does look inky. Has his state been defeated? Has his heir died? Moreover, the virtuous sway of barbarians is always unstable, and cannot last. Let us wait for a time.”

Thus Jin went first.”

‘When Jin and Chu came together in a covenant meeting, family relations did not and could not become an issue. Chu asserted its strength, and the Jin ministers accepted that strength while looking beyond it to its demise. Here, however, the peripheral state uses the legend of its founding to assert seniority among its partners.” This time Jin is the party to threaten military action, perhaps somewhat foolhardily, given the military escort Fuchai has brought with him. But the threat is only a foil for the virtuoso interpretive act that solves the problem: in the appearance of the Wu king, perhaps in the dark circles under his eyes or the overall discoloration of his face, the Jin

master of horse is able to discern a hidden setback that will force Wu to yield in time. The question, like that of the nine cauldrons, is one of virtue, and confidence in the changeability of barbarian virtue (bolstered by retrospective knowledge of Wu's fall) allows Jin to be patient.” Plots, as Aristotle proposed, can be understood as instruments for the manipulation of emotion. Whether one understands the reference to kathar-

| sis in his famous definition of tragedy in a medical sense, as a purgation of harmful emotions, or in a cultural sense, as a purification of old abominations, plot and the ornaments of tragedy are therapeutic.’”° For all its differences from Athenian tragedy, early Chinese historiography also had as its central purpose the representation and control of certain emotions, chief

Writing and the Ends of History —.293

among them fear and joy. The anecdotes concerning the Spring and | Autumn period, its last decades in particular, foreground and sanction certain types of fear. At the same time, they feature ministerial characters who overcome fear through faith in the ultimate effectiveness of actions guided by li. If they resembled their characters, the historiographers also regularly justified their claims of fearlessness through appeals to li. But their work in

historical narration had favored a redefinition of li. For them li was not equivalent to any specific set of prescriptions that guided religious and public activities in earlier eras. Rather, it was a general attitude of fidelity to past practices and was less often realized in events than it was invoked as the ab-

sent key to events. Through their management of emotions and through their elevation of li, the historiographers mastered the changes of the end of the Spring and Autumn period and made themselves the keepers of history.

The Dilemma of Writing In the view of the historiographers, the collapse of the Zhou order was accompanied by a revolution in administrative technique, at least in some of the central states. Specifically, certain governments began to abandon unwritten codes of behavior, including ritual propriety, in favor of published law codes. The result was that the project of explaining the history of the

late Spring and Autumn period was linked to a theoretical treatment of writing. As problems with literal readings of the Chungiu suggested, the historiographers faced a dilemma in their attitudes toward writing. On the one hand,

as readers and interpreters of the written word, they could not do without documents. Texts read or ostensibly read—including the Shu, inscriptions of all sorts, and the Chungiu itself—clearly had a special evidentiary status. On the other hand, the historiographers were not prepared to vest authority entirely in the book. Like Mencius, they seem to have believed that writing was insufficient to its own interpretation; unless texts were transmitted within a

teaching tradition that guided readers to correct understandings, texts would mislead.’*’ They made understanding the Chungiu a figure both for historical knowledge and for all learning, including political philosophy. Documents had a place in education and in the ordering of political life, but that place was to be strictly controlled; new documents could not be added at will, and access to the documents was to be restricted. As I will show in the last sec-

294 Writing and the Ends of History tion of this chapter, the historiographers linked the birth of this scholastic control of texts to the death of its supposed founder, Confucius.

The historiographers’ attitudes toward cultural and administrative changes in the late Spring and Autumn period are manifest in their treatment of artifacts and wen. As noted in Chapter 2, the depiction of creatures on Yu's legendary cauldrons exemplified the ideal mechanism of aesthesis and public imagery. The knowledge assembled on their surfaces was, like the material from which they were made, a gift from the governed to themselves, but a gift that passed through the refining and ordering agency of the ruler. The reciprocal relationship and the representations themselves admitted of

no argument. As the Zhou order falls to pieces, the historiographers recount two more episodes in which cauldrons are made tools of government communication. In both, relations between rulers and ruled are again made concrete in bronze vessels with figured surfaces, and these vessels again become emblematic of the shape of history. But the casters of these vessels are not sages, the representations are not pictures but writing, and the casting itself is a sign of the degenerate times. In the first incident, Shu Xiang of Jin offers a critique of a Zheng law code published in bronze. As a later episode will show, his objections can properly be called “Confucian” and likely represent the attitudes of the historiographers:"”

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Writing and the Ends of History 295 “In the beginning I had hopes for you, but I have given them up now. Long ago the former kings consulted about matters to decide them but did not make penal codes: they feared that the people would become contentious. When they still could not control them, they restrained them with rightness, bound them with administration, conducted their affairs with ritual propriety, maintained them with good faith, and fostered them with humaneness. They determined emoluments and ranks to encourage their obedience and decided punishments strictly to overawe them in their perversity. “Fearing that that still was not enough, they taught them loyalty, rewarded good conduct, instructed them in their duties, commissioned them with harmony, supervised them respectfully, oversaw them with might, and decided [their cases] with rigor. Still they sought superiors who were sagely and principled, officials who were brilliant and discerning, elders who were loyal and trustworthy, and masters who were kind and generous. Only then could the people be employed without disaster or disorder resulting. “When the people know that there is a code, they have no wariness of their supe-

riors. All of them become contentious, appealing to the writings, and achieve their goals through lucky conniving. They cannot be governed. When the Xia had

disorder in its administration, it composed the ‘Code of Yu.’ When the Shang had disorder in its administration, it composed the ‘Code of Tang,’ When Zhou had disorder in its administration, it composed the ‘Nine Codes.’ All three of these penal codes arose in terminal ages.

“Now as chief minister in the state of Zheng you have rectified fields and ditches, established an administration that is reviled, determined the three statutes, and cast the penal text [in bronze], all to calm the people. Will this not be difficult? The Shi says:

‘Make of the virtue of King Wen a guide, a model, a pattern; Daily calm the four quarters.’ And again it says: ‘Make a guide and pattern of King Wen: The ten thousand communities will respond in kind.’

Given this [injunction], what penal codes can one have? When the people have learned the points of contention, they will abandon ritual propriety and appeal to the writings. Even at chisel’s tip and knife’s edge they will contend. Chaotic litigiousness will flourish, and bribes will circulate everywhere.

“Will Zheng perhaps perish at the end of your generation? I have heard that ‘when a state is about to fall, it has numerous regulations.’ Surely that refers to this sort of situation.”

Zichan wrote back to him: “It is as you have said, Sir. I am untalented and cannot reach as far as the sons and grandsons. I have done it to save this generation.

296 Writing and the Ends of History Although I cannot obey your orders, how should I dare to forget your great kind-

ness?” As Mark Lewis has argued, scenes like this one tend to exaggerate the extent

to which the use of writing for legal purposes in the Eastern Zhou represented a departure from traditional patterns.” The exaggeration has important consequences. In the first half of his letter, Shu Xiang describes the ancient fear felt by the former kings as they implemented their unwritten measures for government. This fear is absent in ages of decline, in which the use of written penal codes makes the people incautious and ungovernable.” Although writing is only part of the larger problem of penal codes, it epitomizes the rigidity and openness that makes those codes hopeless gestures. Ritual is forever dependent on public imagery and the attentiveness of its popular audience, but it does conceal aspects of its effectiveness. Ideally, it instills an automatic imitation, a general attitude of reverence and obedience, and a generous abstention from the details of self-restraint. Writing, on the other hand, spells it all out; it makes the governed masses readers and pettifoggers and dispels the misty good cheer of the civic banquet.

The written penal code resembles the Shi and the Chungiu as Mencius saw them: it is both a product of and a compensation for fear, a sign of decline and a last resort against chaos.” But it is too powerful a mimetic tool: it reproduces the very contentiousness it combats. The chisel’s point and knife’s edge at which the people will henceforth contend are the very instruments with which this law is inscribed upon the cauldron’s surface. Shu Xiang does not acknowledge yet that he and Zichan live in a “last age,” a time of decline, but Zichan believes that his extreme measure may suffice only to preserve order during his lifetime. _ Some twenty years later, Shu Xiang’s successors in the Jin administration follow Zheng’s precedent:"”

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KR - ARGO: Ate - WR: | In the winter, Zhao Yang and Xun Yin of Jin led an army to build walls on the banks of the Ru. They then levied a drum of iron from Jin and used it to cast a Penal Cauldron, on which they had inscribed the penal code Fan Xuanzi had made. Zhongni said, “Jin will perish! It has lost its standards. Now Jin must maintain the norms and standards that Tang Shu received and by these bring continuity and coherence to its people. The high ministers and officers maintain them in proper order: by this the people are enabled to respect the elite, and by this the elite are able

to maintain their hereditary duties. Elite and common do not err; that is what is meant by ‘standards.’ This is why when Duke Wen created the post of director of offices and made the Pilu code he became mastet of the covenant. “Now that they have abandoned these standards and made the Penal Cauldron, the people attend to the cauldron. How are they to respect the elite? In what way

will the elite maintain their hereditary duties? When there is no proper order for elite and common, how will they manage the state? What's more, Xuanzi’s penal code is from the muster at Yi and is a system from a period of disorder in Jin. How can it be used as a legal norm?” Mo, the scribe of Cai, said, “The Fans and the Zhonghangs will perish! As lower

minister, Zhonghang Yin has interfered with the commands of his superiors and has taken it upon himself to create a vessel for the penal code to be the legal norm for the state; this is a perversion of legal norms. And he has further brought the Fans into it; when it extends to them, they will perish. As it affects the Zhaos, Zhao Meng will have a part in it. But he had no choice, and if he is virtuous, he will be able to escape.”

Confucius and the scribe Mo of Jin divide the work of prediction between them. T’o Mo, a paragon of Confucian knowledge elsewhere in the work,” the historiographers assign the task of explaining why the casting of the iron cauldron presages the fall of the Fan and Zhonghang families and not, or not necessarily, of the Zhao family. That is, this incident and the predictions attached to it help the historiographers explain why Jin split into three parts rather than five. As one would expect from parallels, such as Yanzi’s predictions about the Chen family, the survival of Zhao Yang and the success of his descendants depend upon his de.” Although Confucius, too, sees what the cauldrons indicate about the future of the Jin noble families, he is made to mention Fan Xuanzi and the provenance of the code only as an afterthought.” The crux of his response to the event and the evidence for his prediction that Jin will perish are his

298 Writing and the Ends of History critique of this use of writing, a critique that in many ways doubles and concentrates Shu Xiang’s. The standards (du) that Jin has lost, the sine qua non of a viable state, control both the behavior of the ruling classes and their relations with the ruled. They “bring continuity and coherence” (jingwei) to the people of Jin because they maintain them in the postures and relations established by the Jin founder, Tang Shu. The choice of terms is significant. In the usage of the historiographers, the words jing and jingwei suggested not a written canon, as they would for later ages, but a body of inherited norms, the general class to which specific examples—like Tang Shu’s standards—belonged.”"* These norms guided social relations without being entirely visible to all classes. They commanded obedience without being fully available for inspection and testing; the effectiveness of ritual was perhaps magical, as Fingarette argued it was, but it was also a calculated opacity, a stratagem of control.’”” But the casters of penal cauldrons proposed a new sort of visibility, not for the rulers, but for the standards. The word zai 4£, which I have translated “attend to,” can mean “to scrutinize,” to read carefully with an eye to loopholes; this is part of what | Confucius means. In a more fundamental sense, however, zai means to reside in a certain place and to belong to it. By the notion of public imagery, the people reside in, or are governed by, the thing they observe most closely. In the years of the iron cauldron they are governed not by leaders, but by a depersonalized and demystified legality. In critiquing writing through Shu Xiang and Confucius, the historiographers faced a paradox. The order inaugurated by the publication of legal codes was nota short-lived experiment; it was the order of their own era. No doubt they idealized a rule of li in which imitation of exemplary individuals would matter more than obedience to written codes. Yet they themselves cherished written texts, and because in their use of writing they shared some of the aims of the Jin and Zheng lawmakers, they had to defend themselves and classical scholarship against the general critique of writing. In their Chungiu exegesis, they were concerned quite specifically with nuances of writing and searched a written text as closely as the people of Zheng and Jin might have searched their legal codes. An uncomfortable legalism informed their relationship to the texts they and their characters cited. ‘They knew that they, no less than the people of Zheng and Jin, were in danger of putting the letter of their law before its spirit. In their anxiety they insisted that citation and interpretation could not proceed on the basis of texts alone but must always be controlled by

Writing and the Ends of History 299 the memory of an individual and his intentions.’ From this perspective, Shu Xiang and Confucius do not simply mourn the demise of unwritten standards, they also inaugurate a new order of scholarship. The scholars’ anxiety over the connections between written legal codes and their own texts becomes somewhat more explicit in a final remark on published legislation. In this case the role of judge falls to the junzi, the persona adopted by the historiographers for extra-narratival judgments:"”

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a: BHP W- RBaAZCaHEB- RVR FRAUASTZ RHE tA BSS - RRR A- HAO - MHPER:- DHAK- A(R: Bw AA - #8 RS - WARS MAMAS - TRL HER Si Chuan [Ziran] of Zheng killed Deng Xi, yet still used his Bamboo Code. The gentleman says of Ziran that in this he was not loyal. If one has something with which he might benefit the state, then it is permissible to forgive his aberrations. In the third stanza of “Graceful Girl,” what one takes is the red tube. In “What shall I report to him?” in “Flagstaffs,” what one takes is loyalty. Therefore when we use someone's way, we do not discard his person. The Shi says, “Lush is the wild pear. Do not trim it, do not cut it: It was here that the Earl of Shao rested.” Thinking of the man, they even loved his tree. How could they have used a man’s way and not have cared for his person? Ziran had nothing with which to encourage ability.’””

_ This is the only passage in the Zuozhuan or Guoyu to mention Deng Xi, and nothing is known about the reason for his execution. Familiar to later ages primarily as a debater and as the composer of this law code, he was not the

sort of character we would expect the historiographers to remember fondly.’”° Yet his execution becomes the occasion of a further refinement in their theory of writing.

In this passage the junzi does not repeat the critique of writing, which is apparently to be taken for granted. Instead, he condemns Si Chuan’s dissociation of the person and his writings. For the reasons I have outlined above, this condemnation does not involve the historiographers in selfcontradiction and in fact results from the legalism inherent in their use of citation texts. If the Zheng administration had to rely upon written legal codes, then it should at least have preserved the author of those codes. As the Shi citations show, saving Deng Xi would have been wise both from the perspective of bao reciprocity and as a guarantee against misinterpretation of his code. In the word qu, “to take,” interpretation becomes a variety of material exchange. To select a stanza that expresses one’s meaning is to incur a

300 Writing and the Ends of History debt; the creditor is the author of the poem. The cited poems exemplify this conception. In “Graceful Girl,” for example, the persona is given a red pipe,

variously interpreted as a writing brush, a tubular container, or a stalk of grass. In the third stanza he remarks that he values the gift not for itself but for the beauty of the giver. That is, one values the object for the sake of the person, just as in the final poem cited one prizes the tree for the sake of the Earl of Shao, who once rested there.

One also values the person for the sake of the text, and the junzi implies that the lessons to be taken from the texts of “Graceful Girl” and “Flagstaffs” have value in spite of the pettiness of their authors. On these premises, what is owed to the text is owed also to its author, and what we might call fidelity in translation or interpretation becomes a type of loyalty (zhong). Si Chuan thus commits a double disloyalty. He fails to spare Deng Xi for the sake of his law code; he does not reward him. Worse, by killing Deng Xi, he implies the complete irrelevance of author to work. He declares a cancellation of all debts, and in this way endangers the delicate management of writing that the historiographers envisioned.

The Death of Confucius and the Birth of Historiography The promulgation of written law codes represented for the historiographers a literal and figurative death of the author. The examples of Si Chuan and the others showed that ruling elites had been seduced by the technology of writing. Instead of maintaining the old subordination of writing to li, rulers would seek in penal codes and covenants a substitute for the less tangible

bonds of loyalty and good faith.’ Implicated as they were in the rise of writing, the historiographers wrote the ending of the Zuozhuan—and by extension the ending of the eponymous period—as a defense of their own vocation. As they tied up loose threads of narrative and completed anecdote series, they reasserted their themes of reciprocity and aesthetic causality. And in narrating the key event of the final years, the death of Confucius, they concentrated in the master and his way of teaching the meaning of the whole period; they made the death of Confucius their answer to the death of the author. In making an ending for the Zuozhuan, the historiographers faced certain constraints. Even if next to nothing is known about the process of compila-

Writing and the Ends of History 301

tion and editing that brought anecdotes into an order matching that of the Chungiu, one may safely make two conjectures about the conclusion of the work. First, the Lu-centered chronicle that the historiographers had commented on and used as the basis for their arrangement of anecdotes recorded events only through the middle years of the reign of Duke Ai. Although versions of the Chungiu do vary slightly in length, none extends past the reign of Duke Ai.’ The compilers of the Zuozhuan, who clearly worked with a text

of the chronicle, could perhaps have broken off their narrations abruptly with the end of their main source text; or they could have ignored the exhaustion of this source and continued compiling anecdotes for the decades following Duke Ai’s exile. Instead, they invested the closing of the Chungiu with historical significance and made the ending of the text and the death recorded there emblems of the close of an era. Their identification of Confu-

cius with the chronicle and with the Spring and Autumn period itself served as an ideal alternative to the threatened dissociation of author and text.

Second, it is safe to assume that the anecdotal sources the historiographers drew on, unlike the Chungiu, were not exhausted. On the contrary, the nature of the material collected in their works and in later anecdote collections suggests that they had at their disposal a profusion of anecdotes for the final years of the Spring and Autumn period, and that they chose very sparingly from among them. Texts from the third century, only shortly after the most likely date of the Zuozhuan’s compilation, show that certain of the incidents the historiographers touched on—the career of Zhi Bo, for instance, and the fall of Wu—were the subjects of multiple and heterogeneous anecdotal treatments. It is not that the philosophers and debaters who used these anecdotes invented them as alternatives to or embellishments of a recognized authoritative account contained in the Zuozhuan; there is no evidence that the Zuozhuan had acquired that authority. Rather, the evidence indicates that the Zuozhuan compilers were as selective, and as polemically oriented, as the later writers and drew from the same vast body of lore. That their account became authoritative was partly an accident of history and partly a result of the extraordinary internal consistency of their work: they had given the period an end and the end a meaning. Before considering the death of Confucius and reactions to it, it is necessary to consider the years that follow that event, which are the last period covered by the Zuozhuan. These years are a sort of twilight. Devotion to li survives in isolated individuals and incidents, but other invocations of tradi-

302 Writing and the Ends of History

tional authority are rarer than they are elsewhere in the Zuozhuan. The historiographers were concerned mainly with completing anecdote series initiated in the first half of Duke Aji’s reign. Just as elsewhere in their

narratives, completion comes with the working out of aesthetic consequences, the exchange of rewards and punishments, and the production of implicit and explicit judgments. In Wey, where the ducal succession had long been contested, the historiographers carried the story forward to include the success and fall of the two main contenders, Duke Zhuang and the ruler referred to as the “Ousted” Duke (r. 492-480, 476-470); aes-

thetic excess figures heavily in the troubles of the dukes. Things end rather well for Chu: the last anecdotes tell of the successes of King Hui (r. 488-432) and his minister, the Duke of She. Together they put down a rebellion by the powerful Duke of Bo, fulfill the old predictions of the annexation of Chen, and fend off an attack from the forces of Ba; the king wins praise from the junzi for his correct use of divination before this campaign.’

The entries for Wu and Yue tell of the long-prophesied fall of the former and the rise of the latter to dominance over the other states.’ The entries for Song carry its story as far as the death of Duke Jing (r. 516-477) and the resolution of the power struggles that put his successor on the throne.” In

Zhu, Yue restores and then removes the hapless Duke Yin (r. 506-471). As these examples show, the historiographers generally ended their account of the events in a state with the death or exile of a ruler; in the contrasting case, Chu, they create the sense of an ending by having the junzi praise the reigning king. The last entries in the Zuozhuan concern the exile of the Lu duke and the

fall of Xun Yao, better known as Zhi Bo, the most powerful opponent of the three families that will divide Jin. As in the narratives of the other states, what makes for an ending in Lu and in Jin is a settling of accounts, a marking of the consequences of excess. Li is not mentioned; but it underlies the historiographers’ evaluation of causes. The penultimate episode of the Zuozhuan explains the exile of Duke Ai of

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Writing and the Ends of History 303 The duke was troubled by the sumptuousness of the three Huan families and wished to use the allied lords to get rid of them. The three Huan families were also troubled by the duke’s extravagance, and so there were many rifts between ruler and ministers. The duke was traveling to Lingban when he encountered Meng Wubo on the Avenue of the Mengs. The duke said, “Permit me to ask you a question: will I die a natural death?” He replied, “I have no way of knowing that.” The duke asked three times, and to the end he refused to answer. The duke wished to use Yue forces to attack Lu and expel the three Huan families. In the autumn, on the jiaxu day of the eighth month, he went to the home of Gongsun Youxing. Thence he slipped away to Zhu and went on to Yue. The people of the state incriminated Gongsun Youshan.”

The source of the strife that leads to the duke’s exile is aesthetic. The duke is

disturbed by the three families’ “sumptuousness,” their usurpation of the material and ritual-performative prerogatives of the ducal house. An example of this sumptuousness is the Ji family’s use of dancers who belong to one

of the state ancestral temples.” For their part, the Huan families are disturbed by the duke’s “extravagance,” which is not so much a material excess as an aberration from the duties prescribed for his position. Years of tension, plotting, and violence are summed up in these lines, which in typical fashion reduce events to their aesthetic and ritual manifestations. The final anecdote in the Zuozhuan looks far ahead into the middle of the

fifth century. The historiographers unearth the origins of the most famous event of that period in a breach of military ceremony:

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In the fourth year of Duke Dao, Xun Yao of Jin led an army to besiege Zheng. Before he arrived, Si Hong of Zheng said, “Zhi Bo is stubborn and loves to win. If we surrender to him early, then we can make him go away.” So they started by setting up defenses in Nanli to await him. Zhi Bo entered Nanli and then attacked the Jiezhi gate. Zheng took Xi Kuilei prisoner and tried to suborn him by offering him a position in the administration, but he stopped up his own mouth and died.

304 Writing and the Ends of History As they approached the gate, Zhi Bo called to Zhao Meng, “Go in!” He replied, “But you are here, master [and I should not precede you].” Zhi Bo said, “As ugly as you are and as bereft of courage, how can you be the heir to your family?” He replied, “Because I am able to endure humiliation and will not bring harm to the Zhao ancestry.” Zhi Bo did not change his ways. From this time on Zhao Xiangzi [Zhao Meng] loathed Zhi Bo and as a result destroyed him. Zhi Bo was greedy and stubborn, and so Hann and Wei turned against him and destroyed him”?

The anecdote meets a narrative obligation, fulfilling a prediction made by Chen Chengzi of Qi, who observed of Zhi Bo that the man who regularly insults others cannot survive long.” Like the other final anecdotes, it ties up a loose thread. But there are deeper thematic advantages to putting this episode last. Zhi Bo is defined by his obsessions and extremes; he resembles certain Warring States figures more than he resembles Spring and Autumn period predeces-

sors.” He is “stubborn” (bi), this text tells us twice, and “strongheaded” (heng), as the Guoyu puts it.’’’ In other words, he has discarded the sort of _ fear that characterizes the best men of previous generations, and he disregards the constraints of courtesy.” His opponent, on the other hand, has at least a semblance of the noble generosity that the historiographers admired. His attempt to defer to Zhi Bo at the Jiezhi Gate—“But you are here, master” —is perhaps ironic, but it preserves some of the forms of courtesy and hierarchy, and even in its latent sarcasm it echoes other battlefield remarks we have examined. In the end Zhao Xiangzi survives his feud with Zhi Bo through a perseverance Confucians could applaud: he endures humiliation for the sake of his family and cultivates the goodwill of the people under his control.’””

Whether as a collection of anecdotes or as a commentary on the Chungiu,

, the Zuozhuan could not simply end with the last entry of the chronicle. ‘The commitment of both the Zuozhuan and the Guoyu to narrative explanation led to their forays into post-Spring and Autumn history; there was no other | way for them to complete their anecdote series. Chungiu scholars who did not work primarily through narrative explanation, however, ended their commentaries with the last entry of the chronicle itself, and they endowed this ending with a significance that was at once literary, historical, and philo-

sophical. Even if their exegetical principles differed fundamentally from those of the Zuozhuan historiographers, their treatment of the ending is il-

Writing and the Ends of History 305 luminating. In many ways they appear to make explicit the claims that re-

main implicit in the closing years of the Zuozhuan. | The Gongyang commentary, following the entry on the capture of the lin, which is the last event in its version of the Chungiu, answers questions about

the end:’”

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Confucius said, “Why did you come? Why did you come?” He wiped his face with his sleeve, and his robe was wet with tears. When Yan Yuan died, the Master said, “Ah! Heaven is destroying me!” When Zilu died, the Master said, “Ah! Heaven is cursing me!” And when the lin was captured during the Western hunt, Kongzi said,

“My Way is at an end.” ,

Why does the Chungiu begin with [Duke] Yin? Because that is as far back in the events of the ancestors as they were able to hear reports. Things witnessed constitute one distinct variety of words; things heard constitute another; and things heard through tradition constitute another. Why does it end in the fourteenth year of Duke Ai? Because it is complete. Why does the gentleman work on the Chungiu? For bringing order to a chaotic

time and returning it to correctness, nothing is better than the Chungiu. But one _ does not know if this is the reason, or if gentlemen take pleasure in speaking of the Way of Yao and Shun. !

In the end is it not a pleasure how Yao and Shun understood the gentleman? We confirm the meanings of the Chungiu and await the sage of later times. In what gentlemen do, they are taking pleasure in this (activicy].””

For the Gongyang tradition, the Chungiu comes to an end because it is “complete” (bei )—all of its necessary parts have been brought together in readiness. What is the nature of this completion? First, the text stretches as far back as reliable historical knowledge can. In typical fashion, this typology

suggests an oral transmission of historical lore rather than any strong dependence on written sources; by this account, the Chungiu must begin where

it does because tradition has too little to tell us about earlier dukes.” Sec- | ond, the contradictory omen of the lin, which appears only for the sake of a royal individual,’”’ signals to Confucius the end of his road, In a strictly lit-

306 Writing and the Ends of History eral sense, the Chungiu ends where it does because its redactor put aside his work to await his own death.

But there is a surplus to the omen: if Confucius is the king revealed by Heaven through the lin, then the capture of that beast and the death of the sage mark a moment of transformation. The king is dead, long live his Way. His judgments on history, encoded in the language of the Chungiu, are en-

| trusted to the gentlemen, those authoritative readers and interpreters whom the Zuozhuan calls “superior men.” And the gentlemen act for two reasons: for the betterment of the world and for their own pleasure, a purified aesthetic that finds its highest fulfillment in the Way of Yao and Shun, the very Way that Confucius realized in his literary work. The echo of the Lunyu in the final lines underscores the continuities between Confucius’ vocation and

the commentators’ own. As I have noted above, the Zuozhuan historiographers seem always to have had a version of the Chungiu that continued past the capture of the lin. In the Zuozhuan, the lin, pushed back from the end, is no great wonder. The man who captures it considers it an inauspicious omen and presents it to the game wardens. “Zhongni examined it and said, ‘It is a lin.’ Only then was it

taken as game.” The scene lacks fantastic overtones; it is only another demonstration of Confucius’ broad knowledge of the world’s minutiae.” With its own characteristic indirection, however, the Zuozhuan does imply a special significance in the death of Confucius. That event and the responses to it epitomize the status of li in the final years of the Spring and Autumn period. In the last scenes of ritually minded critique, the historiographers sum up the embattled position of li and its practitioners, who must simultaneously cleave to and resist the possessors of political power. In these scenes the historiographers describe, with ressentiment and endurance, their own place in a fallen world. According to the Zuozhuan, when Confucius died, Duke Ai of Lu took

the unusual step of composing a eulogy for him: |

BM ACH FES - BRZA- RAAD- TRAE: ARR -A DEM: RRRER IM RREX: RAE In summer, on the jichou day of the fourth month, Confucius died. The duke eulogized him, saying, “High Heaven, unkind, Does not spare me one elderly man, To aid and hedge me, the one man alone, as I stand in my place.

Writing and the Ends of History 307 Forlorn am I in my deficiency. Alas and woe for Father Ni! I Jack that with which to regulate myself.”

The eulogy, made up largely of lines also found in the older sections of the Shi, has some of the gravity of archaic texts.” If the anecdote ended here, one might assume that the duke had performed the ritual appropriate to the occasion and marked the loss of an extraordinary man with a fitting solem-

nity.” The song would work rather beautifully to represent mourning’s stylized abandonment, the dependence of the powerful on the learned, and the ultimate recognition of the sage’s worth. And in fact the Liji’s version of this anecdote does end with the song.” However, the Zuozhuan, in which luxury must always yield to li, undoes the pleasure of the eulogy and replaces it with something very different:

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Be APBRM ERG Hina 2: HEE: BHA HAH: A Zigong said, “The ruler will not die in Lu! To quote the Master, “When ritual propriety is lost, one is benighted; when the name is lost, one is errant.’ Losing one’s proper aims is being benighted; losing one’s place is being errant. That he could not employ him when he was alive but eulogized him when he died is contrary to ritual propriety. That he calls himself ‘the one man alone’ is contrary to proper naming,

The ruler has failed on both counts.” . No other disciple of Confucius is as active as Zigong in Lu politics, and no other disciple appears as frequently in the anecdotes of the Zuozhuan.*’ His prominence lends weight to his criticism of the duke. Zigong’s censure makes for a surprising restriction of aesthetic response. It does not matter that the duke mourns Confucius, or that he chooses to express his sorrow in lines culled from the Classic; even here the indulgences of the powerful open them to criticism. Both because Zigong utters it and because it is founded entirely in the remembered words of the deceased, the condemnation of the duke’s eulogy is authoritative. Laid open with the usual techniques of rhetorical amplification, Confucius’ apothegm justifies both the criticism and the prediction of doom. That the duke has eulogized a man he could not employ and that he has adopted for himself a term formerly reserved for the king demonstrate that the duke has abandoned proprieties of ritual and naming. Matched with the words of Confucius, this evidence sug-

308 Writing and the Ends of History gests that the duke will end his days “benighted” and “errant”; and these terms lead in turn to the prediction of final delusion and exile. The trick of clairvoyance, repeated in every fulfilled prophecy, this time proves not only the value of the cited text but also the validity of an unusually abstract conception of li, What amounts to a ritual violation in this case is not just the departure from accepted practice but the irony or hypocrisy implied by the duke’s tardy reverence. In other words, li now designates fairness in the relationship between powerful employer and learned employee; it has become part of the Warring States topos of the misprised worthy. Hegel remarked of Alexander the Great that he “had the good fortune to die at the proper time; i.e. it may be called good fortune, but it is rather a necessity.”" The individual does not become the World-Historical individual without leaving an image of perfection, completion, even exhaustion.” The anecdote of the eulogy bypasses the moment of Confucius’ death and substitutes for it an invocation of Confucian restraint. But in so doing, it completes an identification of the dead Master with the essence of li and with its

historical meaning.

The Zuozhuan has pursued this identification since very early in Confucius’ career. The Lu nobleman Meng Xizi, who devoted himself to ritual study, predicted greatness for Confucius as a master of li. Confucius, he says, is the descendant of Song sages (shengren) whose line had been extinguished in Song. According to a saying of the Lu wise man Zangsun He, when men of bright virtue do not succeed in their own time, there must be among their descendants a man of accomplishments (dazhe, daren). Meng’s logic neatly turns accepted notions of cultural immortality—like Fan Xuanzi’s ideas of the undecaying—to Confucian uses. Despite Shusun Bao’s objections, the length of the family line does matter, at least in the case of Confucius. But it

matters because of the humility of ancestral worthies and their maltreatment. The coming greatness of the sage is a historical compensation, an automatic restoration of balance in response to familial de. Confucius’ life only partly substantiated Meng Xizi’s prediction, since the Master was as famous for his political failures as for his scholarly accomplishments. Yet this deferred fulfillment makes a place for the work of Chungiu exegetes and

other Confucians. Whether as editor or as observer, the Confucius of the Chungiu commentaries acquires an authority that he could not have exercised in life."°? He becomes the unerring judge of history, the uncrowned king.” The historiographers are instruments of a compensatory justice.

Writing and the Ends of History 309 An incident from the years after Confucius’ death signifies the arrival of a

new model of Confucian learning and a new relationship with political power. At a meeting with Duke Ping of Qi (r. 480-456), Duke Ai angers the Qi ministers by refusing to reciprocate a kowtow from the Qi duke. On the advice of his assistant Meng Wubo, he only bows and insists that the Lu duke kowtows to no one but the Son of Heaven.” Years later the men of Qi remember the incident:'””

KN A CORBR: BPFRT BE BABB AKZA- BAZ Se BEANS (HR ei MRS - URI Me In autumn, in the eighth month, the duke made a covenant with the lord of Qi and the ruler of Zhu at Gu. The men from Qi, censuring us for the matter of the kowtow, sang about it, saying:

“The fault of the men of Lu: For many years they have not perceived it, And it makes us leap high. Just for the sake of their ru writings,

They cause sorrows for two states.”

Everything in the earlier anecdote suggests that by this time the exchange of kowtows was the regular practice. What makes the Qi singers leap about in rage is the Lu representatives’ stubborn insistence on an outmoded system of ritual signification and their willingness to disrupt diplomatic convention for the sake of their writings.” The men of Lu are ritualist pettifoggers, sticklers for ceremony, as dependent on the letter of their texts as any seeker of legal loopholes. The insult is clear enough, but the term ru is something of an enigma.

The context makes it clear that the ru writings contained ritual prescriptions. These may have resembled later manuals of ritual practice, or they may have featured the type of anecdote, common in historiography, in which a speaker steadfastly insists on following inherited forms. What is enigmatic

is the sudden emergence of a term to describe the ritualists and their attitudes, Nowhere else in the Zuozhuan or Guoyu has a single word joined the various individuals who know the canon well enough to apply citations from

it in their deliberative speeches. The origins of the term are obscure, and it seems to have had only negative associations.” The name they acquire and the very fact that they have acquired a name reflect the marginalized position Meng Wubo and people like him occupy in the interstate political hierarchy. From the perspective of the historiographers, whose attitude toward ritualist

310 Writing and the Ends of History

conservatism could only have been admiring, the episode of the Qi insult was a moment of triumph, a definition of their class.

In narrating the decline of the Zhou political order, the ending of the Spring and Autumn period, and the death of their philosophical ancestor, the historiographers of the Zuozhuan and Guoyu made a place for their own vocation. They developed a concept of writing that allowed them to exploit its technological advantages and, at the same time, to fend off the challenge that un-

constrained use of writing would pose to their authority. Their Chungiu hermeneutic, dependent as it was both on the text of the chronicle and on knowledge from outside that text, was part of their solution to the problem - of writing and one that would become singularly influential in later perceptions of Spring and Autumn period history. In narrating the final decades of

that period, the historiographers linked irresponsible uses of writing—the publication of law codes—to the failure of old states. More generally, they made narrative closure dependent on the aesthetic and ritualist themes that inform narratives throughout the Zuozhuan and Guoyu; these themes were all the more powerful now that they could be used to explain the divisions, annexations, and extinctions that came at the end of that era. Finally, in their

treatment of the death of Confucius—a treatment that is in many ways more restrained than those found in other sources—they hint at the origins of their own place in history. They are the defenders of correct rituals and of a correct orientation toward ritual against powerful opponents. This devotion pits them against dukes and even invites mockery, but it has its rewards in the sort of historical understanding it makes possible. Nietzsche wrote of the artists of the theater in the modern age that they alone “have taught us the art of viewing ourselves as heroes—from a distance and, as it were, simplified and transfigured—the art of staging and watching ourselves.”””’ The historiographers of early China accomplished something similar in their depictions of events of the Spring and Autumn period. It is not merely that they established pervasive principles of narration, habitually representing certain tenets as naturally true and certain types of behavior as laudable; as much could be said of any narrative. Their unique achievement was to create a conceptual world in which aesthetics and the rule of bao were

united under the aegis of ritual propriety. This narrative habitus served Confucian interests by grounding such virtues as good faith and humaneness in the inevitable workings of the world. Once the Warring States Confucian

Writing and the Ends of History +311

account of Spring and Autumn period history was accepted as the authoritative account, it all but displaced other contemporary accounts; later it would serve as an all-but-invisible basis for the domination of official dis-

course by newer (and more homogeneous) incarnations of the Confucian school.

As Nietzsche's remark implies, the gift given by inventors of a naturalist —

theater may not be an entirely welcome one.” Even as the Zuozhuan and Guoyu teach Confucian ways of reading the world, they also invite the reader to participate in a form of surveillance and, perhaps more important, of selfsurveillance. The narrators speak through the observers in their anecdotes, the men and women who exert the strictest control over their own observ-

able acts while enunciating the most perceptive interpretations of others’ acts. If only because the historiographers’ resources make it possible for them to give their characters superhuman foresight, interpretive genius over-

comes all attempts at dissimulation. But the reader—and especially the reader for whom the Zuozhuan is canonical—pays a price for the spectacle. Believing the narratives, even understanding the narratives, means taking for granted an extreme form of discipline that corresponds to the intense sur-

veillance of behavior in historiography. Another branch of Confucian thought expresses a similar imperative in the minute description of the — Master's behavior and in the saying “Look at the means he uses. Observe the path he follows, Scrutinize the things in which he is at peace. How can he hide? How can he hide?””’ The Zuozhuan and Guoyu prove that hiding is impossible.

The arguments presented in this and the preceding chapters do not account for all the narratives or even all the types of narratives found in the Zuozhuan and the Guoyu. Especially in the Zuozhuan, anecdotes and speeches tend to be so complex and so interesting in a literary sense that they defy re-

duction to any simple polemical content. Yet the principles I have identified characterize this type of historiography and distinguish it from genres that were to come later. The cultural and political decline that Confucius saw in his own time might also be represented as a change in the style of possible narratives, so that a deterioration in shared values, certainties, and standards of behavior would gradually extinguish the narrative conventions that they had made possible. To question this account of epochal change, which has been accepted as the correct account, one might note how the supposed effect was really a

312 Writing and the Ends of History cause. What ends circa 479 B.C.E. is not so much an era as a set of interrelated writings about an era, in which an economy of bao supports a carefully defined system of ritual propriety and a corresponding set of aesthetic proprieties. The same writings incorporate and naturalize the principle of public imagery and the central Confucian virtues. But as it happens, narratives about the ensuing era thrive on very different principles. Representations of events from the Warring States period have less to do with ritual and aesthetics than with the profitable manipulation of perceptions, an extension of the logic of public imagery. The interest and the meaning of the period for the tellers of its stories lay in the opportunities it presented to the eloquent, the crafty, and the powerful. But the cynical style of narratives about the Warring States period only helped it to become a foil for the Spring and Autumn period. The latter period, with the set of narrative habits associated with it, would loom behind representations of later ages as a model both of the highest cultural and political achievements and of the sources of decline. The historiographers had begun to make these centuries a Confucian casebook. History in the Zuozhuan and Guoyu is in the process of becoming the most valuable possession of this intellectual lineage.

Appendix

BLANK PAGE

APPENDIX Orality and the Origins of the

Zuozhuan and Guoyu | But for those of us who are not in search of an orthodoxy, it is not impossible that

there were multiple transmissions, all authentic, of a teaching that would be formed and deformed as it passed from mouth to mouth, without ceasing to be attributed to Confucius, and we see no need to consider false that which is nothing but a different version. — Henri Maspero

It is impossible to date pre-Han texts with any degree of accuracy. It is also impossible to ascertain their authors. Before every terminus ante quem there stretches a period of unknown duration in which the contents of a text came together; every terminus post quem marks the beginning of a hazy process of compilation. And arguments from termini typically require that a single datable part of a text accurately represent the dating of the whole work, an assumption unwarranted for works that, like most “pre-Han” texts, took shape gradually and underwent extensive editing in the Han and even afterward. In reviewing some of the arguments that have been advanced for the dating and attribution of the Zuozhuan and Guoyu and in offering hypotheses of my own, I hold that early Chinese literary and scholarly practice, by its very nature, produced texts that must frustrate our attempts to fix their origins.

The twentieth-century debates over the dating and attribution of the Zuozhuan and Guoyu reflected the prestige of the debaters and the political stakes of the argument’s outcome; too often they were politically compelling _

316 Orality and the Origins of the Zuozhuan and Guoyu and philologically unsound. Building on the work of Liu Fenglu (1776-1829), Kang Youwei (1858-1927) maintained in his Xinxue weijing kao (Study of forged classics in Xin [dynasty] scholarship) of 1891 that Liu Xin (46 B.c.B.— 23 c.E.) had compiled the Zuozhuan on the basis of extracts from an older, now lost Guoyu, in order to provide support for the usurping emperor Wang Mang (r. 9-23 c.z.).” The theory, which served the interests of reformist late Qing New Text scholarship, exploited ambiguities in the Hanshu bibliogra-

phy and in accounts of Liu Xin’s work on the texts. For more than half a century after Kang’s work appeared, his accusations dominated scholarly discussion of the Zuozhuan and Guoyu. Kang found supporters in Cui Shi (1852-1924), lijima Tadao (1874-1954), Tsuda Sdkichi (1873-1961), Gu Jiegang (1893-1980), and others,’ and efforts to prove Kang and his followers wrong inspired the work of Liu Shipei (1884-1919), Zhang Binglin (18681936), Bernhard Karlgren (1889-1978), Shinjo Shinzo (1873-1938), Henri Maspero (1883-1945), William Hung (Hong Ye, 1893-1980), and, perhaps most definitively, Kamata Tadashi.* The conflict was fruitful in the sense

that it spurred development of new weapons on both sides. Iijima, Shinj, Maspero, and Hung attempted to date the Zuozhuan by explaining the astronomical knowledge evidenced in certain passages; Tsuda focused attention on the speeches as data of intellectual history; and Karlgren became famous in China for his application of linguistic tests to the Zuozhuan and related texts.” The New Text argument still has its adherents among Chinese scholars, and some of the best recent articles on the dating and attribution of the Zuozhuan still address the old charges.”

The current consensus, founded largely on techniques developed in response to the New Text school’s arguments, holds that the contents of the Zuozhuan were in existence by the end of the fourth century B.c.E. The strongest evidence has come from predictions attributed to characters within

the text; the composers of these predictions seem not to have known of events during the last century of the Warring States period.” According to this consensus, the text has no single author, but was assembled gradually, and from disparate sources, by several generations of scholars.’ Most scholars have preferred to emphasize the contributions of one or another individual, whether he is to be considered the “author” or “compiler.” There are those who uphold some version of the traditional attribution to Zuo Qiuming.” A few eminent scholars have adopted the position of Yao Nai (17321815), who noted the place reserved for the Warring States general Wu Qi in

Orality and the Origins of the Zuozhuan and Guoyu 317

accounts of the Zuozhuan’s transmission and argued that he must have played a role in the writing.” Certain other individuals credited with transmitting the texts have also been named as primary authors or compilers.” Given the paucity of evidence and the lack of a strong model of authorial possession in the Warring States period, it is difficult to imagine that any attribution to a single author or compiler will ever win general agreement. As for the Guoyu, most scholars hold it to be later than the Zuozhuan, and only a few have attempted to name a single author or compiler.“ The New Text charges could not have been made and would not have continued to influence Zuozhuan and Guoyu studies if there were not in the texts themselves and in the history of Han classical scholarship certain opportune silences. Our age has asked most intensely the questions that the texts, by their very nature, answer poorly or not at all. In my approach to the problem of dating and authorship, I wish to emphasize an aspect that has occasionally been mentioned in discussions of the Zuozhuan since the time of Sima Qian but that until recent years was ignored in favor of the bibliographical concerns of New Text adherents and their opponents. The Shiji states unequivocally that historiography had its origins in a body of teachings transmitted among the disciples of Confucius. This account, as late as it is, is nonetheless the earliest extant account and deserves to be considered seriously. Instead of a single person, time, and place—the traditional who, when, and where of literate authorship—we should imagine | behind the Zuozhuan, and behind a large group of related texts, a long history of preliterate composition involving many transmitters of lore in many places. Although written notations were apparently among the tools used by teachers and although the process did ultimately produce the written texts we possess, writing was for a long time overshadowed by the primarily oral activity of teaching. Recognition of the importance of this activity supports the conclusions of the best scholars mentioned above, suggests solutions to some of the problems surrounding the early history of the Chungiu and Zuozhuan, and accounts in large measure for the literary characteristics of historiographical speeches and narratives. Sima Qian was more interested than any writer before him in the authorship of the texts that had come down to his age.” He included in his work accounts of the composition of both the Guoyu and the Zuozhuan. Of the Guoyu, he wrote elliptically that “When Zuo Qiu lost his sight, he had the Guoyu”;"° as noted above, most scholars have set aside this attribution in fa-

318 Orality and the Origins of the Zuozhuan and Guoyu vor of more complex models of compilation. His more detailed account of the Zuozhuan’s provenance, although rarely taken at face value, can nonetheless be read as a simplified, legendary reflection of the real circumstances of compilation. Sima Qian’s legend has it that Confucius composed the Chungiu after visiting the Zhou house and “putting in order its historical records and old traditions” 2@ & 2c & fH; the former would seem to be written sources, the latter unwritten.’ The chronicle Confucius produced was intended not as a | comprehensive and self-explanatory record, but as a text to be decoded viva voce:'®

tCTrTHZ2E ORR SH - BARRA BIBER CMA PALS Wi BATA RAR BLTAARM- BAHAR -KEHEE- RAST HR al? Flam a® - MAREE The seventy disciples received the meanings of the tradition orally. Since there were patterned words that satirized and ridiculed, praised and obscured, and impugned, they could not make them plain by writing them out. The Lu gentleman Zuo Qiuming feared that the various disciples, differing in their biases, would be content with their own opinions and lose what was genuine. Therefore, taking Confucius’ scribal records as his basis, he put in order all their words and completed the Chungiu of Master Zuo.

To paraphrase, the Master's explanations of the meanings hidden in the text were transmitted orally until Zuo Qiuming, fearing heterodoxy, wrote the

, text known as Zuoshi chungiu, the ancestor of our Zuozhuan.” There is in the final sentence of this account a significant ambiguity. On the one hand, Zuo Qiuming’s aim seems to have been to fix an authoritative oral tradition (yu) that originated with Confucius; early and medieval retellings of Sima Qian’s tale emphasize the oral character of the transmission.” On the other hand, Zuo Qiuming put this tradition in order on the basis of “Confucius’ scribal records,” arguably the very records Confucius consulted

at the Zhou capital,” The difficulty of the passage lies in its reference to these records: they are available to Confucius in Zhou; they are not available

to his disciples during the early transmission of the Chungiu; then, unaccountably, they are available again to Zuo Qiuming in Lu when he makes his transcription of Confucius’ teachings. Does Sima Qian hold that the Zuozhuan was based on orally transmitted explanations of the Chungiu or on written historical accounts not known to the disciples?

Orality and the Origins of the Zuozhuan and Guoyu 319

Sima Qian believed, perhaps uneasily, that the Zuozhuan was compiled both from written and from oral sources. In this respect his legend likely preserves a kernel of truth. Despite an old habit, in Asia and in the West, of focusing on the written materials that the compilers of historiography might have drawn on, several Chinese and Japanese scholars have recently emphasized the role of oral transmission in the making of the Zuozhuan and the Guoyu. No one claims that the works are raw transcriptions from an oral tradition. The office of the scribe was well established in the courts and aristocratic homes of the Spring and Autumn period.” That the Chungiu records such events as eclipses accurately, if selectively, indicates that it was always a written record.” That a version of the Chungiu is embedded in Zuozhuan anecdotes suggests that Confucian teachers and historiographers used the written chronicle as an aide-mémoire in their historical work.”

Highly specific day-by-day dating in a few narrative passages in the Zuozhuan strongly suggests that for some events the compilers had access to de-

tailed written records, perhaps made by contemporary observers of the events.” Discrepancies in the dating of events reported in different states may also reflect the existence of local records that served as sources for some Zuozhuan accounts.” And references to the use of writing in covenants and

_ diplomatic communications raise the possibility that sections of the Zuozhuan relating to events of this sort are also based on primary sources.” Among the many scholars who have seen the Zuozhuan as a compilation from disparate sources, several have emphasized the combination of documentary sources with materials transcribed from an oral tradition.” During the Warring States period and much of the Western Han, the term Chungiu designated not only the chronicle itself, but the exegetical tra- _ ditions relating to the chronicle and, ultimately, the entire corpus of Spring and Autumn period lore. Although anecdotes of historical writing in the Zuozhuan imply that it normally took the form of brief notations,” references to the Chungiu in both the Zuozhuan and the Guoyu seem to encompass both the chronicle and the moralizing teachings associated with it, as well as

some full narrations of the events chronicled.” Mozi, when he cites the Chungiu of Zhou, Yan, Song, and Qi, cites not chronicle notations but full anecdotes like those found in the Zuozhuan.”* Mencius, speaking of historical works in Jin and Chu, the “Sheng” and “Taowu” respectively, said that they were equivalent to Lu’s Chungiu;” but it has been argued with some justifi-

320 Orality and the Origins of the Zuozhuan and Guoyu cation that by Lu’s Chungiu he meant something resembling our Zuozhuan.” Citations from the Chungiu in other Warring States texts regularly relate to

anecdotal material rather than to the chronicle.“ As Jin Dejian demonstrated, Sima Qian sometimes used the term Chungiu in references to the chronicle or to the Gongyang commentary but also regularly applied it to the materials collected in the Zuozhuan.”

The ambiguity in the term, like the ambiguity in Sima Qian’s legend, reflects the coexistence of written sources and unwritten traditions in Chungiu

teachings. Throughout the Warring States period and into the Western Han, the Chungiu consisted of the written chronicle and the body of explanatory materials, both oral and written, that pertained to the text and, more generally, to the events of the Spring and Autumn period.” Historiography originated neither with stenographers busily recording speeches and dialogues nor with scribes writing and archiving detailed narratives of all public events; there is little evidence that either sort of recording took place, and in any case such a habit of documentation would not account for the well-wrought speeches and the stories of moralizing foresight that figure so heavily in the received texts.” Instead, it is likely that much of the material currently included in the Zuozhuan and Guoyu changed and developed in the course of oral transmission among members of the Eastern Zhou learned classes and, later, among Confucian teachers and students. This thesis has the support of recent scholarship. Starting in the 1950s, Kaizuka Shigeki examined the role of oral transmission in the preservation of historical and philosophical wisdom in the Zhou courts and in Confucian scholarly lineages.” In an article first published in 1957, he extended this line of investigation to the Guoyu and the Zuozhuan. On the basis of what is written of the role of blind musicians and reciters during the Zhou, on the basis of the scenes and content of instruction in the Guoyu, and in light of the way anecdotes in both the Zuozhuan and Guoyu foreground the judgments of named individuals and the anonymous junzi, Kaizuka concluded that anecdotes in both works began as the table talk of Chungiu aristocrats,

| were transmitted in part by blind reciters, and developed further as the teaching materials of Warring States Confucians.” In a later article, Kaizuka showed how the theory would explain the compilation of the Zuozhuan; as a corpus of oral lore organized around the teaching of the written Chungiu, the Zuozhuan would gradually have been transcribed and organized along the lines of the chronicle.”

Orality and the Origins of the Zuozhuan and Guoyu 321

Although he appears to have been unaware of Kaizuka’s early research, Xu Zhongshu advanced a similar argument in a 1962 article on the attribu-

tion and dating of the Zuozhuan. According to Xu, the tales and songs of Spring and Autumn period blind scribes (gushi) and musicians became the “discourses” (yu) and “accounts” (shuo) mentioned in Warring States sources; although these were transcribed some time after Zuo Qiuming’s death, he had a part in amplifying and shaping them.” During the past fifteen years, Chinese scholars have repeated and refined Xu’s claims. Several writers have argued that the Guoyu is a collection of transcriptions from the yu, or oral lore, of various states.” Others have stressed the importance of orally transmitted anecdotes among the sources of the Zuozhuan.”’ More general considerations of the practices of early historical commemoration have made a place for oral transmission alongside well-established institutions of writing.” Although relatively little work has been done on the subject in the West, Jens Ostergard Petersen has established in an article on the “sayings of the many persons” (baijia zhi yu) that these were “compilations predominantly consisting of didactic historical anecdotes” and has strongly suggested that these originated in an oral tradition.” The recognition that many of the anecdotes in the Zuozhuan and Guoyu were incubated in an oral tradition is attractive because of the problems it solves. First, it explains both why the works’ predictions of Warring States events are overwhelmingly accurate and why these predictions support different datings of the texts: anecdotes about predictions reflected contem-

porary circumstances as long as they circulated orally but would have stopped changing as soon as they were transcribed. Patently false predictions, like the claim that Qin would never again attack to the east, reflect incremental transcription from the oral tradition; the anecdote that includes this prediction was transcribed during a period of Qin weakness, probably in the early fourth century, and was not revised later.” Second, the views of Kaizuka and the others suggest new answers to the old question of the relation between the Zuozhuan and the Guoyu. The two texts have in common more than sixty anecdotes; in no case are the anec-

dotes wholly identical, but they often contain identical phrases and sentences.”” William Boltz has argued on the basis of an isocolometric analysis that the two texts derive from, but also differ from, a third written source, now lost.” Although the orality hypothesis complicates this scenario, it does not conflict with it. For some anecdotes, it is easy to imagine that the Zuo-

322 Orality and the Origins of the Zuozhuan and Guoyu

| zhuan and Guoyu reflect separate transcriptions of oral versions; the missing third text is unnecessary. For cases in which the isocolometric method clearly applies, the oral tradition would furnish the material needed to round out strips with the desired numbers of graphs. Frequent retelling of anecdotes would promote the rhetorical tendencies and the matching of speech and narrative that I analyzed in Chapter 1 and might also help account for the emergence of vast well-wrought speeches like those found in some parts of the Guoyu.””

Third, the orality hypothesis also explains some of the peculiarities of early Chinese narrative. Many of the anecdotes collected in the Zuozhuan and Guoyu also appear—never without some variation—in the writings of Warring States philosophers.”* It is clear that writers who drew on the lore of the Spring and Autumn period sometimes followed written versions and sometimes transcribed their own version of the tale, but they were always at liberty to differ from other versions. As the Han Feizi and numerous other texts show, anecdotes were thought of as polemical ammunition; one repeated or recorded an anecdote not for the sake of disinterested historical documentation but in order to prove some philosophical or political point.” The anecdotes used by Warring States writers also resemble orally transmitted lore in that they are disproportionately concerned with a relatively small number of famous characters and tend to follow well-established literary forms.” It is not surprising that anecdote collections unearthed from Warring States and Han tombs have consisted not of previously unknown narrative documentation for earlier periods but of further variations on familiar themes.” The stages of transcription, compilation, and editing that produced the received texts of the Zuozhuan and Guoyu may be summarized as follows: 1, During the Spring and Autumn period and the early Warring States, a limited corpus of written historical materials, including the Chungiu chronicle and other documents relating to political, military, and religious events,

gradually became available outside the courts and aristocratic houses in which they had been composed.” At the same time, many anecdotes and speeches were being transmitted orally. 2. Beginning circa 400 B.c.E., selected anecdotes and speeches were transcribed from the oral tradition.”° It is likely that these were at first gathered in relatively small collections like the ones that have been discovered in Warring States tombs;’” well-known peculiarities of the Zuozhuan, such as its in-

Orality and the Origins of the Zuozhuan and Guoyu 323

consistent uses of names and terminologies, would seem to reflect the heterogeneity of its sources.” The anecdotes in these collections already included evaluative remarks attributed to the junzi and other observers.” Even as transcriptions were being made and circulated, narratives concerning events of the Spring and Autumn period continued to develop in the oral tradition, producing accounts that differed strikingly in language and philosophical orientation from materials transcribed earlier.” 3. [he process by which the Zuozhuan was reorganized as a commentary on the Chungiu chronicle was a gradual one, and the details are murky. Sima Qian, when he wrote of Zuo Qiuming’s “taking Confucius’ historical records as his basis,” perhaps meant to indicate that the Zuoshi chungiu as he knew it was organized as an annals; yet his list of works in the Chungiu category makes it clear that chronological arrangement was not a definitive quality. The incorporation of a fragmentary version of the Chungiu chronicle within the anecdotes of the Zuozhuan suggests the possibility that in the teaching tradition, and even in early transcriptions, anecdotes were already paired with chronicle entries. As for the sections of the received Zuozhuan that most resemble the Gongyang and Guliang commentaries, the direct explanations of the chronicle’s hidden meanings, these probably originated as a separate work of Chungiu exegesis. Like the other commentaries, it would have been transmitted orally; when it was transcribed and joined to the anecdotal materials is unknown.” What exactly Liu Xin did when he “used the text of the commentary to explain the Classic” is unclear; he may have organized the Zuozhuan chronologically to resemble the other Chungiu commentaries, and he may also have attached to it a complete text of the Chungiu.”” It was Du Yu who gave the Chungiu Zuoshi zhuan its current form by dividing up the integral Chungiu text and matching each year’s chronicle entries with the Zuozhuan materials for that year. 4. The changing status of the Zuozhuan and Guoyu during the Han is best understood as a function of the usual circumstances of canonization. The Zuozhuan, if not its sister text, acquired prestige because of the favor shown

it by such well-known and powerful individuals as Zhang Cang (before 230?-152), Prince Xian of Hejian (r. 155-130), and late Western Han literati like Yin Gengshi, Zhe Fangjin, and Liu Xin himself.” Like most texts that have achieved canonical status, the Zuozhuan came into being through a long

series of inclusions, exclusions, and accommodations.” By the time the Zuozhuan was officially recognized as a commentary on the Chungiu, during

324 Orality and the Origins of the Zuozhuan and Guoyu the first century of our era, the Guoyu, too, was considered authoritative, and

it was possible for Wang Chong (27-ca. 100) to call it an “external commentary” (waizhuan) to the Chungiu.”’ The special status accorded these two

works distinguished them from all other anecdote collections and marked the triumph of an overwhelmingly Confucian telling of Spring and Autumn

period history. | |

Reference Matter

BLANK PAGE

Notes

For complete author names, titles, and publication data for publications cited here in short form, see the Works Cited, pp. 443-70. For the conventions used in citing the Zuozhuan and the Guoyu, see pp. xi-xii; for the abbreviations used here, see pp.

XV-XVIL. , Introduction

1. The Zuozhuan first refers to Duke Huan as ba at Zhuang 15.1 (Yang, p. 200); see also Zhuang 27.6 (Yang, p. 237). 2. Zuo, Xi 22.8 (Yang, pp. 397-99). 3. “The day jisi’: days were customarily designated using terms in the sexagenary

cycle, generated from combination of the ten Heavenly Stems with the twelve Earthly branches. Jisi is the sixth day in the cycle. “Gate officers”: these are either the ruler’s personal guards or the sons of high officials, assigned to accompany him in battle (Yang, p. 397). 4. See discussion of Duke Zhuang of Zheng in Chapter 5, pp. 183-86. 5. Ziyu: some versions of the anecdote, and some later scholars, have held that Ziyu and the master of horse are the same individual; see Yang, p. 396; and Takezoe, “Saden” kaisen, 1: 463. “The fighting spirit”: this translation of the term qi is appropriate for military contexts; cf. Zuo, Zhuang 10.1 (Yang, pp. 182-83). 6. See Xi 19.3 (Yang, pp. 381-82), Xi 21.1 (Yang, pp. 389-90), and Xi 22.8 (Yang,

p. 396). Other episodes in the rise of Duke Xiang can be found at Xi 18.1 (Yang, p. 377), Xi 19.2 (Yang, p. 381), Xi 19.5 (Yang, pp. 383-84), Xi 20.5 (Yang, p. 387), and Xi 21.3 (Yang, p. 391). 7. SSIZS 2: 2259.

328 Notes to Pages 4-8 8. Ibid., 2400. For common views on the origins of the Gongyang and Guliang commentaries, see Loewe, Early Chinese Texts, p. 68.

9. Chen Qiyou, Han Feizi jishi, 2: 658. I follow Chen’s emendation of the line. 10. For a version close to that of the Zuozhuan, see Shiji, 38.1626. For the views of the Grand Scribe, see Shiji, 38.1632 and 130.3298. 11. See, e.g., the version of the tale that is included in the text known as Chungiu

shiyu, a small collection of anecdotes found with other texts in an early Western Han tomb at Mawangdui; there an otherwise unknown character explains military principles to a Lu army. See Zheng Liangshu, Zhujian boshu lunwenji, pp. 38-40; and see Appendix for discussion of the theories of Kaizuka Shigeki.

12. See discussion in Appendix, pp. 323-24. , 13. For the early titles of the Zuozhuan, see Appendix, pp. 318-20. The version of the Chungiu attached to the Zuozhuan is longer by two years than the versions attached to the Gongyang and Guliang commentaries. The Zuozhuan includes narratives for events as late as 463.

14. For exceptions to the principle of chronological ordering, see Chapter 6, pp. 205-6. 15. See p. 435735, for figures. 16. For the exact figure (70,361), see Bauer, Concordance to the Kuo-yii, 1: xl.

17. More detailed discussion of the makeup and provenance of the Zuozhuan and Guoyu is reserved for the Appendix. 18. See remarks cited in Zhu Yizun, Jingyi kao, 6: 209.1a~2b. 19. Xu Zhaochang, “Shiguan yuanliu kao,” pp. 64-70. 20. The work of Lothar von Falkenhausen, Yuri Pines, and others on this question is discussed in the Appendix, pp. 437-39. 21. See sources collected in Li Simian, Lé Simian dushi zhaji, pp. 238-42. 22. The mutually contradictory loci for the legend can be found in the Hanshu

and Liji. See Jin Jingfang’s critique in Jin Jingfang gushi lunji, pp. 186-90. | 23. For elaboration of these points, see Appendix, pp. 319-21. 24. See Chapter 8, pp. 259-64. 25. As long ago as 1935, Herrlee Creel argued that control of historical writing was one of the primary means by which pre-Qin scholars advanced their own claims

to prestige against those of military men; see “Soldier and Scholar in Ancient China,” pp. 342-43. I thank David Keightley for bringing this article to my attention. —

26. Narratology distinguishes narrators (reconstructed by implication from clues - within the text) from authors (living individuals who write texts). Although true for all narrative, this distinction is difficult to apply to the Zuozhuan and Guoyu, because both narrators and authors remain anonymous and not enough is known about the

| Notes to Pages 9-21 329 origins of the works to force an author upon them. For reflections on the authors’ use of their narrators, see Chapter 8, pp. 258-70. 27. Eno, Confucian Creation of Heaven, pp. 190-92; Lewis, Writing and Authority, PP. 75-79. 28. [hat it is inappropriate to speak of Confucian orthodoxy even later, during the

Han, is clear from Michael Nylan’s “The Chin wen / ku wen Controversy in Han Times.”

29. As noted below, p. 442n60, these sections were likely the latest additions to the Guoyu.

30. According to the Lunyu, Confucius both praised and condemned Guan Zhong; see Lunyu 3.22, 14.9, 14.16, 14.17. On Confucianism in the Qin, see Kern, Die Hymnen der chinesischen Staatsopfer, pp. 107-8.

31. Opus operatum and modus operandi are united dialectically in practice; see Bourdieu, Logic of Practice, p. 52. The dialectic would have expressed itself in successive

negotiations with received accounts, as in the various tales of the battle at Hong. 32. Discussing native informants and Hegel’s idea of “original historians,” Bourdieu (ibid., p. 91) argues that the narrative product reveals more about a practice than does any practitioner's systematic description of that practice. 33. Historia rerum gestarum is a narrative of deeds; res gestae are the deeds themselves.

34. Derrida, Of Grammatology, pp. 158-59.

35. Pierre Bourdieu (Logic of Practice, pp. 52-56) uses the concept of the habitus, “systems of durable, transposable dispositions,” to resolve the contradiction between

voluntarist and mechanist models of human motivation. Freedom of will is in no way endangered by the recognition that personal meanings and choices are made within interpersonal structures. 36. As I argue in the Appendix, the Zuozhuan and Guoyu probably did draw on written sources, and most certainly include a good deal of accurate information about the Spring and Autumn period. But that information is mixed with interested fictions, and it will never be possible to determine precisely where the fiction ends.

, 37. Recent readers have quite unjustifiably had more confidence than some of the earliest users of the texts. Han Fei, for instance, puts Duke Xiang’s battle at Zhuogu, not at Hong, introducing doubt about a fundamental detail (Chen Qiyou, Han Feizi jishi, 2: 658). For studies of Spring and Autumn history based largely on the Zuozhuan, see Tong Shuye, Chungiu shi; and Cho-yun Hsu, Ancient China in

Transition. , ,

Chapter 1 , |

1. Liu Zhiji, Shitong tongshi, 2.1. The four speeches Liu mentions are all from the Zuozhuan: Cheng 13.3 (Yang, pp. 861-65); Xiang 25.10 (Yang, pp. 1104-6); Huan 2.2

(Yang, pp. 86-90); Xiang 3.7 (Yang, pp. 929-30). Liu’s phrasing echoes the Zuo-

330 Notes to Pages 22-23 zhuan's praise of the language of the Chungiu at Cheng 14.4 and Zhao 31.5 (see discussion in Chapter 8, pp. 265-67), Ji Zha’s remarks on the Shi at Xiang 29.13 (discussion in Chapter 2, pp. 86-94), Confucius’ praise of Shi, “Guanju” (Mao 1) at Lunyu 3.20, and the Mao School's “Great Preface” (“Daxu”) to the Shi. 2. The narratorial voice in the Zuozhuan, Guoyu, and most other collections of historical anecdotes before the Shiji confines itself to narration, assigning all abstract reflection to quoted remarks and to a specific historical character. One exception to the rule is the mass of Chungiu exegesis found in parts of the Zuozhuan. But a confirmation of the tendency to put reflection in quotes is the anonymous junzi character who appears frequently in the Zuozhuan (and less frequently in the Guoyw and other works) to remark on events; his utterances have all the generic characteristics of the speech except the designation of a specified historical occasion. In the second half of the Zuozhuan, this commentator-junzi is largely replaced by Kong Qiu. These problems of narrative are considered in Chapter 5, pp. 178-80. The quotation of teachers’ remarks in philosophical collections like the Lunyu, the Mengzi, and the Mozi no doubt reflects the circumstances of the texts’ compila-

tion. But given the strong connections between philosophical rhetoric and the speech rhetoric we are about to examine, it is quite probable that the literary convention of quoting thought (rather than writing it in the impersonal voice of the essay) influenced the form of these texts. 3. Han’s remark is found in his essay “Jinxue jie” (“Explication of ‘Progress in Learning,” as translated by Hartman in Han Yi and the T’ang Search for Unity, p- 412), and is cited with several other scholars’ generalizations on Zuozhuan style in Zhang Gaoping, Zuozhuan zhi wenxue jiazhi, pp. 49-50. 4. For Liu Zhiji’s views on the Chungiu, see the chapter “Huojing” (Making trou-

ble for the Classic), in Shitong tongshi, 363-77. On Han canonization debates, see Michael Nylan, “The Chin wen / Ku wen Controversy in Han Times,” pp. 102-8; and Shen Yucheng and Liu Ning, Chungiu Zuozhuan xueshi gao, pp. 10-29. See Shen and Liu, pp. 192-98, for an account of the work of Dan Zhu and his school. 5. Zhang Gaoping, Zuozhuan zhi wenxue jiazhi, pp. 49-50, cites Fan Ning and He Xun. For a large collection of comments on the Zuo, including Xun Song’s, see Zhu Yizun, Jingyi kao, juan 169.

6. For typical remarks on the Guoyu speeches, see the comments of Li Tao (111584) and Cui Shu (1740-1816), cited in Zhang Xincheng, Weishu tongkao, pp. 521-23. For Liu Zongyuan’s attack on the Guoyu's style and substance, see “Fei Guoyu,” in Liu Hedong ji, 2: 746-88. For a defense of Guoyu style, see Zhang Yiren, “Cong Guoyu yu Zuozhuan benzhi shang di chayi shilun houren dui Guoyu di piping,” pt. 1.

7. Li Zuqian’s (1137-81) Guwen guanjian begins with Han Yu; Xie Fangde's (1226-89) Wenzhang guifan starts with the Han dynasty. 8. SKOSZMTY 5: 4154.

Notes to Pages 24-28 331 9. For the attribution of Miaojue gujin to Tang Han, see SKQSZMTY 4: 3758 and

5: 4156.

10. Here and below I borrow the translations of genre names, with minor changes, from Edwards, “A Classified Guide to the Thirteen Classes of Chinese Prose.” I was led to Edwards's article by Benjamin Elman’s helpful discussion of Tongcheng notions of genre, in Classicism, Politics, and Kinship, pp. 294-95. 41. Wu Chengquan and Wu Tiaohou, Guwen guanzhi zhuyi.

12. See the remarks of Li Shuchang, discussed below, in the preface to his Xu Guwen ci leizuan.

13. You Xinxiong, Tongcheng wenpai xueshu, pp. 102-3, cites a letter of Xie Yingzhi

prefacing his Kuaiji shanfang wenxu, in which Xie wrote of his disappointment with Yao’s exclusion of most pre-Qin works and mentioned an incomplete anthology compiled by a certain Wu Jinwang, who excerpted Zuozhuan pieces in the category of “detailed accounts” or narrative (xushi). See also Li Shuchang’s preface to Xu Guwen ci leizuan.

14. Zeng did not include passages from the Guoyu. 15. Li's was not the only continuation of Yao Nai’s great anthology. The eminent evidential scholar Wang Xiangian (1842-1918) also compiled a Xu Guwen ci leizuan in

Tongcheng tradition. | :

which he gathered works by Yao Nai, his contemporaries, and successors in the 16. See Chapter 5, pp. 165-68, for some of the Tongcheng theorists’ remarks on

historiographical narrative. |

17. These debates are discussed briefly in the Appendix, pp. 315-16. 18. E.g., “Huangyi” (Mao 241), “Dang” (Mao 255), “Yunhan” (Mao 258), “Zhengmin” (Mao 260), “Hanyi” (Mao 261), “Jiang Han” (Mao 262). 19. See Pines, “Intellectual Change in the Chunqiu Period”; and the discussion in the Appendix. 20. The theoretical problems underlying the historiographers’ attempt to under-

stand the past and our attempt to understand the historiographers are outlined in Gadamer's discussion of the “historically effected consciousness”; see Truth and Method, pp. 300-307. 21. Among the twelve chapters thought to be the oldest—i.e., the five gao (“proclamation”) chapters, and “Zicai,” “Duoshi,” “Wuyi,” “Jun Shi,” “Duofang,” “Lizheng,” and “Guming”—the only extended narrative passage is in the “Guming,” with its ac-

count of a royal funeral and the accession of the new king. In the other pieces, shorter framing passages set scenes or tell of the results of injunctions. In many places the frame is nothing more than “The king said” (wang yue) or the like. Chapters of the Yi Zhoushu that concern the early Zhou show a similar tendency to record speech and limit detailed narrative; see, e.g., “Fengbao,” in Huang Huaixin et al., Yi Zhoushu huijiao jizhu, pp. 205-24.

332 Notes to Pages 28-30 22. The “Yao dian” and “Yu gong” are relatively rich in narrative, but the other chapters usually dated to the Warring States are, like the Western Zhou chapters, almost entirely devoted to recorded speech. 23. Readers like Edward Shaughnessy (Before Confucius, pp. 101-36) and Matsumoto Masaaki (“Kun Shi hen seiritsu ni tsuite no sho mondai”) argue that “Jun Shi’ and related pieces are highly focused examinations of particular problems of early Zhou policy. But it has required a great deal of work to find clear evidence for such claims in the texts themselves, which in any case have less marked rhetorical structure than any speech in historiography. 24. For a discussion of the ideas of the “Hongfan” and of proposed dates for the text, see Nylan, The Shifting Center. 25. SSJZS 1: 188.

26. [ have modified the draft translation of Serruys et al., Shangshu.

27. Shaughnessy, Sources of Western Zhou History, pp. 76-85. In a critique of Shaughnessy’s four-part morphology, Lothar von Falkenhausen (“Issues in Western Zhou Studies,” pp. 156-60) identifies deep structures that account for a wider range of inscriptions. 28. See transcriptions and annotation in Ma Chengyuan et al., Shang Zhou qing-

tong gi mingwen xuan, pp. 567-81. See also the discussion by Gilbert Mattos, in Shaughnessy, New Sources of Early Chinese History, pp. 104—1. \

29. For a description of citation as a rhetorical technique, with examples from the years of Duke Zhao, see Heidbiichel, Rhetorik im antiken China, pp. 207-37,

30. Here it is appropriate to cite the remarks of Anne Cheng (“La valeur de exemple,” p. 73) on exemplarity in Chinese philosophy: “To say that the ancient Chinese were guided only by practical preoccupations serves only to reveal a cultural prejudice; it would undoubtedly be more just to say that what strikes us as ‘practical’ is, in the Chinese context, theory's mode of enunciation.” 31. As Ronald Egan (“Narratives in Tso chuan,” p. 326) puts it, “The speech has no effect on any person or event in the narrative. Its only effect is that on the reader. ... But the fact that the judgments and predictions such speeches contain are regularly borne out in the narratives indicates that the speeches are not merely rhetorical exercises.” The occasional ineffectuality of good and eloquent speech does not mean that there is no science of good speaking; we will address such a science later in this chapter. Especially around the character of Zichan, who was renowned for his ability to speak well under difficult circumstances, there is some attention to the problem of rhetorical success. But the Zuozhuan and Guoyu rarely draw attention to the amoral utility of rhetorical techniques, as certain other texts, notably the Zhanguoce,

tend to do. ,

32. Zuo, Xiang 31.13 (Yang, pp. 1193-95). This is a slightly modified version of the translation I included in “Calming the Heart,” pp. 8-10.

Notes to Pages 32-38 333 33. “The chief minister has come to resemble the ruler”: Yang, pp. 1193-94, argues

thar si {| should be read yi [\, meaning yi © “already,” for either “the minister resembles his ruler” or “he is already acting as a ruler.”

The first Shi cited is “Dang” (Mao 255). These lines are also cited at Zuo, Xuan 2.3 (Yang, p. 657). The contrast of beginnings and ends is something of a commonplace, appearing in several chapters of the Shangshu. The second Shi cited is “Yi” (Mao 256); the third “Bozhou” (Mao 26); the fourth

“Jizui” (Mao 247). Contrast the translation of Karlgren (“Glosses on the Ta Ya and Sung Odes,” Gl. 888): “The guests are assisted; they are assisted with a dignified demeanour.” The context of this speech requires a different understanding of the lines.

The passage cited from the “Writings of Zhou” is not found in the received version of the Shangshu, although the compiler of the spurious “Old Text” chapters did include it in “Wu Cheng.” The fifth Shi cited is “Huangyi” (Mao 241); it is important to note that in the poem itself the quoted words are addressed to King Wen by the Lord of Heaven (di). 34. Zuo, Zhao 1.13 (Yang, pp. 1223-24). His career is discussed further in Chapter 6, pp. 193-207.

35. Weiyi is a key term in several passages in the Shi and in historiography. At Zuo, Cheng 14.1 (Yang, p. 869), observing weiyi is said to have been one of the purposes of banqueting in ancient times. For the development of the concept of weiyi through the Zhou, see Kaizuka, Chugoku kodai no densho, pp. 363-81. 36. For further discussion of the public image and its connections with wen and related terms, see Chapter 2. 37. Guoyu, Zhou 3.2 (pp. 94-100). 38. In this section, the speaker uses a sort of figura etymologica that philosophers

also occasionally adopted. The connection between good faith (xin) and the self (shen) is based in part on the sounds of the words in question, as is the relation between the human (ren) and humaneness (ren). For reconstructions of these words, see Baxter, Handbook of Old Chinese Phonology, Appendix C. These writers held that similarities in the pronunciations of words reflected relations outside language. 39. To borrow the analytic categories of Greek grammar, the connection marked by zhi Z sometimes resembles the simple possessive genitive (e.g., [J;] “Intelligence is wen’s vehicle”); sometimes a genitive of manner, for which there is no analogue in Greek (e.g., [E,] “Reverence is respectfulness in accordance with wen”); and in one case, an objective genitive ((L,] “Teaching is the promulgation of wen”). 40. See discussion in Chapter 4, pp. 154-60. 41. According to Wei Zhao’s comment on this passage (Guoyu, p. 98), the six for Heaven are Yin, Yang, wind, rain, darkness, and light; the five for earth are the wu xing, the Five Phases: metal, wood, water, fire, and soil. The Han Yijing specialist

334 Notes to Pages 38-41 Meng Xi assigned the same numbers to Heaven and Earth, although with different explanations (Liao Mingchun et al., Zhouyi yanjiu shi, pp. 84-85). 42. For meanings of wen, see Chapter 2, pp. 7-58. 43. “Virtue” is too limiting a translation of the word de. See the discussion in Chapter 4, pp. 158-59. 44. Interestingly, this “devotion to roots” (bu bei ben) is elsewhere the very definition of humaneness; see Zuo, Cheng 9.9 (Yang, p. 845). Other situations demand other definitions: “Combining the three [virtue, correctness, and straightness] is humaneness” (Xiang 7.6 [Yang, p. 952]); “Measuring achievement and acting is humaneness” (Zhao 20.2 [ Yang, p. 1408]). See the discussion in Chapter 4, where I argue that virtues and their definitions are maintained in a state of fluidity partly be-

cause of the interests of speech construction, which requires them to perform various functions in the linguistic network. 45. See Unger, Rhetorik des klassischen Chinesisch, which amounts to a list of rhe-

torical figures found in pre-Qin texts, each identified by the appropriate Greek rhetorical term, illustrated by examples, and accompanied by useful observations on broader aspects of rhetoric in early China. In her Rhetorik im antiken China, Heidbiichel, a student of Unger’s, applies the same methodology to the speeches recorded in the Zuozhuan in the years of Duke Zhao of Lu. For both of these references, I

thank Christoph Harbsmeier, who has produced some of the best comparative work on rhetorical figures in early Chinese, Greek, and Latin; see his “The Music of Xici Prose Style” and “Thinking Through Parentheses.” A history of Chinese rhetoric from a comparative perspective is available in Zhenhua Zhang, Chinesische und europdische Rhetorik. Karl S. Y. Kao gives a more general account of rhetorical figures in Chinese literature in his article “Rhetoric,” in Nienhauser, Indiana Companion to Traditional Chinese Literature, pp. 121-37. Recent Chinese discussions of rhetoric in Zuozhuan speeches include Zhang Gaoping, Zuozhuan zhi wenxue jiazhi, pp. 165-86; Hu Anshun, “Zuozhuan ciling di yuyan tese’; and Gao Yirong, “Zuozhuan shuici di tese ji qi chengyin.” 46. Isokolon, trikolon, tetrakolon, and pentakolon, terms for series of two, three, four,

or five consecutive parallel phrases, capture some of the pleasure in pattern. Combined with various figures of repetition (among which anaphora and anadiplosis are the most familiar), they would permit sentence-by-sentence description of the larger patterns early Chinese writers worked to create. See Unger, Rhetorik des klassischen Chinesisch, pp. 41-71, 89-98; and Heidbiichel, Rhetorik im antiken China, pp. 49-80. Perhaps the closest parallel to the sort of reading well-wrought speeches require is the recognition of ring composition in individual poems and books of poetry, a type of analysis that classics scholars have applied to works as diverse as the Homeric epics and the libelli of the Roman Neoterics. For further examples of ring composition, see Qian Zhongshu, Guanzhui bian, 1: 228-30.

Notes to Pages 41-44 335 47. James Hart (“The Philosophy of the Chou Yi,” p. 192), in an analysis of speeches in the “Zhou yu” section of the Guoyu, observed that the strength of an argument “is not that the conclusion follows with inevitable logic from the premise, but rather a pattern has been discovered which allows a concurrence of different factors in the situation. The concurrence of various factors demonstrates that a valid pattern has been discovered, a pattern against which the proposal must be tested.” 48. Lloyd, Adversaries and Authorities, pp. 74-92; and idem, “The Agora Perspective.”

49. Lloyd, Adversaries and Authorities, p. 79.

50. Anecdotes featuring psychological cunning in crafty persuasions first become common in the late Warring States period and the Western Han; see my “Remonstrance in Eastern Zhou Historiography,” pp. 177-79. See Chapter 2, pp. 65-86, for the role of citations and wen in speech rhetoric. 51. Epideictic oratory, associated with such individuals as Gorgias (ca. 483-376 B.c.E.) and Isocrates (436-338 B.c.E.), has been treated with something like disdain since the fifth century B.c.g. Yet the well-wrought speeches of early Chinese historiography resemble nothing in Greek so much as the antithetical style of Gorgias; that it is sometimes very trying to read the proudest speeches of the Zuozhuan and Guoyu certainly has something to do with this history of reception. See Kennedy, The Art of Persuasion in Greece, pp. 61-68.

52. Given the loose correlation between weiyi and the feelings it inspires, this syllogism might best be explained as an argument from signs. I discuss the importance of this type of argument in “The Logic of Signs in Early Chinese Rhetoric.” 53. Speeches in historiography resemble sermons, the logic of which differs from the logic of an Aristotelian proof. Although the proof revolves around the rules of

formal demonstration, the sermon must not end by overthrowing the textual authorities it cites and often has as its secret purpose proving again the validity of those authorities.

54. For the characteristics and parts of a Warring States speech, see Crump, “The Chan-kuo ts’e and Its Fiction,” pp. 315-17; and idem, Intrigues, p. 100. 55. See, e.g., Zuo, Zhuang 32.3 (Yang, p. 252).

56. In European rhetoric, speeches are deliberative, forensic, or epideictic. The Chinese written tradition preserves little of the verbal argumentation that would have accompanied lawsuits, and there are few instances of pure rhetorical display before the entertainments of Sima Xiangru (ca. 179-117 B.c.E.) in the Western Han. Most of the speeches in the Zuozhuan and Guoyu are deliberative, i.e., designed to answer a question of policy. See discussion on p. 50. 57. In Chapter 7, pp. 223-34, I argue that judgments of the aesthetic type have a fundamental role in the meaning and construction of historiographical speeches and narratives.

336 Notes to Pages 45-49 58. The faith in repetition is best epitomized in the word gu, which means “the way things were before,” “precedent,” or, as a conjunction, “given this precondition.” See Mencius 4B.26; and discussion in Graham, Studies in Chinese Philosophy and Philosophical Literature, pp. 49-53. See Guoyu, Lu 1.4 (p. 156) for a duke’s unsound argu-

ment that his own actions constitute precedent and need not conform with past practices. 59. For further discussion of the virtues, see Chapter 4, pp. 154-60.

60. In the words of Jean Levi (“L’art de la persuasion,” p. 63), discussing the rhetoric of Xunzi, “The ornaments, the figures of rhetoric, are to discourses what the designs of spirits and of fabulous animals are to the bronze cauldrons of the Zhou: wen, striations, magical signs reveal the cosmic configuration in the royal talismans; marks that, by attesting to the legitimacy of the reality they figure forth, resuscitate it.” That language is the site of latent truths is evident especially in two rhetorical allusions to relations within the written language: at Zuo, Xuan 12.2 (p. 744) and Xuan 15.3 (p. 763), speakers cite as evidence for their arguments the

shapes and components of graphs. | 61. See Heidbiichel, Rhetorik im antiken China, pp. 93-100, for examples from the

years of Duke Zhao. 62. See Zuo, Yin 3.7 (Yang, p. 32); Xuan 15.3 (Yang, p. 762); Xiang 28.8 (Yang, p. 1144); and Zhao 1.12 (Yang, pp. 1221-22), a masterful employment of enumerative schemes that occurs in a Qin doctor's diagnosis of a Jin duke’s illness. In the Guoyu, see Zhou 3.7 (p. 138; seven musical tones matched with historical and mythological moments), Lu 1.10 (p. 171; five prerogatives of office), and Jin 9.18 (p. 500; five strengths of the doomed Zhi Bo). 63. For a telling example of this responsiveness, see Guoyu, Lu 2.1 (p. 186), and Zuo, Xiang 4.3 (Yang, p. 934), where the two versions of Shusun Muzi’s speech differ in concluding with “six virtues” (liu de) and “five goods” (wu shan) respectively. 64. SSIZS 2: 1673.

65. The structure of the translated portion of Duke Xiang’s speech might be

schematized as follows: , [ap-dg = Ep-Op Po-4o] prediction

E,-O, (= wen]

E,-O, [= Heaven/earth] E,—O, resumed: Heaven/earth E,-O, resumed: wen

“clothed in wen”: prediction ,

a;—-d, {behavior matched with moral attributes]

Notes to Pages 50-51 337

a,—d, (attributes matched with de] oe d,—a, resumed: good de

d,-a, resumed: “the help of de”

Pi~q “clothed in virtue” “the help of de”

prediction

The outline is to be read from left to right and from top to bottom. Letters indicate the repetition of syntactical structures (as in phrases a;—d,, which are syntactically parallel), and numerals indicate the shift from one set of such structures to the next

(as in the shift from E,-O, to E,-O,, two sets that employ different syntactical patterns). The horizontal axis traces the linear progress of the anecdote and speech from word to word; this progress is interrupted only by repetition, which is registered on the vertical axis. The columns therefore show how elements reappear and are reworked as the text takes shape; their cohesion lies both in the serial repetition

of themes and in the production of mediating terms that permit progression by equivalence from one statement to another (as from a, to a, by way of zheng, “correctness’). Schematic symmetry on this order recalls Roman Jakobson’s (“Linguistics and Poetics,” in Language and Literature, p. 71) famous statement that “the poetic function projects the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection into the axis of combination.”

For further examples of the carefully crafted speech, see Shi Hui's argument against fighting and the Chu king’s speech on the meaning of military action at Zuo, Xuan 12.2 (Yang, pp. 722-26, 744-47); Xi Zhi on the duties of ministers at Cheng 12.4 (Yang, pp. 857-58); Shengzi’s speech on the loss of Chu ministers to Jin at

Xiang 26.10 (Yang, pp. 120-23); Yanzi’s speech on harmony and identity at Zhao | 20.8 (Yang, pp. 1419-20); and Shu Xiang’s speech on Duke Jing of Shan at Guoyu, Zhou 3.4 (pp. 114-18). Many examples could be added to this list. 66. As Graham (Disputers of the Tao, p. 25) explains apropos of Lunyu 12.0, “The succession of tasks which transfers grain from the fields to the dining table depends on each person doing what rightly used names instruct him to do; and only when the process is running smoothly will ceremony and music come to life to harmonise relations, and enforcement of order by punishments be morally informed.” 67. The role of speeches in narrative is discussed in Chapter 5, p. 180. 68. Lunyu 2.18.

69. For other examples in the Lunyu, see 9.24, 13.4, 13.17, 13.25, 13.28, 15.6, 15.8, 16.1, 16.2, 16.4—-7, 16.10, 17.6, 17.8, 19.10, 20.2. It is probably significant that none of these

examples come from the Lunyu chapters widely considered to be the oldest. The

338 Notes to Pages 51-55 rhetoric of explicit pattern may belong to an era after the Master's death. Most Lunyu chapters, regardless of putative date of compilation, include short remarks attributed to the Master. The rhetorical tendencies of these passages—repetition with variation (e.g., 3.17); repetition with negation (4.13); sorites (6.20); figura etymologica (8.7)—overlap with those of longer speeches but are best understood as common features of the early Chinese aphorism. 70. For examples of some of the figures discussed above, see the following passages of the Mengzi: sorites: 1A.3, 1B.7, 4A.12, 4A.27, 4B.14, 5A.4, 5A.5, 7A.21, 7A.30,

74.45, 7B.14, 7B.25; marked structures: 2A.6 (on the si duan, “four germs”), 4A.10, 4A.27, 7B.24, 7B.31; enumeration: 4B.30, 7A.40; figura etymologica: 6A.3, 7B.16.

71. See Van Zoeren, Poetry and Personality, pp. 68-74; and Saussy, The Problem of a Chinese Aesthetic, p. 115.

72. Some examples, numbered as in Knoblock, Xunzi: sorites: 3.9a, 3.9b, 13.5, 18.13 elaboration, repetition with variation: 2.2, 2.11, 4.6, 15.6a, 24.5; figura etymologica: 9.16a, 12.6 (both passages connect jun, “to rule,” with gun, “to form groups”), 15.2 (on ren). 73. See discussion in Lewis, Writing and Authority, pp. 169-72.

74. Han Fei’s justification of Mohist stylistic monotony is discussed in Chapter 2, pp. 84-85. 75. Wu Yujiang, Mozi jiaozhu, 1: 10. The chapter title is also translated “Conforming Upward”; see Graham, Disputers of the Tao, p. 51.

76. “When you hear of something good or something not good”: the phrase might otherwise be translated “When you hear that something is good, and yet it is not.” But several commentators gloss er ff] as yu £i, “and” (Sun Yirang, Mozi fiangu, p. 45). 77. Wang Xianqian, Xunzi jijie 1: 84. 78. Ibid., 1: 84-85; trans. Knoblock, 1: 208-9 (slightly modified). 79. Wang Xiangian, Xunzi jijie 1: 86-87; trans. Knoblock, 1: 209.

80. Knoblock here follows Wang Niansun’s (1744-1832) emendation. The received text reads “elucidate its significance with parables and praiseworthy examples, illustrate its meaning by making distinctions and drawing boundaries.” 81. Wang Xianqian, Xunzi jijie 1: 88; trans. Knoblock, 1: 211.

| 82. See the discussion of Xunzi’s ideas on rhetoric in Levi, “L’art de la persuasion, pp. 49-64. 83. See discussion of Zuo, Cheng 14.4 and Zhao 31.5, in Chapter 8, pp. 265-67. 84. Guo Qingfan, Zhuangzi jishi, p. 143.

85. Chen Qiyou, Han Feizi jishi, 1: 49. The multipart chapters “Shuilin,” “Neichushuo,” and “Waichushuo” are compilations of anecdotes to be used in persuasions.

86. For the rhetoric of Warring States disputers, see Kroll, “Disputation in Ancient Chinese Culture”; and Reding, Les fondements philosophiques de la rhétorique.

Notes to Pages 56-58 339 87. Seé Zuo, Xi 23.6 (Yang, p. 410); and Guoyu, Jin 4.10 (p. 359).

Chapter 2 1. For Shang kings with wen, wu, and wenwu in their names, see Keightley, Sources of Shang History, pp. 206-7; I thank David Keightley for bringing this passage to my attention. On wen in bronze inscriptions, see Falkenhausen, “The Concept of Wen.”

As Falkenhausen notes, originally the epithet wen was probably distinct from the word meaning “pattern.” By the time of the historiographers, the two meanings were being conflated, most productively by the historiographers themselves. For the gradual process by which wen and wenzhang came to refer to literary texts, see Kern, “Ritual, Text, and the Formation of the Canon.” 2. In Shangshu, “Guming,” wenbei means “striped cowries”; see SSJZS 1: 239. In Zhouli, “Kaogong ji” (SSJZS 1: 918), wen is a textile pattern of dark blue and red. For Xu Shen (Shuowen jiezi zhu, p. 425), wen was “crossed marks” (cuobua). The textile metaphor is expressed in many passages in the Zuo; see, e.g., Huan 2.2 (Yang, p. 88), Zhao 25.3 (Yang, p. 1457), and Zhao 28.3 (Yang, p. 1495). 3. Ji You, ancestor of the most powerful noble family in Lu, was reportedly born with the graph you 7Z on his palm; see Zuo, Min 2.4 (Yang, p. 264) and Zhao 32.4 (Yang, p. 1520). The mother of Duke Huan of Lu was also born with writing on her

palm; see the Zuozhuan passage before the first year of Duke Yin’s reign (Yang, p. 3). | For these and related passages, see Boltz, Origin and Early Development, pp. 138-43.

4.This notion of wen is most beautifully expressed in the last section of Xunzi, “Lilun”; Knoblock, 3: 72-73, renders it as “proper forms.” 5. Without entering the debate on whether China ever had a “public sphere,” I will note that the assumptions about visibility and public images found in the Zuozhuan and Guoyu amount to a kind of imaginary Offentlichkeit, or “publicity.” Any action of the rulers may potentially become “open” to inspection and judgment by the

observing public, and narratives often turn on the consequences of public reaction. For more on this form of publicity, see Habermas, Structural Transformation, p. 2. This sort of publicity is a feature of narratives and not necessarily reflective of actual Spring and Autumn political arrangements, but it has become part of that period’s historical image. 6. Bourdieu (Logic of Practice, p. 108) implies a similar connection between linguistic and material artifacts of culture: “Official representations, which, as well as customary rules, include gnomic poems, sayings, proverbs, every kind of objectification of the schemes of perception and action in words, things or practices... have a dialectical relationship with the dispositions that are expressed through them and which they help to produce and reinforce.” 7. L use the word “text” indiscriminately for both written and unwritten compositions. Written, a text acquires a materiality that more obviously suggests its asso-

340 Notes to Pages 59-61 ciations with other adorned artifacts; an unwritten text, on the other hand, has its

materiality in the repeated acts of intonation that bring it out into the open, whether for purposes of ritual, rhetorical citation, or education. 8. Havelock, Preface to Plato, pp. 7-60. 9. For examples of nian and jingnian, see Shirakawa, Kinbun tstishaku, 56: 196-97. 10. For examples, see ibid., 56: 223.

11. They are wang, “to forget” (written with various graphs; for examples, see ibid., 56: 182, 56: 230, and 56: 268, and discussion at 9: 483), and zhui, “to let fall” (see ibid.,

56: 203). To words for the cognitive and verbal act of commemoration, we might add words designating succession in office, including geng, “to take the place of” (ibid., 56: 183), and others (see discussion in ibid., 20: 407).

12. Xiao 3X is written with & instead of 4€ on the left in the Ye gui (tureen) (ibid., 15: 25) and I on various vessels (see ibid., 56: 226, for examples). The apparent identity of this word and the word xue 8, “to learn” or “to study,” is of immense importance in the philosophy of Confucius. Shuai frequently appears in verb-object compound with xing, “to follow the standard”; see ibid., 56: 206-7. 13. For a list of the verbal and adjectival uses of this word, see ibid., 56: 134. 14. For an examination of the mimetic vocabulary as it links bronze inscriptions with such later texts as the Lunyu, see Munro, The Concept of Man in Early China, pp- 99-102; and Savage, “Archetypes, Model Emulation, and the Confucian Gen-

tleman.” ,

15. An example is xiang, which means “to represent” or “to depict” in Zuo, Xuan 3.3 (translated below, pp. 60-61), and “to imitate” or “make a model of” in Huan 2.2 (Yang, p. 89; also discussed below, p. 62). 16. Zuo, Huan 2.2 (Yang, p. 88), specifies the following textile patterns (wen): fire

(buo), dragon (long), ax-pattern (fu), and double-bow pattern (fu). The first two patterns are clearly named after the phenomena they represent, and the third is supposedly related by homophony to fu, “ax.” The last is described as resembling two bows (or graphs for bow, gong) facing each other. Martin Powers (“The Figure in the Carpet,” p. 218) writes that “ceremony consisted largely of the display of artifacts (clothing, vessels, architecture). These artifacts were not symbols for political concepts such as social prerogative or resource allocation. Rather, such ‘concepts’ were both expressed and understood in terms of these artifacts.” 17. See Zuo, Huan 2.2 (Yang, pp. 88-89) and Xi 24.1 (Yang, pp. 418-19), both discussed below, pp. 62-64. 18. Zuo, Xuan 3.3 (Yang, pp. 669-72).

, 19. King Ding reigned 606-586. King Cheng reigned 1042/35-1006. The closing prophecy has naturally been attractive to scholars interested in dating the Zuozhuan.

See the discussion in the Appendix. ,

Notes to Pages 61-63 341 20. According to the myth, the predynastic sage ruler Fu Xi invented the eight trigrams after “looking up and observing representations in heaven, looking down and observing the models in the land, and observing the patterns (wen) of the birds and beasts and their appropriateness to the land”; see SSJZS 1: 86. See also discussion in Lewis, Writing and Authority, pp. 197-202. 21. In future ages, the notion that the cauldrons could change size—here a figure of speech—would be read quite literally; in legends of the Qin and Han they moved on their own power and sank in the Yellow River; see Sima Qian, Shiji 28.1365, 1383, 1392. For discussion of meanings of the nine cauldrons, see Wu Hung, Monumentality in Early Chinese Art and Architecture, pp. 4-1. 22. Zuo, Zhao 6.3 (Yang, p. 1276). See the discussion in Chapter 8, pp. 294-96. 23. See the discussion in Chapter 7, Pp. 223-34. 24. Zuo, Yin 5.1 (Yang, pp. 41-44). 25. Zuo, Huan 2.2 (Yang, pp. 86-90). As Takezoe (“Saden” kaisen, 1: 147) noted, Xuan 3.3 (translated above) says that it was King Cheng, not King Wu, who placed the cauldrons. The supposition is supported by Zhao 32.3 (Yang, p. 1517). Takezoe —— (ibid., 1: 725) incorrectly cites Mozi, “Minggui,” in support of his point; the passage

he intends is found in “Geng Zhu” (Wu Yujiang, Mozi jiaozhu, 2: 656), as Shen Qinhan (1775-1832) and Karlgren noted; see Karlgren, “Glosses on the Tso Chuan I,” gl. 269.

26. Zuo, Cheng 2.2 (Yang, pp. 788-89). See also Xuan 14.5 (Yang, p. 757) and Xi-

ang 11.5 (Yang, pp. 993-94), where Wei Jiang of Jin at first rejects a gift of bells, chiming stones, and musicians on the basis of principles expressed by Confucius above. What allows him finally to accept the gifts, and with the explicit sanction of the narrators (who write, “It was ritually proper”), is the duke’s insistence that giving rewards itself functions as part of the state’s use of display. In passages on gifts, wen and related terms tend to retain their most material meaning, “flags”; see Zhao 15.7 (Yang, p. 1373) and compare Huan 2.2, cited above, p. 62. 27. Zuo, Xiang 19.4 (Yang, p. 1047). See also Guoyu, Chu 1.6 (p. $49), in which the system of old is preserved in various media, including writing (“they wrote it up by means of graphs [wen]”), so that later ages will be able to follow ic. 28. Guoyu, Jin 6.1 (p. 411). I translate zhi as I do because of the apparent aphoristic nature of the “records” cited under this title; see discussion of citation sources below.

These were clearly not historical records in the usual sense of the word, although some scholars have assumed that they represent possible sources of the Zuozhuan and Guoyu. 29. Zuo, Xi 23.6 (Yang, p. 410) / Guoyu, Jin 4.10 (p. 359). Cf. Guoyu, Jin 4.6 (p. 348).

30. As if to confirm the appropriateness of his posthumous name, the Chu king

describes Chong’er, the future Duke Wen, as wen at Zuo, Xi 23.6 (Yang, p. 409), : and, in a rather different speech, at Guoyu, Jin 4.8 (p. 354). According to the “Shifa”

342 Notes to Pages 63-66 chapter of the Yi Zhoushu, one of the characteristics justifying the name Wen is “being assiduous in learning and fond of inquiry,” although it seems to be Chong’er’s excellence in speech and attention to ritual propriety that impress the Chu king (see Huang Huaixin et al., Yi Zhoushu huijiao jizhu, p. 679). See also Zuo, Xiang 31.10 (Yang, p. 1191), where Zitaishu of Zheng is described as “outstandingly beautiful and wen”; and Lunyu 5.15, where the wen man is deferential and eager to learn. 31. Zuo, Min 2.7 (Yang, p. 270). Guoyu, Jin 1.9 (p. 281), includes the discussion of the duke’s gifts but lacks this passage. See Chapter 7, p. 225, for further discussion. 32. Guoyu, Lu 3.6 (p. 195). For further reflections on the correspondence between regalia and inner intentions, see the discussion in Chapter 7, p. 224, of the beautiful carriages of Qing Feng of Qi. 33. Zuo, Xi 24.1 (Yang, pp. 418-19). The zhi in Jie zhi Tui’s name is a connecting word and is not part of his given name Tui; the same usage is found in several other Spring and Autumn period names. 34. Guoyu, Jin 5.2 (p. 394). The corresponding Zuozhuan speech at Wen 5.5 (Yang, pp. 540-41) does not include the passage on words and the self. 35. For several examples, see Chapter 7, pp. 226-28. 36. Such changes in early China are reconstructed only with the greatest diffi-

culty. One recent example is the hypothesis of a Western Zhou ritual reform involving new types and arrangements of bronze vessels and new activities for participants in ceremonies; see Shaughnessy, Before Confucius, pp. 165-95; Rawson, “Statesmen or Barbarians?” pp. 89-91, cited in ibid., p. 194; and Falkenhausen, “Youguan Xi Zhou wandi lizhi gaige.” 37. Although simple narratorial judgments of the ritual appropriateness of particular acts are scattered throughout the Zuozhuan and Guoyu, all lengthy expositions of the ritual system are presented in the context of speeches. 38. See Guoyu, Chu 1.1 (p. 528).

39. For divinations conducted with the Zhouyi, see Zuo, Zhuang 22.1 (Yang, p. 222), Min 2.4 (Yang, p. 264), Xi 15.4 (Yang, pp. 353-54), Xi 25.2 (Yang, pp. 431-32), Xiang 9.3 (Yang, pp. 964-66), Xiang 25.2 (Yang, p. 1096), Zhao 5.1 (Yang, pp. 126365), Zhao 7.15 (Yang, p. 1298), Zhao 12.10 (Yang, pp. 1337-38), Ai 9.6 (Yang, pp.

1652-54), and Guoyu, Jin 4. (p. 362). For divination-rhymes not found in the Zhouyi, see Zuo, Min 2.4 (Yang, p. 264), Xi 4.6 (Yang, pp. 295-96), Cheng 16.5 (Yang, p. 885), Xiang 10.5 (Yang, p. 978), and Ai 17.5 (Yang, p. 1709-10). For studies of Zhouyi divination in Zuozhuan and Guoyu, see Kat, “Shunja” “Saden” senwako; Gao Heng, Wenshi shulin, pp. 347-81; and Smith, “Zhouyi Interpretation from Accounts in the Zuozhuan.”

40. See Zuo, Xuan 6.6 (Yang, pp. 689-90), Xuan 12.2 (Yang, pp. 726-27), Xiang

Notes to Pages 67-68 343 28.8 (Yang, pp. 143-44), Zhao 1.12 (Yang, p. 1223), Zhao 29.4 (Yang, pp. 1502-3), and Zhao 32.4 (Yang, p. 1520). 41. For the relation of Shi imagery, Zhouyi trigram images, and conceptions of writing, see Lewis, Writing and Authority, pp. 262-78. 42. This woman, Mu Jiang, is herself the subject and interpreter of an interesting divination at Zuo, Xiang 9.3 (Yang, pp. 964-66). 43. Zuo, Zhao 4.8 (Yang, pp. 1256-59). For a discussion of this dream and its implications for the interpretation of signs in the Zuozhuan, see Li Wai-yee, “Knowledge and Skepticism in Ancient Chinese Historiography,” p. 35. 44. Zuo, Zhao 5.1 (Yang, pp. 1263-65). 45. “Mingyi’s Qian”: in what is apparently a reflection of divination practice, the Zuozhuan refers to the particular line relevant to a divination not by number (e.g., “the first line of Mingyi” or “the initial nine of Mingyi”) but by naming the hexagram

that differs from the initial hexagram solely by this line. The Qian (“Modesty”) hexagram, the fifteenth hexagram in the traditional enumeration, has a broken, or Yin, first line where Mingyi has a solid, or Yang, line. The first line statement of the Mingyi (“Calling Pheasant” or “Brightness Level”), thirty-sixth in the traditional enumeration, reads “The calling pheasant in flight. He lowers his wings. The superior man is traveling. He does not eat for three days. He has somewhere to go. The

ruler has words” HARB FIR: BHR -ATFTT-=A*R:- AME: EA 44 = . To adapt the translation to this Zuozhuan episode, I have combined elements from the translations of Shaughnessy, I Ching, p. 113; and Wilhelm and Baynes, I Ching, p. 140.

“Mingyi is the sun”: as Yang, p. 1264, explains, Mingyi consists of the trigram Li (associated with the images of fire and the sun) placed below the trigram Kun (associated with the image of earth). “The number of the suns was ten” or “the number of the sun is ten”: according to Du Yu, cited by Yang, p. 1264, the line refers to the ten-day cycle designated by the Heavenly Stems; Yang also cites the myth of the ten suns. Takezoe (“Saden” kaisen, pp. 1456-57) points out that in explaining the next line, “there are ten periods in the day,” Du forces a correspondence with the twelve-part division of the day more familiar in his time. As Takezoe shows, earlier texts suggest a ten-part division. “He will perform ancestral sacrifices to you”: that is, the first line of Mingyi is

bright, but close to the horizon, just like the dawn sun. The sun at noon corresponds to the king, at the time of the morning meal it corresponds to the duke, and at dawn it corresponds to the minister. Thus, the divination results indicate that Shusun Bao will achieve the rank of minister, succeeding his father and overseeing the family’s sacrifices.

“The Gen trigram is a mountain”: when the Mingyi hexagram changes to the Qian hexagram, the lowest line of the Mingyi hexagram changes from solid to bro-

34.4. Notes to Page 69 ken, and the lower trigram changes from Li to Gen, which is associated with the image of a mountain. “Accompanying the Li trigram is the Niu (ox) trigram”: for “accompany,” see Jiao Xun (1763-1820), cited by Yang, p. 1265. The upper trigram in both Mingyi and Qian is Kun, normally associated with earth. As the “Shuogua” chapter of the Yi shows, one of this trigram’s early collateral images is that of the ox (see SSJZS 1: 95). Du, refuted by Takezoe (“Saden” kaisen, p. 1458), understood the line as a reference to the cow (pinniu) in the hexagram statement for Li (no. 30). “He will be your successor”: since he does not fly high and his wingspan is not broad, he will not go far from his starting point but will return to succeed his father.

46. The only comparable phenomenon would be the recitation on diplomatic and ritual occasions of specific Shi poems, whose words would be understood to inform the actions of the participants. But since reciters are frequently allowed or encouraged to choose for themselves which poems to recite, the use of the Shi never has the sort of impersonal necessity that is presumed to characterize Zhouyi divination. See the discussion of recitation in Chapter 7, pp. 234-43. 47. At Zuo, Zhao 2.1 (Yang, p. 1226), Han Qi (Xuanzi) of Jin views the Yi, the “Images” (“Xiang”), and the Lu Chungiu during a diplomatic visit to Lu. Commen-

tary on the passage has focused on the possibility that the text here refers to the “Image” commentary on the Zhouyi. Yang (p. 1227) argues that “Xiang” here is the “Xiangwei” or “Gate Tower,” administrative announcements that took their name from the place where they were hung up for display; see Zuo, Ai 3.2 (Yang, p. 1622). It is perhaps significant that even in Lu, a bastion of Zhou culture, Han is not said to have seen most of the written texts that scholars assume were widely available in — written form. There is no mention of Shu chapters or of historical archives beyond the Lu Chungiu, which by most interpretations would resemble the concise chronicle — of the extant Chungiu. The Shi could be seen in Lu, if Xiang 29.13 is credible (see discussion of the Ji Zha scene below), but only as a performance, not as a written text.

48. See Zuo, Zhuang 22.1 (Yang, p. 222), where a Zhou scribe skilled in the Zhouyi pays an official visit to the ruler of Chen and uses the text to interpret a milfoil divination; Xi 25.2 (Yang, pp. 431-32), where the interpreter of a divination limits its meaning by reminding the questioner (here Duke Wen of Jin) that, despite appearances, the results in no way challenge the existing Zhou ritual hierarchy; and see again Zhao 2.1 (Yang, p. 1226), in which Lu is said to possess a copy of the Yi. 49. Sima Qian was the first to attribute any part of the Yi to King Wen; Yijing, “Xici shang” speculates only that the Yi originated in the time of the king; see SSJZS I: 90. Yang Xiong (53 B.c.E.-18 c.E.), Wang Chong (27-ca. 100), Xu Gan (171-218), and others followed the Shiji in crediting King Wen with the development of the sixty-four hexagrams from Fu Xi's eight trigrams; see Huang Peirong, Yixue lunzhu xuanji, pp. 1-2. For a discussion of the historical and philosophical reasons for the

Notes to Pages 70-71 345 King Wen attribution, see Li Chunren and Geng Zhiyong, “Zuozbuan shili ya Wen Wang yan Zhouyi.” The speaker at Guoyu, Jin 4.11 (p. 362), building on trigram images, does use the abstract wen (paired with wu, “military prowess”) to refer to the flowing compliance of the masses in the presence of the ruler. 50. See, e.g., “Dagao,” where commentators have identified the unnamed monarch as King Cheng. Ambiguity in the identification of the speaker, even when it is said to be the king, has allowed scholars considerable room for disagreement. Matsumoto Masaaki (“‘Kun Shi’ hen seiritsu ni tsuite no sho mondai,” pp. 154-67), _ for instance, has argued that in several chapters the “king” is in fact the Duke of Zhou. 51. For the Duke of Shao, see Shangshu, “Shao gao” and “Guming.” For the Duke of Zhou, see “Luo gao,” “Wuyi,” “Jun Shi,” “Duofang,” and “Lizheng,” For an investigation of the political implications of the various speeches attributed to these two men in the Shangshu and elsewhere, see Shaughnessy, Before Confucius, pp. 101-64. For a discussion of Shi attributions, see note 54 to this chapter. 52. On the origins of the Shangshu prefaces, see Zhu Tingxian, “Shangshu” yanjiu, Pp. 4-20. 53. For a list of self-referential Shi passages, see Zhang Yongxin, Han yuefu yanjiu, p. 27.

54. King Wu is said to have composed three hymns after the Shang conquest: “Shimai” (Mao 273), “Lai” (Mao 295), and “Huan” (Mao 294); see Zuo, Xuan 12.2 (Yang, pp. 744-45). According to “Jinteng,” the Duke of Zhou composed “Chixiao” (Mao 155) when he was slandered and forced to live away from King Cheng. He is also credited with the “Zhouli” and the “Shiming,” both lost; see Zuo, Wen 18.7 (Yang, pp. 633-34). The poem “Changdi” (Mao 164) is attributed to the Duke of Zhou at Guoyu, Zhou 2.1 (p. 45); at Zuo, Xi 24.2 (Yang, pp. 423-24), it is attributed to Duke Mu of Shao. Duke Wu of Wey is said to have composed the “Yi” admonition (identified with the Shi poem “Yi” [Mao 256]); see Guoyu, Chu 1.7 (p. 551). The

Zhai Duke Moufu, a minister of King Mu of Zhou (r. 956-918), made the poem “Qizhao” (not found in today’s Shi); see Zuo, Zhao 12.11 (Yang, p. 1341). Rui Liangfu,

a minister of King Li of Zhou, composed “Sangrou” (Mao 257); see Zuo, Wen 1.9

(Yang, pp. 516-17). Other attributions are to groups rather than individuals. “Shiren” (Mao $7) was purportedly sung by the people of Wey in praise of a noblewoman of Qi; see Zuo, Yin 3.7 (Yang, pp. 30-31). Similarly, “Huangniao” (Mao 131) is explained as a commemoration of three Qin noblemen forced to accompany the corpse of Duke Mu as tomb sacrifices; Zuo, Wen 6.3 (Yang, pp. 46-47). Especially interesting from the point of view of the association of texts with eminent authors is the comment on Deng Xi at Zuo, Ding 9.2 (Yang pp. 1571-72); see the discussion in Chapter 8, pp. 299-300.

346 Notes to Pages 71-73 55. For attempts to address the Shi as a transcription of an oral tradition, see C. H. Wang, The Bell and the Drum; and idem, From Ritual to Allegory.

56. Gregory Nagy argues that “the Hesiodic compositions determine the identity of their composer” (Nagy, Best of the Achaeans, p. 296) and that “the Panhellenic tradition of oral poetry appropriates the poet, potentially transforming even historical

figures into generic ones who represent the traditional functions of their poetry” (Nagy, Pindar’s Homer, p. 79). In China, too, it would seem that the tradition existed long before attributions to known individual “authors” appeared. The internal attributions of some Shi poems might be compared to the sphrégis, “seal,” that Theognis of Megara puts on his collection of gnomic verses as he claims authorship and possession in the opening lines. The sphrégis is perhaps less a sign of authorship than of

the possession of a tradition once transmitted orally; see Ford, “The Seal of Theognis.” Like the verses of Theognis, the works of Herodotus and Thucydides start by naming the author. 57. See Lewis, Writing and Authority, pp. 149-55.

58. The exception that proves the rule is the failure of Qing Feng of Qi to understand poems recited in Lu as a veiled criticism of him; see Zuo, Xiang 27.2 (Yang, p. 1127) and Xiang 28.9 (Yang, p. 1149). His failure to recognize the poems is so remarkable as to merit commemoration. Although ministers and nobles are assumed to know the poems and other texts, it is perhaps significant that they are never said to have learned them by reading. One of the very few explicit references to reading, the episode in which Duke Wen of Jin learns in his later years to read, makes no mention of the Classics; see Guoyu, Jin 4.22 (p. 386). 59. The poem “Qizhao,” for example, was reportedly composed as a criticism of

King Mu of Zhou as he roamed far from his capital; see Zuo, Zhao 12.1 (Yang, p: 1341) and the discussion in Chapter 6, pp. 202-3.

60. The scholarship on uses of the Shi in the Zuozhuan is vast. Two important Chinese books of recent years have addressed both citation and recitation: Zeng Qinliang, “Zuozhuan” yinshi fushi zhi shijiao yanjiu; and Zhang Suging, “Zuozhuan” chengshi yanjiu. For uses of the Shi in the Guoyu, see Xia Tiesheng, “Zuozhuan Guoyu yinshi fushi zhi bijiao yanjiu.” In English, see Lewis, Writing and Authority, pp. 16669; Saussy, The Problem of a Chinese Aesthetic; and Van Zoeren, Poetry and Personality.

61. Relevant to the following discussion is Jean Levi's (“Quelques exemples de détournement subversif de la citation,” pp. 41-43) distinction of two “modes of citation,” a first mode that simply summons the authority of the source text, and a second, more subversive, mode that engages with the cited material and makes it the basis of a new argument. 62. Saussy, The Problem of a Chinese Aesthetic, pp. 63-65, reading the dictum “The poem articulates the intent” (shi yan zhi)—found both in Shangshu, “Yao dian,” and

in the Mao School's “Great Preface” to the Shi—reflects on the distinction between

Notes to Pages 73-74 34.7 speakers’ and reciters’ freedom to press their own interpretations of quoted passages and the Mao prefaces’ relatively restricted construction of zhi as the originating intention behind a poem. Relating interest in folkloristic readings of the Shi to suspicions that the Mao commentaries somehow robbed the classic of its authenticity, he considers the possibility that authenticity and original meaning were at some mo-

ment irrelevant, and that the meaning of any given Shi passage was determined largely by the needs of the person who used it. Frangois Martin argues along similar lines in “Le Shijing, de la citation a l'allusion,” pp. 13-19. Li Simian (Li Simian dushi zhaji, pp. 691-92) notes quite rightly that in the context of oral transmission, the “original meaning” of a composition is unknowable. Van Zoeren (Poetry and Personality, pp. 52-79) focuses on zhi as personal intent expressed through poems and subject to others’ interpretation but finds in Xunzi an emphasis on the norms that the

| poems might impose on their users. 63. This is Saussy’s (The Problem of a Chinese Aesthetic, pp. 64-65) interpretation.

64. Zuo, Xiang 28.9 (Yang, p. 145). Both Lupu Gui and his wise wife help in bringing to an end the period of disorder that began in Qi when Cui Zhu murdered Duke Zhuang (r. 553-548) at Zuo, Xiang 25.2 (p. 1097). Although it is hard to imagine that the historiographers could have sanctioned incestuous marriage, Gui's role in the fighting supports no particular moral judgment of his character, and he disappears after this year. 65. See Mencius 5A.4, where Xiangiu Meng cites Shi, “Beishan” (Mao 205). 66. Zhang Suging (“Zuozhuan” chengshi yanjiu, pp. 131-38) makes the same point. 67. There are twelve citations in the Zuozhuan and two in the Guoyu. See Zuo, Huan 6.4 (Yang, p. 113), Zhuang 6.1 (Yang, p. 169), Wen 2.1 (Yang, p. 521), Xuan

15.6 (Yang, p. 765; note explicit connection with King Wen in speech), Cheng 2.8 (Yang, p. 807; King Wen mentioned in speech), Xiang 4.3 (Yang, pp. 932-33), Xiang 13.3 (Yang, p. 1000), Xiang 30.12 (Yang, p. 1179), Zhao 6.3 (Yang, p. 1276), Zhao 10.2 (Yang, p. 1317), Zhao 23.9 (Yang, p. 1448), Zhao 28.3 (Yang, p. 1496); and Guoyu, Zhou 1.4 (p. 13), Lu 2.1 (p. 186). Zuo, Xiang 4.3, and Guoyu, Lu 2.1, include recitation of “King Wen” (Mao 235), among other poems, and a comment on the function of recitation. 68, Cited or recited poems that refer to King Wen: “Daming” (Mao 236): see Zuo, Xiang 4.3 (Yang, pp. 932-33), Xiang 24.2 (Yang,

p. 1089), Zhao 1.3 (Yang, p. 1207; cited in a show of royal ambition), Zhao 26.10 (Yang, p. 1479); and Guoyu, Lu 2.1 (p. 186), Jin 4.2 (p. 341). “Mian” (Mao 237): see Zuo, Xiang 4.3 (Yang pp. 932-33), Zhao 2.1 (Yang, p. 1227; | recited), Ai 2.3 (Yang, p. 1613), and Guoyu, Lu 2.1 (p. 186). “Siqi’ (Mao 240): see Zuo, Xi 19.5 (Yang, p. 384), and Guoyu, Jin 4.24 (p. 387).

“Lingtai” (Mao 242): see Zuo, Zhao 9.7 (Yang, p. 1313), and Guoyu, Chu 1.5 (p. 545).

348 Notes to Pages 74-75

1495). | |

“Huangyi” (Mao 241): see Zuo, Xi 9.6 (Yang, p. 331; King Wen mentioned in speech), Wen 2.1 (Yang, p. 521), Wen 4.6 (Yang, p. 534), Zhao 28.3 (Yang, p. “Wen Wang yousheng” (Mao 244): see Zuo, Wen 3.4 (Yang, p. 530).

“Wo jiang” (Mao 272): see Zuo, Wen 4.4 (Yang, p. 534), Wen 15.11 (p. 614), Zhao 6.3 (Yang, p. 1276), Zhao 16.3 (Yang, p. 1381; recited).

“Lai” (Mao 295): see Zuo, Xuan 11.4 (Yang, p. 713; King Wen mentioned in speech), Xuan 12.2 (Yang, p. 745; the lines here cited from “Wu” [Mao 285] and attributed to King Wu are currently found in “Lai”). 69. The two most frequently cited poems that have no obvious connection with King Wen are “Ban” (Mao 254) and “Yi” (Mao 256). Each is cited eight times in the Zuozhuan. It is perhaps relevant that both poems mention weiyi, so closely associated with King Wen in Beigong Wenzi’s speech, and that both poems compare present rulers unfavorably with unnamed predecessors. 70. “Shengmin” (Mao 245) tells the story of Hou Ji’s life. Hou Ji is mentioned in only four passages in the Zuozhuan: Wen 2.5 (Yang, p. 525), Xuan 3.6 (Yang, p. 675),

Xiang 7.2 (Yang, p. 950), and Zhao 9.3 (Yang, pp. 1307-9). The Guoyu adds five similarly laconic references: Zhou 1.4 (p. 13), Zhou 3.3 (p. 10), Zhou 3.7 (p. 138), Zhou 3.9 (p. 145), Jin 4.12 (p. 365). Although “Shengmin” is never cited, Zuo, Wen 2.5, includes a citation from “Bigong” (Mao 300), a poem that praises both Hou Ji and his mother, Jiang Yuan, placing them in a lineage that leads ultimately to Kings Wen and Wu; and Guoyu, Zhou 1.4, cites the opening lines from Shi, “Siwen” (Mao 275), in which Hou Ji is himself described as wen. 71. “Gong Liu” (Mao 250) tells how the hero led the Zhou people to Bin. 72. See Savage, “Archetypes, Model Emulation, and the Confucian Gentleman,” pp. 7-16. 73. Zuo, Xi 19.5 (Yang, p. 383-84). The citation from “Sigi” begins with the line “He was a model for his primary wife” #fl] J- & 3; that xing #f!] was thought to mean “gave a model of behavior” is amply demonstrated by the interpretation of the same

lines in a different context at Guoyu, Jin 4.24 (p. 387). | The Jin duke who bore the same posthumous title as King Wen has a similar experience with the city of Yuan (Zuo, Xi 25.4 [Yang, p. 435]). That he succeeded in becoming hegemon after one great battle at Chengpu is explained as a result of this

virtuous conquest and other acts that constitute “the teachings of Wen” (wen zhi jiao), i.e., the teachings of the duke who was justly called “Wen” (see Zuo, Xi 27.4 (Yang, p. 447]). See also the discussion in Chapter 6, pp. 219-21. 74. Zuo, Xuan 15.6 (Yang, p. 765). On the topic of generosity and wise rewards,

Yangshe Zhi cites a line from “King Wen” (Mao 235). The “Zhoushu” citation is now found in “Kang gao” and there refers to King Wen.

75. Zuo, Xiang 4.1 (Yang, p. 932).

Notes to Pages 75-77 34.9 76. See Zuo, Xiang 13.3 (Yang, p. 1000), and compare Zhao 4.1 (Yang, p. 1247) on the king's “generosity and harmonious mildness” (huihe).

77. Other passages that present King Wen as the ultimate object of imitation include Zuo, Xi 9.6 (Yang, p. 331), Xi 19.5 (Yang, pp. 383-84), Wen 2.1 (Yang, p. 521), Xuan 15.6 (Yang, p. 765), Xiang 31.13 (Yang, pp. 1193-95), Zhao 6.3 (Yang, p. 1276), Zhao 7.2 (Yang, p. 1284), Zhao 9.7 (Yang, p. 1313), Zhao 10.2 (Yang, p. 1317), Zhao

23.9 (Yang, p. 1448), Zhao 26.10 (Yang, p. 1479), Zhao 28.3 (Yang, pp. 1494-95); and Guoyu, Zhou 1.1 (p. 1), Zhou 1.4 (p. 13), Zhou 3.3 (p. m0), Lu 1.1 (p. 174), and Jin 4.24 (p. 387). The list is far from complete. It is significant that the king is also made

a model for action in Chu. In Cheng 2.8 (Yang, pp. 806-9), the Chu chief minister _ cites the example of King Wen as he musters the masses for the army, and the “gentleman” (junzi) who remarks on the successful Chu military expedition does Chu the honor of comparing its policies to those of the early Zhou. Zhao 7.2 (Yang, p. 1285) refers to the er wen “two Wens” i.e., King Wen of Zhou and King Wen of Chu (r. 689-677). A Chu speaker at Zhao 23.9 (Yang, p. 1448) first cites the poem “King Wen’ and then mentions the example of King Wen of Chu and others. 78. See translation and discussion of Guoyu, Zhou 3.2 (pp. 94-98) in Chapter 1,

Pp: 34-40. ,

79. Guoyu, Jin 4.24 (387). Xu Chen cites Shi, “Siqi” (Mao 240), twice in the

course of his biography of the king. 80. Guoyu, Chu 1.1 (p. 29). That zhao li is properly construed as verb-object, “illumination of benefits,” is clear from the following phrase, “explain the removal of harms (chu hai) in order to lead him to martial prowess.” For the importance of material generosity in bringing about King Wen’s rise, see again Zuo, Zhao 4.1 (Yang, p. 1247), Zhao 10.2 (Yang, pp. 1317-18); and Guoyu, Zhou 1.4 (pp. 12-13). 81. Zuo, Zhao 28.3 (Yang, p. 1495). 82. “The Shi says”: “Huangyi” (Mao 241). “Concordant was the news of his virtue”: mo 52 is mo $4 in the Mao text; glosses

suggest that a kind of tranquillity or silence is meant, but the word is defined later in | this speech as a responsive harmony developing from virtue. “He could be good”: lei #8 is regularly glossed shan #2, “good.” There is an added connotation here, suggested also in the speech, that the good man gathers people of —

his own “type” or “kind” around him. _

83. Mao has wei ci Wang Ji #€ tL E25, “There was Wang Ji.” Wang Ji, father of King Wen, is mentioned in a number of early texts but does not share King Wen’s cultural stature. As noted by Yang, p. 1495, the Hann school of Shi exegesis made ,

King Wen the subject of the line. , |

84. The sentence marked a, is the first in a series of nine parallel sentences; each

defines a term from the poem, as I have indicated in the bracketed markers. Cita- , tions and exegeses as long as this one are rare in speeches; see, however, Zuo, Xiang

350 Notes to Pages 78-79 4.3 (Yang, pp. 933-34) / Guoyu, Lu 2.1 (pp. 185-86), and Guoyu, Zhou 3.4 (pp. 1418).

85. By my count, this phrase appears three times in the Zuozhuan and three times in the Guoyu. A related phrase, gu zhi zhi, appears ten times in the former work and three times in the latter.

86. For a tabulation of Shangshu citations in various texts, see Chen Mengjia, Shangshu tonglun, pp. 15-35. By Chen’s count, 30 of the 47 Shangshu citations in the Zuo and 10 of the 14 in the Guoyu are not in the current texts. The Yi Zhoushu ac-

counts for only one of the otherwise unattested Shu citations and that in a variant version (see Zuo, Xiang 25.15 [Yang, p. 1109]; and Huang Huaixin et al., Yi Zhoushu huijiao jizhu, p. 52). See also Matsumoto, Shunja sengoku ni okeru shojo no tenkai, pp. 313-406. 87. Zuo, Ai 1.2 (Yang, p. 1605). 88. The editors of the Shanghai Zhanguoce suggest in their comment on this pas-

sage, pp. 172-73, that the original citation was of a lost Shi poem, but that a later copyist changed it in light of the inclusion of similar phrases in the forged chapters of the Shangshu. However, they also mention several other cases in which Zhanguoce speakers, like speakers in other works, cite lines that either were from lost poems or were aphorisms loosely associated with the Shi. 89. Certain attributions in the Mozi suggest that the classics-to-be were circulating in a fluid and perhaps oral form. In the second “Shangtong” essay (Wu Yujiang, Mozi jiaozhu, 1: 121), a passage that most closely resembles Shi, “Zaijian” (Mao 283) is called both a “Zhou hymn (song)” and “the writings (shu) of former kings.” But that

does not mean that the Mohists were reading the Shi: the second “Shangxian” (Wu Yujiang, Mozi jiaozbu, 1: 79) has a long citation from a “Zhou hymn” that is not found in the extant Shi and departs so markedly from the prosody of the “Hymns” that it resembles prose. Perhaps the Mozi here represents a hybrid, paraphrased form in which classical “texts” circulated and were made available for polemical use. See also the second “Tianzhi” (Wu Yujiang, Mozi jiaozhu, 1: 303) and third “Vianzhi” (ibid., 1: 323), where Shi, “Xiaoming” (Mao 207) and “Huangyi” (Mao 241) are cited not as Shi poems but as “the writings of former kings,” with specifying descriptions tangentially related to their titles in the Shi. The third “Jian’ai” (ibid., 1: 179) cites the lines currently found in Shangshu, “Hongfan,” as a “poem (shi) of Zhou,” joining to them four lines—closely related to the current Shi, “Dadong” (Mao 203)—as if they

were originally part of the same text. The poem “King Wen” is cited from the “Daya” section of the “Zhoushu’” in the third “Minggui” (ibid., 1: 340). For a tabulation of Mohist uses and titles of Shangshu chapters, see Matsumoto, Shunja sengoku ni okeru shéjo no tenkai, pp. 513-20.

90. Among the lost works that speakers cite are the “Junzhi” at Xi 28.3 (Yang, p. 456), Xuan 12.1 (Yang, p. 739), and Zhao 21.6 (Yang, p. 1427); the “Zhouzhi” at

Notes to Pages 79-80 351 Zuo, Wen 2.1 (Yang, p. 520); the “Qianzhi” at Wen 6.8 (Yang, pp. 552-53), Cheng 15.1 (Yang, p. 873), and Guoyu, Jin 6.1 (p. 411); the “Zhouli” and “Shiming” at Wen 18.7 (Yang, pp. 633-34); the “Zhi” ar Xiang 4.4 (Yang, p. 935), Xiang 25.10 (Yang, p. 106), Zhao 1.12 (Yang, p. 1220), Zhao 3.8 (Yang, p. 1242), Zhao 12.1 (Yang, p. 1341), and Ai 18.2 (Yang, p. 1713); the “Xiaxun” and “Yuren zhi zhen” at Xiang 4.7 (Yang, pp. 936-38); the “Zhuhou zhi ce” at Xiang 20.7 (Yang, p. 1055); the “Zhengshu” at Xiang 30.13 (Yang, p. 180) and Zhao 28.2 (Yang, p. 1491); the “Zhiguan” and other texts at Guoyu, Zhou 2.7 (pp. 68-74); the “Xifang zhi shu” and the “Gushi zhi ji’ at Jin 4.2 (p. 324); and the “Lizhi” at Jin 4.9 (p. 358). Others are discussed below.

Although some of these may have been the regular titles under which works were referred to, others are no doubt loose designations. 91. Zhong Hui, whom Du Yu identifies as a minister to Cheng Tang, is cited at Zuo, Xiang 14.9 (Yang, p. 1019) and Xiang 30.10 (Yang, p. 1175). Matsumoto (Shunju sengoku ni okeru shdjo no tenkai, pp. 412-15) associates these citations with the lost

“Zhong Hui” chapter of the Shangshu. According to sources cited by Yang, p. 50, Zhou Ren was an early historian, possibly under Pan Geng of Shang. He is cited at Zuo, Yin 6.4 (Yang, p. 50) and Zhao 5.1 (Yang, p. 1263).

Jizi was a minister of the last king of Shang; see Zuo, Xi 15.8 (Yang, p. 367).

Yang, pp. 359-60, identifies Scribe Yi as the Yin Yi who served Kings Wen, Wu, and Cheng of Zhou. See Zuo, Xi 15.4 (Yang, pp. 359-60), Wen 15.4 (Yang, p. 611), Xuan 12.3 (Yang, p. 747), Xiang 14.9 (Yang, p. 1019), Zhao 1.13 (Yang, p. 1224); in all these cases the quote is introduced by “Scribe Yi has a saying.” At Cheng 4.4 (Yang, p. 818), the speaker refers to the “Records of Scribe Yi” (“Shi Yi zhi zhi’).

On the citation of unattributed sayings, see Ogura Yoshihiko, “Gen no in’yo— Saden to Shiki no ba’ai.”

92. At Zuo, Xuan 12.2 (Yang, p. 731), a Jin minister cites words (yan) spoken by “the former official (xian dafu) Zifan.” Xi 28.3 (Yang, p. 458) narrates the circumstances under which Zifan spoke those words. Zifan last appears as a living official at Xi 29.2 (Yang, p. 476), thirty-four years before he is quoted. For the quote from Zichan, see Zuo, Zhao 25.3 (Yang, p. 1457), where Zichan is referred to as “the former official Zichan.” Zichan’s death is recorded at Zhao 20.9 (Yang, p. 1421). 93. [here are three examples. At Zuo, Xi 33.6 (Yang, p. 502), Jiu Ji of Jin cites “Kang gao”: “When the father is

| not kind, or the son not obedient, or the elder brother not affable, or the younger brother not respectful, then they do not incriminate each other” 4¢ AV BK + FH 4° UN A + BB ARSE + ANA AY tH. The only passage in the received “Kang gao” that might be relevant reads, “When a son does not obediently submit to the business of his father, he greatly injures his father’s heart. When a father is not able to foster his son, then he troubles his son. When a younger brother does not think on

352 Notes to Page 80 , what Heaven has made illustrious, then he is not able to respect his elder brother. An elder brother, too, when he does not think on the troubles of the younger sons, is not at all affable to his younger brothers” == #5 #R AR BRAC Be KGB Ds

RABE FRAG + TOPRIR A + TBH KA + 7556 GER LIRA FR KAR F FA (SSZS 1: 204). I have underlined the points of overlap be-

tween the two versions. |

In Guoyu, Chu 1.7 (p. 551), the Chu scribe of the left Yixiang speaks of King Wen's dedication: “The “Writings of Zhou’ say, ‘King Wen had no time to eat until the sun had passed its zenith. He was beneficent to the common people, and was

reverent in the matters of government” fl] #Al> MEBRAPR- A SIR fe: BRAVE - WEB HR. The corresponding passage in the “Wuyi” section of the Shangshu (SSJZS 1: 222) reads: “King Wen ... had no time to eat from dawn until

the sun had passed its zenith; thus he brought harmony to all the myriad people. King Wen did not dare take his leisure in the hunt, and thus partook of correctness

with the many states” XE*: -BRABFAHPER- AREeBR- ARAB Fee MED MAT - DAR FB EEE. The Guoyu makes the uneven periods of the “Wuyi” into tidier four-character phrases.

At Guoyu, Zhou 1.13 (p. 35), a Zhou minister cites the “Pan Geng” chapter: “What is good about the state is due to you, the masses; what is bad about the state is due to me, the lone person, because I have committed some offense” [Bq jBu ° Fl

ERR Al A ie RUE R — A + Axe 2). The corresponding passage in the Shangshu uses a different word for “state” and is slightly more concise: #} Z

je TERR FP SP ih PEP A LE alll (SSJZS 1: 170), Note that the Guoyu includes a particle in the last phrase and thus makes possible the tetrasyllabic balance that is so much more common in historiography than in the Shangshu.

94. Although rhyme does occur in bronze inscriptions, it is quite rare in the Shangshu (see the “Yangzhou” section of “Yu gong” and the “Five Affairs” section of

the “Hongfan”), and absent in the twelve pieces that are thought to make up the earliest stratum of that work; see Jiang Yougao, Yinxue shishu, pp. 16-19. But at Zuo,

Ai 6.4 (Yang, p. 1636), Confucius cites an otherwise unattested rhyming passage from the “Xiashu” (later incorporated in the spurious “Wuzi zhi ge”): “Tao ‘T'ang, following the norms of Heaven, came to possess this territory of Ji. Now his conduct has been abandoned, and his framework of order thrown into chaos, and thus they have been destroyed and have perished” ff (fk My HE - AN IR KM ° A Uk

A-SREGA- Hic - 75K mt. Rhymes are in -ang. This type of endrhyme in consecutive lines is also found in Shi, for instance in “Zhijing” (Mao 274). A “Hongfan” passage cited by the junzi commentator at Zuo, Xiang 3.4 (Yang, 927), also rhymes in -ang: “Have no partiality, form no clique; the kingly way is awesome” fe (a FE ‘ee > ET 3 YB (SSJZS 1: 190); as noted above, the Mozi cites the same lines as a “poem of Zhou.”

Notes to Page 80 353 At Zuo, Zhao 7.12 (Yang, p. 1295), Meng Xizi of Lu cites a rhyming inscription that Confucius’ ancestor Zheng Kaofu is said to have composed; at Guoyu, Jin 1.2 (p. 257), a Jin minister cites a rhyming inscription supposedly dating from the period of the Shang’s decline. See also the “Chanding zhi ming” at Zuo, Zhao 3.3 (Yang, p. 1237).

95. Matsumoto, Shunji sengoku ni okeru shojo no tenkai, p. 355. The same pattern holds in the Xunzi, where six of a total of fifteen Shu citations are from “Kang gao’; this is in keeping with other links (discussed below) between the Xunzi and the Zuo. By comparison, the Mencius cites “Kang gao” only once, with a possible additional echo in 3A.5, and the Mozi does not cite “Kang gao” at all. 96. See, e.g., the Shangshu passage cited at Zuo, Yin 6.4 (Yang, p. 50) and Zhuang 14.3 (Yang, p. 199); the words of Scribe Yi cited at Xi 15.4 (Yang, pp. 359-60) and Xuan 12.3 (Yang, p. 747); the passage from “Taishi” cited at Cheng 2.8 (Yang, p. 809) and Zhao 24.1 (Yang, p. 1450); the passage from “Xiashu’” cited at Xiang 21.2 (Yang, p. 1057) and Xiang 23.8 (Yang, p. 1085), and Ai 6.4 (Yang, p. 1636); the words of Zhong Hui cited at Xiang 14.9 (Yang, p. 1019) and at Xiang 30.10 (Yang, p. 1175), where the source is called “Zhong Hui zhi zhi”; the “Taishi” passage cited at Xiang 31.3 (Yang, p. 1184), Zhao 1.1 (Yang, p. 1204), Guoyu, Zhou 2.10 (p. 84), and Zheng 1.1 (p. 515); the “Kang gao” passage paraphrased once and quoted once at Xi 33.6 (Yang, p. 502) and Zhao 20.4 (Yang, p. 1413); the passage from the “Junzhi’ cited at Xuan 12.1 (Yang, p. 739) and Zhao 21.6 (Yang, p. 1427); and the words that the king who speaks in the “Kang gao” cites as something he has heard (SSJZS 1: 203), parts of which are cited at Zuo, Zhao 8.5 (Yang, p. 1303), and Guoyu, Jin 9.20 (p. $02). Certain passages are presented as citations in one place and as a speaker's own invention elsewhere. See the passage cited from the “Xianwang zhi ming” at Zhao 26.9 (Yang, p. 1478); similar language appears, not marked as citation, in a speech at Xiang 31.4 (Yang, p. 185). The most interesting such case is the coincidence between Zuo, Zhao 12.11 (Yang, p. 1341), and Lunyu 12.1: “To overcome the self and re-

store ritual propriety is humaneness,” cited by Confucius as an old “record” or “aphorism” (zhi) in the Zuozhuan passage, is to all appearances his own statement in the Lunyu version, which differs only very slightly. See the discussion in Chapter 6, pp. 204-5. 97. One further noteworthy feature of the Shangshu citations in historiography is that the majority of speeches in which the Shangshu is quoted are uttered by characters from Jin. Several others are by ministers of other states but have something to do with Jin. For whatever reason, Shangshu citations are more likely to travel with anecdotes relating to Jin. Does this mean that the ministers of Jin really did use tags from the Shangshu more frequently in the deliberative speeches? Or is this a convention of the representation of Jin and its ministers among the other states? It is hard to know whether this is a fact of Jin history or a feature of the anecdotal tradition.

354 Notes to Pages 80-81 98. See Guoyu, Jin 6.1 (p. 411), cited above, p. 341028.

99. In the following passages, King Wen either is mentioned explicitly or is the original subject of the lines cited: Zuo, Xuan 6.3 (Yang, p. 688), Xuan 15.6 (Yang, p. 765), Cheng 2.6 (Yang, p. 803), Cheng 8.6 (Yang, p. 839), Xiang 31.13 (Yang, p. 1194), and Guoyu, Chu 1.7 (p. 551). Elsewhere the connection with King Wen is implicit. In Zuo, Xiang 13.3 (Yang, p. 1000), for instance, a quote from the Shu (now found in “Liixing”) is brought into a loose relation with King Wen by way of a cita-

tion from Shi, “King Wen.” .

100. See, e.g., the citations from “Kang gao” at Zuo, Xi 23.4 (Yang, p. 403) and Cheng 16.5 (Yang, p. 890), and from “Xiashu” at Wen 7.8 (Yang, pp. 563-64) and Xiang 23.8 (Yang, p. 1085).

101. See citations of two works composed by the Duke of Zhou, the “Zhouli” and the “Shiming,” at Zuo, Wen 18.7 (Yang, pp. 633-34), of Zhou’s “Zhiguan” at Guoyu, Zhou 2.7 (p. 71), and of the “Lizhi” at Guoyu, Jin 4.9 (p. 358).

102. See citations from “Qianzhi” at Zuo, Cheng 15.1 (Yang, p. 873), from | “Chanding zhi ming” at Zhao 3.3 (Yang, p. 1237), from the Shu (a passage incorporated into the spurious “Yue ming”) at Zhao 6.7 (Yang, p. 1279), and from the “Xiashu” (the rhyming passage discussed above) at Ai 6.4 (Yang, p. 1636). See also Ding 4.1 (Yang, pp. 1537-40), where the “Kang gao” and the lost “Bo Qin” and “Tang gao” serve as inviolable guides to ritual precedence among the states of the

Zhou realm. , |

103. For the Zhou King Wen’s law (“Zhou Wen Wang zhi fa”), see Zuo, Zhao 7.2 (Yang, p. 1284), cited above; the speaker also cites the law code of King Wen of Chu, called “Puqu zhi fa.” Other codes are mentioned or cited at Zhao 6.3 (Yang, p. 1275; the “Yu xing,” the “Tang xing,” and the “Jiuxing”), at Zhao 14.7 (Yang, p. 1367; the “Xiashu,” identified more specifically as the “Gao Yao zhi xing”), and Ding 9.2 (Yang, pp. 1571-72; the “Zhuxing” devised by Deng Xi of Zheng). Confucius’ remarks on the new Jin written code at Zhao 29.5 (Yang, p. 1504) suggest that previous bodies of law, like the one promulgated by Duke Wen of Jin at Pilu in 633 B.C.E., were generally known, but did not circulate in written form. For further discussion, see Chapter 8, pp. 294-99. 104. Zuo, Zhao 15.7 (Yang, pp. 1371-74).

105. The king gives an interesting but brief lineage of Ji’s family and the Dong family, whose most famous son, Dong Hu, is known for his remarks at Zuo, Xuan 2.3 (Yang, pp. 662-63), discussed in Chapter 8, pp. 262-63. 106. The prediction is apparently fulfilled at Zuo, Ding 14.9 (Yang, p. 1598). 107. Both died earlier in the year; see Zuo, Zhao 15.3-4 (Yang, p. 1370). The king dies of a disease of the heart at Zuo, Zhao 22.3 (Yang, p. 1435). Zhao 21.1 (Yang,

pp. 1423-24) attributes the death to the improper and overwhelming aesthetic effects of the great Wuyi bell array, discussed in Chapter 3, pp. 113-17.

Notes to Pages 82-84 355 108. Guoyu, Zheng 1.1 (pp. 507-23).

109. [he passage echoes Yanzi’s famous remarks on harmony at Zuo, Zhao 20.8 (Yang, pp. 1419-20), discussed in Chapter 7, pp. 230-32. 110, See again Keightley, Sources of Shang History, pp. 207-8, for evidence of very early pairing of the two terms. 1. Lunyu 1.3 (cf 17.17), 5.25, 15.27. After the disciple Zigong has accurately pre-

dicted that Duke Ding of Lu will die, Confucius says, “It is unfortunate that Si (‘Zigong] was correct in what he said; this has turned Si into someone who talks a lot.” See Zuo, Ding 15.1, 15.3 (Yang, pp. 1600-601).

12. See Zuo, Xiang 31.1 (Yang, p. 1192), Zhao 13.3 (Yang, p. 1360), Zhao 20.9 (Yang, p. 1422). The last is extraordinary: hearing of Zichan’s death, Zhongni weeps and says: “His was a kind of love passed down to us from ancient times” -y Z 113. Zuo, Xiang 25.10 (Yang, pp. 1104-6).

114. Stephen Owen has a partial translation (here modified very slightly) and a discussion of this passage in Readings in Chinese Literary Thought, pp. 29-30.

115. Zichan again speaks well and again is praised for it at Zuo, Xiang 31.6 (Yang, p. 1189).

116. Zuo, Xiang 27.4 (Yang, p. 1130). Since the passage includes no speeches to which this judgment might apply, commentators have assumed that the “cultivated words” (wenci) were words spoken at a banquet held for the Jin representative by the Song hosts. Takezoe (“Saden” kaisen, p. 1265) takes wen and ci separately, as “cultivated etiquette” (yiwen) and “words.” The compound refers elsewhere to the wording of treaty documents: see Zuo, Xiang 25.7 (Yang, p. 1103) and Zhao 13.3 (Yang, p. 1355).

117. Zuo, Zhao 26.9 (Yang, p. 1479). I follow Yang’s punctuation, corroborated by Takezoe, “Saden” kaisen, 2: 1737. Both Legge, Tso Chuen, p. 718, and Couvreur, Tso Tchouan, p. 416, punctuate before li #@ and translate accordingly: as Legge has it, “It

is right that such notifications should be circulated.” ! 118. For more praise of speakers and speeches, see Zuo, Xiang 26.13 (Yang, p. 1124), Zhao 1.12 (Yang, p. 1221), Zhao 3.3 (Yang, p. 1238), Zhao 8.1 (Yang, pp. 1300-301), and Ding 4.1 (Yang, p. 1535).

119. Qian Zhongshu, Guanzhui bian, 1: 221-22. Qian implies that what goes for wenci goes for wenxue as well, and in fact cites only Zhanguoce, p. 81, for evidence of the Warring States meaning of wenci. In that passage, Su Qin attempts to persuade King Hui of Qin (r. 337-311) that only armed force will allow him to unite the states. First citing examples of ancient rulers (including King Wen) who waged war, he then lists and rejects the traditional means of diplomacy, including treaties and their language: “When scholars trained in wen combine their skills, there is chaos and doubt among the ruling lords. ... With rich allusions and words of wen, the world is

356 Notes to Pages 84—86 not well-ordered.” In this example at least, the speaker still envisions an eloquence put to public use. 120. Chen Qiyou, Han Feizi jishi, p. 623.

121. For bian, “elegant,” see ibid., p. 623. 122. All texts read mei £X rather than wen/min 3X in wengui $X BE. The name of the

stone is properly pronounced wen or min. See Xu Shen, Shuowen jiezi, p. 18, and Karlgren, Grammata Serica Recensa, 4750 and 546b. 123. Following the suggested emendations of Chen Qiyou, Han Feizi jishi, p. 624. 124. See Itano Chéhachi, “Saden no sakusei.”

125. Wang Xianqian, Xunzi jijie, 1: 83-84. The translation is Knoblock’s, 1: 208, with minor modifications. 126. Xunzi hints at a connection between King Wen and wen as inherited forms in “Zhongni”; see Wang Xiangian, Xunzi jijie, 1: 107-8. 127. Relevant to this point is Xunzi’s remark on the “Xiaoya” section of the Shi in “Daliie” (Wang Xiangian, Xunzi jijie, 2: 511): “Concerned about the government of today, [the ‘Xiaoya’ poems] think upon the men of the past. Their words have wen to them, and their sound has a sadness to it.” Although the compound wenci is never used in the Guoyu, Wei Zhao uses it to gloss wen on several occasions, including a remark on Chong’er that is reminiscent of the Xunzi passage. At Jin 4.8 (p. 354), a Chu observer notes after Chong’er’s conversation with the Chu king that the Jin prince “is percipient and has wen”; Wei Zhao’s gloss may reflect the formality of Chong’er’s language. See also his note on Jin 4.10 (p. 359). 128. Shiji 14.509. See discussion in Appendix, pp. 318-20. For “made its words (ci) and wen concise,” the parallel passage in “Kongzi shijia” has “made its wen and words [i.e., wenci] concise”; see Shiji 47.1943. At Shiji 130.3310, wenci is the medium by which

Confucius transmits his teachings to later generations. 129. Sima Qian seems to envision a public use of Confucian rhetorical forms when he recounts a meeting between Emperor Wu (r. 140-87 B.c.g.) and an elderly teacher of the Shi, noting that “at this time the Son of Heaven was fond of patterned words” x eR KF Ay UF XX el (Shiji 121.3122). The parallel Hanshu passage reads ci ff for ci fa]; see Ban Gu, Hanshu 88.3608. Summarizing the “Rulin liezhuan,” Sima Qian notes that wenci flourished especially during the Jianyuan (140-135) and Yuanshou (122-117) periods and implies a connection with Emperor Wu’s interest in Ru learning; see Shiji 130.3318.

_ As amore general term for eloquent speech, wenci describes two men who were “skilled in words of wen” at Shiji 49.1978; cf. Shiji 4.2029, where certain officials are chosen because they are “wooden and reticent in words of wen” (following the emendation suggested in Takigawa, Shiki kaicha koshé, p. 801). Ban Gu (Hanshu 28B.1645) applies the term to the writings of Sima Xiangru.

Notes to Pages 86-88 357 130. Shiji 60.2114. The decrees are a studied exercise in archaism, with stylized interjections, grammar, and diction reminiscent of the Shangshu and explicit and implicit allusion to aphorisms and the Classics; Sima Qian again uses the term wenci in his précis of this chapter at Shiji 130.3312. At Shiji 122.3137, wenci describes the surprisingly correct form in which a child at play writes up his legal indictment of a thieving rat. 131. For the assumptions encoded in anecdotal form, see Chapter 5. For the historiographers’ biases, see Chapter 8, pp. 258-70. | 132. For the figure of the wise “barbarian,” see Chapter 4, pp. 132-35. Besides the Ji Zha episode, only one other passage, Guoyu, Lu 2.1 (pp. 185-86), hints—in a reference to rehearsal of the Shi corpus—that the work could have been heard from be-

ginning to end. The possibility of rehearsal is not mentioned in the Zuozhuan equivalent of that anecdote, Xiang 4.3 (Yang, pp. 932-33). Zhao Zhiyang (“Zuozhuan Ji Zha guanyue youguan wenti di taolun,” p. 18), in a detailed discussion of this episode, concludes that it originated in storytelling and was added to the Zuozhuan when the latter was compiled. 133. [he only parallel to Ji Zha’s review is the Jin minister Han Xuanzi’s examination of Zhou documents in Lu at Zuo, Zhao 2.1 (Yang, p. 1226). 134. See, however, Zhang Suging, “Zuozhuan” chengshi yanjiu, pp. 109-15. DeWoskin, A Song for One or Two, pp. 27, 159, discusses Ji Zha’s musical and aesthetic terminology and notes the prevalence of a balancing rhetoric; see below. 135. Except in this year, Ji Zha is not an especially prominent figure. He appears in Zuo, Xiang 14.2 (Yang, pp. 1007-8), Xiang 31.9 (Yang, pp. 189-90), and Zhao 27.2 (Yang, pp. 1482-85). It is unlikely that the Jizi in Ai 10.6 (Yang, p. 1656) is the same man, and he is not mentioned in the Guoyu. 136. For the first eight sections, the order given in the Zuozhuan is the same as the Mao order; for the last sections, however, Zuozhuan gives Bin—Qin—Tang—

Wei—Chen—Kuai and unspecified others, whereas Mao gives Wei—Tang— Qin—Chen—Kuai—Cao—Bin. The order of the remaining large sections— “Xiaoya,” “Daya,” “Song”—is the same, but Zuozhuan shows no traces of the subdivisions Mao draws in these sections. 137. Zuo, Xiang 29.13 (Yang, pp. 161-67). The passage is also translated and discussed in DeWoskin, A Song for One or Two, pp. 21-27. 138. “Bei, “Yong, and “Wey’”: these three groups of Shi odes are associated with

the territory of Wey. Kang Shu, the younger brother of the Duke of Zhou, was the founder of the state and helped his brother suppress the rebellion of Guan and Cai; his enfeoffment is recorded in “Kang gao,” which, as I have noted, is widely cited in Zuozhuan, Duke Wu helped the Zhou house recover from barbarian attacks after the disastrous reign of King You.

358 Notes to Pages 88-90 “These would be the Duke of Zhou’s move to the east”: The prince is ascribing the Bin airs to the time and place of the Duke of Zhou’s visit to the east, which was

either an attack on elements hostile to the Zhou court or a retreat from his own enemies within the Zhou court. “These would be from Zhou’s past”: The word xia usefully combines a number of meanings: it is sometimes glossed as “great” or “large”; it is read as a synonym for

ya, “elegant”; and it is a name both for the first of the three dynasties and for the westernmost reaches of the central states, the territory ruled by the Zhou royal court during the Western Zhou and by Qin during the Spring and Autumn period. Ji Zha recognizes that the Qin airs convey a quality appropriate to the Zhou dynasty’s original territory. “There would be an enlightened ruler”: or, to follow the suggestion of Shen Tao, cited by Yang, p. 1163, “there would be a treaty leader” (mengzhu). “What profundity of thought!”: or, taking si #4 as a particle, “What profundity!” Taotang is the sage-king Yao. 139. For evidence that certain performances of the Shi odes were accompanied by dance, see Zuo, Xiang 16.1 (Yang, pp. 1026-27), where Duke Ping of Jin (r. 557-532) has the ministers of several states dance for him and sing appropriate songs; see also

| Mozi, “Gong Meng” (Wu Yujiang, Mozi jiaozhu, 2: 705), on “reciting the three hundred poems, strumming the three hundred poems, singing the three hundred poems, and dancing the three hundred poems.” 140. See Zuo, Xiang 18.4 (Yang, p. 1043), the famous scene in which Shi Kuang uses musical observations to predict that campaigning Chu forces will not cause dif- | ficulties for Jin. Shi Kuang’s career is discussed in Chapter 3, pp. 117-20. 141. The predictions suggested in Ji Zha’s remarks are generally accurate. Zheng is not precisely the first state to perish, since the prediction for Chen will be fulfilled

in 478 B.c.E. (Zuo, Ai 17.4 [Yang, p. 1709]). But setting aside the division of Jin among its three most powerful families, a change that was not always considered the fall of Jin, Zheng is the first of these states to disappear, falling to Hann in 375 B.c.g. (Shiji 15.716). Ji Zha also foresees the pre-eminence of Qin and Qi during the Warring States period. 142. “Although it turns, it has a straight basis”: here and in his comment on the “Hymns,” Ji Zha plays on the double meaning of qu, both “musical piece” and “bent, winding, crooked.” A melody, he suggests, is a winding course of rising and falling

tones. ,

143. Cf, e.g., the phrase “joyous but not dissipated” (le er bu huang) at Zuo, Xiang 27.5 (Yang, p. 135) and Lunyu 3.20, where Shi, “Guanju” (Mao 1) is described as “joyous but not lascivious, mournful but not injurious” (le er bu yin, ai er bu shang). The first of the Lunyu phrases appears also in Ji Zha’s comments on the airs of Bin, and

Notes to Pages 90-94 359 the antithetical form is found throughout. See also Liji, “Yueji” (SSJZS 2: 1535) and

“Biaoji” (SSJZS 2: 1641). |

144. The most elaborate expression of this conception in historiography is Yanzi’s speech at Zuo, Zhao 20.8 (Yang, pp. 1419-20). 145. Saussy (The Problem of a Chinese Aesthetic, p. 104) states on transformationthrough-teaching (jiaohua) in the Mao prefaces: “The theory of chiao-hua, by making the poems of the Book of Odes into moral exempla, does to them what the reality of chiao-hua, if there is such a reality, ought to have done to the world the poems de-

scribe.” Ji Zha’s reading of the Shi as a performative and textual whole asserts a similar continuity between theory and its effectiveness in the world. 146. “Elephant Pipes” and “Southern Flutes”: Du Yu attributes this music and dancing to the time of King Wen and understands han “regret” as the king's disappointment at not living to see a time of peace. The dancers seem to have held the pipes and flutes as they danced; see SSJZS 2: 2008.

“Great Martial”: Du Yu identifies this as the music of King Wu; see the poem “Wu" (Mao 285), attributed to King Wu at Xuan 12.2 (Yang, p. 745). According to Jia Kui (30-101), however, the music was composed by the Duke of Zhou on behalf of King Wu; see Hong Liangji, Chungiu Zuozhuan gu, 2: 612.

“Shaohu”: No commentator has given a convincing explanation of the name of the dance. According to Du Yu, this is the dance of Cheng Tang, founder of the Yin. The difficulties referred to may be those associated with the founding of the dynasty. “Great Xia”: the music of Yu. It is not that Yu or his music was somehow without virtue; Yu worked under Shun and did not turn his virtue into the lasting political sway of a dynasty. “Shao Pipes”: According to Du Yu, this is the music of Shun.

147. Scenes such as that described at Zuo, Cheng 9.9 (Yang, pp. 844-45), show that aesthetic expressions that receive the historiographers’ tacit sanction are as likely to reveal deep-seated regional loyalties and identifications as they are to show any more purely individualistic ambition. As in the Shi, one hears in individuals’ songs the regions and the regional affections of the places where Zhou culture cir-

culates. |

148. See Chapter 8, pp. 267-69; and Schaberg, “Remonstrance in Eastern Zhou Historiography.” 149. Saussy, The Problem of a Chinese Aesthetic, p. 91: “In the ritual texts the state is

seen, not as the repository of power, religious authority, or even of national identity, but as a vast Gesamtkunstwerk of ethical import.” 150. Zuo, Xiang 29.13 (Yang, pp. 1161, 166-67). For yue as a response to good individuals and expressions, and for further discussion of Ji Zha’s travels, see Chapter 8, pp. 268, 277-78.

360 Notes to Pages 96-99 Chapter 3 1. For the term “extra-human,” see Poo, In Search of Personal Welfare, pp. 6-7.

2. On early Chinese uses of laws of nature as patterns for human behavior, see Turner, “War, Punishment, and the Law of Nature.” 3. For personal entities in Heaven, see Zuo, Xi 10.3 (Yang, pp. 334-35), in which a

resentful ghost speaks of the Lord (di)—apparently of Heaven—who has granted his requests for revenge. 4. For views of Heaven in the Zuozhuan, see Zhang Ruisui, Zuozhuan sixiang tanwei, pp. 1-20. As Zhang argues, and as the examples discussed below indicate, the Zuozhuan does not deny the existence of Heaven as a deity but tends to subject it to rationalized and moralized explanations. Useful for the division between an anthropomorphized Heaven and a regular Heaven is Kwong-loi Shun’s (Mencius and Early Chinese Thought, pp. 15-18) distinction between normative and descriptive dimensions in the use of tian and ming. 5. For general accounts of the Chinese understanding of Jupiter's cycle, see Saussure, Les origines de l'astronomie chinoise, pp. 403-94; and Needham, Science and Civilisation in China, 3: 242-52.

6. At Zuo, Zhao 17.5 (Yang, pp. 1390-92), a comet appears in the Dachen con-

stellation, presaging fire in four states, including Song, which is said to be the earthly counterpart to the constellation. At Zhao 10.1 (Yang, pp. 1314-15), a previously unseen star appears in a section of the heavens corresponding to the states of Qi and Xue, indicating that Duke Ping of Jin is going to die. The ancestresses of

the Jin ducal line include the daughter of the Grand Duke of Qi (Tai Gong, Lii Wang), who is being informed by the star of her descendant’s imminent demise. Here a relatively obscure ancient historical detail performs a function that in the example discussed below is reserved for Five Phases theory: it creates the tissue of connection between the observed stellar phenomenon and the historical event (the

duke’s death) that the historiographer-rhetorician remembers and predicts. For other rhetorical uses of astronomical knowledge, see Zuo, Zhao 11.2 (Yang, p. 1322), Zhao 26.10 (Yang, pp. 1479-80), Zhao 32.2 (Yang, p. 1516); and Guoyu, Jin 4.12 (p. 365).

7. See Chungiu, Zhao 8.9 (Yang, p. 1300), Zhao 9.3 (Yang, p. 1306), Zhao 13.8 (Yang, p. 1343), Zuo, Ai 17.4 (Yang, p. 1708). That the move had long been envisioned is suggested by Xuan 11.5 (Yang, p. 715), in which King Zhuang of Chu annexes Chen and almost immediately reverses his decision. The Chen predictions have been useful to scholars interested in determining the date of the Zuozhuan on the basis of its references to the Jupiter cycle; see Shinj6, Téyé temmongaku shi kenkya,

pp: 407-12.

Notes to Page 99 361 8. Zuo, Zhao 8.6 (Yang, pp. 1304-5). For alternative translations and interpretations, see Pankenier, “Applied Field-Allocation Astrology in Zhou China,” p. 268; and A. Wang, Cosmology and Political Culture in Early China, pp. 82-83. I differ from Pankenier in seeing the astronomical reasoning in this and other scenes as retrospective reconstruction on the part of historiographers, not as the strategic planning of astrologically minded Chunqiu period commanders. 9. Zhuanxu: The prehistoric emperor also known as Gaoyang. The Chen ruling house is descended from Shun, who was descended from Zhuanxu.

Chunhuo: one of the twelve stations of Jupiter, located in the center of the southern palace, and identified with three of the twenty-eight mansions (xiu): Liu, Xing, and Zhang; see Needham, Science and Civilisation in China, 3: 242-43. In a table

borrowed from another source, Needham, 3: 243, has Chunxin 38 -() instead of Chunhuo 38 1X, and romanizes accordingly; the table at 3: 403 gives the correct

character and romanization. Zhao adds another justification for his prediction: “Moreover, only when the Chen family gains control of the government in Qi will Chen finally perish.” As descendants of the sage ruler Shun, Chen must last at least one hundred generations. For further discussion, see Chapter 8, pp. 279-80. 10. Zuo, Zhao 9.4 (Yang, p. 1310). 11. “Chen belongs to water”: of the Five Phases, water is the one associated with Zhuanxu and his descendants. “The counterpart of water”: Du, cited at Takezoe, “Saden” kaisen, 2: 1517, says, “Fire fears water and is therefore its consort.” Takezoe sees instead a complementarity between the two phases, which fits better with the rest of the passage and is confirmed by Fu Qian’s (ca. 125-ca. 95) understanding of the passage, cited at Yang, p: 1310. Jiao Xun explains the marriage of water and fire with reference to the system by which yin-yang specialists matched the ten celestial stems with the five phases (HQJJ 2: 1396). On pairings of fire and water, see Qian Zhongshu, Guanzhui bian, 1: 232-33.

“What Chu serves”: the Chu ruling line was descended from Zhurong, who served the emperor Gaoxin as Fire Minister (huozheng). Yu Yue (1821-1907) suggested emending xiang #4 to zu 4H: “Fire is that which Chu regards as its ancestor” (XJJ 2: 2277).

“The appearance of fire”: this fire is not Chunhuo, but the Heart asterism (xinxing), the brightest star in which is Antares (huoxing); see Porter, From Deluge to Discourse, pp. 39-41. According to Yang, p. 1310, citing Zuo, Zhao 17.5 (Yang, p. 1391), the asterism became visible in the fifth month of the Zhou calendar. Since the entry for the Chen fire is dated to the fourth month, Du, cited at Yang, p. 1310, speculated that an intercalary month had mistakenly been inserted in the previous year. Take-

362 Notes to Pages 99-101 zoe, “Saden” kaisen, 2: 1517, argues that the difference of a month is the natural result of the system of intercalation and not an error. “Chu is expelled and Chen established”: as the proper counterpart (or consort) to

Chen’s water, the fire star strengthens Chen, and as the object of Chu’s ancestral service, it returns Chu to a subservient position. “Counterparts are completed by fives”: this sentence continues to vex commentators. Du, cited at Takezoe, “Saden” kaisen, 2: 1517, identifies five pairs of consorts among the Five Phases. Takezoe rejects Du’s interpretation as forced, referring instead to the Yijing, “Xici” passage that assigns the first five odd numbers to Heaven and the first five even numbers to Earth. In late Warring States correlative cosmology, each of the Five Phases was matched with one of the odd and one of the even numbers from one through ten, so that water, for instance, was assigned the numbers one and six, fire was assigned two and seven, and so forth. The two numbers assigned to a phase were in each case separated by five. See the discussion in Graham, Disputers of the Tao, p. 342. Gu Yanwu (1612-81) explained more specifically that “water, by means of Heaven’s one, becomes the male counterpart to fire’s two’; see HQJJ 1: 928. That is, 6 (water) plus 1 (Heaven) equals 7 (the odd or “male” number associated with fire).

“When the year-planet comes around to Chunhuo five times”: Du, cited at Takezoe, “Saden” kaisen, 2: 1518, calculates as follows: Jupiter will next be in the Chunhuo station in the fourth year after Chen’s restoration. Counting from that year, in the forty-eighth year Jupiter will reach Chunhuo for the fifth time. Four years plus forty-eight years equals the fifty-two years of Pi Zao’s prediction. 12. It is perhaps relevant to Pi Zao’s reasoning that a children’s ditty predicting the destruction of the state of Yu, where Yao enfeoffed Shun, includes a reference to the position of Chunhuo; see Zuo, Xi 5.8 (Yang, pp. 310-11). 13. For the eclipses recorded, not recorded, and interpolated by calculation in the Chungiu, see Guan Liyan, “Chungiu rishi sanshiqi shi kao.” All the eclipses visible in East Asia during the period are listed in Stephenson and Houlden, Atlas of Historical

Eclipse Maps. |

The Zuozhuan includes remarks about the eclipses at Huan 17.7 (Yang, pp. 149so), Zhuang 25.2 (Yang, pp. 231-32), Xi 15.2 (Yang, p. 351), Wen 15.5 (Yang, p. 612), Xiang 27.10 (Yang, p. 1138), Zhao 7.4 (Yang, pp. 1287-88), Zhao 7.14 (Yang, pp. 1296-97), Zhao 17.2 (Yang, pp. 1384-86), Zhao 21.5 (Yang, pp. 1426-27), Zhao 24.4 (Yang, p. 1451), and Zhao 31.6 (Yang, pp. 1513-14). The first five Zuozhuan remarks are made by the anonymous narrator and concern problems of dating and the appropriate ritual response to eclipses. The Guoyu records no eclipses.

All the predictions are delivered during the years of Duke Zhao of Lu, years that, on average, include longer and more numerous anecdotes than any other parts of the work. The intensity of transmission and discussion that produced the copious

Notes to Pages 101-2 363 material for these years may also account for the use of eclipse dates in the composition of prediction speeches. 14. Zuo, Zhao 17.2 (Yang, pp. 1384-86). As noted above, two of the earlier Zuo-

zhuan remarks on eclipses (Zhuang 25.2, Wen 15.5) concern the ritual response, which is sanctioned at Zhao 17.2 by a quotation from the “Xiashu.” 15. From the perspective of native theory, Zi Shen’s statement makes sense. Du, cited at Takezoe, “Saden” kaisen, 2: 1667, assumes that Zi Shen is reasoning from the relative lengths of day and night at the four points of the year: “At the equinoxes the day and the night are equal; thus he says they are in the same path. At the solstices length and shortness reach their extremes; thus he says they pass each other.” ‘Takezoe, 2: 1667, amplifies: “At the two equinoxes, the sun and the moon move together along the ecliptic, their motions parallel. Zi Shen means that when the sun and the moon are in the same path, there should quite naturally be eclipses; this is the con-

stant of their motions and is therefore no disaster. At the solstices the sun and the moon move apart in the southern and northern extremities of their paths, one long and one short. Therefore they necessarily on occasion pass each other and come together. Thus eclipses are at these times also natural occurrences and not disasters.” Zi Shen is, however, mistaken: solar eclipses are no more likely at the equinoxes and solstices than at any other time, since eclipses are determined by the regular variations in the position of the moon’s orbit that bring its intersection with the ecliptic plane into alignment with the sun and the earth, and these variations are in no way related to the apparent seasonal movements of the sun. 16. Zuo, Zhao 21.5 (Yang, pp. 1426-27). The unadorned notice of Shu Zhe's death at Chungiu, Zhao 21.5 (Yang, p. 1423), follows directly on the notice of the eclipse in Chungiu, Zhao 21.4: the speech may result entirely from a productive

reading of the chronicle.

17. See Zuo, Zhao 7.14 (Yang, pp. 1296-97), where the Jin minister Bo Xia explains to Duke Ping of Jin why eclipses cannot yield infallible predictions and cites as an authority the Shi, the ultimate token of the moral order. 18. See Chungiu, Ai 13.10 (Yang, p. 1675); Chungiu, Wen 14.5 (Yang, pp. 600601) / Zuo, Wen 14.7 (Yang, p. 604); Chungiu, Zhao 17.5 (Yang, p. 1383) / Zuo, Zhao 17.5 (Yang, pp. 1390-92); and Zuo, Zhao 26.10 (Yang, pp. 1479-80).

19. Zuo, Wen 14.7 (Yang, p. 604). 20. Zuo, Zhao 17.5 (Yang, pp. 1390-92).

21. Zuo, Zhao 26.10 (Yang, pp. 1479-80). The mimetic theme of the mirror of past times is commonplace in archaic texts. See Shi, “Jingzhi” (Mao 288), “Every day use these things as a mirror” A BE 7 %&; Shi, “Dang” (Mao 255); Shangshu, “Wuyi” (SSJZS 1: 223), “Let the succeeding king(s) take these things as a mirror” ja] -E EL BE FH; Shangshu, “Liixing” (SSJZS 1: 251), “Use these auspicious codes as a mirror” 85

F oy FF Fl. |

364 Notes to Pages 102-4 22. This comet is mentioned, and a related story told about it, at Shiji 32.1504. 23. Chungiu, Wen 9.11 (Yang, p. 571); Xiang 16.6 (Yang, p. 1025); Zhao 19.3 (Yang, p- 1400); Zhao 23.9 (Yang, p. 1440) / Zuo, Zhao 23.6 (Yang, pp. 1446-47); Chungiu, Ai 3.2 (Yang, p. 1619).

24. The proclamation issued to the rulers of the states by Wangzi Chao (also known as Zichao) is discussed in Chapter 2, p. 84. 25. Chungiu, Zhao 23.9 (Yang, p. 1440) / Zuo, Zhao 23.6 (Yang, pp. 1446-47). 26. Guoyu, Zhou 1.10 (pp. 26-27). 27. See Guoyu, Zheng 1.1 (pp. 518-19) for the full story of Bao Si and her involvement with King You. See also Shiji 4: 147-49. 28. For another enormous speech in which history, political theory, and geological theories are brought together, see Guoyu, Zhou 3.3 (pp. 101-13), where King Ling of Zhou (r. 571-545) fails to heed a long remonstrance against blocking two rivers. The episode is translated and discussed in Hart, “The Speech of Prince Chin.” The model of natural circulation advanced here is fundamental and seems to inform vi-

sions both of tribute payment and of public criticism (e.g., poetry collection) in the realm. See Schaberg, “Travel, Geography, and the Imperial Imagination.” 29. Chungiu, Xi 14.3 (Yang, p. 346) / Zuo, Xi 14.3 (Yang, pp. 347-48). Shalu, the site of the landslide, is apparently a mountain in Jin territory. In the next year, Jin’s forces are routed by Qin at Hanyuan; see Chungiu, Xi 15.12 (Yang, p. 350) / Zuo, Xi 15.4 (Yang, pp. 351-66). 30. Zuo, Cheng 5.4 (Yang, pp. 822-23). Cf. Guoyu, Jin 5.13 (pp. 405-6). 31. “Plain chariot”: see Karlgren, “Glosses on the Tso Chuan I,” gl. 391.

“The priests present sacrificial goods . . .”: Karlgren, “Glosses on the Tso Chuan I,” gl. 392, follows Du’s reading, as does Yang, p. 823, but interprets it differently: “He zhu 4 reads prayers over bi # gifts, he shi % puts on record his ci §# exculpations.” (I have altered Karlgren’s romanization and added graphs). The construction of shi as a verb is forced, especially since in passages on ritual responses to disaster, it is a convention that both the ruler and the lower ranks of the hierarchy have specific roles to play, with their functions listed in just this fashion. Karlgren is neatly contradicted by Zuo, Zhao 17.2 (Yang, p. 1385), on eclipse responses: “The priests use sacrificial goods, and the scribes use words” #7, FA @% > SE FA RR.

32. See the famous tale of the commoner Cao Gui's military advice to Duke Zhuang of Lu at Zuo, Zhuang 10.1 (Yang, pp. 182-83) / Guoyu, Lu 1 (p. 151). 33. For the translation of the term wu xing, see Major, “A Note on the Translation of Two Technical Terms in Chinese Science.” I use the term “Five Phases,” al-

though, as will become clear, the materiality of the five terms is important for the rhetoricians of historiography. Even when the five terms are conceived of as a cyclical system (Zuo, Xiang 27.6 [Yang, p. 136], Zhao 11.2 [Yang, p. 1324]), they can be referred to as cai, though they are also at times called xing. “Phases” rather than

Notes to Pages 105-6 365 “elements” is appropriate for the discussion of Zou Yan, but the Zuozhuan and Guoyu depend on the joining of physical and conceptual orders. As materials, the five terms have a place in the vision of circulation, by which the resources of agricultural production and of the commoners’ public-minded speech flow toward the royal center (see translation of Zhao 29.4 below for a depiction of the role of Five _ Phases theory in the procuring of resources). The best recent discussion of the Five Phases, with reflection on their role in the construction of centralized power, is that of A. Wang; see Cosmology and Political Culture in Early China, pp. 75-128.

34. For discussion, see Gu Jiegang et al., Gushi bian, 5: 404-22; Qian Mu, Xian Qin zhuzi xinian, pp. 438-41; and Schwartz, The World of Thought in Ancient China, pp. 356-69. Needham, Science and Civilisation in China, 2: 232-44, includes a translation of all fragments. 35. Zuo, Xiang 9.1 (Yang, pp. 963-64). See Karlgren, “Glosses on the Tso Chuan

I,” gl. 496. |

36. Yang, p. 963, citing Zheng Wenguang, explains that at the end of the third millennium the Heart asterism would have risen in early evening at the beginning of the plowing season, but that by the Shang, because of precession, it would have risen much later. The Shang instead marked the beginning of the plowing season by the appearance of Chunhuo directly to the south. 37. Another solitary appearance of fire joins the heavenly and the terrestrial (Zuo, Zhao 6.3 [Yang, p. 1277]): when Zichan of Zheng has had a law code cast in bronze

for all to see, Shi Wenbo of Jin predicts that Zheng will have a fire when the fire star appears in the Heavens. He reasons that the use of fire for bronze casting before _ _ the season of the fire star, along with the improper use of public writing, will result in a destructive fire. This fire finally breaks out in Zhao 18.3 (Yang, pp. 1394-97) and is preceded by several other predictions (see Zhao 17.5 [Yang, pp. 1390-92)]). Here is further evidence of how a complicated and heterogeneous theoretical apparatus found its expression in the making of sense from history. Zheng’s bronze law code and its disastrous conflagration are connected through the flexible use of fire as a category and through the subordination of physical theory to moral order. The Zheng code is discussed in Chapter 8, pp. 294-96. 38. See Takezoe, “Saden” kaisen, 2: 1041, who also notes a similarity to Zuo, Zhao 7.14 (Yang, pp. 1296-97), discussed above. ‘There the theory of eclipses was subordinated to a larger understanding of governmental propriety (cf. Zhao 7.4 [Yang, pp. 1287-88]), and the question is not ke bi hu, but ke chang hu, “Can this be treated as a

| constant?” 39. Zuo, Zhao 17.5 (Yang, pp. 1390-92). 40. See again Zuo, Xiang 9.1.

41. The association of states and rulers is geographical: Chen is located where Taihao once had his fief, and Zhurong ruled from what would one day be Zheng.

366 Notes to Pages 106-7 Zhurong is elsewhere (e.g. Zuo, Zhao 29.4 [Yang, p. 1502]) a general term for fire officials, commonly linked with the early ancestry of the Chu ruling line (see Guoyu, Zheng 1.1 [p. 10]). Taihao’s connections with fire are more obscure. Since the phase associated with Taihao is wood, Du notes simply that wood is the source of fire; this is rejected by Yang, p. 1391, as an anachronism. For an account of slightly later systematizations of these astrological correspondences, see Pankenier, “Applied FieldAllocation Astrology in Zhou China.” 42. For water as the counterpart to fire, see again Zuo, Zhao 9.4 (Yang, p. 1310). Du, cited at Takezoe, “Saden” kaisen, 2: 1621: “Wey’s star is Yingshi, which is water.” Yingshi is another name for the Shi mansion, located in the north. _ 43. In bingzi, the stem is fire and the branch water; in renwu the order is reversed. For charts showing the correspondence of the ten- and twelve-term cycles with the | Five Phases, see Saussure, Les origines de l’astronomie chinoise, Pp. 212, 295. Apparently

this correspondence had been developed by the time Zuozhuan speeches were reaching their final form. One wonders what role the composition of such speeches had in bringing the correspondences to maturity. For details of the Warring States practice of divinatory hemerology, see Kalinowski, “Les traités de Shuihudi.” 44. Chungiu, Zhao 18.2 (Yang, p. 1393): “In summer, in the fifth month, on the renwu day, Song, Wey, Chen, and Zheng had conflagrations.” Zuo, Zhao 31.6 (Yang, pp. 1513-14), mentioned above in connection with eclipses, contains one further example of fire used in conjunction with another of the Five Phases: according to — Scribe Mo of Jin, an eclipse this year presages Wu's invasion of the Chu capital (506 B.c.E.: Chungiu, Ding 4.14 [Yang, p. 1534] / Zuo, Ding 4.3 [Yang, pp. 1542-48]), but apparently because the eclipse began on a gengwu day, “fire overcomes metal, and [Wu] will not finally prevail.” Again Five Phases theory is joined with astronomy and the sexagesimal cycle to create sense, and again sense is the product of essentially literary labors after the event. 45. Guoyu, Jin 4.1 (p. 362). This episode is not included in the Zuozhuan's account of Chong’er's return; see Xi 23.6-24.1 (Yang, pp. 404~19). 46. Chong’er’s divination results are expressed in unusual fashion. As in the divination about Shusun Bao, results are normally given in the form “X zhi ZY,” “X’s Y.” The diviner obtains a first hexagram, X, which may include certain lines prone to change; Y is the hexagram that results from the change of these lines to their opposite values: In this divination, however, Chong’er “got Zhun on the inside and Yu

on the outside, all eights” 7] Ai > eR - AY /\t. Wei Zhao and Wang Yuansun, XJJ 1: 1147, explain that the trigram Zhen is the inner (lower) trigram of the Zhun hexagram and the outer (upper) trigram of the Yu hexagram. The number eight, produced through manipulation of the stalks, gives a “young yin” (shao yin) line, a broken line not prone to change. “All eights” may mean that the two yin lines of the Zhen trigram were young yin lines both in the context of the Zhun hexagram

Notes to Pages 107-8 367 and in the context of the Yu hexagram. Thus the diviners say, “It is inauspicious. He is closed off and unpenetrating; the lines do nothing.” Cohen (“A Possible FusionWord in the Yi-ching Divinations”) argues that ba /\ is a fusion of bu zhi 7. Z, indicating that the trigrams do not change. 47. Gao Heng, Zhouyi dazhuan jinzhu, pp. 25-30, provides a convenient tabulation of these equivalences and their various locations in the Yijing text. The primary image associations may be summed up as follows: Qian = heaven; Kun = earth; Zhen

= thunder; Sun = wind; Kan = water; Li = fire; Gen = mountain; Dui = marsh. Later systems, especially in the Han, added dozens of images for each trigram. The account of Chong’er’s divination matches Kun with soil rather than with earth, and Zhen with carriage rather than with thunder. Wei Zhao, in his annotation of this passage (Guoyu, p. 363), justifies the latter substitution by the rumbling sound that

carriages make. ,

48. For another set of prognostications based on the matching of divination results with phases (in this case water and fire), see Zuo, Ai 9.6 (Yang, pp. 1652-54). Although the Zhouyi is cited in that passage, it is as part of an entirely separate divination. Likely there was a prognostication technique involving the phases (how many we cannot know) but not the words of the Zhouyi, which in this anecdote is presented as a more powerful system. 49. Evidence from Warring States musical technology suggests the same thing. See Falkenhausen, Suspended Music, p. 284. 50. E.g., Zuo, Xiang 27.6 (Yang, p. 1136: wu cai); Zhao 11.2 (Yang, p. 1324: wu cai);

Zhao 29.4 (Yang, p. 1502: wu xing); Zhao 32.4 (Yang, p. 1519: wu xing); Guoyu, Lu 1.9 (p. 170: wu xing).

51. See Gu Jiegang et al., Gushi bian, 5: 410. For a set of six, see Zuo, Wen 7.8 (Yang, p. 564): the liu fu include water, fire, metal, wood, earth, and grain (gu). For ~ aset of four, Gu cites the four spirit-emperors of Qin. One might add the passage at Guoyu, Lu 2.9 (p. 201), in which Confucius, speaking of the sorts of monsters the world produces (guai), divides them into four categories: those of wood, stone, water, and soil. (Despite Lunyu 7.21, where it is said that the master did not speak of guai, the Master does identify and discourse on oddities more than once in the anec-

dotes of historiography.) | |

52. The significance accorded to individual phases in certain passages—e.g., to metal at Guoyu, Jin 1.9 (p. 281)—should also be considered in light of the general metaphorical applicability that made the phases useful tools in interpretation. 53. See Gu Jiegang, Gushi bian, 5: 410: before the end of the Warring States period, “there was never a rigorous Five Phases system.” The evidence he cites makes it clear that he considers the Zuozhuan representative of an earlier period, but he fails

to cite the relevant passage, Zhao 29.4. , 54. Zuo, Zhao 29.4 (Yang, pp. 1500-504).

368 Notes to Pages 109-11 55. | have omitted Cai Mo’s citation of six line statements from the Qian and Kun hexagrams in which dragons are mentioned. 56. ‘Qiongsang”: Yang, p. 1503, cites two passages indicating that Qiongsang was Shaohao's city. Depending on the source one chooses, this line might also mean that the three officers helped the Shaohao line finally to attain imperial status at Qiongsang. “Qi of Zhou”: Hou Ji.

| 57. For another dragon anecdote, also unannounced in the Chungiu, see Zuo, Zhao 19.10 (Yang, p. 1405), 58. For Zou Yan's periodization, see the fragment from Liishi chungiu translated in Needham, Science and Civilization in China, 2: 238. The order outlined in the ac-

count of dragons bears comparison with the explanation of the early origins of different sacrifices at Guoyu, Lu 1.9 (pp. 165-70), where the wise man Zhan Qin condemns sacrifices made to strange seabirds that have appeared in Lu. The system

, expounded there, although not organized around the Five Phases, has certain details in common with Cai Mo’s account. For another speech involving certain of the Five Phases (here fire and water, joined with birds, clouds, and dragons) in very early political and cultural order, see the Tan ruler’s explanation of official titles at Zuo, Zhao 17.3 (Yang, pp. 1386-89). This is the speech that prompts Confucius to study with the Tan ruler (who is of Yi rather than central descent) and to affirm what he

has heard, ie. that “When the Son of Heaven has allowed official ranks to lapse, learning about official ranks remains among the barbarians of the four quarters.” See the discussion in Chapter 4, p. 133. 59. On the development of yin-yang as philosophical terms, see Graham, Yin-Yang and the Nature of Correlative Thinking.

60. Zuo, Zhao 24.4 (Yang, p. 1451). 61. For the eclipse and rain sacrifice, see Chungiu, Zhao 24.3-4 (Yang, p. 1449). 62. Zuo, Xi 16.1 (Yang, p. 369). 63. The Song duke’s visitor does not mention the people, perhaps because, as he

says, he does not dare offend the duke. But after Duke Xiang’s famous defeat at Hong, when he refuses to advance against Chu forces until they have crossed a river and set up their formation, an observer suggests that it is right to take advantage of an enemy's weakness because of the suffering it saves one’s own forces; see Zuo, Xi 22.8 (Yang, pp. 398-99). The people and their relation to visible phenomena are again made the cause of a supernatural event at Zuo, Zhuang 14.2 (Yang, pp. 19697): A battle of snakes at the gate of Zheng correctly presages the coup of Duke Li of Zheng (r. 700-673). As an observer says, “Portents (yao) arise from people. If there are no openings for them among the people, then portents do not come about on their own. But if people give up the constants, then portents arise; that is why there are portents.” See also Shi Kuang’s remarks on the speaking stones at Zhao 8.1

Notes to Pages 111-13 369 (Yang, pp. 1300-301), discussed below, pp. 18-19. On the relation of the people and Heaven, see Tong Shuye, Chungiu Zuozhuan yanjiu, pp. 213-15. 64. Zuo, Zhao 1.12 (Yang, pp. 1221-22). Woman herself is, one would expect, yin; but the male ruler’s intercourse with women is a yang activity that takes place in the dark (“woman is a thing of the yang, and darkness is her time,” p. 1222); fever is produced by the excess of yang and confusion (huo) by the excess of darkness. The diagnostic system works by recombination of such theoretical terms as we have been ex-

amining and is subject to the same rules of rhetorical order that inform the expression of other theories in this historiography. 65. Guoyu, Zhou 3.6 (p. 128).

66. See the eclipse prediction above, p. 110, and Guoyu, Zhou 1.6 (pp. 15-21), a long explanation of the plowing ritual. It is the duty of the minister of the alcar of grain to inform the people on the first day of spring that yin and yang are in perfect balance (p. 20). 67. Guoyu, Yue 2.6 (p. 653).

68. Much about the use of yin-yang and other terms in this speech is obscure, but it is clear that their complementarity is a model for a military strategy of reaction. For more on the use of yin-yang theory in military thought, see Lewis, Sanctioned Violence in Early China, pp. 138-46.

69. The best expositions in English of the Zhou musical system are Lothar von Falkenhausen’s Suspended Music and Kenneth J. DeWoskin’s Song for One or Two.

70. Guoyu, Zhou 3.6 (pp. 122-31), 3-7 (pp. 132-41). Zuo, Zhao 21.1 (Yang, pp. 1423-24), gives a much simplified version of the anecdote, with one relatively short speech (distantly related to the second of the Guoyu speeches) by the musician Zhoujiu. For translation and analysis of this episode, see Hart, “The Discussion of the Wu-yi Bells in the Kuo-yii.” He Youqi attempts to prove that the passage was composed by Liu Xin; see ““Zhou yu’ ‘zhu wuyi’ zhang bianwei.”

71. Wuyi is both the name of the great bell in the set and the name of one of the six li pitch standards listed in Guoyu, Zhou 3.7 (p. 132). See Falkenhausen, Suspended Music, pp. 296-99.

72. For more on aesthetics, see Chapter 7. Although I treat music here as a source of theory for speech rhetoric, there I examine music in the context of an aesthetic that underlies narratives. 73. Che musician's name (given in slightly different form in Zuo, Zhao 21.1, mentioned above) is interesting for its possible reference to Shi, “Guanju” (Mao 1), with its opening image of a “fishhawk’” (jujiu) on an “islet” (zhou). 74. Or, with Falkenhausen, Suspended Music, p. 1, “Government is modeled upon music.” Musical ideals like harmony do get transferred, through metaphorical usage in rhetorical constructions, to the theory of government. I would like also to empha-

370 Notes to Pages 114—17 size the ways in which music is an effective activity, both the public image of which Duke Mu spoke and a manipulation of the order of nature, as Zhoujiu will argue. 75. Guoyu, Zhou 3.6 (p. 128). On the eight winds and musical correlations, see Major, “Notes on the Nomenclature of Winds and Directions in the Early Han.” 76. For more on the concept of pleasure in historiography and in Warring States philosophy, see Schaberg, “Social Pleasures in Early Chinese Historiography and

, Philosophy.” : 77. Henry V Lii.

78. [he greatest expression of this notion can be found in Zuo, Zhao 20.8 (Yang, pp. 1419-21), Yanzi’s speech on harmony and identity; see discussion in Chapter 7, pp. 230-32. See also Qian Zhongshu, Guanzhui bian, 1: 236-38. 79. Guoyu, Zhou 3.7 (pp. 132-41). 80. The same enumeration of the six airs is given at Zuo, Zhao 1.12 (Yang, p. 1222) in the Qin doctor's diagnosis of Duke Ping’s fever. Although Zou Yan's choice of the term de for his set of five might seem to support Wei Zhao’s explanation,

Zuo, Zhao 28.3 (Yang, p. 1495), translated in the previous chapter (pp. 76-78), draws the nine items from Shi, “Huangyi” (Mao 241), and defines each as a matter of personal moral uprightness. Such numbered sets as these were traditional, although their contents were not always fixed. 81. See Falkenhausen, Suspended Music, p. 286, for a comparison of these stan-

dards with those of the Zeng Hou Yi bell set. | 82. This is probably to be distinguished from the heptatonic music of Zheng (see Lunyu 15.11, 17.18 [music of Zheng]; Guoyu, Jin 8.7 [p. 460: “new music”]); but see Needham, Science and Civilisation in China, 4: 1: 164.

, 83. In addition to Hart’s article on these speeches, I have found very helpful the translation by d’Hormon and notes by Mathieu, Guoyu: propos sur les principautés, pp.

311-31. A sentence of translation is missing on p. 323, though there is a note on it (330n59): “The measurement from south to north is the seven accords” Bj db 7

+c [A] t8. According to the interpretation of Wei Zhao, in Guoyu, pp. 140-41, Zhoujiu first establishes that from the Jupiter station Chunhuo to the asterism Tiansi (identified with the mansion Fang) is a distance of seven mansions, then remarks that from the position of Jupiter in Chunhuo to the position of Mercury in Tianyuan (identified with the Jupiter station Xuanxiao) is a distance of seven mansions, or gi tong. Tong is a musical term designating the six in-between notes thar,

with the six ordinary pitch-standards, make up the full twelve-tone gamut (see Falkenhausen, Suspended Music, pp. 297); it is also a general term for the identity and |

solidarity by which King Wu will prevail. |

84. Another exemplary master of musicians is Shi Hui; see Zuo, Xiang 15.4 (Yang, p. 1023). 85. Zuo, Xiang 18.3 (Yang, p. 1038).

Notes to Pages 117-21 371 86. Zuo, Xiang 18.4 (Yang, p. 1043). See translation and discussion in Needham, Science and Civilisation in China, 4: 1: 136-37.

87. As another Jin minister remarks, “The way of Heaven is for the most part in the northwest; it is not the time for a southern army, and it will not achieve anything.” Yang, p. 1043, explains that the way of Heaven refers to the position of Jupiter in its twelve-year cycle. 88. Zuo, Xiang 14.6 (Yang, pp. 1016-18). See related passages at Guoyu, Zhou 1.3 (pp. 9-10), Jin 6.1 (p. 410), and Chu 1.7 (pp. 550-51). For discussion, see Schaberg, “Remonstrance in Eastern Zhou Historiography,” pp. 143-46. 89. Guoyu, Jin 8.7 (pp. 460-61). go. “The mountains and rivers are sung of in airs”: In light of the rest of the pas-

sage, I take this to mean that proper attention to music and to feng can win for the ruler new territory—mountains and rivers—beyond his current borders. 91. Zuo, Xiang 26.1 (Yang, p. 111) / Guoyu, Jin 8.10 (p. 463).

92. Zuo, Zhao 8.1 (Yang, pp. 1300-301).

93. The first graph in the name of the palace has several readings. I follow Lu Deming, Jingdian shiwen, 2: 1092.

94. Shu Xiang cites Shi, “Yu wu zheng” (Mao 194) on the qualities of good

speech. See further discussion in Chapter 7, p. 227. | 95. Zuo, Xiang 30.3 (Yang, pp. 1170-73). 96. See Zuo, Wen 11.2 (Yang, p. 580) and Chungiu, Wen 11.6 (Yang, p. 580) for confirmation of Shi Kuang’s recollections. 97. The calculation itself combines mathematics with more familiar hermeneutic

patterns. Specifically, Scribe Zhao of Jin appears to count the number of days by analyzing the graph hai %, which some commentators (Hui Dong, in HQJJ 2: 991, cited without attribution by Takezoe, “Saden” kaisen, 2: 1328; Hong Liangji, Chungiu Zuozhuan gu, 2: 617) have suggested is the old man’s name. Zhao says, “Hai has two heads and six bodies; if you bring down the two and place it beside the body, that is the number (of days).” Zhao's colleague Shi Wenbo immediately solves his strange

equation, giving the number as 26,660 days, or a little over seventy-three years. Various explanations have been offered on the basis of hai’s shape in seal script. 98. For the important role of music in the conduct and theory of war, see Lewis, Sanctioned Violence in Early China, pp. 213-31.

99. Zuo, Xiang 23.4 (Yang, p. 1077). The “difficulties” were an insurrection in Jin led by the disaffected noble Luan Ying in Xiang 23.3 (Yang, p. 1073).

100. See Zuo, Xuan 9.8 (Yang, p. 703) and Xuan 12.2 (Yang, pp. 721-47). 101. The virtues—good faith, for instance—are a small state's only resource in its dealings with larger states; see Zuo, Xiang 8.7 (Yang, p. 957), Ai 7.4 (Yang, p. 1642), and discussion in Chapter 4, pp. 141-42.

102. Zuo, Xiang 18.3 (Yang, p. 1040). ,

372 Notes to Pages 121-26 103. Zuo, Xuan 6.3 (Yang, p. 688). , 104. Zuo, Xuan 15.3 (Yang, pp. 762-63).

105. Zuo, Zhao 4.4 (Yang, pp. 1253-54). See Chapter 6, pp. 193-207, for a full discussion of the rise and fall of King Ling, including the episode of Qing Feng’s execution. 106. Zuo, Xuan 12.2 (722-26).

: 107. Moral principles are frequently adduced in military counsel. At Zuo, Xuan 15.3 (Yang, pp. 762-63), just before the Jin defeat of the Chi Di, the advisor Bo Zong cites five crimes of the Di as part of his argument for military action. At Cheng 16.5

(Yang, p. 883) a Jin advisor cites six weaknesses in Chu that will permit Jin to attack successfully (there are five in the parallel passage, Guoyu, Jin 6.3 [p. 414]). At Xiang

5.9 (Yang, p. 944), when Chu sets up the virtuous Zinang (Prince Zhen) as chief minister, a Jin observer knows that Chu, by reforming previous errors in its ways, will be able to reassert its control of the state of Chen. At Cheng 6.4 (Yang, p. 827), Jin resists an easy attack on the state of Wey, which in its trust of Jin has not set up _ defenses; by acting virtuously, Jin wins the confidence of its allies, a much greater good than the prisoners it would have taken in Wey. That virtue does not overrule every sort of proper military planning is shown by Xi 22.8 (Yang, pp. 396-99), mentioned above, the defeat of Song forces under Duke Xiang by a Chu army; see pp. 1-4.

Chapter 4 1. The major speeches are Zuo, Ding 4.1 (Yang, pp. 1535-42), Guoyu, Zhou 1.12 (pp. 29-33), Lu 1.9 (pp. 165-70), Chu 2.1 (pp. 559-64), and Chu 2.2 (pp. 564-71).

2. Particularly telling in this connection is the legend that spirits appeared as omens both of the rise and of the fall of dynasties and states; see Zuo, Zhuang 32.3 (Yang, pp. 251-53) / Guoyu, Zhou 1.12 (pp. 29-33), where improper exchanges with a strange spirit in Shen presage the fall of Guo. 3. See Guoyu, Lu 1.9 (pp. 165-70), Zuo, Ding 4.1 (Yang, pp. 1535-42), and discus-

sion below. Chinese sacrifices as depicted in historiography do not make a strong distinction between spirits—entities that were never human and never died—and heroes—entities who died but receive sacrificial devotion because of their achievements as discoverers and ancestors. Impersonal entities such as the Five Phases are also at times spoken of as the objects of devotion; see Zuo, Zhao 29.4 (Yang, pp. 1500-504).

| 4. See Guoyu, Chu 2.1 (pp. 559-64), and discussion below. 5. Zuozhuan and Guoyu speeches on sacrifice are a major source of information about Warring States versions of predynastic mythology. See the materials collected in Tong Shuye, Chungiu Zuozhuan yanjiu, pp. 1-30.

Notes to Pages 126-28 373 6. Guoyu, Chu 2.1 (pp. 559-64). The king is perhaps referring to Shangshu, “Liixing,” in which the divine August Lord (huangdi), offended by the violence of oppression among humans and by the stench of punishments, has Chong and Li sever the route connecting Heaven and earth (SSJZS 1: 248). 7. See again Zuo, Zhao 29.4 (Yang, pp. 1500-504), in which the ideal scheme includes an official responsible for each of the Five Phases.

8. For the relevance of this myth to Han history, including the work of Sima Qian, see Lewis, Writing and Authority, pp. 313-14.

9. Theogony 535-57. Gods and men were “chosen” or “distinguished” (ekrinonto) at

Mek6né; although it is not clear what that means, the account of events at Mekoné includes the determination (made by Zeus with the deceptive guidance of Prometheus) of which portions of the slaughtered ox will be burnt in sacrifice to the gods and which left for worshippers’ consumption. 10. Guoyu, Lu 1.9 (p. 166).

u. That contact with extra-human forces is embodied in material exchange | even outside the context of established sacrifices is clear from scenes like Zuo, Xiang 18.3 (Yang, pp. 1036-37), in which a prayer to the spirit of the Yellow River is accompanied by a gift of jade. Bao as a principle underlying narrative is the subject of Chapter 6. 12, Zhan Qin’s speech, including the general account of sacrifice, is prompted by a sacrifice by Zang Wenzhong, whom Confucius also condemns, although more briefly, at Zuo, Wen 2.5 (Yang, pp. 525-56). 13. For barbaric sacrifices, see Zuo, Xi 19.3 (Yang, pp. 381-82), where Duke Xiang

of Song has Duke Wen of Zhu sacrifice the ruler of Zeng at the Cisui altar in the hope of winning the allegiance of Eastern Yi tribes. For heroes of separate lineages, see Zuo, Xi 31.5 (Yang, p. 487), in which the duke of Wey is enjoined not to sacrifice

to Xiang, a king of the Xia line, although Kang Shu, the founder of Wey, has told the duke in a dream that Xiang is stealing the sacrifices intended for him. “Ghosts and spirits not of one’s own line,” says the remonstrating minister, “cannot enjoy one’s sacrifices. ... You cannot interrupt the sacrifices instituted by King Cheng and the Duke of Zhou.” Cf. Lunyu 2.24: “To sacrifice to ghosts not one’s own is mere fawning.” 14. Zuo, Zhao 7.7 (Yang, pp. 1289-90) / Guoyu, Jin 8.19 (p. 478). Diagnosing the

illness of Duke Ping of Jin, who has dreamed of a yellow bear, Zichan of Zheng suggests that Gun, who changed into a bear at Yushan near the Xia capital and was worshipped by the three dynasties, may now be demanding from Jin sacrifices that Zhou is neglecting. 15. Zuo, Ding 4.1 (Yang, pp. 1535-42).

16. Guoyu, Chu 2.2 (pp. 64-71).

374 Notes to Pages 129-30 17. [his principle is adduced at Zuo, Xi 19.3 (Yang, pp. 381-82) and Zhao 11.8

(Yang, p. 1327). 18. Zuo, Xi 19.3 (Yang, pp. 381-82). At Zuo, Zhao 10.3 (Yang, p. 1318), the Duke of Zhou, rightful recipient of Lu’s sacrifices, will not bless that state in response to

the slaughter of prisoners of war. At Zuo, Zhao 1.8 (Yang, p. 1327), doom is predicted for King Ling of Chu when he sacrifices the Cai heir. King Ling commits suicide at Zhao 13.2 (Yang, p. 1347). Interestingly, although Shen Hai, who shelters the king in his last days, buries his two daughters with the king, the text does not censure him; this form of human sacrifice (albeit involving adult, noble, male victims) is

condemned forcefully in the anecdote concerning the burial of Duke Mu of Qin (Zuo, Wen 6.3 [Yang, pp. $46-49]) and in the Shi poem “Huangniao” (Mao 131), said to have been composed for the three men Duke Mu took with him. See also Zuo, Xuan 15.5 (Yang, p. 764). The Zuozhuan’s depictions of human sacrifice are discussed in Zhou Ciji, “Zuozhuan” zakao, pp. 91-94, and Zhang Ruisui, “Zuozhuan” sixiang tanwel, pp. 52-70. 19. At Guoyu, Chu 1.3 (pp. 32~33), Qu Dao, a Chu minister and a lover of caltrop

(ji), asks that that vegetable be included among the items offered to him after his death. His son later forbids the family elders to implement the change, insisting that no variation is permitted in the canon of sacrifice, particularly for one who in life was a model to his subjects. 20. At Zuo, Zhuang 23.1 (Yang, pp. 225-26) / Guoyu, Lu 1.2 (p. 153), Cao Gui, fa-

mous as the commoner who offered Duke Zhuang of Lu advice on doing battle, criticizes the duke for recklessly attending a Qi sacrifice. , 21. When a Lu official decides that Duke Xi should be placed ahead of his predecessor and elder brother Duke Min in the sacrifices, both historiographical texts at- _ tack the move with principles of strict precedence. See Zuo, Wen 2.5 (Yang, pp. 52326) / Guoyu, Lu 1.11 (pp. 173-75).

22. Zuo, Xiang 14.4 (Yang, p. 1013). Cf. Zuo, Huan 6.2 (Yang, p. m1), “The people are the masters (zhu) of the spirits” and the development of this idea there. See also Mencius 5A.5, where Mencius cites Shangshu, “Taishi,” to show that the people serve

as Heaven's organs of perception: “Heaven sees through our people's sight; Heaven hears through our people's hearing.”

23. Zuo, Zhao 20.6 (Yang, pp. 1415-18). | 24. Or where they have somehow been forgotten or ignored. Groups marked as culturally other almost always have a distant origin in common with the central states, but the myths have it that they were purposely sent into exile from culture at an early period. See, e.g., Zuo, Zhao 9.3 (Yang, pp. 1307-10), for the notion that leg_ endary criminals (including Taowu and Taotie) were expelled to the periphery to serve as a bulwark against outside forces; cf. Zuo, Wen 18.7 (Yang, pp. 633-42).

Notes to Pages 130-31 375 25. In one exception, at Zuo, Xiang 14.1, discussed below on pp. 132-33, the Rong leader lists among the differences between the Rong and the Chinese their “incompatabilicy of language” (yanyu bu da). For a rare early example of a foreign tongue represented in Chinese graphs, see Xiang Zonglu, Shuoyuan jiaozheng, p. 278. By putting the term “barbarians” in quotation marks, I wish to represent, but not to exaggerate, the sense of cultural superiority with which the educated elite of the central states regarded members of culturally different groups. “Barbarian” is not a completely pejorative term in its Greek root, and it is clear that the Chinese, like the Greeks, only occasionally exploited the most negative connotations of their terms for foreign groups (Man, Yi, Di, Rong). 26. See Creel, Origins of Statecraft in China, p. 197.

“Chinese” is as good a translation as any for the various terms speakers in historiography use. The dichotomy is framed in the following terms: zhuxia vs. di at Zuo, Min 1.2 (Yang, p. 256); zhongguo vs. manyi at Cheng 7.1 (Yang, pp. 832-33); hua vs. rong at Xiang 4.7 (Yang, pp. 935-39); bua vs. zhurong at Xiang 14.1 (Yang, pp. 10057); tianzi vs. siyi at Zhao 17.3 (Yang, p. 1389); hua vs. yi at Ding 10.2 (Yang, p. 1578). 27. The Chungiu was traditionally seen as “revering the royal house and defending

against the barbarians” (zunwang rangyi). See discussion in Cheng Faren, “Chungiu”

yaolin, pp. 17-18. 28. Zuo, Cheng 2.9 (Yang, pp. 809-10). 29. For the year of King Xiang’s accession, see note at Yang, p. 320. Cf. Loewe and Shaughnessy (Cambridge History of Ancient China, p. 26), who give 651 as the start of King Xiang’s reign. 30, Zuo, Xi 24.2 (Yang, pp. 419-25) / Guoyu, Zhou 2.1 (pp. 45-53). Many speakers make similar claims. When Jin punishes Lu for attacks against the non-Chinese states of Zhu and Ju, a Lu advocate asserts the claim of brotherhood and accuses Jin of abandoning the descendants of the Duke of Zhou in favor of barbarians (see Zuo, Zhao 13.3 [Yang, p. 1357] and Zhao 13.9 [Yang, pp. 1361-62]). That Zhu is to be considered non-Chinese is clear at Xi 21.4 (Yang, p. 392), where Zhu is called manyi; I find no direct evidence of Ju’s cultural lineage, but Zhao 13.3 (Yang, p. 1357) and the corresponding passage in Guoyu, Lu 2.8 (198-200), strongly suggest that Ju can

also be counted among the Yi. When the Chinese state of Xing is attacked by the Di at Zuo, Min 1.2 (Yang, p. 256), Guanzi cites principles of Chinese familial connection to argue that Duke Huan must send help. At Cheng 7.1 (Yang, pp. 832-33), a Lu minister predicts doom for China when it fails to aid the state of Tan against an attack from barbarian Wu. At Cheng 8.10 (Yang, p. 840) Jin leads an attack on Tan for making peace with the invaders; the Lu leadership reluctantly sends its forces. Definitions of the barbaric are especially fluid here; as Zhao 17.3 (Yang, pp. 1386-89) shows, Tan can be considered barbaric (Confucius refers to it as part of the siyi), and Wu's Zhou lineage will be recognized during its period of ascendancy

376 Notes to Pages 131-34 (Zuo, Ai 7.3 [Yang, p. 1641]; Guoyu, Wu 1.7 [p. 6m]). At Zuo, Cheng 4.4 (Yang, p. 818), Lu may not make an alliance with Chu against Jin, because Chu is not of the

same ancestry as Lu and will not give protection. , 31. Zuo, Xiang 4.7 (Yang, p. 936) / Guoyu, Jin 7.5 (p. 441); Guoyu, Zhou 2.6 (p. 62).

32. See again Zuo, Xi 24.2 (Yang, p. 425). 33. For descriptions of this system in Shangshu, see “Yu gong” (SSJZS 1: 153) and “Kang gao” (SSJZS 1: 202). For connections among notions of economic, cultural, and natural circulation, see Schaberg, “Travel, Geography, and the Imperial Imagination.” 34. Guoyu, Zhou 1.1 (pp. 1-7). 35. Guoyu, Lu 2.19 (pp. 214-15). 36. For wise commoners, see the incident of Cao Gui’s military advice, translated

below, pp. 186-88, and recall the carter encountered by Bo Zong as he rushed to deal with the landslide on Mount Liang (Zuo, Cheng 5.4 [Yang, pp. 822-23] / Guoyu, Jin 5.13 [pp. 405-6], discussed in Chapter 3, pp. 103-4). When wisdom joins birth as a measure of status, virtuous and knowledgeable commoners (or foreigners) can and often do correct their social superiors. 37. Zuo, Xiang 14.1 (Yang, pp. 1005-7). 38. Again, the assimilation of cultural barbarians begins with an acknowledgment of blood lines, even very long ones, that lead back to the center. See also Zuo, Zhao 17.3 (Tan; Yang, p. 1386), Zuo, Ai 7.3 (Wu; Yang, p. 1641), and the passages men-

tioned above.

39. Zuo, Zhao 17.3 (Yang, pp. 1386~89). I have already mentioned this passage in | connection with Five Phases theory. Lewis (Writing and Authority, pp. 46-47) relates the speech of the Tan ruler to Warring States models of government. 40. As noted in the previous chapter, the Confucius described in historiography,

and especially in the Guoyu, is avid in the acquisition and purveying of recondite knowledge; compare this passage with Guoyu, Lu 2.9 (p. 201), 2.18 (p. 213), and 2.19

(pp. 214-15). The capture of the lin (Zuo, Ai 14.1 [Yang, p. 1682]), discussed in Chapter 8, pp. 305-6, belongs to the same type of narrative. 41. The use of the phrase shiguan at Zuo, Zhao 9.5 (Yang, p. 1312), indicates that “losing officials” refers to forgetting proper knowledge and the execution of their duties. 42. For one more wise barbarian, see Zuo, Xi 29.4 (Yang, p. 477): Gelu, the ruler of Jie, knows from the lowing of a cow that she has borne three sacrificial victims. 43. See Guoyu, Jin 8.12 (pp. 466-67), where a Jin minister recalls how Chu, as the Man of Jing, used to perform the most servile duties at treaty gatherings. Guoyu, Lu 2.4 (p. 193), emphasizes Chu’s barbarian sympathies in the present: if the Lu duke

asks for Chu military aid against a Lu rebel, Chu will use the opportunity to put their own kind in power in Lu, win the allegiance of the Eastern Yi, and threaten the

Chinese states (zhuxia). Zuo, Xuan 4.3 (Yang, pp. 679, 683), describes the feral

Notes to Pages 134-35 377 appearance of one Chu character and recounts how another was suckled by a tiger.

the “central states.” .

See also Mencius 3A.4, where Chu is still manyi, clearly distinguished from zhongguo,

44. The nomenclature of Chu government is a constant and glaring reminder of Chu’s separation from the center: lingyin and related official titles are used in none of the other states, and Chu (along with Wu and Yue, equally savage) usurps the title

of wang (king). ,

For anecdotes in which Chu is both wise and non-Chinese, see Zuo, Xuan 12.2 (Yang, pp. 721-47), Chu’s stunning victory at Bi, and Ai 6.4 (Yang, p. 1636), where

sacrifices. :

King Zhao of Chu refuses to sacrifice to the Yellow River, citing the sacrificial practices of the three dynasties as precedent; and contrast the evidence of the Chuci piece “He Bo,” one of the “Jiu ge,” in which Chu clearly does include the river in its 45. Falkenhausen, “The Waning of the Bronze Age,” pp. 514-25.

46. For King Zhuang, see Chapter 2, pp. 60-61. For King Ling, see Zuo, Zhao 12.11 (Yang, pp. 1338-41) and 13.2 (Yang, pp. 1344-47), translated in Chapter 6, pp.

200-2. King Ling asks his ministers not about one of the nine dynastic cauldrons, but about a cauldron that, as a gift from the Zhou court, would mark Chu’s parity with such states as Qi, Jin, and Lu. 47. Zuo, Xiang 27.4 (Yang, pp. 1129-34) / Guoyu, Jin 8.12 (pp. 466-67). The Guoyu account is much more explicit about Chu’s rise to virtue. I discuss this episode in Chapter 8, pp. 285-87. 48. See, e.g., Zuo, Zhao 7.2 (p. 1284), where citations from the laws of King Wen of Zhou and of King Wen of Chu are conspicuously juxtaposed in a Chu minister's remonstrance.

49. See especially Guoyu, Zhou 2.2 (p. 54), where King Xiang of Zhou admits that Zhou’s virtue is in decline and appears to entertain the possibility that Jin will one day have its own royal dynasty. The very brief Zuozhuan version of the king’s speech (Xi 25.2 [Yang, p. 433]) lacks the suggestion that Zhou’s virtue has failed and that Jin may have a royal future. In a passage mentioned in Chapter 2, Duke Huan, the founder of ‘Zheng, prepares to flee Zhou just before the fall of King You and asks the Zhou minister Shi Bo where he should go. When he asks specifically about the south, Shi Bo gives a long history of the various lines of Chu rulers and identifies the Jing line as the only one with enough virtue to win the mandate; when the Zhou declines, he says, Jing

must rise. Further on in the passage, however, Shi Bo names Jin as the one Jisurnamed state that might flourish. See Guoyu, Zheng 1.1 (pp. $07-11). so. For at least one thinker, it was conceivable that China’s greatest cultural heroes emerged from beyond the edges of central culture: Mencius 4B.1 calls Shun an Eastern Yi and King Wen a Western Yi.

378 Notes to Pages 135-36 51. For an anthropological perspective on the circulation of gifts and the coherence of the realm, see C. Cook, “Wealth and the Western Zhou.” For a discussion

of the evolution of notions of the royal center from Shang through Western Zhou, see Keightley, The Ancestral Landscape, pp. 55-79; and A. Wang, Cosmology and Politi-

cal Culture in Early China, pp. 23-74. 52. Basic materials on kinship in the Zuozhuan and Guoyu are collected in Yan Jun, “Zuozhuan xingshi xiangguan wenti di tansuo”; and Yang Ximei, “Guoyu Huangdi ershiwu zi dexing chuanshuo di fenxi shangpian.” Some of the complexities of Chunqiu kinship systems, and interrelations among the terms xing, shi, zu, and zong, are explained by Chun, “Conceptions of Kinship and Kingship in Classical Chou China.” For the role of kinship in appointments within states, see Blakeley, “The Factor of Clan Ties in the Distribution of Political Offices in the Spring and Autumn Period”; and Ge Zhiyi, “Xi Zhou chunqiu zhengzhi juewei.” 53. Guoyu, Zhou 1.1 (pp. 1-7), discussed above, pp. 131-32.

54. Zuo, Xi 24.2 (Yang, pp. 419-25), discussed above, p. 131. See also Zuo, Zhao 26.9, discussed below in note 60 to this chapter. 55. Zuo, Zhao 9.3 (Yang, pp. 1307-10). 56. For the details of this myth, see Zuo, Wen 18.7 (Yang, pp. 633-42). 57. Practices”: literally, “objects” or “paraphernalia.” Yang, p. 1309, and Takezoe,. “Saden” kaisen, 2: 1516, agree that Shu Xiang is referring to the incident described at Zuo, Xi 25.2 (Yang, pp. 432-33) / Guoyu, Zhou 2.2 (p. 54), where King Xiang denied Duke Wen’s request to perform the sui ceremony, understood by Du Yu as a tunnel or trench used for royal funerals. 58. Especially Guoyu, Zhou 1.1 (pp. 1-7); and Zuo, Xi 24.2 (Yang, pp. 419-25) and Zhao 9.3 (Yang, pp. 1307-10).

59. At Zuo, Xiang 14.8 (Yang, pp. 1018-19), for instance, when King Ling of Zhou sends orders to Duke Ling of Qi, he begins by recalling the service rendered to the Zhou house by the Qi founder Tai Gong. For his achievements, it is suggested, he and his descendants were given their territory by the Eastern Sea; it is the duty of every new ruler of this territory to imitate the loyalty of his forebears. As Du Yu points out, the orders had to do with the marriage of a Qi woman to Zhou as the king's bride, which is recorded at Chungiu, Xiang 15.2 (Yang, p. 1020). At Zuo, Zhao 13.3 (Yang, pp. 1354-56), when one of Duke Ling’s successors fails in his loyalty to the king by refusing to join a treaty sponsored by Zhou and Jin, the Jin minister Shu Xiang lectures him on the necessity of constancy (ye), ritual correctness (li), awe (wei), and public displays (zhao) in the international order; all of them are secured in the “system of the enlightened kings” (mingwang zhi zhi) by regular court visits, meetings, and treaties. Since this system is the basis of every country’s survival, and since Qi’s noncompliance will endanger the whole system, Jin must threaten Qi with military action. Qi finally agrees to participate.

Notes to Pages 137-39 379 60. Zuo, Xi 24.2 (Yang, pp. 419-25). See also Cheng 2.9 (Yang, pp. 809-10), where Jin attempts to present Qi prisoners of war to King Ding (r. 606-586). The king reminds the Jin duke that states may attack the barbarians and present prisoners to the king, but that brothers, uncles, and nephews who attack one another on the king’s orders must refrain from presenting prisoners so as to show their reverence for the ties of family. Prince Chao also refers repeatedly to the brothers’ duty to correct wrongs in the royal house; see his grand proclamation at Zhao 26.9 (Yang, Pp: 1475-79), discussed in connection with earthquakes in the previous chapter, pp. 102-3. 61. Zuo, Yin 5.7 (Yang, pp. 46-47). Cf. Lunyu 3.1, where the Master criticizes the

Ji family for usurping the king’s prerogative. Recent disputes over the relationship between the two passages are detailed in Fei Min, “Ye lun ‘JJishi bayiwu yu ting.’” 62. See, e.g., Guoyu, Lu 2.2 (p. 188); and Zuo, Xiang 25.10 (Yang, pp. 104-6).

63. Archaeological discoveries have uncovered some evidence that ritual prescriptions for numbers of luxury objects, e.g, in assemblages of vessels, functioned in practice; see Falkenhausen, “The Waning of the Bronze Age,” pp. 472-75. 64. Guoyu, Zhou 1.14 (pp. 40-44). 65. Zuo, Zhao 32.3 (Yang, pp. 1517-19). See also Zuo, Cheng 8.6 (Yang, pp. 83839), where after turmoil in Jin has led to the near extermination of the Zhao family,

the minister Han Jue argues that Zhao Wu should be saved in acknowledgment of his forefathers’ great service to the royal house. Zhao Shuai achieved great things for Duke Wen, and Zhao Dun was famous for his loyalty; to extinguish the family would be an insult to the king, At Xiang 14.8 (Yang, pp. 1018-19), discussed above, in note 59 to this chapter, King Ling completes his command to Duke Ling of Qi with the following words: “Do no disservice to your forebears. Respect this! Do not abandon my commands.” 66. Zuo, Xi 22.6 (Yang, p. 395). For Prince Dai's flight, see Xi 11.3 (Yang, pp. 338-

39) and Xi 12.3 (Yang, p. 341). , For another example of royal display, see Zuo, Xi 25.2 (Yang, pp. 43233) / Guoyu, Zhou 2.2 (p. 54), where Duke Wen of Jin requests the sui burial prerogative (discussed above; see note 57 to this chapter) after saving King Xiang from another uprising by Prince Dai. In refusing the duke this honor, the king holds

forth magnificently on the public display of prerogative and its effect on the commons. The very brief Zuozhuan version of this speech makes the point about public imagery very simply in its opening sentence: “(The burial prerogative) is a

matter for the king's display (zhang).” | 67. Guoyu, Zhou 1.6 (pp. 15-21). | | 68. Zuo, Zhao 15.7 (Yang, pp. 1371-74); see discussion in Chapter 2, p: 81.

69. In yet another discussion with a Jin envoy over ritual propriety at Guoyu, Zhou 2.6 (pp. 62-66), King Ding explains to Fan Hui the ritual principle by which

380 Notes to Pages 139-40 he has feasted him with cut portions of meat rather than with a whole animal. As in other speeches concerning consumption and entertainment, simple aesthesis is married to a complete system of specifications, which are justified by their effect on the observing public. The version of the speech given at Zuo, Xuan 16.4 (Yang, pp. 76970), is much shorter.

, 70. Zuo, Xi 12.4 (Yang, pp. 341-42). “It is deemed proper and not to be forgotten”: Gu Yanwu noted thar these lines bear strong similarities to a passage in Shangshu, “Weizi zhi ming.” For wei du bu wang ag 2 7 iS, “Weizi zhi ming” has yue du bu wang El BS 7 Tt, “T say that your generosity is not to be forgotten.” Once Yan Ruoju (1636-1704) had identified “Weizi zhi ming” as one of the forged guwen chapters, it became impossible to gloss the Zuozhuan passage on the basis of the Shangshu passage. See the discussion in Liu Wendi, “Chungiu Zuo shi zhuan” jiuzhu shuzheng, 1: 306. The language of the king’s pronouncement also echoes some of the formulas of bronze inscriptions. A similar archaism is apparent in King Ling’s orders to Duke Ling of Qi (Zuo, Xiang 14.8 [Yang, pp. 1018-19]), mentioned above, in note $9 to this chapter. 71. Zuo, Zhao 32.3 (Yang, pp. 1517-19). For bu huang gichu, see “Simu” (Mao 162) and “Caiwei” (Mao 167); it is also used in formal diplomatic language at Zuo, Xiang 8.7 (Yang, p. 959). For “vermin,” see “Zhanyang” (Mao 264) and “Shao min” (Mao 265). The Shi citations are noted by Yang, p. 1517. 72. See, however, the use of Shi language in the eulogy for Confucius by Duke Ai of Lu at Zuo, Ai 16.3 (Yang, pp. 1698-99).

73. See Zuo, Zhao 23.6 (Yang, pp. 1446-47); and Guoyu, Zhou 1.4 (pp. 12-13), Zhou 1.10 (pp. 26-27), Zhou 2.2 (p. 54), Zheng 1.1 (pp. 507-23). 74. See Rosen, “Changing Conceptions of the Hegemon in Pre-Ch’in China.” The history of the hegemony during the Chunqiu period is detailed in Yoshimoto, “Shunji Sei ha ko” and “Shunja Shin ha ko.” The historiographers have several ways of designating this position and the person who holds it. Ba, bo, and mengzhu, “treaty leader,” are most common, but one could also speak more generally of “getting” (de; huo) or “gathering” (he) the allies (zhubou). The allies also “come to” (gui) the hegemon (Zuo, Zhao 4.3 [Yang, p. 1250], Zhao 30.2 [Yang, p. 1506]; Guoyu, Zhou 1.14 [p. 41], et passim).

As for the famed “Five Hegemons” (wu bo), the reference to them at Zuo, Cheng 2.3 (Yang, p. 798), makes it fairly clear that the term for such a set existed even before there were five suitable Zhou period candidates to fill ic. Duke Huan of Qi and Duke Wen of Jin are regularly included on the list, but the rest of the membership varies, extending as far back as the Xia in some versions and as far forward as King

Helu of Wu (r. 514-496) in others. | 75. See especially Mencius 2A.3 (SSJZS 2: 2689). For similarities between the Zuozhuan's and Xunzi's views on the hegemon, see Itano, “Saden no sakusei (j6),” pp. 6-8.

Notes to Pages 140-42 381 76. Duke Huan: Zuo, Xi 9.2 (Yang, pp. 326-27) / Guoyu, Qi 1.7 (pp. 244-45). Duke Wen: Zuo, Xi 28.3 (Yang, pp. 463-66). 77. The clearest articulation of this principle comes at Zuo, Zhao 24.6 (Yang, pp: 1451-52), when a Zheng minister urges Jin to help King Jing against the rebel Prince Chao; the minister, Zitaishu, points out that while it is hardly a matter that he, the representative of a small state, can presume to concern himself with, it is quite a disgrace for the great state of Jin that it does not save the royal house from its troubles. Jin takes the point. At Zuo, Cheng 2.3 (Yang, pp. 797-99), when Jin, having invaded Qi after an insult to one of Jin’s ministers, demands excessive terms for peace, the Qi envoy has to remind the Jin commanders of the duty of a hegemon, which is to carry out the commands of the king rather than to bring the whole system into disrepute by bullying other states.

78. Except, of course, when the Chu king himself attains the position of hegemon, See discussion in Chapter 6, pp. 195-98, of King Ling and Chu’s position as leader of interstate treaties.

79. For the dangers of leaderlessness, see Zuo, Xi 19.4 (Yang, p. 383) and Zhao 16.2 (Yang, p. 1376). At Guoyu, Jin 5.4 (pp. 397-98), Zhao Dun of Jin demonstrates the ideal nature of hegemony as he argues that it is his state’s duty as hegemon to march against Song after the murder there of Duke Zhao (r. 619-611). For hegemonic abuses of power, see again Zuo, Cheng 2.3 (Yang, pp. 797-99). At Zuo, Zhao 13.3 (Yang, pp. 1359-60), Zhao 13.9 (Yang, pp. 1361-62) / Guoyu, Lu 2.8 (pp. 199-200), when Jin arrests the Lu minister Ji Pingzi because Lu has attacked the small states of Zhu and Ju, Ji Pingzi’s colleague reminds Jin of Lu’s services during past times of trouble and warns that the allies will not stay with a state that forgets gratitude; convinced, Jin sends the prisoner home and worries that its actions will be perceived by the allies as an offense. See also Zuo, Xiang 4.5 (Yang, p. 935), where Lu, which has annexed the small state of Zeng, justifies the act to Jin by arguing that it needed the extra territory in order to meet the heavy tribute obligations imposed by the Jin hegemon. On three occasions, representatives of the state of Zheng have to argue for limits to Jin’s grasping leadership. See Zuo, Xiang 22.2 (Yang, pp. 1065-67), Xiang 24.2 (Yang, pp. 1089-90), both involving Zichan, and Zhao 30.2 (Yang, pp. 1506-7).

80. Zuo, Wen 7.8 (Yang, pp. 563-64). As noted above, the hegemon is the “leader of the treaties” (mengzhu). Compare Zhao 7.11 (Yang, pp. 1293-94), where Jin again returns land to Wey, and for similar reasons. 81. Zuo, Ai 15.2 (Yang, p. 1692). For the ritual duty to serve the dead as if they were living, see Liji, “Zhongyong” (SSJZS 2: 1629); and Xunzi, “Lilun” (Wang Xiangian, Xunzi jijie, 2: 378).

82. Zuo, Zhao 4.3 (Yang, pp. 1250-51). 83. For the importance of economic thought in the Guoyu, see Lin Xudian, “Lun

382 Notes to Pages 142-45

Appendix. ,

Guoyu di sixiang qingxiang,” pp. 14-18. For the multiple origins of the Guoyu, see

84. See Zuo, Xi 25.4 (Yang, pp. 435-36), Xi 27.4 (Yang, p. 447), and Guoyu, Jin 4.7 (pp. 349-50) for the emphasis on Duke Wen’s virtue. See also the explanation at Cheng 18.3 (Yang, pp. 909-11) of Duke Dao’s restoration of the hegemony. Duke Wen's career is discussed further in Chapter 6, pp. 216-21. 85. In Guoyu, Jin 6.2 (p. 413), two Jin ministers bemoan the plight of the hegemon; if Jin held royal status rather than the hegemony, it could complete its virtue and cause even distant states to bring tribute. But Jin is bound to have troubles, including internal strife, as long as it attempts to maintain hegemony without perfect virtue. The possibility of a line of Jin kings is entertained in several passages; see the discussion on p. 426103. 86. Richard Walker (The Multi-state System of Ancient China) has given an account of interstate relations during the Chunqiu period using the Zuozhuan as a primary source, but he neglects its literary and ideological characteristics. 87. Covenants are discussed in connection with the meetings at Song and Guo in

Chapter 8, pp. 284-88. ,

88. Guoyu, Jin 4.4 (p. 345). For this and the following Chong’er anecdotes, see

also Zuo, Xi 23.6 (Yang, pp. 404-11). |

89. Guoyu, Jin 4.5 (pp. 346-47), Jin 4.7 (pp. 349-52), Jin 4.6 (p. 348). 90. See Zuo, Zhao 13.3 (Yang, pp. 1354-56); and Zuo, Zhuang 23.1 (Yang, pp. 225-

26) / Guoyu, Lu 1.2 (p. 153). | 91. Zuo, Xiang 31.6 (Yang, pp. 1186-89). 92. Zuo, Zhao 5.4 (Yang, pp. 1266-69).

93. At Zuo, Cheng 8.8 (Yang, pp. 839-40), Wuchen (formerly of Chu, now of Jin) delivers a speech on preparation, warning the ruler of the state of Ju that his crumbling walls will not protect his state. The listener is apathetic, and the state is overcome by Chu the next year (Cheng 9.10 [Yang, pp. 845-46]). 94. The exchange of hostages, usually ducal sons, among local courts and between these courts and the royal house, was related to the rituals of visiting, but it was also intended to provide stronger guarantees of good faith than occasional visits could; see Sun Rui, “Shilun Chungiu shiqi di renzhi.” 95. Zuo, Zhao 30.2 (Yang, pp. 1506-7). At Zhao 7.11 (Yang, pp. 1293-94), ministers of Jin send an appropriate mourning delegation for the deceased Duke Xiang of , Wey (r. 543-535) in hopes of keeping Wey from leaving the alliance after a series of Jin offenses. 96. Zuo, Wen 15.4 (Yang, p. 611). In contrast to Yang, Takezoe, “Saden” kaisen, 1:

, 677, thinks that only the first four graphs are being attributed to Shi Yi, and that the rest is part of the speech that frames the quotation. I see instead a set of six parallel statements arranged in three pairs.

Notes to Pages 145-47 383 97. At Zuo, Xi 33.3 (Yang, pp. 497-98), Jin contemplates an attack on Qin but hesitates because of the recent death of Duke Wen. The decision to fight is confirmed when one minister points out that Qin did not mourn for Duke Wen and is therefore lacking in ritual propriety. 98. For mourning visits, see Zuo, Wen 3.3 (Yang, p. 529), Xiang 28.13 (Yang, p. 1152), Zhao 6.1 (Yang, p. 1273). States send mourning delegations not only for the rulers of other states but also for their mothers and wives and for important ministers; see Zuo, Ai 23.1 (Yang, p. 1720). The disastrous results of otherwise unjustified attacks made on states in mourning are demonstrated by two failed Wu campaigns against Chu; see Zuo, Xiang 13.5 (Yang, p. 1002), Xiang 14.1 (Yang, pp. 1005-7), and Zhao 27.2 (Yang, pp. 1482-85). 99. At Zuo, Cheng 18.13 (Yang, pp. 913-14), Jin asks for troops from Lu, whose ministers debate the number of troops to send. The matter is decided when one argues that it is li to determine the number of troops according to the rank of the official sent to present the request. 100. Guoyu, Lu 1.5 (pp. 157-58). Cf. Zuo, Zhuang 28.4 (Yang, p. 242), for confirmation of ritual propriety.

, 101. Zuo, Xi 13.4 (Yang, pp. 344-45), Xi 14.4 (Yang, p. 348) / Guoyu, Jin 3.5 (pp. 323-24). 102. Zuo, Wen 12.5 (Yang, pp. 588-89). Similarly, at Zuo, Xi 26.3 (Yang, pp. 439-

40) / Guoyu, Lu 1.6 (pp. 159-60), when a Qi army advances toward Lu, which has violated a treaty, the Lu minister Zhan Xi is able to spare his state by reminding the Qi general that King Cheng commanded the founders of the two states never to harm each other. He further expresses the hope that Duke Xiao of Qi (r. 642-633) will continue the great accomplishments of his predecessor Duke Huan. These allu-

sions to elevated historical standards for Qi’s status and its relations with Lu amount to apology and bring about the Qi retreat. 103. Zuo, Cheng 13.3 (Yang, pp. 861-65). According to Yang, p. 861, the letter was

the model for the “The Denunciation of Chu” (“Zu Chu wen”) composed by King Zhaoxiang of Qin (r. 306-251). Later it may have inspired Jia Yi’s (201-169) “On the Faults of Qin” (“Guo Qin lun”); see Zang, Han Wei liuchao wen, pp. 22-26. 104. See Zuo, Xuan 9.8 (Yang, p. 703), Xiang 23.4 (Yang, pp. 1076-77). 105. Zuo, Xuan 14.5 (Yang, pp. 756-57). For the acme of Chu’s successes, at the battle at Bi, see Xuan 12.2 (Yang, pp. 721-47). 106. Zichan has sometimes been seen as a predecessor of Legalism; see Schwartz, The World of Thought in Ancient China, pp. 325-27. Although Warring States observers’ interest in Zichan was certainly fueled by new trends in statecraft, the Zuozhuan represents him as both an innovator and a savvy defender of inherited practices; in this respect he resembles Confucius’ disciple Zigong as he is represented in Shiji 67.2195-201. For overviews of Zichan’s career and policies, see Rubin, “T'zu-ch’an

384 Notes to Pages 147-50 and the City-State of Ancient China’; and Yasumoto, “Tei no Shisan to Shin no Shukks.” 107. Zuo, Xiang 28.8 (Yang, pp. 1144-45). 108. Zuo, Xiang 25.10 (Yang, pp. 104-6); cf. Ai 7.4 (Yang, pp. 1642-43). 109. Zuo, Xiang 29.11 (Yang, pp. 159-60). 110. Creel, The Origins of Statecraft in China, p. 372, citing Chen Mengjia, has made this point. See also Keightley, The Ancestral Landscape, p. 56.

| 1. For a good example and linguistic justification of this linkage, see Mencius 4A.5 (SSJZS 2: 2718). The early Mohists’ doctrine of “Conforming Upward” (shangtong), discussed in Chapter 1, pp. 2-53, perfects the vision of nested hierarchies outlined in historiographical speeches. 112. For the military importance of the people, see Ren Changtai and Shi Guangming, “Xi Zhou Chungiu shiqi di ‘guoren.’” The putative “populism” and “humanism” of the Zuozhuan and Guoyu are a topos in the secondary scholarship; see, e.g., Wang Congming, “Zuozhuan zhi renwen sixiang yanjiu’; Wu Xingming and Huang Shengwen, “Zuozhuan, Guoyu zhong di zhongmin sichao”; and Liu Jiahe, “Zuozhuan zhong di renben sixiang yu minben sixiang.” 113. One of the Shu tags most frequently cited in the Zuozhuan and Guoyu is from the lost “Taishi” chapter: “What the people desire, Heaven unfailingly follows”; see Chen Mengjia, “Shangshu” tonglun, pp. 15-20. 114. Zuo, Cheng 16.5 (Yang, pp. 880-81); cf. Xiang 9.4 (Yang, pp. 966-67), where good administration in Jin makes Chu unwilling to join Qin in an attack.

115. See again Zuo, Huan 6.2 (Yang, p. 1), for the idea that the people are the masters of the spirits. 116. For the structure and erosion of the Zhou bureaucratic hierarchy, see Qian Zongfan, “Xi Zhou Chungiu shidai di shilu shiguan zhidu ji qi pohuai.” 117. Zuo, Xiang 14.6 (Yang, pp. 1016-18). The ministers in turn have their own helpers, and so on down through the hierarchy. 118. The theme of obedience (even to a wrong or failed ruler) is stressed frequently. See Zuo, Xuan 2.3 (Yang, pp. 658-59) / Guoyu, Jin 5.5 (399), where Chu Ni,

sent by Duke Ling of Jin (r. 620-607) to kill the virtuous Zhao Dun, cannot bear either to kill the man or to disobey orders and commits suicide; Guoyu, Zhou 2.4 (p. 59), where ministers are forbidden to bring legal charges against their lords; Zuo, Xi 24.1 (Yang, pp. 414-16) / Guoyu, Jin 4.13-14 (pp. 368-71), where two low-ranking Jin officials explain to the newly installed Duke Wen why they remained loyal to the government instead of following him into exile; and Jin 9.2 (pp. 485-86), where a minister of a small state conquered by Jin impresses the victors with his absolute loyalty to his ruler. 119. Zuo, Zhao 20.8 (Yang, pp. 1419-21), translated and discussed in Chapter 7,

| pp. 230-32. Cf. Lunyu 13.23: “The Master said, “The gentleman is harmonious but

Notes to Pages 150-51 385 “not identical; the petty man is identical but not harmonious.” Xunzi fundamentally

agrees with historiography’s view of society and, in the “Wangzhi” chapter, argues | for the necessity of highly visible social distinctions in terms that are reminiscent of several historiographical speeches.

120. See, e.g., Zuo, Cheng 8.6 (Yang, pp. 838-39), where Zhao Wu of Jin is. preserved as heir of the Zhao family because of such recognition; Zuo, Xiang 21.5 (pp. 1060-61), where Shu Xiang of Jin is spared for similar reasons: “He is a pillar of the state's altars, and [his family] should even be forgiven for ten generations to encourage able men”; and Zuo, Xiang 7.6 (Yang, pp. 951-52) / Guoyu, Jin 7.6 (p. 442),

where Duke Dao rewards a man for yielding to another in the matter of an appointment. Such anecdotes, and the speeches that define their themes, make a principle of modesty and self-effacement but do not release the duke from his duty to recognize service. 121. Zuo, Xiang 10.2 (Yang, p. 976). At Xiang 11.5 (Yang, pp. 993-94), Wei Jiang

, of Jin also refuses a reward for his accomplishments under Duke Dao, arguing that he cannot claim any personal responsibility for the success. A phrase used here—

“What effort (li) did I contribute to that?”—is echoed in Jie zhi Tui’s bitter rejection of Duke Wen’s reward at Xi 24.1 (Yang, pp. 417-19). 122. Statements that ministerial families should maintain a righteous poverty also show up with some regularity. See Zuo, Xiang 22.4 (Yang, p. 1068); and Guoyu, Lu 1.16 (pp. 183-84), Jin 8.20 (p. 480), Chu 2.3 (pp. 572-75). For the triumph of ministerial families, see discussion in Chapter 8, pp. 277-83. 123. In his proclamation to the various rulers at Zuo, Zhao 26.9 (Yang, pp. 147579), Prince Chao cites the mandate of the former kings (xianwang zhi ming) on succession: “If the queen lacks a son, then select the [king's] eldest son as heir; between those who are of equal age, choose according to virtue; between those of equal virtue, choose by divination.” 124. For an example of conflict between the two standards, see Zuo, Xi 8.5 (Yang, p 323), where a younger brother selected as heir attempts to yield in favor of his elder brother, who himself yields to the virtue of the appointee. 125. Zuo, Zhuang 28.2 (Yang, pp. 238-41), Min 2.7 (Yang, pp. 268-72); Guoyu, Jin 1.7 (pp. 271-74), 1.8 (pp. 274-78), 1.9 (pp. 279-81), 2.1 (pp. 285-93). See also the case of Shi Que of Wey, whose remonstrance with Duke Zhuang of Wey (r. 757-735) is recorded at Zuo, Yin 3.7 (Yang, pp. 31-33). One of the duke’s lesser sons, Zhouxu, enjoys favor and shows an interest in military matters, and the duke must either destroy Zhouxu or set him up as heir, since his low position and arrogance will lead to

disaster. At Yin 4.1 (Yang, p. 35), Zhouxu assassinates his half-brother and Duke

Zhuang’s successor, Duke Huan (r. 734-719). , 126. For two more speeches that touch on the problem of succession, see Zuo, Xiang 7.6 (Yang, pp. 951-52) and Zhao 28.3 (Yang, pp. 1494-95).

386 Notes to Pages 152-54 127, Zuo, Cheng 5.4 (Yang, pp. 822-23), translated and discussed in Chapter 3, pp: 103-4. Cf. Jin 5.13 (pp. 405-6), where there are only four measures, presented in slightly different order. See also Guoyu, Zhou 2.6 (pp. 62-65), with its impeccably balanced description of a feast ritual. 128. For Song's fire, see Zuo, Xiang 9.1 (Yang, pp. 961-64). Note especially the long series of three-character phrases describing fire-fighting measures. Zheng’s fire is described at Zhao 18.3 (Yang, pp. 1394-97), where linguistic symmetry is less pronounced. For Lu’s fire, see Ai 3.2 (Yang, pp. 1620-22), with its series of four-

character phrases.

129. Zuo, Xuan 9.6 (Yang, pp. 701-2). At Xiang 21.2 (Yang, pp. 1056-58), Lu’s willingness to receive a Zhu rebel who brings two cities with him prompts a like criticism. Cf. Lunyu 12.18.

130. See again Zuo, Yin 5.1 (Yang, pp. 41-44) and Huan 2.2 (Yang, pp. 86-90). 131. In two articles, Bai Xianpeng has shown that the deeds of individuals in the Zuozhuan tend to be narrated as revelations of familial characteristics; the family is

the focus, not the individual; see “Lun Zuozhuan jiazu cengmian xushi xieren di yishu” and “Lun Zuozhuan zuozhe xushi xieren di jiazu yishi.” For aesthetic choices that do mark characters as memorable individuals, see Chapter 7, pp. 224-25. 132. Raphals, Sharing the Light, pp. 1-86.

133. The best known of the wise women is Jing Jiang of Lu, usually referred to as

mother of Gongfu Wenbo; anecdotes concerning her are collected in Guoyu, Lu 2.10-17 (pp. 202-12), along with words of praise from Confucius; see also Raphals, Sharing the Light, pp. 30-33. It is notable that several of historiography’s virtuous women come from Chu; see Zuo, Zhuang 4.1 (Yang, pp. 163-64), Zhuang 14.3 (Yang, pp. 198-99), Zhuang 28.3 (Yang, p. 241), Wen 1.7 (Yang, p. 514).

134. Raphals, Sharing the Light, pp. 56-59. In a recent article, Raphals (“Arguments by Women in Early Chinese Texts”) establishes the possibility that the “Skill in Argument” (“Biantong zhuan”) and “Maternal Rectitude” (“Muyi zhuan”) chapters of the Categorized Biographies of Women (Lientizhuan) preserve records of specifi-

cally female argumentation and examines some of the distinctive characteristics of this argumentation. _ 135. Raphals, Sharing the Light, p- 86.

136. Guoyu, Zhou 2.1 (p. 48). See also Zuo, Zhao 28.2 (Yang, pp. 1492-93).

137. A famous example of conflicting loyalties is the wife of Duke Huan of Lu, Wen Jiang, who carries on an affair with her brother, Duke Xiang of Qi. As the historiographers tell it, it was because of this incestuous affair that Duke Huan was murdered in Qi; see Zuo, Huan 18.1 (Yang, pp. 151-53). 138. For the travels of Xia Ji, see Chapter 7, pp. 225-26. 139. The word zhi is always written ¥[] in the Zuozhuan; in the Guoyu the nominal

form is often written 4.

Notes to Pages 154-55 387 140. E.g., “reverence” (jing), “straightness” (zhi), “rectitude” (zheng), “benefit” (li),

“harmoniousness” (he), “compliance” (shun), and “yielding” (rang). “Likening-to-

oneself” (shu) and “filiality” (xiao) deserve special comment. Shu, which Graham placed at the center of his interpretation of the Lunyu’s system of virtues, is never mentioned in the Guoyu and appears in only five passages in the Zuozhuan. Three of these are comments by the junzi or Confucius. The historiographers valued reciprocity but did not refer to it as shu. See Zuo, Yin 3.3 (Yang, p. 27), Yin 11.5 (Yang, p. 77), Xi 15.8 (Yang, p. 366), Xiang 23.8 (Yang, p. 1085), Xiang 24.2 (1089). Xiao is almost as marginal as shu, appearing as the name of a virtue in relatively few passages. As devotion and service to father and to ancestors, xiao is an important part of the ritual system, but it does not play as great a role in speech rhetoric as several of the other virtues. See Zuo, Yin 1.4 (Yang, p. 16), Yin 3.7 (Yang, p. 32), Min 2.7 (Yang, p. 269), Wen 2.7 (Yang, p. 526), Wen 6.5 (Yang, p: 550), Wen 18.7 (Yang, pp. 635), Cheng 2.3 (Yang, p. 797), Cheng 18.3 (Yang, p. 909), Xiang 23.5 (Yang, p. 1079), Zhao 20.2 (Yang, p. 1408), Zhao 26.11 (Yang, p. 1480), Ding 4.3 (Yang, p. 1547); and Guoyu, Zhou 1.8 (p. 23), Zhou 3.2 (pp. 94, 96, 100), Lu 1.41 (p. 174), Qi 11 (p. 226), Qi 1.2 (p. 233), Qi 1.3 (p. 238), Jin 1.4 (p. 265), Jin 1.9 (p. 279), Jin 2.1 (p. 290), Jin 4.24 (p. 387), Jin 9.9 (p. 491), Chu 1.1 (pp. $29, 531), Yue 2.2 (p. 67). 141. With few exceptions, English-language studies of early Confucian philoso-

phy are framed as attempts to demonstrate the coherence of its ethical system and its relevance to problems in the philosophy of our day. Exemplary contributions include survey accounts like Graham, Disputers of the Tao, pp. 9-31; Schwartz, The World of Thought in Ancient China, pp. 61-117; and specialized considerations like Cua,

“The Status of Principles in Confucian Ethics”; Chong, “The Aesthetic Moral Per-

Pp. 34-40. ,

sonality”; and Hall and Ames, Thinking Through Confucius.

142. See Guoyu, Zhou 3.2 (pp. 94-100), translated and discussed in Chapter 1,

143. I choose this translation to avoid the Christian connotations of “righteousness.” It is indicative of yi’s status as a highly general term for morality that it often appears in the compound deyi (virtue and right). See Zuo, Xi 24.2 (Yang, p. 425), Xi 27.4 (Yang, pp. 445-47), Xuan 15.3 (Yang, p. 762), Zhao 28.2 (Yang, p. 1493), Ai 2.3 (Yang, p. 1614); and Guoyu, Zhou 2.9 (p. 79), Jin 4.21 (p. 382), Jin 7.9 (p. 445), Chu

1.5 (p. 544). | | |

144. Graham, Disputers of the Tao, p. 1. Graham's definition has the direct support of Guoyu, Zhou 2.6 (p. 65), which relates yi to “appropriateness” (yi). Hall and Ames (Thinking Through Confucius, pp. 89-110), who argue that yi should be understood through the concept of “signification,” receive very limited support from historiography; Zuo, Huan 2.8 (Yang, p. 92) and Huan 6.6 (Yang, p. 15) do indicate a relationship between naming and yi but have little to say about the problem of signifying.

388 Notes to Pages 155-56 145. Zuo, Xi 24.2 (Yang, p. 425), Xuan 15.3 (Yang, p. 762), Xiang 31.4 (Yang, p. 1185), Zhao 16.3 (Yang, p. 1379), Ding 4.2 (Yang, p. 1542), Ding 4.3 (Yang, p. 1544), Ding 14.8 (Yang, p. 1598); Guoyu, Zhou 3.1 (p. 91), Lu 2.13 (p. 205), Qi 1.1 (p. 221), Qi 1.3 (p. 238), Jin 1.4 (p. 264), Jin 7.1 (p. 429), Chu 1.1 (p. 528), Chu 2.6 (p. 578), Chu 2.9 (p. $84). Yi is explicitly related to ranking and hierarchy in Zuo, Zhuang 23.1 (Yang, p. 226), Cheng 18.3 (Yang, p. 909), Xiang 23.4 (Yang, p. 1077); and Guoyu, Zhou 1.14 (p. 41), Lu 1.2 (p. 153), Chu 1.6 (p. $49). 146. For yi in punishments, see Zuo, Xuan 11.5 (Yang, p. 715), Cheng 10.4 (Yang, p. 849), Zhao 7.9 (p. 1292); and Guoyu, Jin 5.3 (p. 396). For attempts to disguise improprieties as yi, see Zuo, Xi 24.1 (Yang, p. 418), Wen 7.4 (Yang, p. 561), and Ai 14.2 (Yang, p. 1682). 147. See Zuo, Xiang 23.2 (Yang, p. 1073) and Zhao 31.5 (Yang, pp. 1512-13). Espe-

cially interesting are the references at Huan 2.2 (Yang, p. 90) and Xi 19.3 (Yang, p. 382) to “gentlemen of rightness” (yishi), who are represented as deeply fastidious judges of the morality of historical characters. 148. States: Zuo, Xi 14.4 (Yang, p. 348), Xi 25.2 (Yang, p. 431), Xuan 11.5 (Yang, p. 715), Cheng 1.1 (Yang, p. 782), Cheng 2.3 (Yang, p. 798), Cheng 8.1 (Yang, p. 837), Zhao 1.3 (Yang, p. 1208); Guoyu, Lu 2.4 (p. 191), Jin 1.2 (p. 257), Jin 9.7 (p. 489), Chu 1.4 (pp. 540-41). Rulers: Zuo, Yin 3.5 (Yang, p. 30), Yin 3.7 (Yang, p. 32), Xuan 11.5 (Yang, p. 715), Xuan 15.2 (Yang, p. 760); Guoyu, Zhou 3.6 (p. 125). Ministers: Zuo, Yin 1.4 (Yang, p. 13), Yin 4.5 (Yang, p. 38), Wen 2.1 (Yang, p. 21), Xiang 25.2 (Yang, p. 1098), Zhao 1.2 (Yang, p. 1205), Zhao 28.3 (Yang, pp. 1496), Ai 6.6 (Yang, p. 1638); Guoyu, Jin 7.4 (p. 440). Commoners: Guoyu, Jin 4.15 (p. 373), Jin 4.25 (p. 391), Yue 11 (p. 635). Fathers: Zuo, Wen 18.7 (Yang, p. 638); Guoyu, Qi 1.1 (p. 226). Husband: Zuo, Zhao 26.1 (Yang, p. 1480). Mother: Zuo, Wen 6.5 (Yang, p. 552). Wife: Zuo,

Xiang 30.7 (Yang, p. 1174).

5.1 (Yang, p. 1630). : |

149. This sort of sacrifice is foregrounded in Zuo, Wen 7.8 (Yang, p. 564) and Ai

150. Zuo, Xi 27.4 (Yang, p. 445), Cheng 16.5 (Yang, p. 880), Xiang 9.3 (Yang,

p. 965), Zhao 10.2 (Yang, p. 1317), Zhao 28.3 (Yang, p. 1494), Ai 15.4 (Yang, p. 1693); ~ Guoyu, Zhou 2.1 (p. 45), Zhou 3.1 (pp. 91-93), Zhou 3.2 (p. 93), Jin 1.4 (p. 264), Jin

2.8 (p. 303), Jin 4.9 (p. 356). Pines (“Intellectual Change in the Chungiu Period,” p. 121) has argued that speakers in the later part of the Zuozhuan do not express positive attitudes toward li. But all the passages listed (including Zhao 28.3, not mentioned by Pines) assign li a key place within the hierarchical system, and all imply a generally favorable position on li as a goal. Huang Weihe (“Cong Xi Zhou dao Chungiu ‘yili’ sixiang di fazhan guiji”) also focuses on negative connotations of li. The historiographers appear to condemn not profit itself but rulers’ improper con-

trol and monopoly of it (zhuanli). |

Notes to Pages 156~57 389 151. [he subordination of yi to ritual propriety is marked in such passages as Zuo, Fluan 2.8 (Yang, p. 92), Zhuang 22.1 (Yang, p. 221), Wen 7.8 (Yang, p. 564), Wen 18.7 (Yang, p. 638), Cheng 2.2 (Yang, p. 788), Zhao 25.3 (Yang, p. 1457), Zhao 26.11 (Yang, p. 1480); and Guoyu, Zhou 1.14 (p. 41), Zhou 2.6 (p. 65). Yi is less frequently subordinated to de: see Zuo, Xiang 11.5 (Yang, p. 993) and Ding 10.2 (Yang, p. 1578). 152. For yi in inherited teachings, see Zuo, Xi 27.4 (Yang, p. 445) and Cheng 2.3 (Yang, p. 798). For yi in the order of the cosmos, see Zhao 25.3 (Yang, p. 1458). The spirit world tends to support upholders of yi; see Zuo, Xuan 15.3 (Yang, p. 762), Cheng 1.1 (Yang, p. 782), Cheng 10.4 (Yang, p. 849), Zhao 10.3 (Yang, p. 1318); and

| Guoyu, Zhou 3.3 (pp. 107-8). |

153. [he connection between xin and speech is drawn explicitly in Zuo, Xiang 9.8 (Yang, p. 971), Zhao 8.1 (Yang, p. 1301), Ai 16.5 (Yang, p. 1700); and Guoyu, Zhou 3.6 (p. 125), Jin 4.20 (p. 381), Jin 5.2 (p. 394), Chu 2.9 (p. 584).

154. Rulers: Zuo, Xi 25.4 (Yang, p. 435), Xi 27.4 (Yang, p. 447), Cheng 8.10 (Yang, p. 840), Xiang 21.2 (Yang, p. 1057), Xiang 27.3 (Yang, p. 1128), Zhao 7.9 (Yang, p. 1292), Zhao 15.5 (p. 1370), Ding 14.8 (Yang, p. 1598); Guoyu, Zhou 1.13 (pp. 35-36), Zhou 1.14 (pp. 40-41), Zhou 3.1 (p. 91), Zhou 3.2 (pp. 94-96), Jin 4.25 (p. 391), Chu 1.8 (p. 556), Wu 1.2 (p. 595). Ministers: Zuo, Xuan 15.2 (Yang, p. 760), Cheng 8.10 (Yang, p. 840), Zhao 1.2 (Yang, p. 1205), Zhao 12.10 (Yang, p. 1337);

Guoyu, Jin 9.2 (p. 484). | 155. Zuo, Yin 3.3 (Yang, p. 27), Xi 7.3 (Yang, p. 318), Xi 14.4 (Yang, p. 348), Xi 26.2 (Yang, p. 431), Wen 1.8 (Yang, p. 516), Cheng 6.4 (Yang, p. 827), Cheng 15.3 (Yang, p. 873); Guoyu, Lu 1.5 (p. 157), Qi 1.8 (p. 247), Jin 2.6 (p. 300). For xin in covenants, see Zuo, Huan 12.2 (Yang, p. 134), Cheng 11.9 (Yang, pp. 854-55), Xiang 9.8 (Yang, p. 971), Xiang 27.4 (Yang, pp. 1131-32), Xiang 30.12 (Yang, p. 1179), Zhao 1.1 (Yang, pp. 1201-2), Ding 8.7 (Yang, p. 1566), Ai 12.3 (Yang, p. 1671); and Guoyu, Lu 2.8 (p. 199), Wu 1.2 (p. 596). Xin matters especially for small states that are bound in

service to large states; see Zuo, Xiang 8.7 (Yang, pp. 957-58), Xiang 22.3 (Yang, p. 1067), and Ai 7.4 (Yang, p. 1642). That the spirits above demand xin from the priests who report to them is clear in Zhao Meng’s remarks at Xiang 27.4 (Yang, p. 1133).

156, See Zhao 17.3 (Yang, p. 1389), Zhao 29.4 (Yang, p. 1500), and Jin 8.5 (457). 157. Xin is a means or manner of “maintaining” (shou) the ritual and political arrangements one has received as a legacy; see Zuo, Cheng 2.2 (Yang, p. 788), Cheng 15.3 (Yang, p. 873), Cheng 16.5 (Yang, p. 881), Xiang 11.5 (Yang, p. 993), Zhao 5.4

(Yang, p. 1267), Zhao 6.3 (Yang, p. 1274); and Guoyu, Zhou 1.14 (pp. 40-41). See also Zuo, Cheng 9.9 (Yang, p. 845). 158. Xin to spirits, zhong to people: Huan 6.2 (Yang, p. m1), Zhuang 10.1 (Yang, pp. 182-83). Xin to ruler, zhong to people: Xuan 2.3 (Yang, p. 658). See also Guoyu,

| Chu 2.1 (pp. 59-60) and Jin 5.5 (p. 399). ,

390 Notes to Pages 157-58 159. Guoyu, Zhou 1.1 (pp. 2-3), Qi 11 (p. 221), Jin 2.4 (pp. 297-98), Jin 8.11 (p. 464). Perhaps significantly, Zuo, Xiang 27.4 (Yang, pp. 131-32), the parallel to Jin 8.11, does not mention zhongxin. But in some cases the Zuozhuan also uses the compound without differentiating the elements; see Zhao 16.3 (Yang, p. 1379) and Zhao 20.6 (Yang, p. 1416).

160. Commitment to the ruler: Zuo, Xi 23.6 (Yang, p. 409), Wen 3.4 (Yang, p. 530), Xuan 12.5 (Yang, p. 748), Xiang 9.4 (Yang, p. 967), Xiang 28.11 (Yang, p. 1150), Zhao 10.4 (Yang, pp. 1319-20); Guoyu, Jin 2.8 (p. 302), Jin 3.3 (p. 319), Jin 4.2 (p. 342).

Commitment to other states and to the hegemon: Zuo, Xi 4.3 (Yang, p. 294), Wen 1.8 (Yang, p. 516), Xiang 22.3 (Yang, p. 1068); Guoyu, Wu 1.2 (p. $95).

161. Zuo, Min 2.7 (Yang, p. 272), Xi 9.4 (Yang, p. 328), Xi 23.4 (Yang, pp. 402-3), | Wen 6.8 (Yang, p. 553), Xuan 2.3 (Yang, p. 658), Xuan 12.2 (Yang, p. 747), Cheng 9.9 (Yang, p. 845), Cheng 16.11 (Yang, p. 894), Xiang 5.10 (Yang, pp. 944-45), Xiang 14.11 (Yang, p. 1020), Xiang 25.2 (Yang, p. 1099), Xiang 31.11 (Yang, p. 192), Xiang 31.12 (Yang, p. 1193), Zhao 1.2 (Yang, p. 1205), Zhao 16.3 (Yang, p. 1379), Ding 9.2 (Yang, p. 1572); Guoyu, Jin 2.8 (p. 302), Jin 4.19 (p. 380). Zhong can justify loyal disobedience to a ruler’s misguided order; see Zuo, Xi 5.2 (Yang, p. 304). Wei Liangtao (“Zhongjie di lishi kaocha: Xian Qin shiqi”) argues that zhong in the Zuozhuan includes loyalty to the people but is generally focused on the ruler. Bian Chaoning (“Lun Zuozhuan zuozhe di sixiang qingxiang”) marks the importance of zhong in the _ vocabulary of the junzi figure in the Zuozhuan. 162. Zuo, Xi 28.8 (Yang, p. 472), Xuan 12.5 (Yang, p. 748), Cheng 2.6 (Yang, p. 805), Cheng 8.6 (Yang, p. 839), Cheng 16.11 (Yang, p. 894), Xiang 25.2 (Yang, p. 1099), Zhao 1.2 (Yang, p. 1205). 163. See Zuo, Zhao 2.3 (Yang, p. 1229).

164. See Graham, Disputers of the Tao, p. 19, for the transformations in the term ren, from its early meaning of “noble” or “lordly” to its later meaning of “benevolent.” Lin Yii-sheng (“The Evolution of the Pre-Confucian Meaning of Jen {=,” pp. 17580) argues similarly that in Spring and Autumn period usage ren meant “manly.” 165. Zuo, Cheng 9.9 (Yang, p. 845); Guoyu, Jin 3.6 (pp. 328-29), Jin 7.7 (pp. 44243), Chu 2.8 (p. 582). 166, Like the other virtues, ren can require heroic self-sacrifice. See Guoyu, Jin 2.1 (pp. 291-92) and Jin 6.10 (p. 424). The qualification of ren as willing submission to mistreatment, especially in Jin 2.1, relates directly to the use of the term in discussions of Bo Yi and Shu Qi; see Lunyu 7.15 and Shiji 61.2124. Bo Yi and Shu Qi are ren both because they die in a certain way and because they are brothers who refused to compete at the moment of succession; cf. Zuo, Xi 8.5 (Yang, p. 323) and Xiang 7.6

(Yang, pp. 951-52). |

167. Zuo, Xi 14.4 (Yang, p. 348), Wen 2.5 (Yang, p. $25), Xuan 12.2 (Yang, p. 730),

Notes to Pages 158-59 391 Zhao 27.6 (Yang, p. 1488), Ai 7.4 (Yang, p. 1642); Guoyu, Jin 9.18 (p. 500), Chu 1.1 (p. 529).

168. Zuo, Xiang 31.11 (Yang, p. 1192); Guoyu, Zhou 2.10 (p. 81).

169. Zuo, Ding 4.3 (Yang, pp. 1546-47); Guoyu, Chu 2.9 (pp. 84-87). Cf. Lunyu 4.3. Lack of ren may justify punishment: see Zuo, Xiang 25.14 (Yang, p. 1108). 170. Zuo, Zhao 12.11 (Yang, p. 1341); cf. Lunyu 12.1. The passage is discussed further in Chapter 6, pp. 204-5. 171. Rulers: Zuo, Yin 3.5 (Yang, p. 30), Xi 7.2 (Yang, p. 317); Guoyu, Zhou 2.10 (p. 84), Chu 1.6 (p. 50). Ministers: Zuo, Wen 3.4 (Yang, p. 30), Xiang 22.6 (Yang, p. 1070); Guoyu, Zhou 3.1 (p. 91). Knowing others properly is a crux of many early Chinese narratives; see Henry, “Che Motif of Recognition in Early China.” 172. Zuo, Yin 11.3 (Yang, p. 76), Xiang 8.8 (Yang, p. 960), Zhao 2.3 (Yang, p. 1229), Zhao 5.3 (Yang, p. 1266), Zhao 6.4 (Yang, p. 1277), Zhao 10.4 (Yang, p. 1319), Zhao 12.2 (Yang, p. 1332), Ding 10.2 (Yang, p. 1577); Guoyu, Jin 2.8 (p. 309), Jin 5.12 (p. 404), Jin 6.4 (p. 415). A topos of ritually informed wisdom concerns the Zang family of Lu: see Zuo, Wen 2.5 (Yang, p. 525), Xiang 22.1 (Yang, p. 1065), Xiang 23.5 (Yang, p. 1083), Xiang 23.8 (Yang, p. 1085); and Guoyu, Lu 1.9 (p. 170). 173. Words: Zuo, Xiang 14.3 (Yang, p. 1010), Xiang 31.6 (Yang, p. 1188), Zhao 1.1

(Yang, p. 1204). Heaven: Guoyu, Zhou 3.1 (p. 90), Zhou 3.9 (p. 145), Chu 1.6 (p. 550), Chu 2.1 (p. 559). Decrees: Zuo, Wen 6.3 (Yang, p. 548), Xuan 15.2 (Yang, p. 760). Subtleties: Guoyu, Jin 1.3 (p. 263), Jin 1.8 (p. 278), Jin 2.8 (p. 309).

174. Nominalized, zhi normally denotes savvy of this sort. For nominal uses and for verbal uses relating to savvy, see Zuo, Xi 30.3 (Yang, p. 482), Cheng 17.10 (Yang, p. 901), Xiang 21.5 (Yang, p. 1059), Xiang 23.5 (Yang, p. 1083), Xiang 23.8 (Yang, p. 1085), Xiang 24.12 (Yang, p. 1093), Ding 4.3 (Yang, p. 1547); Guoyu, Lu 1.1 (p. 151), Lu

2.16 (p. 211), Jin 2.1 (p. 291), Jin 3.4 (p. 321), Jin 3.6 (pp. 328-29), Jin 3.8 (p. 333), Jin 4.19 (p. 380), Jin 4.21 (p. 383), Jin 5.14 (p. 407), Jin 6.7 (p. 420), Jin 6.10 (p. 424), Jin 6.12 (p. 426), Jin 7.2 (p. 435), Jin 7.6 (p. 442), Jin 8.15 (p. 471), Wu 1.9 (p. 620). 175. Zuo, Xi 27.4 (Yang, p. 447), Xiang 28.9 (Yang, p. 146), Xiang 31.6 (Yang, p. 1188), Zhao 10.4 (Yang, p. 1319); Guoyu, Jin 4.25 (p. 391). Zhi forms a complementary pair with ren in both Zuozhuan and Guoyu, but it is not subordinated to ren as it is in Lunyu; see Zuo, Xi 30.3 (Yang, p. 482), Wen 2.5 (Yang, p. 525); and Guoyu, Jin 3.6 (p. 328), Jin 6.12 (p. 426), Jin 7.6 (p. 442), Jin 7.7 (p. 442). Nor is zhi the object of suspicion, as it is for Mencius. See Raphals, Knowing Words, pp. 28, 38. 176. For the historical development of the concept of de, see Boodberg, “The Se-

masiology of Some Primary Confucian Concepts”; Kominami, “Tenmei to toku’; Kryukov, “Symbols of Power and Communication in Pre-Confucian China”; and Nivison, The Ways of Confucianism, pp. 17-43.

177. Lewis, Writing and Authority, pp. 132-39; Zhang Sugqing, Xushi yu jieshi—

"Zuozhuan” jingjie yanjiu, pp. 229-38; Shen Yucheng and Liu Ning, “Chungiu

392 Notes to Pages 159-64 Zuozhuan” xueshi gao, pp. 83-90; Zhan Ziging, “Lun Zuozhuan di zhengzhi sixiang

_ qingxiang.” Kong Guichun demonstrates in “Qiantan Zuozhuan zhong Kongzi di lizhi sixiang” that the emphasis on li is especially strong in remarks attributed to Confucius. »

178. Speeches that adduce li as a principle in passing are too numerous to list; some of the Zuozhuan’s definitive remarks on li are conveniently collected in Cheng Faren, “Chungiu” yaoling, pp. 52-53. Speeches that focus on the ritual system include Zuo, Yin 5.1 (Yang, pp. 41-44), Huan 2.2 (Yang, pp. 86-90), Cheng 13.2 (Yang, pp. 860-61), Zhao 25.3 (Yang, pp. 1457-59), Zhao 26.11 (Yang, pp. 1480-81); and Guoyu,

559-65). | |

Zhou 1.6 (pp. 15-21), Zhou 1.14 (pp. 40-41), Zhou 2.6 (pp. 62-65), Chu 2.1 (pp.

179. Several scholars trace the evolution of li from a set of specific practices to a philosophical abstraction; see Luo Jiaxiang, “Zuozhuan zhong guanyu li wenhua di zaiqiang’; Bian Chaoning, “Lun Zuozhuan zuozhe di sixiang qingxiang”; and Ye Youchen, “Jiu Zuozhuan lun Chungiu shigi li de jiazhi quxiang yu gongtong tezheng.” The ideological advantages of this evolution are discussed in Chapter 8, pp. 292-93. 180. On the centrality of li and de in the ideological foundations of the Zuozhuan, see Itano, “Saden no sakusei.”

181. This point, derived from Ricoeur, is expanded in Chapter 8, pp. 272.

Chapter 5 1. “To ask for the significance of an event, in the historical sense of the term, is to ask a question which can be answered only in the context of a story” (Danto, Narration and Knowledge, p. 11). Much of the work of Hayden White has been devoted to

demonstrating that narratives, particularly in their modes of emplotment (comic, tragic, etc.), determine the conditions of an event's signification; see Metahistory, especially pp. 1-42, and “The Historical Text as Literary Artifact,” in Tropics of Discourse, pp. 81-100. Although the four-part division of plots that White borrows from

Northrop Frye could be adapted to Chinese texts (or those of any other nonWestern tradition) only by the most dubious labors, I accept his more general argument that plot and meaning are inseparable. 2. Among the scholars holding the latter view are Huan Tan (ca. 43 B.c.E.-C.E. 28), Zhu Yizun (1629-1709), and Chen Feng (1810-1882); see Zhang Sugqing, Xushi

yu fieshi, pp. 73-108. | 3. It is remarkable that Peter Opitz in “The Birth of “History,” an otherwise thorough article on pre-Qin views of history, should barely mention the Zuozhuan and Guoyu.

4. [hese points are discussed in more detail in the Appendix. 5. On the supplementarity of xiaoshuo, see S. Lu, From Historicity to Fictionality, pp. 51-52.

Notes to Pages 165-66 393 6. For the notion of the alibi, see Barthes, Mythologies, pp. 123-24. That the alibi sometimes wore thin is not surprising; many readers who later criticized the Zuozhuan and Guoyu did so because of discrepancies they saw between the diverse material of historiography and the putatively unitary views encoded in the Chungiu. 7. Sheldon Lu (From Historicity to Fictionality, p. 92), in his overview of fictional

and historical narrative in China, has written that “Chinese historiography, as a grand metanarrative of legitimation, aims at rendering human social institutions such as the Patriarch, the Emperor, the Father, the State, and the Law into natural, transparent, and universal relations.” 8. See Zuo, Cheng 14.4 (Yang, p. 870) and Zhao 31.5 (Yang, pp. 1512-13), translated and discussed in Chapter 8, pp. 265-67. 9. Liu Zhiji, Shitong, 2.14.

10. Ibid., 4.2-3. See also the remarks on Zuozhuan narrative and speeches in the “Shen Zuo” chapter, ibid., 3.77-88. 11. For Fang Bao’s views on the Zuozhuan, see Zhang Gaoping, “Zuozhuan” wenzhang yifa tanwei, p. 195. The term yifa is normally associated with the Chungiu rather than the Zuozhuan, but it was also commonly applied by Tongcheng school writers,

150-62. :

including Fang Bao, to the rules by which they composed their own ancient-style prose. Yifa may also be translated “models and rules”; see Elman, Classicism, Politics, and Kinship, pp. 12-13, 178-80. See also You Xinxiong, Tongcheng wenpai xueshu, pp.

12. For an explanation of the history and conventions of pingdian criticism, see

Rolston, How to Read the Chinese Novel, pp. 3-34.

13. A list of pingdian works by Tongcheng school adherents is given in You Xinxiong, Tongcheng wenpai xueshu, pp. 115-16. Fang Bao (on whom more below), Liu

Dakui (1698-1780), Yao Nai, Fang Zongcheng (1818-1888), and Wu Rulun (18401903) wrote pingdian commentaries on Zuozhuan; Liu Dakui and Wu Rulun also wrote on Guoyu. These works are now difficult or impossible to find. 14. Hummel, Eminent Chinese of the Ch’ing period, p. 843. Neither the author of the ECCP biography nor the Siku editors mention the Zuozhuan ping, although the latter

do explain their reasons for excluding another work of Wang's, a set of literary analyses of all three commentaries to the Chungiu, the Huo’an ping Chungiu (Chunqiu

SKQOSZMTY 1: 631. and its three commentaries, critiqued at A Certain Cottage) in three fascicles; see 15. See Fang Bao, Fang Bao ji, pp. 216-17. The biography, less its preface, is

printed with Zuozhuan ping.

16. These are the main idea (zhuyi); the central point (yanmu), a character repeated throughout the passage; supplementary information (an); extraordinary events (jingcai) and surprising changes (gibian); and relaxed (xianging) or merely decorative (dianzhui) writing; see Wang Kunsheng, Zuozhuan ping, fanli 2b.

394 Notes to Pages 166-72 17. Ibid., xu 2a.

17.1, ,

18. In a recent photoreprint, the work is nearly 2,000 pages long. 19. See Feng Lihua and Lu Hao, Zuoxiu, 1: 49-50, 53-55. 20. This observation on tropes originates with pseudo-Longinus, De sublimitate 21. For a biography, see Liu Shengmu, Tongcheng wenxue yuanyuan zhuanshu kao,

p: 295. The author of a 1923 preface to the Zuozhuan wei notes that Wu was completing work his father left unfinished when he died; see Wu Kaisheng, Zuozhuan wel, p. I.

22. Jia Yingpu’s 1923 colophon to the Zuozhuan wei, p. 212, suggests that Wu started with Ma Su’s edition. Both Ma and Gao followed in the footsteps of Zhang Chong (fl. 1187), whose Chungiu Zuoshi zhuan shilei benmo (Chungiu Zuo commentary categorized events, arranged as discrete narratives) was printed in 1185 (SKQSZMTY

2: 1070). According to the editors of the most recent edition, Ma’s work was completed before 1649; see Ma Su, Zuozhuan shiwei, p. 2. The brief essays Ma appends to each of the narratives contain historical analysis and moral judgments rather than literary criticism in the mode of Wang Yuan; as Ma writes in his summary of editorial principles (lilie), he has “not dared to speak of literary style (wen).” 23. Wu Kaisheng, Zuozhuan wei, p. 2. None of Wu's terms is common among pingdian critics of literature, but several closely related terms are listed in Rolston, How to Read the Chinese Novel, pp. 341-55.

24. See especially Zhang Gaoping, Zuozhuan wenzhang yifa tanwei. 25. Watson, Early Chinese Literature, pp. 47-48.

| 26. John Wang, “Early Chinese Narrative: The Tso-chuan as Example.” In an article in Chinese, Wang (Wang Jingyu, “Cong xushi wenxue jiaodu kan Zuozhuan yu Guoyu di guanxi”) demonstrates that the Guoyu is by no means a work solely devoted to the recording of speeches and has narrative characteristics that distinguish it from

the Zuozhuan. , , 27. Egan, “Narratives in Tso chuan,” p. 326.

28. Ibid., pp. 350-51. 29. Sun Liiyi, “Zuozhuan” yu Zhongguo gudian xiaoshuo, p. 102. 30. On interpretations of zhuci bishi, see Zhang Sugqing, Xushi yu jieshi, pp. 109-35. The phrase has been used as an interpretive framework by other writers as well; see Jian Zongwu, “Zuozhuan zhuci bishi di chengjiu.”

31. Guoyu, p. 661. , |

32. See Zhang Xincheng, Weishu tongkao, p. 523. For the genre known as yu, see

Appendix, p. 321. | |

33. For discussions of the anecdotal in biblical narrative, see Aune, “Prolegomena to the Study of Oral Tradition in the Hellenistic World,” esp. pp. 93-95 on chreiai; and Ellis, “The Making of Narratives in the Synoptic Gospels.”

Notes to Pages 172-76 395 34. Fludernik, Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology, pp. 85-91.

35. Fineman, “The History of the Anecdote.” 36. Considered in light of texts like these, the distinction Barthes (S/Z, pp. 3-6) drew between the lisible (readerly) and the scriptible (writerly) is misleading. Making the reader the author of the text can be—and in early Chinese historiography is—a way of inculcating interpretive habits. 37. Guoyu, Zhou 3.5-7 (pp. 118-32). The practice of the Guoyu resembles that of chronicles like the Zhushu jinian (Bamboo annals) and the Chungiu. In the chronicles the conventions arise naturally from the serial presentation of data under successive years, whereas in the Guoyu they are a sign that chronology is, after geography, the basic organizing principle of the text in its present form. 38. There is a fragmentary Chungiu embedded in the anecdotes of the Zuozhuan; see discussion in Appendix, p- 319. 39. In Fludernik’s (Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology, pp. 63-71, 88) terminology, developed for the analysis of “natural” narratives found in spontaneous oral storytelling, the anecdote opens with an orientation (in our examples usually a note of the

time and place) and an incipit (the event or situation that prompts first actions), continues with incidences (actions, reactions, speeches), and closes with resolution and evaluation (final effects of speaking, judgments of actions). 40. Guoyu, Zhou 1.1 (p. 8). 41. Ibid., 1.2 (p. 8).

42. Zhao Guangxian, “Zuozhuan bianzhuan kao,” pt. I, pp. 140-42; Hu Nianyi, “Zuozhuan di zhenwei he xiezuo shidai wenti kaobian,” pp. 3-5. 43. An example is the comment inserted in the middle of Zuo, Yin 1.4 (Yang, p.

14). See discussion below, pp. 183-86. 44. Zuo, Zhao 9.1 (Yang, p. 1306); see also Zhao 6.10 (Yang, p. 1280). 45. Chungiu, Zhao 9.1 (Yang, p. 1306); see also Zhao 6.8 (Yang, p. 1273).

46. Examples are numerous. In the years of Duke Zhao’s reign alone, see Zuo, Zhao 4.8-5.1 (Yang, pp. 1259-61), 6.11-7.1 (Yang, pp. 1280~82), and 22.5-23.1 (Yang, pp. 1437-41). 47. See discussion in Appendix, p. 323. 48. Zuo, Zhao 3.12 (Yang, p. 1244). 49. Zuo, Zhao 4.1 (Yang, pp. 1245-48). 50. Zuo, Zhao 5.2 (Yang, p. 1265), Zhao 5.4 (Yang, pp. 1266-69).

51. See Appendix for more on the history of the text and on the relation of the Zuozhuan and the Chungiu. Ronald Syme (Tacitus, p. 305) has summarized the difficulties posed by the annalistic form in Tacitus’ masterpiece: “The annalistic framework, it might seem, is a primary obstacle: it breaks and disperses a genuine theme or sequence, it juxtaposes unrelated items in mere enumeration.” 52. Yang, p. 676.

396 Notes to Pages 177-79 53. Zuo, Xuan 4.2 (Yang, pp. 677-78). 54. Duke Ling of Zheng reigned only during the year 605 B.c.z., having acceded the previous winter.

, “Eating-finger”: the index finger, used with the thumb to pick up food. See Liu Wendi, “Chungiu Zuoshizhuan” jiuzhu shuzheng, 2: 640, who cites ancient lore on the naming of fingers to support the glosses of Fu Qian and Du Yu. 55. According to Du Yu, SSJZS 2: 1869, the duke wished to disprove the omen of the moving finger. 56. For the phenomenon, see Heidegger, Being and Time, pp. 51-55. Barthes (S/Z, p. 30) links the unfolding of narrative to the decoding of enigmas: “The readerly text is atonal text ..., and its tonal unity is basically dependent on two sequential codes:

the revelation of truth and the coordination of the actions represented: there is the same constraint in the gradual order of melody and in the equally gradual order of the narrative sequence.” 57. Scholars disagree on the precise relevance of the gentleman's remark. For Du Yu, SSJZS 2: 1869, Zijia is humane because of his reluctance to kill the duke (and his comparison of the duke to an aged domestic animal), but ultimately unmartial in his failure to oppose Zigong. Liu Wendi, “Chungiu Zuo shi zhuan” jiuzhu shuzheng, 2: 641, cannot believe that the gentleman would consider humane a man who compared his

ruler to an animal, citing against Du a similar comparison at Zuo, Cheng 17.10 (Yang, p. 903); that the latter scene presents the user of the metaphor, Han Jue of Jin, in a rather positive light somewhat weakens Liu’s argument. Liu proposes that the gentleman's remark relates to the duke himself, who is unmartial in the sense that he fails to act resolutely against his ministers’ insubordination. Takezoe, “Saden” kaisen, 1: 731, follows Du.

58. On the Zuozhuan's principles of composition (li), see Shen Yucheng and Liu Ning, “Chungiu Zuozhuan” xueshi gao, pp. 144-47; and Kamata, “Saden” no seiritsu to sono tenkai, pp. 605-37.

59. Zhao Guangxian (“Zuozhuan bianzhuan kao,” pt. I, p. 142) divides the exegetical sections into earlier shu yue, local explanations of the classic, and later fanli sections, more general statements of the principles of Chungiu composition. 6o. As explained in the Appendix, the junzi yue passages, whatever their precise

dating and relation to the anecdotal stratum of the Zuozhuan, were found in the Zuozhuan materials before the time of Sima Qian.

, 61. The habit of detached judgment represented by the junzi passes into the imperial historiographical tradition by way of Sima Qian, who comments on his own narratives in the guise of the “Grand Scribe” (taishi gong). Although his remarks make use of a greater range of material and involve a more marked personal voice than do the junzi judgments, the latter are quite clearly his model. For a treatment of

Notes to Pages 179-80 397 the junzi yue evaluations as part of Zuozhuan’s influence on later historiography, see Lu Yaodong, “Shizhuan lunzan xingshi yu Zuozhuan junzi yue.’” 62. Confucius acts in the role of the junzi commentator in the following passages: As Zhongni: Zuo, Xi 28.9 (Yang, p. 473), Wen 2.5 (Yang, p. 525), Cheng 2.2 (Yang, pp. 788-89), Cheng 17.6 (Yang, p. 899), Xiang 23.8 (Yang, p. 1085), Xiang 25.10 (Yang, p. 1106), Xiang 31.11 (Yang, p. 1192), Zhao 5.1 (Yang, p. 1263), Zhao 7.12 (Yang, p. 1296),

Zhao 12.11 (Yang, p. 1341), Zhao 13.3 (Yang, p. 1360), Zhao 14.7 (Yang, p. 1367), Zhao

20.7 (Yang, p. 1418), Zhao 20.9 (Yang, pp. 1421, 1422), Zhao 28.3 (Yang, p. 1496), Zhao 29.5 (Yang, p. 1504), Ding 9.3 (Yang, p. 1573); Guoyu, see Lu 2.13 (p. 208), Lu 2.14 (p. 209), Lu 2.16 (p. 211), Lu 2.17 (p. 212). As commentator he is called Kongzi at Zuo, Xuan 2.3 (Yang, p. 663), Xuan 9.6 (Yang, p. 702), Ai 3.2 (Yang, p. 1622), Ai 6.4 (Yang, p. 1636), Ai 1.1 (Yang, pp. 1660-61), Ai 15.5 (Yang, p. 1696). See also Zuo, Xiang 27.4 (Yang, p. 130), where Zhongni’s opinion of a historical event is recorded without any quoted remark. For a discussion of differences among comments attributed to the junzi and to Confucius, see Henry, “‘Junzi yue’ versus “Zhongni yue’ in Zuozhuan.”

Passages in which Confucius can be said to participate in events are by comparison rare in the Zuozhuan: see Xiang 10.2 (Yang, p. 978), Zhao 7.12 (Yang, pp. 129596), Zhao 17.3 (Yang, p. 1389), Zhao 20.4 (Yang, pp. 1413-14), Ding 1.4 (Yang, p. 1527), Ding 10.2 (Yang, pp. 1577-78), Ding 12.2 (Yang, p. 1587), Ding 15.3 (Yang, p. 1601), Ai 11.6 (Yang, pp. 1665-67), Ai 11.7 (Yang, p. 1668), Ai 12.2 (Yang, p. 1670), Ai 12.5 (Yang, p. 1673), Ai 14.1 (Yang, p. 1682), Ai 14.5 (Yang, p. 1689), Ai 16.3 (Yang, p.

1698). The last is the record of his death. In Guoyu, see Lu 2.9 (p. 201), Lu 2.18 (p. 213), Lu 2.19 (pp. 214-15), and Lu 2.21 (p. 218).

Other eminent characters sometimes remark from a distance on contemporary events (see, for instance, Scribe Mo’s remark at Zuo, Zhao 29.5 [Yang, p. 1504]), but only Confucius is quoted as commenting on events before his own time.

63. See Chapter 8 for further discussion of the historiographers’ selfrepresentation and their identification with Confucius. 64. As Kaizuka Shigeki (“Kokugo ni arawareta setsuwa no keishiki”) has shown, Confucian teachings favored anecdotes accompanied by moralizing remarks attributed to individuals who had not been involved in the events narrated. 65. As we might expect in a teaching tradition based on historical anecdotes, explicit judgments were attached to anecdotes at different moments during their long transmissions, and these moments were not marked. 66. Narrative does sometimes employ stylistic symmetry resembling that usually found in speeches. See, e.g., the description of fires and fire-fighting measures at Zuo, Xiang 9.1 (Yang, pp. 961-64), Zhao 18.3 (Yang, pp. 1394-97), and Ai 3.2 (Yang, pp: 1620-22), discussed in Chapter 4, pp. 151-52.

398 Notes to Pages 180-84 67. One utterly enigmatic anecdote is to be found at Zuo, Ai 13.4 (Yang, p. 1679),

where a Wu visitor to Lu will be sold grain only if he performs a series of strange acts. See also Zuo, Xuan 12.6 (Yang, pp. 749-50), where a member of the Chu force besieging Xiao asks a friend from the city a series of odd questions:

ARMY -A-- SUB Y- A R-WRRBRAW-AH-AaR GHRMKZ2 BBP: RAC. “Do you have yeast for brewing?” He said, “No.” “Do you have mountain nettle?”

He said, “No.” “What's to be done about the ailment in the belly of the river fish?” He said, “When you see it in the dry well, rescue it.” “If you'll weave a rope of grass, I will be the one weeping beside the well.”

The conversation is a rescue plan, and when Xiao is reduced, the Chu soldier rescues his friend from the well in which he has hidden. The terms of the coded exchange are so obscure that it is hard to reach any judgment except that the plan is a clever one. See discussion in Liao Xiaoming, “Zuozhuan yize yinyu fenxi.”

68. To borrow another term from narratology, the “implied reader” of the Zuozhuan, the reader whose knowledge, predilections, and blindnesses the text accommodiates, is a reader ever interested in the possibility of seeing moral meaning in the observable facts of the world; see Chatman, Story and Discourse, pp. 149-50.

69. See analysis in Zhu Weide, “Zuozhuan ju, duanjian di yinhan”; and Wang Shoukuan, “Zuozhuan zai lishi wenxue shang di liang da tese.” 70. White, Content of the Form, pp. 23-25. 71. As the epigraph to this book suggests, Tacitus, like the Chinese historiographers, saw history as momentous events emerging from trivial causes. 72. For Thucydides, a general tendency toward repetition in human affairs justi-

fies the writing and the reading of history: “It will be enough for me... if these words of mine are judged useful by those who want to understand clearly the events which happened in the past and which (human nature being what it is) will, at some time or other and in much the same ways, be repeated in the future” (Thucydides,

The Peloponnesian War, 1.22). | 73. Relevant here are Danto’s remarks on narrative sentences in Narration and Knowledge, pp. 143-81. Our narrators see in beginnings the full significance that comes only from ends. All historians do the same. But few so consistently endow historical individuals with the foresight required to discern historical meaning and

to utter narrative sentences. ,

74. Zuo, Yin 1.4 (Yang, pp. 10-16). For this title, see Wu Chengquan and Wu Tiaohou, Guwen guanzhi zhuyi, p. 1.

75. Lii Zugian, Donglai boyi, pp. 1-3; Wu Kaisheng, Zuozhuan wei, p. 3; Wang

Kunsheng, Zuozhuan ping, 1b. ,

Notes to Pages 184-87 399 76. Elsewhere in historiography, characters who exemplify patience, forbearance, or a sense of timeliness by saying “not yet” win the implicit praise of the narrators. See Cao Gui at Zuo, Zhuang 10.1 (Yang, pp. 182-83; discussed below); Hu Yan (Zifan) at Xi 27.4 (Yang, p. 447); and Fan Li at Guoyu, Yue 2.2 (p. 648). 77. Guan Xuhua, “Zuozhuan xiyi (1),” reads the anecdote as I do, rejecting the judgment of the Chungiu exegete and professing to restore Duke Zhuang’s rightful reputation. See also the reservations expressed by John Wang in “Early Chinese Narrative: The Tso-chuan as Example,” p. 12. For a useful selection of comments on the episode, see Huang Peirong, “Zuozhuan “Zheng Bo ke Duan yu Yan’ xinlun.” Kaizuka (Chugoku kodai no denshé, pp. 347-62), with characteristic originality, treats Duke Zhuang as a semi-mythical hero of the Zheng founding. Even Wu Kaisheng (Zuozhuan wei, p. 3), who like most other readers condemns

the duke, believes that the exegetical passage “is an interpolation by some later teacher of the Classic. When it is removed, the passage reads smoothly. In all cases, the explanations added by teachers of the Classic are largely irrelevant and shallow; often they contain obvious contradictions of the Classic's meaning.” He professes a fervent wish that he had the power simply to edit out all exegetical passages that appear in the midst of narratives. 78. For the heterogeneous contents of the Zuozhuan, see Appendix. 79. Yinggu: Takezoe, “Saden” kaisen, 1: 50, places Yinggu in the vicinity of Lady Jiang’s place of exile, Chengying. “As at the beginning”: What can this conclusion mean, when the duke’s mother has hated him since his birch? Wang Kunsheng (Zuozhuan ping, 1.2b), who like Wu Kaisheng reads the whole Ying Kaoshu anecdote as a foil for the duke’s former unfiliality, sees this as a description of the proper happiness of the mother-son relationship. 80. See discussion on p. 387/140. 81. For a more detailed discussion of this anecdote, see Schaberg, “Social Pleasures in Early Chinese Historiography and Philosophy.” 82. In addition to the present passage (Zuo, Zhuang 10.1 [Yang, pp. 182-83]), see Zhuang 23.1 (Yang, pp. 225-26) and Guoyu, Lu 1.1 (p. 151), 1.2 (p. 153). Under the name Cao Mo, the character is also famous for extracting military concessions from Duke Huan of Qi by holding him at dagger point; see Shiji, 86.2515-16. 83. “Such a small faith is not inclusive”: Legge, p. 86, translates, “That is but small sincerity; it is not perfect.” Couvreur, p. 148, has “Faible sincérité, elle n'est pas grande.” Fu } is glossed xin {3 (good faith) when it appears in the archaic Chinese of the Shangshu and Shijing. I follow Yang, p. 182, who relates it to fu 7@ (to cover). “I always rule according to the circumstances”: See Karlgren, “Glosses on the Tso

Chuan I,” gl. 51. 84. Qian Zhongshu, Guanzhui bian, 1: 176, cites a parallel from Shuoyuan (Xiang Zonglu, p. 271), which sharpens the class dimensions of the remark: opposed to the

400 Notes to Pages 187-92 meat-eaters who sacrifice to their ancestors and make military policies are the eaters of coarse food (huoshizbe) who die on the battlefield. 85. Wang Kunsheng, Zuozhuan ping, 1.17a-18b. 86. Qian Zhongshu, Guanzhui bian, 1: 178.

87. Feng Lihua and Lu Hao (Zuoxiu, 1: 258) note the carefully patterned use of speech in this anecdote.

| 88. See Nagy, Pindar’s Homer, p. 362, with note 127: “The very concept of genre becomes necessary only when the occasion for a given speech-act, that is, for a given poem or song, is lost.” 89. See Appendix. 90. On terms for transmission, see Lii Simian, Li Simian dushi zhaji, pp. 684-91. g1. See discussion in Chapter 4, pp. 145-46, along with the passage cited there. For further examples, see Zuo, Min 2.7 (Yang, p. 272), Xuan 12.5 (Yang, p. 748), Xiang 26.10 (Yang, pp. 1121-22), Zhao u.10 (Yang, p. 1328); and Guoyu, Zhou 2.10 (pp. 80-85), Zhou 3.3 (pp. 103-9), Jin 9.20 (pp. 502-3), Chu 1.8 (pp. 554-56). In many of

these passages, a narrative of shared history is summed up in a single, title-like phrase; the anecdote is common knowledge. Narrative was useful for keeping accounts not only of interstate relations but also of family relations. In light of the focus on family characteristics and achievements discussed by Bai Xianpeng, and in light also of the various theories that hold that the Zuozhuan was composed to exalt. one or another Warring States lineage, it is not unlikely that many anecdotes were valuable in the exchanges of glorification and vilification during that later period; see the Bai Xianpeng articles cited on p. 386n131, and theories of composition discussed in the Appendix.

92. On the use of anecdotes in Warring States and Han collections, see Schaberg, “The Anecdotal Hero.”

Chapter 6 1. Guoyu, Jin 1.2-3.8 (pp. 252-335); Wu 1.9 (pp. 618-28), Yue 1.1 (pp. 631-39), Yue 2.1-2.8 (pp. 641-59). 2. See Appendix.

3. There is some indication that the text of the Zuozhuan, especially where it comments on the Chungiu, guides the reader's attention to the international characteristics of certain moments, particularly when there is reason to believe that the powerholders are virtuous. See, e.g., Xiang 12.5-7, 13.1, 13.3, 13.4, 13.6 (Yang, pp. 9961002), Xiang 28.2-3 (Yang, pp. 1141-42), Zhav 9.5-7 (Yang, pp. 311-13), Zhao 13.4-

8 (Yang, pp. 1332-34). It seems that when a hegemon is virtuous and secure in his

, place or when an international treaty meeting has been carried off successfully, there is a noticeable increase in the number of actions (even unrelated actions) that are explicitly judged li, ritually proper. If this tendency is more than a coincidence, then

Notes to Pages 193-95 401 this is another way for the writing of the Zuozhuan to show the influence of the ruler’s excellence. See also Zhao 5 (Yang, pp. 1261-72), which amounts to a little anthology on the theme of preparedness; the series of human sacrifices in Zhao 10,

1490-97). |

11, and 13; and the discussion of the dangers of female beauty at Zhao 28 (Yang, pp.

4. The prevalence of anecdote series (as opposed to isolated anecdotes) may be judged by the efforts of Ma Su and Gao Shigqi, who both make it clear in their introductory matter that they have succeeded in attaching most, if not all, of the Zuozhuan's anecdotes to series; see Ma Su, Zuozhuan shiwei, p. 5; and Gao Shiqi, Zuozhuan jishi benmo, p. 5. Egan (“Narratives in Tso chuan,” p. 340) writes that “though the narratives are typically composed of many distinct units, they are not fragmentary.... Even those scenes that are not essential to the plot, such as those that illustrate the behavior of a character, or those in which a judgment is expressed, clearly

contribute to the meaning of their stories. Though many such scenes are self- | contained dramatic units, their implications radiate outward, linking them to a larger context.” 5. The anecdotes are gathered as a coherent series in Ma Su, Zuozhuan shiwei, pp. 349-71; Gao Shigi, Zuozhuan jishi benmo, pp. 673-97; and Wu Kaisheng, Zuozhuan wel, pp. 130-38.

6. Zuo, Zhao 13.2 (Yang, p. 1347). | 7. Predictions about the long-term fortunes of states are discussed in the Ap-

pendix and in the articles cited there. For a more general view of predictions of disaster in the Zuozhuan, see Xue Yajun, “Zuozhuan zaiyi yuyan lielun.” Besides pre-

dictions based on observations, like the ones found in King Ling’s anecdotes, proleptic anecdotes include narrations of dreams, divinations, and prophetic songs. For a typology of dreams, see Yang Jianmin, “Zuozhuan jimeng di mengxiang leixing ji zhanmeng tedian.” Divination is discussed in Chapter 2, pp. 66-69, and in the articles cited there. For dreams, divinations, and other signs in the Zuozhuan, see Kalinowski, “La rhétorique oraculaire”; and Li Wai-yee, “Knowledge and Skepticism in Ancient Chinese Historiography,” pp. 30-41. 8. For a remarkable example, see Zuo, Zhao 24.9 (Yang, p. 1453), where a contemporary observer notes the Chu policy decision that began the chain of events that would end in the sack of the capital of Ying by Wu forces: “This was the beginning of the loss of Ying,”

jokyé.”

9. This point is made by Mori Hideki in “Saden no yogen kiji ni mieru shiso no 10. Wu Kaisheng, Zuozhuan wei, p. 130.

i. Zuo, Xiang 29.3 (Yang, p. 1155). 12. Zuo, Xiang 30.1 (Yang, p. 1170). 13. Zuo, Xiang 30.11 (Yang, pp. 1178-79).

402 Notes to Pages 195-98 14. Zuo, Xiang 31.13 (Yang, pp. 1193-94).

15. Zuo, Zhao 1.13 (Yang, p. 1223). For three more predictions, see Zuo, Zhao 1.1 (Yang, pp. 1202-4), Zhao 1.3 (Yang, pp. 1207-8), and the very beginning of Zhao 1.13

(Yang, p. 1223). |

16. The move is foreseen at Zuo, Zhao 1.14 (Yang, p. 1225). Three years later, at Zhao 4.3 (Yang, pp. 1250-52), Chu does manage to organize a meeting of several states with Jin’s tacit approval. The major participants in the meeting are the rulers

of Cai, Chen, Zheng, and Xuu, along with the heir apparent of Song. Lu, Wey, Cao, and Zhu decline the invitation. Even the absence of these four states is a matter of prediction in Zhao 4.1 (Yang, p. 1248), where Zichan assures King Ling that he will get his way; the conversation is ominous in that it epitomizes the king’s unreflective lust for power. Observers see beyond Chu’s temporary dominance at Zuo, Zhao 4.1 (Yang, pp. 1246-7). Duke Ping of Jin is not at first inclined to permit the meeting but is even-

tually convinced by the argument that Heaven may be inciting the Chu king to greater excesses so that he can finally be punished. 17. These can be found at Zuo, Zhao 4.3 (Yang, p. 1252; Zichan gives the extrava-

gant king no more than ten years); Zhao 4.4 (Yang, p. 1254; the Chu minister Wuyu of Shen on the deceptive ease of the king’s military campaign); Zhao 5.4 (Yang, p. 1267; Shu Xiang of Jin on the king’s extravagance); Zhao 6.7 (Yang, p. 1279; Zheng ministers know that Prince Qiji of Chu will be king); Zhao 11.2 (Yang, pp. 1322-24; two predictions: Chang Hong of Zhou sees hidden trouble for Chu in the imminent annexation of Cai; Shu Xiang of Jin sees the same); Zhao 11.8 (Yang, p. 1327; Wuyu of Shen says the king will regret having made a human sacrifice); Zhao 11.10 (Yang, pp. 1327-9; Wuyu of Shen sees danger in placing strong members of the royal house in important border territories); Zhao 12.11 (Yang, p. 1340; ominous remarks from Chu court plotters); Zhao 13.2 (Yang, p. 1350; two predictions, both presented in analepsis: King Ling gets a negative answer when divining about the possibility of winning all under Heaven; and Shu Xiang of Jin, commenting on the candidates for the Chu throne, predicts that Prince Qiji will get it).

18. Zuo, Zhao 4.4 (Yang, p. 1253). | 19. “The allied forces”: these are the troops he had gathered this year (Zhao 4.3 [Yang, pp. 1250-52]) from other states with Jin’s acquiescence (Zhao 4.1 [Yang, pp. 1245-48). 20. Zuo, Zhao 7.6 (Yang, p. 1289).

21. Bows are often included in the gift lists of bronze inscriptions. At Xi 28.3 (Yang, p. 464) Duke Wen of Jin also receives a bow (among other things) when he is recognized by the Zhou king as hegemon. 22. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, 1: 64-70, argues that by judgment a reader of any historical work or, indeed, of any set of historical events, retrieves concordance from

Notes to Pages 198-202 4.03 the discordance of episodes and establishes a unity of plot and a concomitant sense of the ending of the story. What should be clear, in the study of Chinese historiography as in Ricoeur's investigations of French historiography, is that the conditions of judgment and narrative closure are determined partly from within the narrative, by the contents of the episodes themselves. The habits of early Chinese historiographers ensured that overtly aesthetic judgments pronounced in individual episodes would support the Kantian judgments by which readers apprehended the meaning

of larger narratives. 7

23. This pattern is best observed in the rearrangements of the text made by Ma Su and Gao Shiai. 24, See the list of offenses at Zuo, Zhao 13.2 (Yang, p. 1344). 25. Zuo, Zhao 13.2 (Yang, pp. 1346-47).

26. “My father twice violated the orders of the king. . .”: Zuo, Zhao 7.2 (Yang, pp. 1283-85), tells how Wuyu cut to pieces a royal flag that the king used when he was still only chief minister, and how Wuyu entered the king’s private palace to capture an escaped servant. On both occasions Wuyu speaks well enough to escape punishment. 27. The generalization of John Wang and others, that characters are static, is too broad; the king is the best, but not the only, example of a character who changes by repenting.

28. Zuo, Zhao 12.11 (Yang, pp. 1338-41). , 29. “Our former king Xiong Yi, together with Li Ji ...”: all are relatives or associates of founding Zhou kings enfeoffed as local rulers. “Riding in a cart of sticks .. .”: cf. Zuo, Xuan 12.2 (Yang, p. 731), where two other early rulers of Chu, Ruo’ao and Fen Mao, are said to have led a similar life. The language here may be formulaically associated with Chu’s history during the Western Zhou. “A bow of peach wood and arrows of thorn’: cf. Zuo, Zhao 4.2 (Yang, p. 1249), where the same items are part of an early ritual surrounding the storing of ice. “Kunwu”: Kunwu was a brother of Jilian, from whom the Chu royal lineage was descended. The state of Xuu had moved its capital, thus leaving behind its “old” ter-

262-63. ritory; see Yang, pp. 1339-40. |

“This is a good scribe”: cf. Zuo, Xuan 2.3 (Yang, p. 663), where Confucius calls Dong Hu of Jin a “good scribe of old.” The passage is discussed in Chapter 8, pp.

“Three Barrows ...”: the four works are not otherwise known, but see Takezoe,

“Saden” kaisen, 2: 1554, for various speculations.

“Qizhao”: according to Jia Kui, gi #7 is qiu 3K, “to seek,” and zhao #9 is ming BA, “clarity”; the clarity sought is that of virtue. Du Yu, however, relates gi to gifu 4 32, a Zhou official title equivalent to sima, and states that Zhao was the name of the

404 Notes to Pages 202-7 official. Kong Yingda follows Du, citing the “Jiugao” chapter of the Shangshu, where the term gifu iff 4¢ appears, apparently as an official title. He also notes that the Shi contains a “Qifu” #7 4¢ (Mao 185); see SSJZS 2: 2064.

“The king managed to die in the Zhi Palace”: ie., he did not die in the wilderness. The Zhi Palace is supposed to have been located in the territory that would later become the state of Zheng; see Yang, p. 1341; and Takezoe, “Saden” kaisen, p- 1555.

30. See again Zuo, Zhao 4.3 (Yang, pp. 1250-52), where the king, hosting his first international meeting, selects from a large set of rituals used by previous hegemons; and Zhao 4.4 (Yang, p. 1253), the execution of Qing Feng. A passage from Zhao 13.2 (Yang, p. 1344), discussed below, states quite clearly that the king's ritually improper treatment of various associates accounted for the rebellion that brought him down. 31. The execution of a similarly overdressed individual is related at Zuo, Ai 17.1 (Yang, pp. 1706-7). 32. The axe is also used metaphorically in Zuo, Ai 15.3 (Yang, p. 1692), where someone speculates that Heaven may be using the Chen family as an axe to cut down the Qi noble house. 33. Saussy, Ihe Problem of a Chinese Aesthetic, p. 122.

34. “To master oneself and to restore ritual propriety is humaneness”: the saying appears with a very slight variation at Lunyu 12.1. 35. Thus these marked judgments often address complete biographies and complete characters. See, e.g., Confucius’ judgments of Zang Wenzhong (Zuo, Wen

2.5 [Yang, pp. 525-26]), Dong Hu (Xuan 2.3 [Yang, p. 663]), Shu Xiang (Zhao 14.7 (Yang, p. 1367]), and Zichan (Zhao 20.9 [Yang, p. 1422]). The Confucius of the Lunyu is similarly interested in reaching judgments of historical events and characters.

36. See Genette, Narrative Discourse, p. 40, for definitions of these terms and discussion of their role in the construction of narratives. As I have indicated, the forward-looking habit of prediction is of extraordinary importance in Zuozhuan narrative; analepsis, too, is striking, both for its frequency and for the way it is marked. No European narrative genre known to me adopts the highly marked economy of balance that makes prolepsis and analepsis structurally indispensable in Zuozhuan narrative.

37. See Zuo, Zhao 13.2 (Yang, p. 1350). The second analepsis (King Gong's anomalous ritual for predicting who among his sons would be king), introduces the reign of King Ping, now just beginning. 38. Greimas, On Meaning, p. 105. 39. Outside historiography, too, writers affirm the place of exchange at the center of ritual interactions, which are conceived of as reciprocal and repetitive. In a very general but perceptive article on the subject, Yang Lien-sheng (Excursions in Sinology,

Notes to Pages 207-14 405 _ pp. 291-309) traced the concept of reciprocity in various texts (including Liji, Chungiu fanlu, and narrative fictions) and identified it as central to Chinese social organization since early times. He expanded on these ideas in his Zhongguo wenhua zhong ‘bao,’ ‘bao,’ ‘bao’ zhi yiyi.

40. Zuo, Xuan 4.2 (Yang, pp. 677-78). See discussion in Chapter 5, pp. 176-79. 41. Zuo, Huan 2.1-2.2 (Yang, pp. 85-90). See discussion in Chapter 2, p. 62.

42. Zuo, Cheng 2.2 (Yang, pp. 788-89). ,

43. Zuo, Xiang 10.2 (Yang, p. 976). 44. Zuo, Xiang 11.5 (Yang, pp. 993-94). 45. Zuo, Xi 28.3 (Yang, pp. 463-66). 46. Zuo, Zhao 15.7 (Yang, pp. 1371-74). 47. Zuo, Xiang 15.8 (Yang, p. 1024). 48. For Bian He, see Han Feizi, “He shi” (Chen Qiyou, 1: 238-39). 49. See the same metaphorical use of jade at Zuo, Zhao 16.3 (Yang, pp. 1381-82). 50. Although the Athenians are eager to give, Pericles says, “The feelings of one who owes us something lack the same enthusiasm, since he knows that, when he re-

pays our kindness, it will be more like paying back a debt than giving something spontaneously” (Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War, p. 147). 51. Mauss, The Gift, p. 23. 52. Derrida, Given Time, p. 13.

53. For a philosophical justification of exogamous marriage, see Guoyu, Jin 4.9 (p. 356).

54. Greimas, On Meaning, p. 99. For the distinction of levels, see p. 64. 55. Zuo, Cheng 3.4 (Yang, pp. 813-14). 56. Lianyin: the duties of this Chu official are unknown.

“Chu granted the request”: the plan to ransom Zhi Ying and the relationships that make the deal possible have been set up in Zuo, Cheng 2.6 (Yang, p. 804). “How will you repay me?”: in what seems to be an indication of formulaic habits in storytelling, King Cheng of Chu asks another Jin visitor, Chong’er, a similar set of questions about repayment. Cf. Zuo, Xi 23.6 (Yang, pp. 408-9). “He will not decay even in death”: this phrase is most famous for the way it designates an immortality achieved through famous virtue, deeds, and words (Zuo, Xiang 24.1 [Yang, pp. 1087-88]), but twice in the Zuozhuan (here and under very similar narrative and linguistic circumstances in Xi 33.3 [Yang, p. 500]), it refers to the prospective death of a virtuous man at home rather than abroad; for these fastidious characters, the memory that one wins for accepting a righteous death is lasting compensation for that death. See discussion in Chapter 8, pp. 259-61. 57. The notion of de as a gift to be repaid is made explicit in the lines from Shi, “Juxia” (Mao 218), cited at Zuo, Zhao 26.11 (Yang, p. 1480).

406 Notes to Pages 214-16 58. Corresponding to the exchange of disservices, at least in archaic usage, is the bad de (xiongde) or bedimmed de (hunde), a willing perversity that demands appropriate recompense in the form of revenge. As de comes to refer more abstractly to the possession and transmission of sanctioned patterns, thinkers no longer use the con-

cept of bad de. , |

59. See Xi 10.3 (Yang, pp. 334-35); Xuan 15.5 (Yang, p. 764); Zhao 7.9 (Yang,

p: 1291); and the demon at Cheng 10.4 (Yang, p. 849). | 60. Zuo, Zhao 5.4 (Yang, pp. 1267-69). See the discussion in Chapter 4, p- 144.

pp. 880-91). |

61. For the battle of Chengpu, see Zuo, Xi 28.3 (Yang, pp. 452-67). For Bi, see Xuan 12.2 (Yang, pp. 721-47). For the battle of Yan, see Zuo, Cheng 16.5 (Yang, 62. For two examples among many of bao denoting attacks made for revenge, see Zuo, Zhao 4.7 (Yang, p. 1255) and Zhao 5.8 (Yang, p. 1270). At Xi 33.3 (Yang, p. 500) and Wen 2.1 (Yang, p. 519), there is a complicated joke on the theme. A mem-

ber of a Qin army defeated by Jin is mistakenly allowed to return to Qin. Jin authorities have second thoughts and pursue him, but as he crosses the Yellow River

he shouts back that he is grateful for the Jin duke’s favor of letting him go and “within three years will bow in response to the lord’s gift.” The ironic use of ceremonial language is by no means unusual, as we will see in the next chapter; he means that he will lead another army against Jin. When that army is also defeated, Jin ridi-

gift.” ,

cules the threat, referring to the losers as “the army that bowed in response to the

63. Zuo, Wen 6.8 (Yang, pp. 552-53), shows quite clearly how ritual propriety is thought to put a stop to cycles of violent bao. 64. See discussion in Chapter 8, pp. 266-67. 65. Zuo, Xi 23.6 (Yang, pp. 404-11). Much has been written about the career of Chong’er. See Li Longxian, Jin Wen gong fuguo dingba kao; and Bissell, Literary Studies of Historical Texts. Because Confucius judged Duke Wen harshly (see Lunyu 14.15),

the question of the morality of his deeds has long occupied scholars; see Guan Xuhua, “Zuozhuan xiyi (4).”

66. Henri Maspero (La Chine antique, p. 261) believed that the adventures of Chong’er constituted a “roman historique,” dating to the fourth century, and should be considered not as a historical source but as a work of the imagination. 67. The ruler’s questioning of a foreign visitor, with occasional commonplaces like the question of rewards, is a type-scene. It is not an indication of stable habits

among Chu rulers dealing with Jin visitors but a result of stable tendencies in the

narrative discourse that produced such tales.

68. Zuo, Xi 28.3 (Yang, p. 458).

Notes to Pages 217-20 407

69. Zuo, Zhao 13.2 (Yang, p. 1344). 70. Wei Yan: Zuo, Xiang 30.11 (Yang, pp. 1178-79). , Xuu: Zuo, Zhao 9.2 (Yang, p. 1307). Ganxi: it is while hunting at Ganxi that the king hears Zige’s devastating remon-

strance (Zuo, Zhao 12.11 [Yang, pp. 1338-41]). , “The minister from Yue”: cf. Zuo, Zhao 4.3 (Yang, pp. 1250-52), where the Yue minister Changshou Guo is not mentioned; one supposes that the king had ample opportunity to offend his guests. “Chengran of Man”: according to Du Yu (cited at Yang, p. 1344), Chengran (lord of the Chu city of Man) is the son of Dou Weigui. The Duke of Cai is Prince Qiji, the future King Ping and himself a younger brother of King Ling. 71. Zuo, Xi 23.6 (Yang, pp. 405-8). 72. Zuo, Xi 24.1 (Yang, pp. 416-17). 73. Zuo, Xi 26.6 (Yang, pp. 441-42), 27.4 (Yang, pp. 444-47), 28.3 (Yang, pp. 452-67), 74. Zuo, Xi 23.6 (Yang, pp. 406-8). — 75. Luo, Xi 28.3 (Yang, pp. 462-63); Xi 30.3 (Yang, p. 479). The Wey duke, who flees his state in fear after the Jin victory, also makes peace afterward.

76. Zuo, Xi27.4 (Yang, p.447). 77, Zifan: Hu Yan, Chong’er’s trusted companion throughout his wanderings

and into the years of his reign. ,

King Xiang: see Xi 25.2 (Yang, pp. 431-34). “Do not display their use of it”: Legge follows Du Yu: “and do not understand how they are to be employed”; see The Chinese Classics, 5: 201. I follow Takezoe, “Saden” kaisen, 1: 518.

Yuan: cf. Xi 25.4 (Yang, pp. 434-36), where the duke, besieging the city of Yuan with only enough provisions for three days, withdraws after three days, although the city is on the verge of surrender. His army learns good faith, and Yuan surrenders

voluntarily. , :

“Grand military review’: this seems to have taken the form of a hunt; with the “administrator,” it is mentioned again at Zhao 29.5 (Yang, p. 1504), where Confu-

cius praises Duke Wen’s measures. ! Gu: see Xi 26.6 (Yang, p. 442), 28.3 (Yang, p. 456); Chu forces stayed near the Qi city for two years. Chu besieged Song because it switched its loyalties to Jin; see Xi 26.6 (Yang, pp. 441-42), 27.4 (Yang, pp. 444-45). 78. Marcel Granet (Danses et légendes de la Chine ancienne, 1: 79-108) emphasizes

the role of material and symbolic commerce in the making of the Spring and

Autumn period hegemon. a _

408 Notes to Pages 222-24 Chapter 7 1. For an exploration of the idea of desire and repression as a motive force in natratives, see P. Brooks, Reading for the Plot, pp. 37-61. The repressed that returns in Fredric Jameson's readings of narratives and literary criticism in The Political Unconscious is social contradiction of every sort. Foucault, in the first volume of The History of Sexuality, depicted a discursive mechanism—our own—in which the marking of sexuality as the repressed contributes richly to the production both of narratives and of other forms of public utterance. 2. One exception is the “Jiugao” chapter of the Shangshu, with its praise of King Wen’s moderate sacrificial use of liquor and its corresponding condemnation of the last Yin king's indulgence in drinking. Certain Shi poems celebrate the pleasures of the feast, but they do not provide the sort of narrative demonstrations of the dangers of pleasure that abound in historiography. 3. Later Warring States and Han lore continued to produce narratives of dangerous aesthesis, which in many of their historical details contradict the Zuozhuan.

, The numerous pre-Han and Han anecdotes concerning King Zhuang of Chu, for instance, show a strong desire on the part of narrators to tell stories of royal luxury and excess. Yet few of these anecdotes find support in the more authoritative and more widely believed accounts of the Zuozhuan, and most of them are so popular as to have been told of other kings as well. See, e.g., the legend that King Zhuang did not attend court for three years after his accession, found in Liishi chungiu (Chen Qiyou, Liishi chungiu jiaoshi, 2: 1156). The story does not appear in Zuozhuan or Guoyu but is told of King Zhuang in at least three other texts, each time with a different minister delivering variations on the same indirect remonstrance; see Chen Qiyou, Hanfeizi jishi, 1: 412-13; Shiji 40.1700; and Xiang Zonglu, Shuoyuan jiaozheng, p. 208.

The same story is told of King Wei of Qi at Shiji 126.3197. The interest in aesthetics was an abiding one, and there is little reason to assume that the Zuozhuan initiated the trend rather than itself following an existing tradition. 4. Xunzi's explanations of the connections among ritual propriety, aesthetics, and historical explanation closely resemble those implied by the historiographers; see S. Cook, “Xun Zi on Ritual and Music,” esp. p. 19. 5. Mencius 6A.7. Eastern Zhou historiography gives no full enumeration of the five senses, but see Guoyu, Zhou 2.6 (p. 65); and Zuo, Zhao 25.3 (Yang, pp. 1457-59). | 6. Zuo, Xiang 27.2 (Yang, p. 1127). 7. Zuo, Xi 24.3 (Yang, pp. 426-27). The junzi cites the Shi twice and the Shangshu

once to construct a little essay on “the fitting” (chen). According to Yang (p. 426),

. the collector acts inappropriately because he is not an astronomer. But Yan Shigu (581-645), cited in Zhao Guangxian, “Zuozhuan bianzhuan kao,” pt. I, p. 138, argued

Notes to Pages 224-26 409 | that the junzi commentator misinterpreted in this instance and that Zizang was collecting not the caps but the astronomers themselves. 8, Zuo, Xi 28.4 (Yang, pp. 467-68). 9. Zuo, Xiang 14.4 (Yang, p. 101); Zhao 12. (Yang, p. 1338). Duke Xian is later restored. 10. Zuo, Xuan 9.6 (Yang, pp. 701-2). 1. Zuo, Ai 17.1 (Yang, pp. 1706-7). The tent or its supporting frame was decorated with tiger patterns. 12. Zuo, Min 2.5 (Yang, pp. 265-66). 13. Zuo, Ding 4.1 (Yang, p. 1534).

14. Zuo, Min 2.7 (Yang, pp. 269-72); Guoyu, Jin 1.9 (pp. 279-81). 15, See the discussion in Chapter 4, p. 153. 16, See the divination at Zuo, Xi 4.6 (Yang, pp. 295-96). Lady Li’s machinations

are narrated at Zhuang 28.2 (Yang, pp. 239-42), Xi 4.6 (Yang, pp. 295-99), and elsewhere, and in more detail in Guoyu, Jin 1.3 (pp. 261-63), Jin 1.4 (pp. 264-65), Jin 1.6 (pp. 268-70), Jin 1.8 (pp. 274-78), and Jin 2.1 (pp. 285-93). 17. Zuo, Xuan 9.6 (Yang, pp. 701-3), Xuan 10.4 (Yang, pp. 707-8). 18. Zuo, Cheng 2.6 (Yang, pp. 803-6). 19. Zuo, Cheng 7.5 (Yang, pp. 833-35). See discussion in Chapter 8, p. 289.

20. Zuo, Zhao 28.2 (Yang, pp. 1491-93). The dynasty-ending femmes fatales, whom the speaker does not name, are Mei Xi of the Xia, Da Ji of the Shang, and Bao Si of the Western Zhou. 21. Zuo, Zhao 28.2 (Yang, pp. 1491-92). Beautiful young men are as dangerous as beautiful women. See Guoyu, Chu 1.5 (p. 542), where King Ling of Chu is said to have staffed his Zhanghua Terrace (a famous architectural extravagance of the age; see discussion below, pp. 227-28) with “richly beautiful youths” (fudu nashu) and “long-bearded fellows” (changlie zhi shi). In a similar correlation of architectural and sexual excess, an illness of Duke Ping of Jin is diagnosed as the result of keeping in his harem concubines who share his surname; see Zuo, Zhao 1.12 (Yang, pp. 121723). This is the same duke whose construction of the Sigi Palace alienates his allies at Zuo, Zhao 8.1 (Yang, pp. 1300-301). |

22, See the discussion of Ji Zha in Chapter 2, pp. 86-94, and of Shi Kuang in Chapter 3, pp. 117-20. 23. See the discussion in Chapter 3, pp. 113-17. 24. Zuo, Huan 9.4 (Yang, p. 126). The heir’s father dies the next year (Zuo, Huan 10.1 [Yang, p. 127]). Sighing is one of the physical expressions controlled by the texts’ implicit bodily discipline: see the remonstrance against Wei Shu’s intention to re-

ceive a bribe at Zuo, Zhao 28.4 (Yang, pp. 1496-97), translated and discussed in Schaberg, “Remonstrance in Eastern Zhou Historiography,” pp. 175-77.

410 Notes to Pages 226-27 25. Zuo, Xiang 26.10 (Yang, p. 1120); cf. Guoyu, Zhou 1.1 (pp. 28-29), where the same tradition is reported. 26. See Zuo, Zhuang 20.1 (Yang, p. 215), Xiang 23.1 (Yang, p. 1072), the excellent indirect remonstrance by the master butcher Kuai at Zhao 9.5 (Yang, p. 1311-12), Zhao 15.7 (Yang, p. 1374), and Guoyu, Zhou 1.0 (pp. 28-29). 27. See Lunyu 15.11 and 17.18 (along with disapproval of extravagance in 2.2 and 3.20). Zuo, Xiang 15.4 (Yang, p. 1023), includes an attack on the music and musicians given to the Song court by Zheng. On the new music (xinsheng), see Guoyu, Jin 8.7 (pp. 460-61), where Shi Kuang makes dire predictions based on Duke Ping’s love of this music; Wei Zhao cites an anecdote (preserved in Shiji 24.1235-36) about a Wey duke’s discovery of a mournful music played near the Pu River, which he presents to the Jin court. Thus the “new music” is the Pu River music. For the dangerous music

of the Mulberry Grove (sangjian zhi yue), see Zuo, Xiang 10.2 (Yang, pp. 977-78), | where Duke Dao of Jin becomes ill after being entertained in Song with the music and dance sacred to the Sanglin spirit. Liji, “Yueji” (SSJZS 2: 1528), brings these together: “The sounds of Zheng and Wey are the sounds of a chaotic age... . The sounds from the Mulberry Grove and the Pu River are the sounds of a dying state.” 28. Zuo, Xiang 11.5 (Yang, pp. 993-94); cf. Guoyu, Jin 7.8 (p. 443), which lacks the

disquisition on musical pleasure and political harmony. At Zuo, Cheng 2.2 (Yang, pp. 788-89), Confucius is made to criticize a gift of musical instruments (here categorized with other ritual vessels) in recognition of an act of military heroism: “Vessels and names cannot be lent to people; they are what the ruler has care of. By means of names one promotes good faith; by means of good faith one preserves one’s vessels; by means of vessels one stores up ritual propriety.” At Lunyu 18.4, Confucius leaves the state to express his disapproval of an inappropriate gift of musicians and

dancers. ,

Related to music is dance. Fewer anecdotes in historiography relate to the aesthetics of dance than to other performances, but the dangers are the same: unsanctioned excess and usurpation turn righteous pleasure into danger, and dance represents interiority of various sorts. See, e.g., Zuo, Zhao 25.6 (Yang, p. 1462), where the temple of the deceased Duke Xiang lacks dancers because the powerful Ji family has commandeered them, and Xiang 16.1 (Yang, pp. 1026-27), where a minister's dance, and its failure to match his song, signals rebellious intent. See also Lunyu, 3.1, 3.2.

29. See the discussion in Chapter 8, pp. 281-82. 30. For physical comfort as the fifth sense, see Wang Xiangian, Xunzi jijie, 1: 63. For a narrative in which physical discomfort resulting from a woman’s mischievous play is depicted as the first cause of an interstate crisis, see Zuo, Xi 3.5 (Yang, p. 286), and Xi 4.1 (Yang, pp. 288-93).

31. Chungiu, Zhuang 23.8 (Yang, p- 225), Zhuang 24.1 (Yang, p. 227); Zuo, Zhuang 23.3 (Yang, p. 227), Zhuang 24.1 (Yang, p. 229); Guoyu, Lu 1.3 (p. 155).

: Notes to Pages 227-29 4ll 32. Guoyu, Jin 8.14 (pp. 469-70). For a remark by Confucius on pillar carving and

rafter painting, see Lunyu 5.18. | 33. Zuo, Zhao 9.7 (Yang, pp. 1312-13). Here, as elsewhere, the Shi poem “Lingtai” (Mao 242) is cited as an account of King Wen’s correct use of the people in a con-

struction project. The same poem is cited by Mencius at 1A.2 and by Wu Ju at

Guoyu, Chu 1.5 (pp. 541-45). | 34. See Zuo, Xuan 2.3 (Yang, p. 655; Duke Ling of Jin taxes heavily to decorate the walls of his palace); Xiang 17.6 (Yang, pp. 1032-33; Duke Ping of Song and his minister Huang Guofu); Ai 17.5 (Yang, p. 1710; a Wey duke overworks his carpenters), Ai 25.1 (Yang, p. 1725; Wey carpenters’ discontent). 35. Zuo, Xiang 31.3 (Yang, pp. 1184-85). 36. Guoyu, Jin 9.19 (p. sor).

37. Zuo, Zhao 8.1 (Yang, pp. 1300-301). See discussion in Chapter 3, pp. 18-19. The fulfillment of the prediction comes at Zhao 13.3 (Yang, p. 1353), with specific reference to the construction project: “When Jin completed Sigi, all the state rulers

who paid court visits went home with rebellious thoughts.” | 38. Guoyu, Chu 1.5 (pp. 541-45). The Zuozhuan anecdotes concerning the Zhanghua Terrace (Zhao 7.3 [Yang, pp. 1285-87], Zhao 7.6 [Yang, p. 1289]) do not include this lengthy remonstrance. For one parallel in Mencius, see 1B.1. 39. For episodes in which food and gifts of food have historically significant consequences, see Qian Zhongshu, Guanzhui bian, 1: 201-2.

40. Zuo, Xi 5.8 (Yang, p. 309).

(Yang, p. 296). ,

41. For fragrant and malodorous plants in prophetic language, see Zuo, Xi 4.6

pp. 176-79. | 42. See Zuo, Xuan 4.2 (Yang, pp. 677-78), translated and discussed in Chapter 5,

43. As Mencius 6A.10 suggests. , 44. Zuo, Wen 1.7 (Yang, p. 515). _ 45. Zuo, Xuan 2.3 (Yang, pp. 655-56).

46. Zuo, Xiang 28.9 (Yang, p. 1146). 7 47. Guoyu, Chu 1.3 (pp. 32-33); see also Chapter 4, p. 129.

48. Zuo, Xi 30.4 (Yang, pp. 482-83). , | , 49. See, e.g., Zuo, Zhao 10.2 (Yang, pp. 1315-16), Zhao 11.2 (Yang, p. 1323). 50. Zuo, Xiang 30.10 (Yang, p. 1175); he dies shortly thereafter (Yang, p. 1177). It

is worth recalling that Chong’er was dragged away from a life of comfortable exile and obscurity in Qi only when his ministers got him drunk and conveyed him out of the country unconscious; see Zuo, Xi 23.6 (Yang, p. 407). Drink makes one peevish when one cannot afford to be peevish. At Zuo, Xiang 22.1 (Yang, p. 1065), the Lu minister Zang Wuzhong is on his way to Jin when it begins to rain. His visit to the overseer of a Lu city interrupts the man’s drinking; the overseer mocks Zang as a

412 Notes to Pages 229-32 sage who cannot stay out of the rain. The Lu administration doubles the overseer’s taxes. 51. Zuo, Xiang 23.5 (Yang, pp. 1078-79). 52. “A mat of double thickness”: Yang, p. 1079, cites Yili, “Xiang yinjiu li” on the height of mats appropriate to different ranks. Here the mat signals the special status

granted to Daozi. 53. Zuo, Xiang 23.5 (Yang, pp. 1079-80).

54. Under the single term “banquet,” I combine a number of different types of gathering: the rather formal ritual xiang 48 or xiang #; the less formal yan &, which often followed the xiang and occasional gatherings for which there is no set Chinese term. 55. Zuo, Zhao 20.8 (Yang, pp. 1419-20). 56. The first Shi cited is “Liezu” (Mao 302). “The two forms”: according to Du, cited in Yang, p. 1420, these are the wen and the wu, the civil and military styles of dance. “The three genres”: Du identifies these as the three major sections of the Shi, “Feng,” “Ya,” and “Song.” “The four materials”: according to Du, materials obtained from the four quarters of the world and used in

the making of musical instruments. “The five tones”: the notes of the pentatonic scale. “The six pitches”: these, with their changed forms, make up the twelve halfsteps of the octave. “The seven notes”: the notes of the heptatonic scale. “The eight airs”: the winds that arise from the four cardinal directions with the added half-

| points. “The nine songs”: see Chuci, “Lisao” and “Tianwen” for association of the “Jiu ge” with Qi, the son of Yu and the first dynastic ruler of the Xia. As “Jiu ge” (which comprises eleven songs) shows, the title is somewhat loose. Zuo, Wen 7.8 (Yang, pp. 563-64), cites a passage from a now-lost section of the “Xiashu,” implying that the nine songs were to be matched with nine types of achievements (jiu gong), which include three political services and six materials, i.e., the Five Phases plus grain.

The second Shi cited is “Langba” (Mao 160). | 57. For the problems involved in referring to a “literal meaning” in Shi lines like this one, see Saussy, The Problem of a Chinese Aesthetic, pp. 13-17, 22. On deyin, see Kern, Die Hymnen der chinesischen Staatsopfer, pp. 138-39.

58. Another example is Zuo, Cheng 14.1 (Yang, p. 869), where the Jin minister Xi Chou (known as Kucheng Shu) behaves arrogantly at a feast hosted by Duke Ding

of Wey (r. 588-577). Ning Huizi of Wey makes the inevitable prediction, citing a poem and defining the purpose of banquets in the process: “The family of Kucheng Shu will perish! The banquets of old were for the observation of dignity and deportment and the scrutiny of blessings and disasters. Thus the Shi [“Sanghu” (Mao 215)] says, ‘Curved are their goblets of horn / and mild the fine brew within. / Their exchange is not arrogant, / and they gather around them myriad blessings.’ Now this man’s arrogance is a way of bringing on disaster.” Again, the mildness (rou) of the

Notes to Pages 232-34 413 drink in the lines of the poem stands for the mildness of the banqueters’ spirits, which determine the blessings or disasters that the scrutinizing (xing) observer discerns. See also Zuo, Zhao 1.4 (Yang, p. 1209), where in an interpretation of Shi, “Caifan” (Mao 13), small states are compared to the tributary food that the great state must use frugally in sacrifice and banquet. On the harmony/identity distinc-

tion and its aesthetic implications in a comparative light, see Qian Zhongshu, Guanzhui bian, 1: 236-38.

59. This is the argument of Zhang Gaoping, “Zuozhuan meixue di hexie lilun.” 60. Guoyu, Zhou 2.6 (p. 65); cf. Zuo, Xuan 16.4 (Yang, pp. 769-70), which lacks the aesthetic elaboration. 61. Zuo, Zhao 25.3 (Yang, pp. 1457-58). 62. Du, cited in Yang, pp. 1457-58, explains the several sets. “Six domestic animals”: horse, ox, sheep, chicken, dog, pig. “Five victims”: ox, sheep, pig, dog, chicken. “Three sacrifices”: ox, sheep, pig. “Six color-mixtures”: dark blue (ging), white (bai), red (chi), black (hei), jet (xuan), and yellow (huang). “Five color-pattern”: mixtures of green and red, red and white, white and black, black and green, and of all five colors.

“The five flavors” are sour, bitter, acrid, savory, and sweet. “The nine weavepatterns” include such weaves as dragon, mountain, and fire. The musical terms are explained above in connection with Yanzi’s speech; see note 56 to this chapter. 63. See the argument at Zuo, Zhao 5.4 (Yang, pp. 1267-68), that the banquet, with all of its objects and ceremonies, was for the sage-kings the acme of ritual. 64. The special style of diplomatic language has been the subject of several articles. See Wu Huihua, “Zuozhuan waijiao ciling tanxi”; and Gan Peigin, “Shixi Zuozhbuan waijiao ciling.” On cynicism and hypocrisy in diplomatic language, see Guan Xuhua, “Zuozhuan xiyi (5).” Witty and stylized battlefield exchanges are discussed below.

65. The practice of poetry recitation has been the subject of a great deal of schol-

arship. Recitation scenes are listed and discussed in Zhang Suqing, “Zuozhuan” chengshi yanjiu; Zeng Qinliang, “Zuozhuan” yinshi fushi zhi shijiao yanjiu; and Koo-yin Tam, “The Use of Poetry in Tso Chuan.” See also Van Zoeren, Poetry and Personality, pp- 38-44.

The Guoyu generally makes much less use of Shi poems and includes only one recitation scene, an expanded version of Zuo, Xi 23.6: Jin 4.10 (p. 360; the poems cited are Mao 222, 227, 1962, 1832, 177).

Besides the performance for Ji Zha, there are several other instances of musicians’ singing the poems and perhaps accompanying themselves as part of court entertainment: Zuo, Xiang 4.3 (Yang, p. 932; Mao 235-37, 161-63) / Guoyu, Lu 2.1 (p. 185; Mao 235-37, 161-63); Xiang 14.4 (Yang, p. 1011; Mao 198); Xiang 28.9 (Yang, p. 1149; the lost poem “Maochi’).

414 Notes to Pages 234-38 The practice of fushi duanzhang “breaking off stanzas while reciting poetry” is ex-

plicitly discussed at Zuo, Xiang 28.9 (Yang, pp. 1145-46). 66. Failures of understanding: Zuo, Xiang 28.9 (Yang, p. 1149), Zhao 12.3 (Yang, p. 1332). Predictions: Xiang 27.5 (Yang, p. 1135), Xiang 27.8 (Yang, p. 1138). 67. Guoyu, Lu 2.15 (p. 210). The line might also be understood to mean that the

poem is that by which the intentions are “matched,” i.e., expressed in words; that interpretation is unlikely, given the rest of the Guoyu passage, which has to do with bringing two houses together through marriage. This pronouncement about poetry echoes more famous formulations in Shangshu, “Yao dian” and in the “Great Preface” to the Shi. See also Zuo, Xiang 27.5 (Yang, p. 1135).

68. See Zuo, Xi 23.6 (Yang, p. 410), Wen 13.5 (Yang, pp. 598-99), Zhao 2.1 (Yang, pp. 1227-28). 69. Zuo, Zhao 1.3 (Yang, pp. 1207-8). “Great Brightness” is “Daming” (Mao 236).

“Diminutive” is “Xiaoyuan” (Mao 196); for the title of the latter, I follow Allen in Waley, Book of Songs, p. 176.

70. Zuo, Xiang 31.13 (Yang, pp. 1193-95). See translation and discussion in

Chapter 1, pp. 30-34. , 71. Zhao 1.4 (Yang, pp. 1208-10).

72. Zipi: the Zheng minister Han Hu. “Reported to Zhao Meng”: i.e., invited him to the banquet; see Takezoe, “Saden”

, kaisen, 2: 1378; Yang, p. 1208.

“Calabash Leaves”: “Huye” (Mao 231). | “One toast”: Yang, pp. 1208-9, discusses the regulations given in ritual texts for the number of toasts appropriate to entertainments of different ranks. According to Du Yu, cited here, five was the right number for the chief minister of a great state and thus was appropriate for Zhao Meng of Jin. “Magpie’s Nest”: “Quechao” (Mao 12).

“Gathering Artemisia”: “Caifan” (Mao 13). , “In the Wilds There Is a Dead Deer”: “Ye you sijun” (Mao 23).

“The Wild Plum”: “Changdi” (Mao 164). | 73. See Mao commentary and Zheng Xuan’s remarks on “Quechao,” in SSJZS 1:

1360-47. | |

283. For a recent discussion of xing, see Saussy, The Problem of a Chinese Aesthetic, pp.

74. The line zhizi yu gui is a formula, and appears in “T'aoyao” (Mao 6), “Hanguang” (Mao 9), “Yanyan” (Mao 28), and “Dongshan” (Mao 156). Mao 6, 28, and 156 strongly suggest a wedding theme, and Mao 9, though more enigmatic, does not rule out that theme. See C. H. Wang, The Bell and the Drum, pp. 50-57. 75. See Takezoe, “Saden” kaisen, 2: 1380; and Yang, p. 1209. For the episode of Mushu’s arrest and pardon, see Zuo, Zhao 1.2 (Yang, pp. 1204-7). Du Yu argues in-

| stead that the duke of Jin is the builder of the nest that Zhao Meng occupies; see

Notes to Pages 238-43 415 SSJZS 2: 2021. Takezoe and Yang also note that Zhao Meng has figuratively built a nest of safety in which the smaller states take shelter from the threat of Chu. 76. Zuo, Zhao 1.5 (Yang, pp. 1210-11).

77. As both Takezoe and Yang note, this is the only instance in the Zuozhuan of a reciter offering an interpretation of his own text. 78. I have slightly alrered the translation of Karlgren, “Glosses on the Kuo Feng Odes,” gl. 39, who judges from the last line that the subject of actions throughout the poem should be “she.” For diplomatic purposes, the implied pronoun must be less specific.

79. See the performance of sequential sets of poems in Zuo, Xiang 4.3 (Yang, pp. 932-34) / Guoyu, Lu 2.1 (pp. 185-86). 80. Sexual conduct is not a problem in itself; it only becomes a theme when it is

coupled with some other impropriety, like the neglect of duties or wrong choice of partners. See Zuo, Yin 8.4 (Yang, pp. 8-59), where a man sleeps with his wife before the marriage has been reported to the temple. The Mao commentary on “Ye you sijun” and the Zheng Xuan exegesis of the poem, SSJZS 1: 292-93, recognize the matrimonial theme. 81. Cf. Zuo, Xi 24.2 (Yang, pp. 423-24), Xiang 20.6 (Yang, p. 1054), Zhao 7.11 (Yang, p. 1294); and Guoyu, Zhou 2.1 (p. 45). In the Shi as we have it now, “Changdi” comes directly after “Luming,” “Simu,”

and “Huanghuang zhe hua” (Mao 161-63), the three poems that, according to Mushu of Lu (Zuo, Xiang 4.3 / Guoyu, Lu 2.1), have designated functions in diplo-

matic entertainment. The present scene, with Wen 4.7 (Yang, pp. 535-36) and Xiang 20.6 (Yang, pp. 1054~-55), may indicate that “Changdi” had a similar function. 82. Yang, p. 1209; and Takezoe, “Saden” kaisen, 2: 1381.

83. See Zuo, Zhao 1.5 (Yang, pp. 1210-11), Zhao 1.8 (Yang, pp. 1214-15), and Zhao 1.12 (Yang, pp. 1222-23).

, 84. Zuo, Zhao 1.12 (Yang, pp. 1221-23). The duke dies at Zhao 10.4 (Yang, p. 1318).

85. Zuo, Zhao 1.15 (Yang, p. 1225). |

86. The connection between aesthetic judgment and the intelligibility of historical narrative is discussed in Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, 1: 66, 156. 87. On warfare in the Zuozhuan, see Kierman, “Phases and Modes of Combat in

Early China’; Huang Pumin, “Zuozhuan junshi sixiang jianxi”; and Wang Zhiping and Wu Minxia, “Lun Zuozhuan zai Zhongguo junshi xueshu shi shang di diwei.” The Zuozhuan's major military narratives are the battles of Hann, at Xi 15.4 (Yang, pp: 351-65); Chengpu, at Xi 28.3 (Yang, pp. 452-67); Bi, at Xuan 12.2 (Yang, pp. 721-47); An, at Cheng 2.3 (Yang, pp. 789-803); and Yanling, at Cheng 16.5 (Yang, pp. 880-91). Large-scale battle narratives are rarer in the second half of the work,

416 Notes to Pages 244-49 but see Xiang 10.2 (Yang, pp. 974-78), Xiang 18.3 (Yang, pp. 1035-40), and Ai 11.1 (Yang, pp. 1657-61) and 11.3 (Yang, pp. 1661-64).

88. Zuo, Cheng 12.4 (Yang, pp. 857-58). 89. The citations are from Shi, “Tuju” (Mao 7).

90. Battle can be forestalled by a stylized submission that represents the ruler of | one state as the slave of his enemy. For this form of ritualized scapegoating, see Zuo, Xuan 12.2 (Yang, pp. 719-20) and Xiang 25.5 (Yang, p. 1103). 91. Guoyu, Jin 4.19 (p. 380).

92. At Zuo, Xi 21.2 (Yang, pp. 390-91), Duke Xi of Lu responds to a serious drought by preparing to burn the shamans and hunchbacks; he is dissuaded by the famous Zang Wenzhong. On human sacrifice and control of the weather, see Schafer, “Ritual Exposure in Ancient China”; and Allan, “Drought, Human Sacrifice and the Mandate of Heaven.” There is a curious parallel in Herodotus (The Histories, pp. 75~76), where the word of wisdom that stops the sacrifice is “Solon,” and Apollo sends rain to extinguish the pyre.

93. Zuo, Xuan 17.1 (Yang, pp. 771-72). 94. Zuo, Cheng 2.3 (Yang, pp. 793-95).

95. “The left and right”: in the ancient Chinese chariot, the driver stood in the center, the noble rider stood on the left as archer or drummer, and on the right was another rider who leaped from the chariot to push it over uneven terrain. “Feng Choufu traded places with the [Qi] duke”: after this switch, the duke is standing on the right, a position normally reserved for men of lower status, and Feng Choufu is standing in the place of and posing as the duke of Qi. “To replace what is lacking”: in one sense Han Jue is making up for the failure he has just claimed to have committed, but as the next events show, he is also taking the Qi duke prisoner by offering to serve him as substitute minister. 96. The scenes of substitution and mimicry discussed here and below constitute early Chinese historiography’s version—explicitly politicized and rationalized—of a pattern found throughout early myth. See Girard, Violence and the Sacred; and for the soldier-companion as surrogate and substitute, see Nagy, The Best of the Achaeans, pp. 292~93.

97. The metaphor is something of a commonplace. See, e.g., Zuo, Cheng 12.4 (Yang, p. 858), in which ministers are compared to “belly and heart” (fuxin), to | “limbs” (gugong), and to “claws and teeth” (zhaoya). 98. For the continuity of local and royal governmental schemes, see Chapter 4, pp: 148-49. 99. Zuo, Cheng 3.9 (Yang, pp. 815-16). 100. As Yang (p. 815) notes, both Guoyu and Shiji take this gift to mean that Qi.

recognizes Jin as king; it may, however, simply be a feature of ordinary interstate visits on this level.

Notes to Pages 249-53 417 101. Yang, p. 816.

102. Zuo, Cheng 16.5 (Yang, pp. 887-88); cf. Guoyu, Jin 6.4 (p. 415). , 103. “Outland minister”: the translation is awkward, but Xi is calling himself a minister of the Chu king despite the fact that he serves the Jin court. Legge’s (The Chinese Classics, 5: 397) translation, “the minister of another State,” does not capture the transference Xi makes. “I dare not bow in response to your command”: Yang, p. 887, cites texts showing that soldiers in armor do not perform the normal ritual bows. The anecdote makes it certain that Xi Zhi is to be lauded for his actions, but in

Zuo, Cheng 17.10 (Yang, pp. 900-901), his actions make it easier for the slanderer Luan Shu to accuse Xi Zhi of spying for Chu; Xi Zhi and the rest of his family are killed. On Luan’s motives, see also Guoyu, Jin 6.3 (p. 414). 104. Zuo, Cheng 16.5 (Yang, p. 889). 105. Luan Zhen: right-hand man on the chariot of Duke Li of Jin. Zichong: the Chu chief minister Prince Yingqi. 106. The word shi means both “to remember” and “to recognize.” The ability to

recall individuals and appraise their acts at the proper moral value is a quality Zichong has and recognizes in his counterpart. 107. See the discussion in Chapter 6, pp. 218-19. 108. Zuo, Xi 28.3 (Yang, pp. 459-60). 109. “How would we have presumed to face the lord [of Chu]?”: See Takezoe, “Saden” kaisen, 1: 533; and Legge, The Chinese Classics, 5: 209. Yang (p. 460) interprets

this as “We thought that the minister would retreat; how could he presume to face a lord?” Such an interpretation would violate the continuity of the speech, which follows the order of Chong’er’s promise at Xi 23.6 (Yang, pp. 408-9).

110. See Zuo, Xi 23.6 (Yang, p. 409); and the discussion in Chapter 6, pp. 216-17.

i. Cf. Shi, “Yi” (Mao 256), stanza 5, line 5; and “Chengong” (Mao 276), line 2. 112. For An, see Zuo, Cheng 2.3 (Yang, p. 790), where the phrase is “for tomorrow morning we request an audience” (jiezhao ging jian). See also Cheng 16.5 (Yang, p- 886), where the Chu king forbids a braggart archer to use his weapons “tomorrow morning” (jiezhao).

| 113. See Kierman, “Phases and Modes of Combat in Early China,” pp. 36-38. One of the finest scenes is Zuo, Xiang 24.8 (Yang, pp. 1091-92). 114. See Zuo, Xi 15.4 (Yang, p. 356), Cheng 2.3 (Yang, pp. 790-91). 115. Zuo, Xuan 12.2 (Yang, pp. 733-34). 16. The use of gan, “dare” or “presume,” ru, “to deign” or “to condescend,” and ming, “command,” is typical of formal diplomatic speech and especially of these invitations to battle. See again Xi 15.4, Cheng 2.3, and Cheng 16.5, all cited above.

418 Notes to Pages 253-59 117. As often, it is hard to say whose command is to be obeyed. Yang (p. 734) takes it as the Jin duke’s command, whereas Legge (The Chinese Classics, 5: 318) translates: “We will not slink away from any commands you may lay on us.” 118. Zuo, Xuan 12.2 (Yang, pp. 734-36). 119. On connections between play and battle, see Qian Zhongshu, Guanzhui bian, I: 194-98. 120. “A judgment of taste must involve a claim to subjective universality” (Kant, Critique of Judgment, p. 54; see also pp. 159-62). Historiography, which constantly

vindicates such claims by linking them to predictions and narrative fulfillments, gives substance to a subjective universality closely tied to Confucian precepts.

Chapter 8 1. Jameson, The Political Unconscious, p. 79. “Ideology” is a term that always re-

quires definition. For Jameson, as for Althusser, it is “a representational structure which allows the individual subject to conceive or imagine his or her lived relationship to transpersonal realities such as the social structure or the collective logic of History” (ibid., p. 30). Raymond Williams (Keywords, p. 156) distinguishes two senses of the term in the writings of Marx and Engels; ideology is, on the one hand, false consciousness and illusion and, on the other, a more conscious “set of ideas which arise from a given set of material interests or, more broadly, from a definite class or group.” Nothing in the Chinese sources allows us to determine how conscious the historiographers were that their narratives expressed the interests of their class.

2. The best-known effort to date to reconstruct social relations in pre-Qin China is Hsu Cho-yun’s Ancient China in Transition, recently updated in Hsu's contribution to Loewe and Shaughnessy, Cambridge History of Ancient China. I challenge Hsu's view of the Zuozhuan as a fundamentally reliable, complete, and ideologically inert account of Spring and Autumn history, but I find useful his observations on the social relations of the early Warring States period, the era when schoolmen would

have been actively involved in the making of the Zuozhuan and Guoyu. | 3. As Albert Lord (The Singer of Tales, pp. 102-3) wrote, “The words ‘author’ and ‘original’ have either no meaning at all in oral tradition or a meaning quite different from the one usually assigned to them. ... A song has no ‘author’ but a multiplicity

of authors, each singing being a creation, each singing having its own single ‘author.’” See also the discussion in the Appendix. 4. Clichéd characterizations of the neglected scholar’s plight—‘“the scholar not encountering his proper era” (shi bu yushi) and the like—are the legacy of pre-Qin Confucian ressentiment. For a discussion of the topos, see Wilhelm, “The Scholar's

Frustration.” , ,

Notes to Pages 259-62 419 5. “But such reports and descriptions are not read by a historian as informative utterances testifying (correctly or incorrectly) to what they report; they are constituents of the performative utterances (addressed, not to posterity or to some future historian, but to contemporaries) in which their authors were responding to their current situations” (Oakeshott, On History and Other Essays, p. 30). 6. Zuo, Xiang 24.1 (Yang, pp. 1087-88). Cf. Guoyu, Jin 8.4 (pp. 453-54). 7. Passages like this one have been the basis of attacks on the Zuozhuan by New Text critics, such as Liu Fenglu (1776-1829) and Kang Youwei (1858-1927), who saw

in them evidence that Liu Xin (46 B.c.g.-c.E. 23) had forged the work in order to curry favor with the usurper Wang Mang (r. 9-23); in this view, the forged Zuozhuan identifies the Han imperial family as descendants of Yao and prefigures the rise of Wang Mang through manipulation of a Five Phases model of historical progression. For details, see Kamata, “Saden” no seiritsu to sono tenkai, pp. 84-94. Zuo, Zhao 29.4 (Yang, p. 1501), Cai Mo’s discourse on dragons, contains a genealogy closely related to the one Fan Xuanzi gives here; see the discussion in Chapter 3, pp.

108-10, , ,

8. See Zuo, Xi 33.3 (Yang, p. 500) and Cheng 3.4 (Yang, p. 813). Both apply the phrase to a virtuous man who would accept a righteous death at home rather than avoiding it abroad.

9. See Zuo, Wen 17.7 (Yang, p. 627). His deeds are mentioned at Wen 18.7 (Yang, p. 633) and Ai 24.1 (Yang, p. 1722). Zang owes much of his lasting renown to

an unfortunate accomplishment, the sacrifices he is said to have conducted for a strange seabird that came to Lu (Guoyu, Lu 1.9 [pp. 165-70]); Confucius criticizes him for this and other acts at Zuo, Wen 2.5 (Yang, pp. 525-26). 10. At Zuo, Zhao 15.7 (Yang, pp. 1372-73), having “blessings” (fu) is defined as having patterned insignia (wenzhang) given by the king and being remembered by one’s descendants; the passage has specifically to do with the lineages of scribes (shi) and draws a connection with the deeds of King Wen. The continuity of memory is

made more important than the continuity of blood. , 1. On the “social insularity” of the Warring States Confucians, see Eno, Confucian Creation of Heaven, p. 63. Lewis (Writing and Authority, pp. 63-73) also places them and other schools outside the sphere of government. 12. Zuo, Xiang 25.2 (Yang, p. 1099). 13. According to Takezoe, “Saden” kaisen, 2: 1220, the Scribe of the South was as-

sistant to the Grand Scribe and lived in the south. Neither Du Yu nor Kong Yingda comments on the term, and Takezoe appears to be speculating. 14. Chungiu, Xiang 25.2 (Yang, p. 1094). | 15. Yuri Pines (“Intellectual Changes in the Chunqiu Period,” pp. 83-84) shows that

the annals were written for the sake of the ancestors; see note 33 to this chapter for evidence that the annals were also intended for an audience of descendants.

420 Notes to Pages 262-66 16. It is difficult to be certain of the exact relationship between Zhao Chuan and Zhao Dun; see Zuo, Wen 12.6 (Yang, p. 590). 17. The Chungiu entry for this event is nearly as laconic as the Zuozhuan citation, adding only a date and a name: “In the fall, on the yichou day of the ninth month,

Zhao Dun of Jin killed his ruler Yigao” fk ILA Cit SHSRHA BH; see Chungiu, Xuan 2.4 (Yang, p. 650). 18. Zuo, Xuan 2.3 (Yang, pp. 662-63).

19. The ruling house of the state of Zhao was descended from Zhao Dun but not from Zhao Chuan; see Shiji 43.1782-85. 20. For examples of the juridical application of Chungiu hermeneutics, see Queen, From Chronicle to Canon, pp. 163-81; and for a sophisticated discussion of the transformation of examples, including Chungiu passages, into legal tools, see Bourgon,

“Les vertus juridiques de l’exemple,” pp. 8-18. | 21. Zuo, Xi 28.9 (Yang, p. 473).

22. See the Appendix for further discussion. 23. Lewis, Writing and Authority, p. 130. Lewis discusses the two heroic anecdotes translated here and notes the links between Confucian thought (ru thought) and the

views of the historiographers. , 24. See Jin Dejian, Sima Qian suojian shu kao, pp. 105-15, and the discussion in the Appendix. 25. Zuo, Cheng 14.4 (Yang, p. 870). 26. “References”: especially in philosophical writing, the term cheng means “to refer to” a historical character or incident. See, e.g., Mencius 3A.1, where, during a visit

from the future Duke Wen of Teng, “Mengzi spoke of the goodness of human nature, being sure always to refer to (cheng) Yao and Shun as he spoke.” 27. SSJZS 2: 1705.

28. See the remarks of Chen Feng, Han Xichou, and Liu Xizai cited in Zhang Gaoping, “Zuozhuan” zhi wenxue jiazhi, pp. 148-49. See also Zhang Gaoping’s defense of Zuozhuan style, ““Zuoshi fukua’ xilun.” 29. Zuo, Zhao 2.4 (Yang, p. 1230) suggests that writing was used in actual pun-

ishments; according to Du Yu's interpretation of the passage, a wooden plaque listing the crimes of a rebel was placed on his exposed corpse. 30. Zuo, Zhao 31.5 (Yang, pp. 1512-13).

31. Heigong: a minister of the small state of Zhu. Here and elsewhere, the Zuo| zhuan quotes the Chungiu passage (‘Zhao 31.6) before commenting on the principles of its wording, Qi Bao: one of the men who instigated an uprising in Wey; see Chungiu, Zhao 20.3 (Yang, p. 1406) and Zuo, Zhao 20.4 (Yang, pp. 1410-14). Zhongni’s remarks on Qi Bao’s banditry at the end of Zhao 20.4 echo the language of Zhao 31.5.

1056-58). ,

Notes to Page 267 421 ,

_ Shugi: see Chungiu, Xiang 21.2 (Yang, p. 1055); and Zuo, Xiang 21.2 (Yang, pp.

Mouyi: Chungiu, Zhao 5.4 (Yang, p. 1260); Zuo, Zhao 5.6 (Yang, p. 1270). 32. Yang (p. 1513) believes that “superior men” refers to the authors of the Zuo-

zhuan. Du Yu understands it to mean officeholders, “who are able to implement its models, something of which lowly men are not capable”; see SSJZS 2: 2127. Takezoe, “Saden” kaisen, 2: 1787, agrees with Du.

33. See Zuo, Zhuang 23.1 (Yang, p. 226), where Cao Gui counsels Duke Zhuang of Lu not to visit Qi to observe sacrifices there, because such a trip is not ritually

proper and will not look good in the records: “The ruler’s actions are written up without fail; if they are written up and yet are not in accordance with the standards, then what will your successors have to observe?” The same story is told at Guoyu, Lu 1.2 (p. 153). See also Zuo, Xi 7.3 (Yang, pp. 318-19), where Guan Zhong advises Duke Huan of Qi not to use a covenant meeting as an opportunity to subvert the govern-

ment of Zheng by supporting a would-be usurper: “During meetings of the allied lords, there is no state that does not record the acts of virtue, punishment, ritual propriety, and rightness. If what is recorded is the elevation of a usurper, then your covenant will be discarded. If you act and yet no record is made, then it is not flour-

ishing virtue.” ,

34. See Zuo, Wen 15.2 (Yang, p. 609), where the Song noble Hua Ou, visiting

Lu, declines an invitation to dine with Duke Wen, recalling that his greatgrandfather Hua Du had murdered his ruler, Duke Shang of Song (r. 719-711). (For the murder, see Chungiu, Huan 2.1 [Yang, p. 83]; and Zuo, Huan 2.1 [Yang, p. 85].) For this offense Hua Du’s “name remains on the bamboo slips of the allied lords.” See also Zuo, Xiang 20.7 (Yang, p. 1055), where Ning Huizi (Ning Zhi) of Wey, on his deathbed, urges his son, Ning Daozi (Ning Xi) to cover up his involvement in the expulsion of Duke Xian of Wey. “My name is stored up on the bamboo slips of the allied lords, where it says, ‘Sun Linfu and Ning Zhi expelled their ruler.’” The surviving Annals record of the event differs from Ning Zhi’s version: “On the day jiwei, the Lord of Wey exited and fled to Qi” (Chungiu, Xiang 14.4 [Yang, p. 1004]). 35. European historians after Herodotus would have endorsed the idea that historians assign blame. See the discussion of historia and aitios in Nagy, Pindar’s Homer, pp. 250~63; and cf. Lewis, Writing and Authority, p. 140. As Barthes (S/Z, pp. 88-89) put it, “Ac the origin of Narrative, desire. To produce narrative, however, desire must vary, must enter into a system of equivalents and metonymies; or: in order to be produced, narrative must be susceptible of change, must subject itself to an economic system. ... One narrates in order to obtain by exchanging; and it is this exchange that is represented in the narrative itself: narrative is both product and production, merchandise and commerce, a stake and the bearer of that stake.”

36. See the discussion of Ji Zha’s visit to Lu in Chapter 2, pp. 86-94. ,

422 Notes to Pages 267-68 37. Wang's dismissal of the Chungiu as “fragmentary reports from court” (duanlan chaobao) is cited in Shen Yucheng and Liu Ning, “Chungiu Zuozhuan” xueshi gao, p. 215.

38. Xunzi, for one, absorbed the Zuozhuan’s account of literary signification in the Chungiu. In his essay “Quanxue,” he refers first to the “subtlety (wei) of the Chungiu" and then echoes the phrasing of the Zuozhuan: “The Chungiu is concise but not quickly understood”; see Wang Xiangian, Xunzi jijie, 1: 12, 14, 133. For the more general influence of Chungiu hermeneutics on Chinese ways of reading, see Cao Shunging, “‘Chungiu bifa’ yu ‘weiyan dayi.’”

39. Some general examples: Zuo, Xi 28.12 (Yang, p. 474), Xuan 14.5 (Yang, p. 757), Xiang 25.14 (Yang, p. 1108), Zhao 9.3 (Yang, p. 1310), Zhao 9.5 (Yang, p. 1312), Zhao 20.6 (Yang, pp. 1415, 1418; the duke is pleased first with bad advice and then with Yanzi's good advice); Guoyu, Lu 1.7 (p. 162), Lu 2.8 (p. 200), Jin 7.5 (p. 441), Jin

9.9 (p. 492). As the graph indicates, yue i (OC “ljot) is closely related to shuo if, “explanation” (OC “bhljot), and to shui it, “to persuade” (OC “hljots); see Baxter, Handbook of Old Chinese Phonology, appendix C.

40. See Schaberg, “Remonstrance in Eastern Zhou Historiography,” pp. 143-50. 41. Some of the better examples: Zuo, Xi 22.6 (Yang, p. 395), Wen 15.4 (Yang, p. 611), Xuan 15.6 (Yang, p. 765; here it is in a comment on pleasure that the eloquence is notable), Xiang 21.5 (Yang, p. 1061), Xiang 24.2 (Yang, p. 1090), Zhao 7.11 (Yang, p. 1294), Zhao 26.10 (Yang, p. 1480), Ding 4.1 (Yang, p. 1542); Guoyu, Jin 4.15 (p. 373), Jin 8.5 (p. 458), Zheng 1.1 (p. 523).

42. Some speeches of bad advice in which rulers foolishly took pleasure: Zuo, Xi 4.2 (Yang, p. 293), Zhao 19.6 (Yang, p. 1402); Guoyu, Jin 1.8 (p. 277).

43. Military planning: Zuo, Xi 30.3 (Yang, p. 481), Xiang 14.3 (Yang, p. 1008), Zhao 18.7 (Yang, p. 1400); Guoyu, Jin 4.18 (p. 377), Jin 6.3 (p. 414).

44. See Zuo, Ai 16.5 (Yang, p. 1702); and Guoyu, Zhou 3.9 (p. 144). 45. See Zuo, Xi 15.4 (Yang, p. 363), Xi 28.1 (Yang, p. 452), Xi 28.2 (Yang, p. 452), Xuan 14.1 (Yang, p. 753), Xiang 10.12 (Yang, p. 983), Zhao 27.6 (Yang, p. 1488), Ai 20.2 (Yang, p. 1716); and Guoyu, Jin 3.5 (p. 323), Wu 1.6 (p. 606).

46. See, e.g., Zuo, Xi 4.2 (Yang, p. 293), Xiang 2.5 (Yang, p. 923), Zhao 20.9 (Yang, p. 1421; Zhongni comments), Zhao 32.3 (Yang, p. 1518), Ding 4.1 (Yang, p. 1535), Ding 5.7 (Yang, p. 1553); Guoyu, Lu 1.13 (p. 180).

47. See Zuo, Xiang 4.3 (Yang, p. 933), where Shi, “Luming” (Mao 161), is the song the ruler uses to show his pleasure in a guest; Zhao 3.4 (Yang, p. 1239), where a Jin ruler is pleased by a flawless performance of interstate ritual; and Zhao 29.4 (Yang, p. 1501).

48. See Zuo, Ai 2.3 (Yang, p. 1617), Ai 11.2 (Yang, p. 1661), and Ai 11.4 (Yang, p. 1664). An exception is Zhao 16.3 (Yang, p. 1381), where Han Qi is delighted by the

Zheng ministers’ ability to choose all their songs for banquet recitation from the

Notes to Pages 268-73 423 Zheng corpus; perhaps it is because they give no particular advice or remonstrance that Han Qi experiences xi rather than yue. 49. For the role of pleasure in Confucian philosophy, see Schaberg, “Social Pleasures in Early Chinese Historiography and Philosophy.” 50. For hao, see Chapter 7, p. 224. For le/yue, see Chapter 3, pp. 114-15.

51. That implied narrator and author need not coincide and that authors may _ manipulate the representation of the narrator are points several narratologists have made; see Chatman, Story and Discourse, especially the classic diagram printed opposite p. 266; and Pratt, Toward a Speech Act Theory of Literary Discourse, pp. 207-9. 52. Mencius 3B.9. Cf. Shiji 47.1943. 53. Mencius 4B.21.

54. Guoyu, Chu 1.1 (p. 528).

55. Shiji 14.509-10. See the discussion in the Appendix.

56. Confucians were not the only thinkers to speak of fear as a motivation for writing. Of the ancient sage-kings, the Mohists wrote that they “served the ghosts and spirits generously. They feared that the sons and grandsons of later generations would not be able to know [this service], so they wrote them on bamboo and silk and handed them down to the sons and grandsons of later generations. In some cases they feared that [the bamboo and silk] would decay, worm-eaten, and thus pass out of transmission, and that the sons and grandsons of later generations would not have the opportunity to remember. So they carved them into basins and pans and engraved them in metal and stone to repeat them” (Wu Yujiang, Mozi jiaozhu, 1: 340). For differences between the Confucian and Mohist views of writing, see Lewis, Writing and Authority, pp. 12-15.

57. It does happen, although rarely. See, e.g., Zuo, Xi 27.4 (Yang, p. 447), on Duke Wen’s rise to the hegemony. 58. Again, there are exceptions, aptly exemplified in the “teachings of Wen” passage of Duke Wen’s narrative. 59. Scholars who read the Zuozhuan for information on Spring and Autumn intellectual history agree that it contains intellectually anachronistic interpolations; see Pines, “Intellectual Change in the Chungiu,” pp. 124-32. 60. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, 1: 52. 61. Lunyu 1.5.

62. Chungiu, Yin 7.3 (Yang, p. 52); and Zuo, Yin 7.2 (Yang, p. 54); see also Zuo, Yin 9.2 (Yang, p. 65), Huan 5.5 (Yang, p. 106), Zhuang 29.1 (Yang, p. 244), Xi 20.1 (Yang, p. 386), Wen 2.2 (Yang, p. 521), and Cheng 18.10 (Yang, p. 913). Ding 15.9 (Yang, p. 1602) is especially interesting: the Chungiu entry records wall construction in the winter, but the Zuozhuan note says that the record was postdated to the winter, i.e., the proper time for construction.

424 Notes to Pages 273-78 63. Zuo, Huan 5.5 (Yang, p. 106), Wen 2.2 (Yang, p. $21); cf. Xi 33.11 (Yang, pp.

504-6), 64. Zuo, Cheng 16.5 (Yang, p. 881).

65. At its most rigorous, the schedule determines activities for every moment of the day. See the extraordinary (for historiography) account of officials’ daily schedules given by the mother of Gongfu Wenbo at Guoyu, Lu 2.13 (pp. 205-8).

66. Huang Ze (1260-1346) envisioned just such chronicles for the Western Zhou; see Zhao Shengqun, “Zuozhuan jishi buhe shifa lun,” p. 119. 67. Chungiu, Yin 1.1 (Yang, p. 5). See also Yin 6.3 (Yang, p. 48), where Yang gives figures for the frequency of such notations. 68. See the example of King Wuding of Shang at Guoyu, Chu 1.8 (p. $54). 69. Zuo, Xuan 3.3 (Yang, pp. 669-72). See Chapter 2, pp. 60-61. See also Zuo, Zhuang 32.3 (Yang, pp. 251-53) / Guoyu, Zhou 1.12 (pp. 29-33); the notion of dynastic decline is found everywhere and is implicit in such texts as Shi, “Daming” (Mao 236).

70. Guoyu, Zhou 3.3 (pp. w0-m). 71. Guoyu, Zhou 3.9 (p. 145).

72. See Lunyu 16.2-3, where Confucius is made to comment directly on this trend, both in general terms and as it has developed in Lu. ————-73. Shouyi zhengyi 1: 7 (SSJZS 1: 19). A similar idea is expressed in connection with

ji, the minute, in Zhouyi, “Xici xia” (SSJZS 1: 88).

74. Mencius pairs the same phrases on assassination and parricide at 3B.9, where he is speaking of Confucius’ reasons for composing the Chungiu; Han Feizi does the same, also referring to the Chungiu and using the term jian (Chen Qiyou, Han Feizi jishi, 2: 717); see also Dai Wang, Guanzi fu jiaozheng, p. 75. 75. Cf. Wang Xianqian, Xunzi jijie, 2: 304 and 2: 515, both on the accumulation of

small incidents that account for great events and catastrophes.

76. For details, see note 3 to Chapter 6, p. 400-401. , 77. Sima Qian’s invention of the historical table perhaps resulted from exactly this sort of training. For a connection between Sima Qian’s first table and the Zuozhuan, see Hardy, “The Interpretive Function of Shib chit4.” 78. See Lunyu 3.9 and Zuo, Zhao 4.3 (Yang, pp. 1250-51). 79. Zuo, Xiang 29.13 (Yang, pp. 1166-67).

80. See Zuo, Zhao 10.2 (Yang, pp. 1315-18). , 81. Zuo, Zhao 28.2 (Yang, pp. 1491-93). In an analepsis, the narrators imply that Shu Xiang was partly to blame, since by marrying the daughter of the infamous Xia Ji of Chen, he resembled the rulers whose infatuation with beauties had destroyed their dynasties. Ji Zha’s positive assessment of Shu Xiang is echoed in a remark attributed to Confucius at Zhao 14.7 (Yang, p. 1367).

Notes to Pages 278-82 425 82. The usefulness of these predictions in the dating of the text is discussed in the Appendix, pp. 316-17. 83. Zuo, Min 2.4 (Yang, pp. 263-64), Wen 1.1 (Yang, p. 510); Guoyu, Zhou 2.8 (pp. 75-79). 84. Zuo, Zhao 11.7 (Yang, pp. 1326-27). See also Zhao 25.2 (Yang, pp. 1456-57) and Zhao 32.4 (Yang, p. 1519).

85. Zuo, Zhao 5.3 (Yang, p. 1266). 86. Zuo, Zhao 10.3 (Yang, p. 1318).

87. For Duke Ding, see Zuo, Ding 15.1 (Yang, pp. 1600-601). The duke dies later

this year. For Duke Ai, see Zuo, Ai 16.3 (Yang, pp. 1698-99). The noble families force the duke out of the state in the penultimate anecdote of the Zuozhuan, Ai 27.4 (Yang, p. 1735).

88. Zuo, Zhuang 22.1 (Yang, pp. 222-24); Xiang 4.2 (Yang, p. 932), Xiang 29.13 (Yang, p. 166), Xiang 30.8 (Yang, pp. 174-75), Zhao 8.6 (Yang, p. 1305), Zhao 9.4 (Yang, pp. 1310-11), Zhao 10.2 (Yang, pp. 1317-18), Ai 15.3 (Yang, pp. 1692-93); Guoyu, Zhou 2.7 (pp. 67-75). See Chapter 3, pp. 99-100, for the interpretation of omens of these events.

89. Zuo, Zhao 3.3 (Yang, pp. 1234-37). | 90. Zuo, Zhao 26.11 (Yang, pp. 1480-81). gi. The couplet cited is from Shi, “Juxia” (Mao 218).

92. Zuo, Zhao 3.3 (Yang, pp. 1236-37). For general predictions on the decline of the ducal house and the rise of the three families, see also Xiang 29.13 (Yang, p. 1167) and Zhao 16.4 with Zhao 16.7 (Yang, pp. 1382-83). 93. “Luan, Xi, Xu.. .”: these families, related to the ducal house, were powerful in earlier times, especially in the age of Duke Wen. The Chan cauldron: a cauldron of this name is mentioned in Lu and then in Qi; see Yang, p. 1237, for references. There may well have been more than one such bronze. 94. See also Zuo, Zhao 1.12 (Yang, pp. 1222-23), on Duke Ping’s sexual excesses, and Zhao 3.1 (Yang, pp. 1232-33), on the demands Jin places on dependent states

and on the coming loss of these dependents.

95. See discussion in Chapters 3, pp. 18-19, and 7, pp. 227-28. 96. Zuo, Min 1.6 (Yang, pp. 259-60). 97. As Yang Bojun points out, the Shiji version of the episode reads mengzhu 5 = instead of mingzhu HA =F, “enlightened ruler,” for “this [state] could be host of the covenants,’ i.e., hegemon. See Yang, p. 1163. See also Zuo, Zhao 28.3 (Yang, p. 1496), for a prediction by Confucius. Kamata, “Saden” no seiritsu to sono tenkai, pp. 352-56,

argues that the Zuozhuan shows a distinct bias toward Wei and that it must thus

have been composed by someone from Wei. , 98. Zuo, Xiang 26.13 (Yang, p. 1124).

426 Notes to Pages 282-87 99. Guoyu, Jin 9.15 (p. 498). Zhuang’s unusual name suggested to Wei Zhao that he was from Wu.

100. Poetry recitations: Zuo, Xiang 26.7 (Yang, p. 1117), Xiang 27.5 (Yang, p. 1135), Zhao 16.3 (Yang, p. 1381). Others: Xiang 29.7 (Yang, pp. 1157-58), Xiang 29.13

(Yang, p. 1166), Xiang 31.10 (Yang, pp. 1190-91), Zhao 4.6 (Yang, pp. 1254-54), Zhao 6.3 (Yang, p. 1276). 101, Qin: Zuo, Xiang 29.13 (Yang, p. 1163). Wen 6.3 (Yang, p. 549) is especially

interesting for its incorrect prediction, attributed to the junzi, that Qin would not again campaign to the east. Chu: Zuo, Xiang 27.8 (Yang, p. 1138; prediction based on observation of a Chu noble’s poetry recitation); Zhao 11.5 (Yang, p. 1325). See also Guoyu, Zheng 1.1 (p. 511). Song: Zuo, Xiang 29.7 (Yang, pp. 1157-58). The line of Zihan, who here acts with the same generosity toward the people as the Chens of Qi do, will be the last Song noble family to fall. Cai: Zuo, Zhao 11.2 (Yang, pp. 1322-24),

Zhao 21.2 (Yang, pp. 1424-25; prediction based on error in ritual performance). Wey: Zuo, Zhao 4.6 (Yang, p. 1255). Cao: Zuo, Zhao 4.6 (Yang, p. 1255). Wu: Zuo, Xiang 31.9 (Yang, pp. 189-90), Zhao 32.2 (Yang, p. 1516), Ai 1.2 (Yang, pp. 1606-7), Ai 7.3 (Yang, p. 1641), Ai 11.4 (Yang, p. 1665).

102. Zuo, Xuan 3.3 (Yang, pp. 669-72). 103. Guoyu, Zheng 1.1 (pp. 07-23), Zheng 1.2 (pp. 524-25). See also Zuo, Xi 25.2 (Yang, p. 433) / Guoyu, Zhou 2.2 (p. 54); Zuo, Ai 1.2 (Yang, p. 1606); and Guoyu, Jin 4.16 (pp. 374-75), Wu 1.7 (p. 611), and Wu 1.8 (pp. 615-17). 104. Zuo, Zhao 24.6 (Yang, pp. 1451-52).

105. “What should be done about the royal house?”: these are the years of Wangzi Chao’s rebellion and attempt to secure the Zhou succession for himself. See Zuo, Zhao 22-27, Zhao 32, Ding 1, and Ding 6-8. 106. See discussion in Chapter 4, pp. 133-35. 107. Chungiu, Xiang 27.2, Xiang 27.5 (Yang, p. 1126).

108. That Shusun Bao is mentioned before the other participants signifies nothing about his precedence in the covenant ceremony itself; the Chungiu is a Lu chronicle and always mentions the Lu delegate first. 109. Zuo, Xiang 27.4 (Yang, pp. 1129-34). 110. Qu Jian dies, apparently of natural causes, at Zuo, Xiang 28.13 (Yang, p. 1152). ut. “He falls down dead”: see Karlgren, “Glosses on the Tso Chuan II,” gl. 643.

“We will get a lot of use out of that”: thus Yang, p. 1132. Du Yu, followed by Takezoe, “Saden” kaisen, 2: 1268, interpreted yong fg as gong I, “merit.” 112. At Zuo, Cheng 2.8 (Yang, pp. 806-9), Chu armies advance north and force a

treaty with Qin, Song, Chen, Wey, Zheng, Qi, Cao, Zhu, Xue, and Zeng. This treaty comes at the end of the year of Jin’s springtime defeat of Qi at An (Cheng 2.3). According to the narrator and the junzi, Jin (which has not acted virtuously in

Notes to Pages 287-89 427 invading Qi) avoided Chu out of fear of its large forces, mustered with great propriety by the Chu chief minister, Zichong. 113. Zuo, Ai 17.6 (Yang, pp. 1711-12), shows that holding the ear of the ox during the sacrifice signifies the lower status of the first sacrificant. 114. The Zuozhuan’s version of events has the support of Guoyu, Jin 8.11 (pp. 46465) and Jin 8.12 (pp. 466-67), which do not, however, refer to the Chungiu notation. 115. Zuo, Zhao 1.1 (Yang, pp. 1201-2).

116. “The Chu chief minister”: Prince Wei, the future King Ling, who has arranged to take a bride from a Zheng family and has attempted to enter the Zheng capital with an armed escort. Zheng takes this attempt as a plot against its sovereignty.

Zhao Wenzi's achievements are narrated in their proper places in the chronicle. For gatherings of allied lords, see Zuo, Xiang 25.3 (Yang, pp. uo01-2) and Xiang 26.5 (Yang, p. 1114). For the lesser gatherings, see Xiang 27.4 (the treaty at Song) and Xiang 30.12 (Yang, p. 1179). Du thought the third was the present meeting, but Takezoe, “Saden” kaisen, 2: 1369, cites the walling of Qii at Chungiu, Xiang 29.5 (Yang, p. 1153) instead. For pacification of the east, see Zuo, Xiang 28.2 (Yang, pp. 1141-42).

For peace with Qin, see Zuo, Xiang 25.16 (Yang, p. 1109) and Xiang 26.1 (Yang, p. 111). For the walling of Chunyu, see Zuo, Xiang 29.8 (Yang, p. 1158). Chunyu is the new capital of the small state of Qii. Qi Wu's assessment of this act is contradicted by Zitaishu of Zheng, who at the time felt it unwise for Jin to be protecting Xia descendants while neglecting Zhou affiliates. At Zuo, Zhao, 1.12 (Yang, pp. 1221-23), when a Qin doctor diagnoses the illness of Duke Ping of Jin and then predicts that Zhao Meng himself will die for it, he gives a shorter version of this list of achievements (see pp. 241-43). 117. The pattern continues. In our examination of the series of anecdotes concerning Prince Wei, we have seen several more examples of defensive prediction on the part of Jin ministers; see, e.g, Zhao 1.14 (Yang, p. 1225) and Zhao 4.3 (Yang, p. 1252).

118. Archaeological finds suggest that northern cultural practices began to be adopted by Wu elites only in the sixth century; see Falkenhausen, “The Waning of the Bronze Age,” pp. 525-39. 119. Zuo, Cheng 7.5 (Yang, pp. 834-35).

120. For the importance of exile in the spread of culture, see Zhang Yanxiu,

“Chungqiu ‘chuben’ kaoshu.” ,

121. Zuo, Ding 4.3 (Yang, pp. 1542-48). 122. Zuo, Ding 3.4 (Yang, pp. 1531-32). 123. Zuo, Ding 4.1 (Yang, pp. 1534-42). The speech of the Wey minister, Priest Tuo, is discussed in Chapter 4, p. 128. 124. Zuo, Ding 4.3 (Yang, pp. 1542-45).

4.28 Notes to Pages 290-92 125. The defeat comes in Zuo, Ai 1.2 (Yang, p. 1605). Ding 14.5 (Yang, pp. 159596) records the origins of King Fuchai’s determination to overthrow the neighboring

state. :

126. Zuo, Ai 1.2 (Yang, pp. 1606-7). Cf. Guoyu, Wu 1.2 (pp. 595-96). 127. Zuo, Ai 1.4 (Yang, pp. 1607-8), Ai 1.6 (Yang, pp. 1608-9). 128. Zuo, Ai 7.3 (Yang, pp. 1640-41). 129. One “full sacrifice” (lao) consisted of an ox, a goat, and a pig. For the more

than ten full sacrifices performed for Jin, Yang, p. 1640, directs the reader to Zhao 21.3 (Yang, p. 1425), where Shi Yang receives eleven lao.

“The number twelve”: Yang, p. 1641, cites the royal number of caps and flags. The ancient Chinese divided the sky into twelve sectors. In the remainder of Ai 7.3 (Yang, p. 1641), the powerful Lu minister Ji Kangzi resists Wu's demand that he attend the meeting and sends Zigong to explain that the proceedings result not from ritual propriety but from self-interest. When Ji Kangzi later, in Ai 7.4 (Yang, pp. 1642-43), attacks the small state of Zhu, a Wu ally, Zifu Jingbo advises against the move; he is not heeded, however, and Wu comes for revenge in the following year (Ai 8.2 [Yang, pp. 1647-50]). Zifu represents propriety against illegitimate powers both within the state (Ji Kangzi) and without (Wu). 130. See Zuo, Ai 13.2-5 (Yang, pp. 1676-79); and Guoyu, Wu 1.6-8 (pp. 604-17). 131. Chungiu, Ai 13.3 (Yang, p. 1674): “The duke met with the lord of Jin and the

ruler of Wu at Huangchi.” That Jin comes first here should reflect the order of the treaty. 132, Zuo, Ai 13.4 (Yang, p. 1677).

133. "We are the hegemon”: Jin has claimed this pre-eminence since Duke Wen was recognized as treaty leader and “uncle” or hegemon by King Xiang of Zhou after the battle ar Chengpu (Zuozhuan, Xi 28.3 [Yang, p. 465]). “Inky”: Legge, p. 832, translates, “Those who eat flesh should have no black [under their eyes].” Takezoe, “Saden” kaisen, 2: 1988, following Du, refers more generally to a blackness of the qi seen in the face.

134. Descended as they are from an elder uncle of King Wen, Wu can claim seniority within the Ji family. 135. The account of the meeting at Huangchi includes three more anecdotes that

appear to undermine and even to ridicule Wu power. Twice the ministers of Lu, known for their mastery of ritual protocol, save their state from humiliation by exploiting the Wu representatives’ relative inexperience. In the last vignette, a Wu

, visitor seeks to buy grain and is told that he may obtain it by crying “Genggui” on top of a certain mountain. Although genggui perhaps refers to the very lowest grade of grain, it is nonetheless possible that this enigmatic little tale implies mockery of Wu uncouthness. See Ai 13.4 (Yang, pp. 1678-79); cf. Zhao 4.3 (Yang, pp. 1250-52)

for a parallel in the case of King Ling of Chu. ,

Notes to Pages 292-97 429 Yue's destruction of Wu is completed in Ai 20.3 (Yang, pp. 1716-17) and Ai 22.2

(Yang, p. 1719). |

136. For the debate over katharsis, see Else, Aristotle’s Poetics, pp. 423-39; and Lucas, Aristotle: Poetics, pp. 273-90. 137. See Mencius 5A.4, on the dangers of wanton Shi interpretation, and 7B.3, on the reliability of the Shu. Despite differences in the role assigned to writing, Chinese

and Greek views here tend to coincide. As Socrates is purported to have said, “And once a thing is put in writing, the composition, whatever it may be, drifts all over the place, getting into the hands not only of those who understand it, but equally of those who have no business with it; it doesn’t know how to address the right people, and not address the wrong. And when it is ill-treated and unfairly abused it always needs its parent to come to its help, being unable to defend or help itself” (Phaedrus 275e). See Plato, The Collected Dialogues, p. 521; and discussion in Derrida, Dissemination, Dp. 75-94. 138. See discussion in Chapter 2, pp. 60-61. 139. Zuo, Zhao 6.3 (Yang, pp. 1274-77). 140. “You have rectified fields and ditches”: see Zuo, Xiang 30.13 (Yang, pp. 1181-

82). Although the farmers initially complain about higher taxes, the move is ultimately presented in a favorable light. “An administration that is reviled”: at Zhao 4.6 (Yang, pp. 1254-55), the people

of Zheng revile Zichan for a new military taxation system; again, the Zuozhuan, which is somewhat ambivalent about Zichan, mitigates the charge by invoking ritual propriety. Here too, however, Zichan’s use of the law wins disastrous predictions for Zheng. Shu Xiang’s Shi citations are from “Wo jiang” (Mao 272) and “King Wen” (Mao 235).

141. Lewis, Writing and Authority, p. 18: “Far from being tools of rational administration or of brutal realpolitik, che Warring States administrative codes remained

embedded within the religious and ritual practices of the society from which they emerged.”

142. Interestingly, a law code, presumably unwritten, is attributed to King Wen at Zuo, Zhao 7.2 (Yang, p. 1284). 143. See Mencius 4B.21.

144. Yang, p. 1276.

145. Zuo, Zhao 29.5 (Yang, pp. 1504-5). 146. “Drum” (gu) is attested as a measure of volume in the Liji and other works. See references in Takezoe, “Saden” kaisen, 2: 1775. Donald Wagner (Iron and Steel in

Ancient China, pp. 57-59) considers it unlikely that the Chinese had sufficient amounts of refined iron to cast a cauldron of this sort in the sixth century.

430 Notes to Pages 297-99 “Pilu code”: see Zuo, Xi 27.4 (Yang, pp. 445-47). At Pilu, Duke Wen mustered and reviewed his armies before marching against Chu forces in defense of Song. For the musters at Yi and Dong, where Jin instituted new official appointments and legal reforms, see Zuo, Wen 6.1 (Yang, pp. 544-46). The period of disorder Confucius refers to is the strife following the appointment at Dong of Zhao Dun as commander-in-chief of the Jin armies. “When it extends to them, they will perish”: following Takezoe, “Saden” kaisen, 2: 1776.

Zhao Meng: i.e., Zhao Yang.

147. Cai Mo, also known as Scribe Mo and Scribe An, delivers his greatest speech at Zhao 29.4 (Yang, pp. 1500-504), an explanation of dragons, offices, and Five Phase theory; see the discussion in Chapter 3, pp. 108-10. He also appears in Zhao 31.6 (Yang, p. 1513), Zhao 32.2 (Yang, p. 1516), Zhao 32.4 (Yang, p. 1519), Ai 9.6 (Yang, p. 1653), and Ai 20.3 (Yang, p. 1717).

148. The last stage of the two families’ strife with the other Jin powers begins in Ding 13.2 (Yang, pp. 1589-91) and continues for some years. 149. Several incidents suggest that the historiographers considered Zhao Yang an exemplar of de; perhaps the most memorable is the old-fashioned harangue (shi) he delivers to his troops at Ai 2.3 (Yang, pp. 1613-15). 150. Fan Xuanzi was last active in Xiang 24.2 (Yang, p. 1089) and seems to have died in Xiang 25. According to Du Yu, SSJZS 2: 2125, the law code he developed had been set aside for some time and was reinstated with the casting of the iron cauldrons. Zhao Guangxian (“Zuozhuan bianzhuan kao,” pt. I, p. 139) argues that either Confucius or the historiographers have confused Fan Xuanzi with Zhao Dun (also called Zhao Xuanzi); For further discussion of Jin’s codes, see Chen Li, “Jin guo chengwenfa di xingcheng shitan.” 151. Jing and jingwei normally refer to unwritten, broadly shared standards of government and social order. One passage in the Guoyu has been cited as an exception; see Wu 1.7 (pp. 608-9); and Jiang Bogian, Shisanjing gailun, p. 2. Unambiguous uses of jing for written texts first appear in the third century. See discussion of the mimetic vocabulary in Chapter 2, p. 59. 152. Fingarette, Confucius—the Secular as Sacred, pp. 8-17. For a relevant critique of Austin’s theory of performatives, see Bourdieu, Language & Symbolic Power, pp. 107-16.

153. See again Zuo, Xiang 28.9 (Yang, pp. 1145-46); and Mencius 5A.4.

154. Zuo, Ding 9.2 (Yang, pp. 1571-72). | 155. “Graceful Girl”: “Jingnt” (Mao 42); “Flagstaffs”: “Ganmao” (Mao 53). The third Shi citation is from “Gantang” (Mao 16). 156. Takezoe, “Saden” kaisen, 2: 1865, collects references to Deng Xi from Xunzi,

Liezi, and Liishi chungiu. A work attributed to him is listed with the School of Names in the Hanshu bibliography; see Ban Gu, Hanshu 30.1736.

Notes to Pages 300-303 431 157. Cheng Junying and Jiang Jianyuan, Shijing zhuxi, p. 116.

_ 158. For covenants in general, see Li Mo, “Xian Qin mengshi zhi zhi shizhi shuping”; and Weld, “The Covenant Texts from Houma and Wenxian.” 159. The Chungiu to which the Gongyang and Guliang commentaries are attached ends with the capture of the lin in the duke's fourteenth year; the version attached to the Zuozhuan includes an additional 220 characters, ending with the death of Confucius in the duke’s sixteenth year. Forty Zuozhuan entries, the annals of twelve full years, are given after the end of the Chungiu, and some scholars have discerned in these and other parts of the Zuozhuan traces of yet another text of the Lu chronicle; see Maspero, “La composition et la date du Tso tchouan,” p. 184; and Hung, preface to Combined Concordances, pp. Ixxv, Ixxxviii—Ixxxix, xcix—ci.

160. The Shi and Shu are cited only once each after the death of Confucius, at Ai 26.3 (Yang, p. 1732) and Ai 18.2 (Yang, p. 1713), respectively. The latter comes in a remark by the junzi. 161. See especially Zuo, Ai 17.5 (Yang, pp. 1709-11) and Ai 25.1 (Yang, pp. 172427). The other entries that bring the Wey narrative to conclusion are Ai 16.2 (Yang, pp. 1697-98), Ai 16.4 (Yang, pp. 1699-700), Ai 16.6—Ai 16.7 (Yang, p. 1705), Ai 17.1 (Yang, pp. 1706-7), Ai 17.3 (Yang, pp. 1707-8), Ai 18.3 (Yang, p. 1713), Ai 26.1 (Yang, pp. 1727-29), and Ai 26.3 (Yang, pp. 1731-32). 162. See Zuo, Ai 16.5 (Yang, pp. 1700-704), Ai 17.4 (Yang, pp. 1708-9), and Ai 18.2 (Yang, p. 1713).

163. See Zuo, Ai 17.2 (Yang, p. 1707), Ai 19.1-2 (Yang, p. 1714), Ai 20.2-3 (Yang,

pp. 1715-17), and Ai 22.2 (Yang, p. 1719). Notations on diplomatic exchanges between Yue and Lu account for much of the Chungiu-like material in these years: see Ai 21.1 (Yang, p. 1717), Ai 23.3 (Yang, p. 1722), Ai 24.2 (Yang, p. 1723), and Ai 27.1 (Yang, pp. 1732-33). The Zuozhuan’s ideologized explanation of the fall of Wu appears in such passages as Zhao 31.6 (Yang, pp. 1513-14), Zhao 32.2 (Yang, p. 1516),

and Ai 1.6 (Yang, pp. 1608-9). The Guoyu explains the rise of Yue and the fall of Wu in terms strikingly different from those of the Zuozhuan; see discussion of dating in Appendix. 164. See Zuo, Ai 17.7 (Yang, p. 1712), Ai 18.1 (Yang, p. 1713), Ai 23.1 (Yang, pp. 1720-21), and Ai 26.2 (Yang, pp. 1729-31). 165. See Zuo, Ai 22.1 (Yang, p. 1719) and Ai 24.2 (Yang, p. 1723). 166. Zuo, Ai 27.4 (Yang, p. 1735). The other anecdotes about Lu in the final years are Ai 17.6 (Yang, pp. 1711-12), Ai 19.3 (Yang, pp. 1714-15), Ai 20.1 (Yang, p. 1715), Ai 24.1 (Yang, pp. 1722-23), Ai 24.3 (Yang, p. 1723), Ai 25.2 (Yang, p. 1727), and Ai 27.2 (Yang, p. 1733).

167. The last events are uncertain; according to Shiji 33.1545, the duke later returned to Lu and died at the home of Gongsun Youshan. Gongsun Youshan: Gongsun Youxing.

432 Notes to Pages 303-7 168. Zuo, Zhao 25.6 (Yang, p. 1462). Cf. Lunyu 3.1. 169. Zuo, Ai 27.5 (Yang, pp. 1735-36).

170. “The fourth year of Duke Dao”: ca. 463 B.c.e. But there is a great deal of confusion about dating in the early Warring States period. Xi Kuilei: the relevance of this episode is uncertain, as is the interpretation. Yang, p. 1736, states that Jin (a typographical error for Zheng) smothered or strangled Xi when he refused the bribe; Legge, p. 863, says he “kept his mouth shut.” The grammar of the sentence and the parallel at Xuan 2.3 (Yang, p. 658) suggest that Xi deliberately killed himself rather than betray his commander. 171. Zuo, Ai 27.3 (Yang, p. 1734).

172. Another character who resembles Zhi Bo in his single-mindedness and his rejection of existing codes of personality is Zhi Bo’s retainer Yu Rang, who will mutilate himself in his effort to punish Zhao Xiangzi for the defeat of Zhi Bo; see Shiji 86.2518—-21.

173. Guoyu, Jin 9.18 (p. 500). | 174. In Guoyu, Jin 9.19 (p. 501), Zhi Bo’s minister has to explain to him why the beauty of his new-built palace should be a cause for fear. In Jin 9.20 (pp. 502-3), he refuses to fear the people he has insulted; they later destroy him. 175. Zhao Xiangzi's father, accepting a fine remonstrance that has much to do with architecture, permitted Jinyang to be turned into the sturdy fortress that would later save the Zhao lineage; see Guoyu, Jin 9.9 (pp. 491-92). Cf. Jin 9.8 (pp. 490-91) and Jin 9.20-21 (pp. 502-5). 176. Gongyang, Ai 14 (SSJZS 2: 2353-54).

177." When Yan Yuan died”: see Lunyu 11.9.

“When Zilu died”: according to Zuo, Ai 15.5 (Yang, p. 1696), Zilu died in battle in Wey. The passage includes a remark from Confucius. 178. See Guliang, Huan 14 (SSJZS 2: 2377), for a similar schematization of histori-

cal knowledge. 179. Gongyang, Ai 14 (SSJZS 2: 2352).

180. Cf. Lunyu 1.1. ,

181. Zuo, Ai 14.1 (Yang, p. 1682).

182. See Guoyu, Lu 2.9 (p. 201), Lu 2.18 (p. 213), and Lu 2.19 (pp. 214-15). For later developments in the legend of the lin’s capture, see Schaberg, “Song and the Historical Imagination.” © 183. Zuo, Ai 16.3 (Yang, pp. 1698-99).

| 184. Yang, p. 1698, notes the Shi echoes. Line one recalls several in “Jienanshan” (Mao 191) and one in “Dang” (Mao 255). Line two is found in “Shiyue zhi jiao” (Mao 193); line three echoes the same poem. Line four differs slightly from the corresponding text in “Min yuxiaozi” (Mao 286), where the Mao version has gionggiong zai jiu We RATE TA.

Notes to Pages 307-9 4.33 185. Little is known about the history of eulogizing in early China, but a passage from Mozi suggests that the practice was common. When a Lu ruler employs a man who has composed a eulogy for a favorite of his, Mozi objects by defining the function of the eulogy: “A eulogy is for speaking about the ambitions of the dead; to be pleased with the eulogy and thus to employ [the composer] is like yoking a wildcat to acarriage” (Wu Yujiang, Mozi jiaozhu, 2: 735). 186. See Liji, “Tangong shang” (SSJZS 1: 1294).

187. Zuozhuan sometimes has gong #% for gong FX. In addition to the present passage, see Ding 15.1 (Yang, pp. 1600-601), Ai 7.3 (Yang, pp. 1640-41), Ai 11.3 (Yang, pp: 1661-64), Ai 12.3-4 (Yang, pp. 1671-72), Ai 15.4 (Yang, pp. 1693-94), and Ai 27.1 (Yang, pp. 1732-33). 188. Hegel, Philosophy of History, p. 273.

189. “If we go on to cast a look at the fate of these World-Historical persons, whose vocation it was to be the agents of the World-Spirit—we shall find it to have been no happy one. ... When their object is attained they fall off like empty hulls from the kernel” (ibid., p. 31). 190. Although the Zuozhuan, unlike the Gongyang and Guliang, does not suggest that Confucius edited the Chungiu, it unequivocally endorses Confucius’ judgments

of historical individuals and events. Not only do the historiographers quote his words in the place of those of the anonymous junzi, they also occasionally incorpo-

rate, without specially marking them, sayings attributed to him elsewhere. That does not necessarily mean that they were silently quoting him; it only means that the Lunyu materials and the historiographical materials were closely associated and, in some cases, were transmitted by the same teachers. Cf. Zuo, Cheng 2.2 (Yang, pp. 788-89), Zhao 32.4 (Yang, p. 1520), Ding 13.3 (Yang, p. 1592) / Lunyu 1.15, Xiang 23.8 (Yang, p. 1085) / Lunyu 14.12, Zhao 12. (Yang, p. 1341) / Lunyu 12.1; and Guoyu, Chu

2.9 (p. 586) / Lunyu 4.3. | 191. Mencius 3B.9 establishes the relationship between study of the Chungiu and the notion that Confucius was symbolically the king of his world; see especially

SSJZS 2: 2714-15. !

192. Zuo, Ai 17.6 (Yang, pp. 1711-12).

193. Zuo, Ai 21.2 (Yang, pp.1717-18). 194. “The fault of the men of Lu”: Yang follows Wang Yinzhi’s (1766-1834) sug-

gestion that gao Sis a loan for jiu &. ; 195. What these ru writings might have been in the early fifth century is uncertain, and it is possible that the term is an anachronism. For the purposes of this discussion I treat the account of the song’s composition as if it were true, but there are good reasons to believe that songs often circulated for a long time before being matched with explanatory framing anecdotes; see Schaberg, “Song and the Histori-

cal Imagination.”

434 Notes to Pages 309-16 196. At Xiang 4.8 (Yang, p. 940) it appears in a compound meaning “midget” (zhuru). The Shuowen jiezi defines it as rou, “soft.” See Creel, Confucius: The Man and the Myth, pp. 182-83, and chap. 11, “The “Weaklings.’” Eno (The Confucian Creation of

Heaven, pp. 190-97) argues that the term ru was coined for the followers of Confucius and related originally to their masked dances. 197. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, pp. 132-33.

198. The ominous connections between seeing and controlling are well attested in Foucault's discussion of Bentham’s panopticon, and scholars of the novel have revealed the structures of vision and control implicit in the relations between narrator and characters. See Dorrit Cohn’s treatment of Foucault's ideas in her “Optics and Power in the Novel,” with the rebuttals from Mark Seltzer and John Bender in the same issue. 199. Lunyu 2.10. Book 10 of the Lunyu shows how Confucius’ own actions were in every detail worthy of observation.

Appendix | EPIGRAPH: Maspero, “La composition et la date du T’so-chuan,” pp. 140-41.

1. Li Ling (“Chutu faxian yu gushu niandai di zai renshi,” pp. 108-13) argues on the basis of archaeological finds that pre-Han texts normally circulated in separate “bundles” (pian) and that the contents of the longer “book” were by no means stable. 2. Liu Fenglu, Zuoshi chungiu kaozheng, Kang Youwei, Xinxue weijing kao, pp. 143-49. 3. Cui Shi, Shiji tanyuan; Tijima, Shina kodai shiron, pp. 75-76; Tsuda, “Saden” no shisdshiteki kenkyd; Gu Jiegang, “Chungiu” sanzhuan ji “Guoyu” zhi zonghe yanjiu.

4. See Liu Shipei, Zuo’an ji, 2.6b-8a, 2.8a-12b; Zhang Binglin, Zhang Taiyan quanji, 2: 805-66, 6: 247-342; Karlgren, “On the Authenticity and Nature of the Tso chuan” and “The Early History of the Chou li and Tso chuan Texts”; Shinjo, Toyo temmongaku shi kenkyd, pp. 398-428; Maspero, “La composition et la date du Tsochuan”; Hung, preface to Combined Concordances; Kamata, “Saden” no seiritsu to sono tenkai.

5. The articles collected in “Zuozhuan” lunwen ji, edited by Chen Xinxiong and Yu Dacheng, are for the most part inspired by Karlgren’s work and are framed as refutations of the New Text thesis; among articles by Sun Cizhou, Hu Shi, Derk Bodde, Wei Juxian, Feng Yuanjun, and Tong Shuye, the best is Yang Xiangkui’s “Lun Zuozhuan zhi xingzhi ji gi yu Guoyu zhi guanxi.” See also Yang Xiangkui, Zhongguo gudai shehui yu gudai sixiang yanjiu, 1: 299-308.

6. The best-known recent defender of the New Text position is Xu Renfu; see his Zuozhuan shuzheng “Zuo Qiuming shi Zuozhuan hai shi Guoyu di zuozhe?”; and “Lun Liu Xin zuo Zuozhuan.” Xu's renewed arguments for the New Text theory are refuted in Yang Bojun, “Zuozhuan chengshu niandai lunshu’; and Hu Nianyi,

, Notes to Pages 316-17 435 “Zuozhuan di zhenwei he xiezuo shidai wenti kaobian.” In addition to Kamata Tada-

shi, cited above, other contributions of the past decades that start from the problem of refuting the New Text charges include Zhao Guangxian, “Zuozhuan bianzhuan kao”; Zheng Junhua, “Lite lun Zuozhuan chengshu niandai di youguan wenti”; and Zhang Handong, “Zuozhuan ji gi xiang Chungiu xue di yanbian.” 7. For overviews, see Shen Yucheng and Liu Ning, “Chungiu Zuozhuan” xueshi gao, pp: 356-99; Wu Xifei, “Zuozhuan zhengyi zhushuo shuping”; Liu Shifan, “‘Chunqiu jingzhuan guoji xueshu taolun hui’ xueshu guandian zongshu’”; and Zhang Gaoping,

“Zuozhuan xue yanjiu zhi xiankuang yu quxiang.” E. Bruce Brooks and A. Taeko Brooks (The Original Analects, p. 6) hold that the Zuozhuan was compiled circa 312 B.c.E. in Qi. The Brookses, through their online discussion group, the Warring States Workshop, have presided over a lively discussion of Zuozhuan provenance and dating, with contributions from Bruce Brooks himself, Barry B. Blakeley, Yuri Pines, and others; see the group’s archives (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/wsw/) for the spring and summer of 1999. In a major recent work, the third in a series on Eastern Zhou calendrical sciences, Hirase Takao (“Saden” no shiry6 hihanteki kenkyi) has argued that the Zuozhuan was compiled in the middle Warring States period under the influence of incipient notions of correlative cosmology. 8. The predictions are the strongest evidence for dating the text to the fourth century; see Kamata, “Saden” no seiritsu to sono tenkai, pp. 318-27; Zhao Guangxian, “Zuozhuan bianzhuan kao,” pt. II; and Yang, pp. 38-41. Hu Nianyi (“Zuozhuan di zhenwei he xiezuo shidai wenti kaobian”) holds that the text was composed at the end of the Chungiu period and attempts to dismiss the predictions as accidents and interpolations. Hu is refuted point for point by Niu Hong’en, “Lun Zuozhuan di chengshu niandai.” Wang He, “Lun Zuozhuan yuyan,” tends to support Niu’s views. Guan Xuhua (“Zuozhuan xiyi [2]”) reads the predictions in the Zuozhuan as evidence not for the dating of the text but for the superstitions of the Chunqiu period aristocracy. .

9. See Li Jiafu, “Kongzi Chungiu yu Zuoshi Chungiu"; and Zhang Handong, “Zuozhuan ji gi xiang Chungiu xue di yanbian.” 10. See Hu Nianyi, “Zuozhuan di zhenwei he xiezuo shidai wenti kaobian”; Wang

Shumin, “Zuo Qiu yu Zuo Qiuming fei yiren bian”; and Huang Lili, “Shuo Zuozhuan.”

11. For Yao Nai’s views, see Zhang Xincheng, Weishu tongkao, p. 362. See also Guo Moruo, Qingtong shidai, pp. 226-30; Qian Mu, Xian Qin zhuzi xinian, pp. 192-95; and Tong Shuye, “Chungiu Zuozhuan” yanjiu, pp. 285-89. This attribution is challenged in Zhao Guangxian, “Zuozhuan de bianzhuan,” pt. II; Sun Kaitai and Xu Yong, “Wu Qi ye shi shixue jia’; Goodrich, “Ssu-ma Ch'ien’s Biography of Wu Ch’i”; and Sailey, “T’ung Shu-yeh, the Tso-chuan, and Early Chinese History.”

436 Notes to Page 317 12. For the earliest account of the Zuozhuan’s transmission, that of Liu Xiang, see

Zhang Xincheng, Weishu tongkao, p. 340. The Zuozhuan has been attributed to a number of individuals. To Confucius: see Yao Manbo, “Kongzi zuo Chungiu ji ‘Chungiu zhuan’ shuo chuzheng.” To Zeng Shen and his followers: see Zhang Pingche, “Chungiu Zuozhuan di zuozhe jiujing shi shui?” To the Han official Zhang Cang: see Hung, preface to Combined Concordances, pp. xciii-xcv. To an otherwise unknown Zuoshi of Lu: see Zhao Guangxian, “Zuozhuan bianzhuan kao.” For his part,

Zuo Qiuming. | |

Yang Bojun (pp. 29-34) refuses to speculate, asserting only that the text is not by 13. Sun Haibo (“Guoyu zhenwei kao”) gave different dates, ranging from late Zhou to Western Han, for different portions of the text. Yin Heng (“Guoyu mantan”) puts it between 335 and 299. Shen Changyun (“Guoyu bianzhuan kao”) dates it to the late Warring States period; Hung (preface to Combined Concordances, p- Ixxxvi) considered it possible that the Guoyu dated to the end of the third century B.c.E. Yoshimoto (“Kokugo shoko,” pp. 24-25) summarizes stages in the work's compilation, from early third century to middle second century B.c.£. Some writers, noting that in parallel passages the Zuozhuan is generally more concise than the Guoyu, have argued on stylistic grounds that the Guoyu must precede the Zuozhuan; see Tong Shuye, “Guoyu yu Zuozhuan wenti hou'an”; Liu Jie, “Zuozhuan Guoyu Shiji zhi bijiao yanjiu”; and Wang Shumin, “Guoyu di zuozhe he bianzhe.” This view is

perhaps a late echo of the New Text school’s thesis that the received text of the Guoyu is the residue of a larger work from which Liu Xin took the materials for his Zuozhuan.

14. For an overview of opinions, see Tan Jiajian, “Lidai guanyu Guoyu zuozhe wenti di butong yijian zongshu.” A few scholars still attribute the text to Zuo Qiuming; see Shi Zhimian, “Guoyu que wei Zuo Qiuming zuo bian”; and Hong Anquan, “Kongzi Chungiu yu Chungiu sanzhuan.” More scholars have been willing to argue for collective authorship than in the case of the Zuozhuan: see Sun Haibo, “Guoyu zhenwei kao”; Yin Heng, “Guoyu mantan”; Xiong Xianguang, “Guoyu fengge, nanbei yiqu”; and Shen Changyun, “Guoyu bianzhuan kao.” On the basis of a stub_ bornly literalist reading of the Shiji, Wang Shumin (“Guoyu di zuozhe he bianzhe”)

argues that the author of the Guoyu was a certain Zuo Qiu of the Warring States period, who has since been confused with the late Spring and Autumn period Zuo Qiuming. 15. I speak of Sima Qian as the author of Shiji, although any of the sections we are about to consider could have come from the hand of his father, Sima Tan, who appears to have begun the work.

| 16. Shiji 130.3300. Cf. Ban Gu, Hanshu 62.2735. The apparent abbreviation of Zuo's name and the Warring States context in which the passage seems to place him have occasioned much speculation that this Zuo is not Zuo Qiuming; see, e.g.,

Notes to Pages 318-19 437 the Wang Shumin article cited in note 14. I suspect that if Sima Qian had thought of Zuo Qiu and Zuo Qiuming as different authors, he would have distinguished them more clearly; in this passage he has abbreviated the name only for the sake of

parallelism. ,

17. Shiji 14.509. It is clear from Sima Qian’s brief description of the text that he

has in mind the Chungiu chronicle, rather than any of the other works that were later known as Chungiu. 18. Ibid., 14.509-10. 19. For the change of titles, see Li Jiafu, “Kongzi Chungiu yu Zuoshi Chungiu.”

20. Ban Gu (Hanshu 30.1715) believed that Zuo Qiuming and Confucius had viewed scribal records (shiji) together, but for the transcription of the teachings he follows Sima Qian’s version with only a few changes in details. Where Sima Qian wrote “he put in order all of its words (yu) and completed the Chungiu of Master Zuo,” Ban Gu clarifies: “putting in order the underlying anecdotes (benshi), he com_ posed a commentary, making it clear that the Master did not explain the Classic by

means of empty words”; there is no suggestion that Zuo gathered additional sources. Dan Zhu (fl. 750) and his followers held that Zuo had access to the written records of several states but passed on his accounts orally; the work associated with his name resulted from later scholars’ transcription and arrangement of his materials and other lore. See Zhang Xincheng, Weishu tongkao, p. 354. For a recent reading that emphasizes the role of oral transmission in this passage, see Durrant, “Ssu-ma Ch’ien’s Conception of Tso chuan.” a1. See Pines, “Intellectual Change in the Chunqiu Period,” p. 82. 22. See Xu Zhaochang, “Shiguan yuanliu kao”; and idem, “Shi lun Chungiu shiqi shiguan zhidu de bianqian.” 23. See Hung, preface to Combined Concordances, p. i-vi. See also Needham, Science and Civilisation in China, 3: 417 and the sources cited there. The most detailed study of the Chungiu in a Western language is Gassmann, Cheng-ming: Richtigstellung der Bezeichnungen, esp. pp. 157-302. Other states also kept written chronicles resem-

bling the Chungiu; see Shaughnessy, “On the Authenticity of the Bamboo Annals” and “The ‘Current’ Bamboo Annals and the Date of the Zhou Conquest of Shang.” 24. For the embedded Chungiu, see the discussion in Chapter 8, p. 306. It is now widely accepted that the Chungiu was, among other things, a teaching text for Confucius and his disciples. See Rosthorn, “Das Tsch’un-tsch’iu und seine Verfasser”; Kaizuka, “Shunji Sashi den kaisetsu,” p. 325; Hu Nianyi, “Zuozhuan di zhenwei he xiezuo shidai wenti kaobian”; Yang, p. 16; Zhao Shengqun, “Zuozhuan jishi buhe shifa lun”; and Zhang Pingche, “Chungiu Zuozhuan di zuozhe jiujing shi shui?”

25. See Pines, “Intellectual Change in the Chungiu Period,” pp. 85-86. Zhao Guangxian (“Zuozhuan bianzhuan kao,” pt. II, pp. 53-54) also argues that these pas-

sages originate in scribal records but notes that they are relatively rare. Eastern |

438 Notes to Pages 319-20 Zhou bronze inscriptions frequently included dates, and it is conceivable that these in some cases served the Zuozhuan compilers as sources. Court documents that served as the basis for investiture inscriptions may also have become sources for the later histories; see Falkenhausen, “Issues in Western Zhou Studies,” pp. 162-63. Ambiguous internal evidence on the matter is to be found at Zuo, Xi 7.3 (Yang, pp. 318-19), which most likely refers to the keeping of chronicle-style records. 26. Yoshimoto, “Sashi tangen josetsu.” 27. See Xu Zhaochang, “Shi lun Chunqiu shiqi shiguan zhidu de bianqian.” A covenant text is quoted at Zuo, Ding 4.1 (Yang, pp. 1541-42). For archaeologically

recovered covenant texts, see Weld, “The Covenant Texts from Houma and Wenxian.”

, 28. See Wang He, “Zuozhuan cailiao laiyuan kao”; Huang Lili, “Shuo Zuozhuan’; and the works on oral composition discussed below. 29. See Zuo, Xuan 2.3 (Yang, pp. 662-63) and Xiang 25.2 (Yang, p. 1099). Both are discussed in Chapter 8, pp. 261-64. 30. Guoyu, Jin 7.9 (p. 445), Chu 1.1 (p. $28).

, 31. Wu Yujiang, Mozi jiaozhu, 1: 337-39. 32. Mencius 4B.21 (SSJZS 2: 2728).

33. Yao Manbo, “Kongzi zuo Chungiu ji ‘Chungiu zhuan’ shuo chuzheng.” 34. Hung, preface to Combined Concordances, p. lxi. See also Liu Zhenghao, Zhou Qin zhuzi shu “Zuozhuan” kao. 35. Jin Dejian, Sima Qian suo jian shu kao, pp. 105-15. Further evidence to support

Jin’s case is presented in Zheng Junhua, “Litie lun Zuozhuan chengshu niandai di youguan wenti.” See also Huang Zhangjian, “Du Du Yu ‘Chungiu xu.’” According to Shiji 130.3297, the Chungiu comprised “many ten thousands of words, and covers several thousand events,” figures that fit the Zuozhuan but not the Chungiu chronicle or

either of the other two commentaries. The Qing scholar Wang Ji counted 16,561 graphs in the Chungiu jing (plus the 220 additional characters of the version accompanying the Zuozhuan) and 194,955 in the Zuozhuan; the Gongyang and Guliang are 27,590 and 23,293 graphs, respectively. See Hung, preface to Combined Concordances, p. Xill.

36. The teaching traditions that became the Gongyang and Guliang commentaries were committed to writing only in the Western Han; the implication is that complete written versions were not considered necessary beforehand, despite the length of the two texts and the complexity of their contents. Two additional commentarial traditions, the Zoushi zhuan and the Jiashi zhuan, seem to have died out because they were never written down. See passages collected in Hung, preface to Combined Concordances, pp. xxvii-xxxi.

37. Yuri Pines has recently argued, in “Intellectual Change in the Chungiu Period,” that many of the speeches of the Zuozhuan are authentic transcriptions datable

Notes to Page 320 439 to the dramatic moments assigned them in the Zuozhuan and can be used as evidence for Spring and Autumn period intellectual history. The article does much to illuminate the sorts of written materials that the Zuozhuan compilers might have had at their disposal; some of these are mentioned above.

Pines’s hypothesis requires that the role of oral transmission be minimized or eliminated altogether, since a speech transmitted orally for any period of time is likely to be embellished in various ways; whenever it is finally transcribed, it will not be a reliable reflection of the original speaker's use of philosophical terminology. For

several reasons, however, I have hesitated to accept his argument in its strongest form and prefer to reserve a place for oral transmission in the making of Zuozhuan speeches. First, it has not been demonstrated that there was in the Eastern Zhou a “common practice of recording speeches” (p. 91), since the examples Pines cites

| strongly suggest that such recording was exceptional. Second, figures for the use of political and ethical terms in different portions of the text (p. 99-100) make for a very small sample, and a sample that is significant only if the selection of speeches included in the Zuozhuan accurately reflects the frequency with which terms were used in each of the periods of the Chunqiu; without this proviso, the figures might as well reflect accidents of preservation or the preferences of the compiler. Further, if the speeches were faithful records of words spoken over a period of more than two hundred years, we would expect to see obvious changes not only in terminology but also in grammar and rhetoric, but these change very little, if at all. Third, narratives of intellectual change derived from the Zuozhuan are inevitably complicated by counterexamples. It is true that by the Warring States period li had come to mean much more than ritual decorum, but it is not the case (as argued on p. 104) that it was not mentioned in connection with the internal political order in the parts of the Zuozhuan devoted to the eighth to seventh centuries; see, e.g., Huan 2.8 (Yang, p. 92) and Zhuang 23.1 (Yang, p. 226). On putative changes in speakers’ and historiographers’ attitudes toward li (profit), see the discussion in Chapter 4, p. 156. Finally, on , pp. 88-89 and 122-24, it is not clear that the distribution of yu js and yu F (a development of Karlgren’s method of dating the text) is statistically significant; as Pines (p. 124) notes, Warring States authors may have been capable of archaism in their use of particles, and in light of Warring States texts found in tombs, one might wonder how faithfully received texts reflect early orthography. Pines’s argument on these matters does find support in the conclusions of He Leshi, “Zuozhuan” xuci yanjiu, pp. 0-11. These objections aside, Pines’s approach to the Zuozhuan is the most coherent and forceful effort ever made to identify its Spring and Autumn period

intellectual history. , ,

content and constitutes an important contribution to the study of Eastern Zhou

38. Among others, see Kaizuka, “Rongo no seiritsu” and “Kodai ni okeru rekishi kijutsu keitai no hensen.”

440 Notes to Pages 320-22 39. Kaizuka (“Kokugo ni arawareta setsuwa no keishiki”) also holds that his investigation corroborates Qian Mu’s arguments that Wu Qi had a role in the writing of the Guoyu. 40. Kaizuka, “Shunja Sashi den kaisetsu.”

41. Xu recognizes that the Zuozhuan is also based in part on documentary sources; see his “Zuozhuan di zuozhe ji qi chengshu niandai.” 42. See Yin Heng, “Guoyu mantan”; Shen Changyun, “Guoyu bianzhuan kao’; Li Kun, “Guoyu di bianzhuan”; and Zhang Jun, “Guoyu chengbian xinzheng.” 43. See Zeng Hailong, “Lun Zuozhuan dui biannian jishi di gongxian”; Wang He, “Zuozhuan cailiao laiyuan kao”; and Huang Lili, “Shuo Zuozhuan.”

44. See Zhang Jun, “"Yu’ di chuanliu, leibie he Churen songxi, zhizuo di ‘yu’”; Zeng Hailong, “Woguo gudai koutou shixue chuyi”; Guo Dongming, “Xian-Qin shiguan wenhua ji qi wenxue yiyun”; and Xu Zhaochang, “Shiguan yuanliu kao.” 45. See Petersen, “Which Books Did the First Emperor of Ch'in Burn?” esp. pp. 2-3. 46. The best overview is Niu Hong’en, “Lun Zuozhuan di chengshu niandai.” 47. Zuo, Wen 6.3 (Yang, p. 549). See Niu Hong’en, “Lun Zuozhuan di chengshu niandai,” p. 21.

48. The Guoyu anecdotes and their Zuozhuan equivalents are conveniently listed in Sun Haibo, “Guoyu zhenwei kao,” pp. 176-80. Zhang Yiren gives a detailed comparison of all the corresponding anecdotes; see “Guoyu” “Zuozhuan” lunji, pp. 19-108.

49. Boltz, “Notes on the Textual Relation Between the Kuo yi and the Tso chuan.”

| 50. James Crump has argued that the speeches of the Zhanguoce (a text connected with the yu genre through its early title, Events and Discourses [Shiyu]) are fictional and may originate in the rhetorical exercises of students; see his Intrigues, pp. 103-9, and “The Chan-kuo ts’e and Its Fiction,” pp. 305-75, 322-23. 51. See Liu Zhenghao, Zhou Qin zhuzi shu “Zuozhuan” kao; and Zhou Ciji, “Zuozhuan” zakao, pp. 5-87.

52. See Kaizuka’s remarks on the Han Feizi, particularly on the form of the “Chushuo” chapters, in “Shunja Sashi den kaisetsu,” p. 335.

53. One might argue that history in our own age is also obsessed with famous characters and stereotypical in its plotting. But it is not generally anecdotal in form, except when it is oral history. For the anecdotal form as characteristic of oral traditions, see Chapter 5, p. 172.

54. The Chungiu shiyu is a famous example. It contains sixteen anecdotes; the Zuozhuan has versions of all but one of these, and most are also found in other Warring States writings. See Zheng Liangshu, Zhujian boshu lunwen ji, pp. 18-46. Xu Renfu (“Mawangdui Han mu boshu Chungiu shiyu he Zuozhuan di shi, yu duibi yanjiu”) attempted to show that these materials were among the sources Liu Xin used

Notes to Page 322 441 in his forgery of the Zuozhuan. Li Xueqin (Jianbo yiji yu xueshu shi, pp. 276-87), on the other hand, argued that the Chungiu shiyu texts were drawn from the Zuozhuan. I agree with those writers who liken the Chungiu shiyu to the Guoyu as a set of transcriptions from the oral genre known as yu; see Li Kun, “Guoyu di bianzhuan” and Zhang Jun, “Guoyu chengbian xinzheng.” The texts recovered at Ji in 281 c.E. from the tomb of King Xiang of Wei (d. 296 B.C.E.) seem to have had the same sort of relation to the received historiographical

texts. Lu Chun (late 8th c.) wrote that a set of divination anecdotes found in the tomb were identical to corresponding passages in the Zuozhuan. Du Yu, however, who saw the texts not long after they were excavated, makes it clear that they were similar, but not identical, to Zuozhuan versions. A passage cited from one of the tomb texts by Liu Zhiji differs from its Zuozhuan and Guoyu counterparts. See Hung, preface to Combined Concordances, pp. xxiv-xxvi. For examples of similarities between Zuozhuan passages and archaeologically recovered texts, see Felber, “Neue Moglichkeiten und Kriterien fur die Bestimmung der Authentizitat des Zuo-zhuan.” 55. For simultaneous oral and written transmission and for the diffusion of traditions, see Xu Zhaochang, “Shi lun Chungqiu shiqi shiguan zhidu de bianqian.” 56. This date is based on the predictions, discussed above, and on the linguistic evidence amassed by Karlgren in “On the Authenticity and Nature of the Tso chuan” and “The Early History of the Chou li and Tso chuan Texts.”

| 57. See Li Ling, “Chutu faxian yu gushu niandai di zai renshi,” pp. 108-13. The Shiji account of the Zuozhuan's transmission may again reflect actual events. According to Sima Qian, after Zuo Qiuming made his transcription, two writers excerpted it for kings who could not read it in its entirety. The first was Duo Jiao of Chu, who prepared his Duoshi wei in fourteen sections (zhang) for King Wei of Chu (r. 339-329 B.c.E.). The second was Yu Qing of Zhao, who presented his Yushi chungiu in eight pian to King Xiaocheng of Zhao (r. 265-245). See Shiji 14.510; and Ban Gu, Hanshu 30.1726. As cited by Kong Yingda, Liu Xiang’s Bielu referred to Duo Jiao’s eight juan and to Yu Qing’s nine juan as “copied selections” (chaocuo); see SSJZS | 2:1703. But the Hanshu “Yiwen zhi” lists instead a Duoshi wei in two pian and a Yushi weizhuan in three pian, both of which may be remnants of the Warring States texts. Ban Gu categorizes these with other Chungiu-related texts, including the mysterious Zuoshi wei in two pian and the Zhangshi wei in ten pian (possibly connected with the Han minister Zhang Cang, known as a Chungiu scholar). See Hanshu 30.1713. These works were probably not organized along the annalistic lines of our Zuozhuan. The four chapter titles Sima Qian gives for the Yushi chungiu at Shiji 76.2375 bespeak

thematic rather than chronological arrangement. Zhang Jun (“Guoyu chengbian xinzheng”) speculated that it was Duo Jiao who first transcribed the oral materials that would become the Zuozhuan and that he then excerpted his own transcription to produce the Duoshi wei. But it is simpler to see the Duoshi wei and similar anecdote

442 Notes to Pages 323-24 collections—many of them unknown to us—as the separate transcriptions that were eventually compiled to form the Guoyu and Zuozhuan. 58. It often happens in the Zuozhuan that a character goes by different names in

different anecdotes, with no indication that the same individual is meant. The matching of individuals with their many names was one aim of the commentary of Du Yu and perhaps occupied his predecessors. See Blakeley, “Notes on the Reliability and Objectivity of the Tu Yi Commentary on the Tso Chuan.” 59. As Zhao Guangxian (“Zuozhuan bianzhuan kao,” pt. I, pp. 149-50) and others have demonstrated, the version of the Zuozhuan that Sima Qian used already contained the junzi yue passages; see also Zheng Liangshu, Zhujian boshu lunwenji, pp- 342-63. A more comprehensive study of Sima Qian’s use of the Zuozhuan is Gu Lisan, Sima Qian zhuanxie “Shiji” caiyong “Zuozhuan” di yanjiu.

60. The Qi, Wu, and Yue sections of the Guoyu diverge from the standard anecdotal narrative in other sections of the Guoyu and in the Zuozhuan. The Qi section, moreover, is closely related to the “Xiaokuang” chapter of the Guanzi. As Rickett (Guanzi, pp. 318-19) has shown, however, there are significant differences between

the Guoyu and Guanzi texts, and they are unlikely to have come from the same author. Sun Haibo (“Guoyu zhenwei kao,” pp. 192-93) and others have speculated that these portions might have been written in the late Zhou or early Han. For a detailed comparison of several Wu and Yue accounts, see Liang Xiaoyun, “Shiji yu Zuozhuan Guoyu suoji zhi Wu Yue lishi di bijiao yanjiu.”

61. See p. 396759. | 62. See Ban Gu, Hanshu 36.1967.

63. The first argument is Karlgren’s; see “The Early History of the Chou li and Tso chuan Texts,” p. 12. The second is Maspero’s; see “La composition et la date du Tso tchouan,” pp. 183-84. Zhang Handong (“Zuozhuan ji qi xiang Chungiu xue di yanbian”) argues that the Zuozhuan became a commentary on the Chungiu and acquired its pres| ent title only because of Liu Xin’s efforts. As Michael Nylan (“The Chin wen / ku wen Controversy in Han Times”) has argued, it makes little sense to understand Liu Xin’s work in terms of a conflict between New Text and Old Text “schools.”

64. As noted in Chapter 5 (pp. 174-75), Du Yu's organization of the text sometimes caused him to split anecdotes that transpired across the coming of a new year. 65. Sources on transmission through the Western Han are collected in Hung, preface to Combined Concordances, pp. xli-xliii.

66. The story of the discovery of the Zuozhuan and other texts in ancient graphs in the wall of Confucius’ home is either terribly distorted or wholly fictional, as Stephen Durrant demonstrates in “Ssu-ma Ch’ien’s Conception of Tso chuan,” pp. 298-99. The social prestige of the Zuozhuan’s backers, and its gradual progress toward canonization, would do much to explain how such a story arose and why it was believed. 67. Cited in Hung, preface to Combined Concordances, p. xliii.

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and Six Dynasties). Taipei: Taiwan shangwu yinshuguan, 1964 [1933]. Zeng Guofan fB #8. Jingshi baijia zachao KE EF A AK HE HY (Various transcriptions from the Classics, the histories, and the hundred schools). 6 vols. Shanghai: Shijie shuju, 1936.

Zeng Hailong He. “Lun Zuozhuan dui biannian jishi di gongxian” i ¢ 7 (8) At ha SE 2c 33 A BORK (On the contribution of Zuozhuan to annalistic narrative). Guizhou wenshi congkan 1993, no. 3: 17-20.

———.. “Woguo gudai koutou shixue chuyi” FX Bd 4 (CF GA BS 33 3 (Humble opinions on the history of ancient oral historiography in our country). Tangdu xuekan 1993, No. I: 91-94.

Zeng Qinliang } 3) f2. “Zuozhuan” yinshi fushi zhi shijiao yanjiu Fe (4 5 | ae BR a ag 2X tt 3 (Research on the poetics of poetry citation and recitation in Zuozhuan). Taipei: Wenjin chubanshe, 1993.

Zhan Ziging f fe. “Lun Zuozhuan di zhengzhi sixiang qingxiang” ifm (7E (8) A) BC 78 & 7S (th fay (On tendencies of political thought in Zuozhuan). Shixueshi yanjiu 1983, no. 4: 5-13.

Zhang Binglin 5 IA BR. Zhang Taiyan quanji BK R= FE (Complete works of Zhang Taiyan). Ed. Wang Youwei. 6 vols. Shanghai: Shanghai renmin chubanshe, 1986. Zhang Duansui 4 Vin FR. “Zuozhuan” sixiang tanwei 7c (HA AG PR Gt (Probing the subtleties of thought in Zuozhuan). Taipei: Xuehai chubanshe, 1987. Zhang Gaoping 5f '& af. “‘Zuoshi fukua’ xilun” ° A PS 33 4 HF ft (“The Zuo is superficial and exaggerated”: analysis and discussion). Kong Meng xuebao 48

(1984): 193—213.

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——. “Zuozhuan xue yanjiu zhi xiankuang yu quxiang” ( 7 fe) Shh A ZH Ye, Hid 8 [FG] (Current state and directions in Zuozhuan scholarship). Jingxue yanjiu luncong 2 (1994): 63-70.

———. “Zuozhuan” zhi wenxue jiazhi 7 18 2M & IB (i (Literary value of Zuozhuan). Taipei: Wenshizhe chubanshe, 1982. Zhang Handong 48 # A. “Zuozhuan ji qi xiang Chungiu xue di yanbian” « 7% {# )

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———.. “"Yu' di chuanliu, leibie he Churen songxi, zhizuo di ‘yu’” « 48 » AY {& iit

~ FS Bl AS A a Oy BE AY «a8 » (Transmission and types of legends, and legends recited and created by the people of Chu). Hubei daxue xuebao (zhexue shehui kexue ban) 1991, no. 5: 55-60.

Zhang Pingche 5f +4 #. “Chungiu Zuozhuan di zuozhe jiujing shi shui?” « # fk) (Fe (8) AN (FE OA OB ze sé (Who was the author of Chungiu and Zuozhuan?). Xibei daxue bao (shehui kexue ban) 1990, no. 6: 82-85. Zhang Suqing Sie 3 Jel. Xushi yu jieshi—“Zuozhuan” jingjie yanjiu FU Ss EH fee FS — (A

{3 ) 4S AB OH A (Narrative and exegesis: research on Zuozhuan as classical commentary). Taipei: Shulin chuban youxian gongsi, 1998. ———. Zuozhuan chengshi yanjiu Az FB a Ht AG (Research on citation of poetry in Zuozhuan). Taipei: Guoli Taiwan daxue chuban weiyuanhui, 1991. Zhang Xincheng 4 Ly /#L, ed. Weishu tongkao {f = 36 % (Comprehensive inquiry into forged works). Taipei: Minglun chubanshe, 1971.

Zhang Yanxiu 5 = {¥. “Chunqiu ‘chuben’ kaoshu” € fk « Hy ARE” F Gt (An inquiry into and exposition of fleeing into exile in the Spring and Autumn period). Shixue yuekan 1996, no. 6: 21-25.

Zhang Yiren $& LA {=. “Cong Guoyu yu Zuozhuan benzhi shang di chayi shilun

houren dui Guoyu di piping” ft Rl ARAB LNB Ram RAN aa BY itt #P (Tentative discussion of later readers’ appraisals of Guoyu, based on substantial differences between Guoyu and Zuozhuan). 2 pts. Hanxue yanjiu 1, no. 2 (1983): 419-53; 2, no. 1 (1984): 1-21.

———. Guoyu jiaozheng a a8 f+ dE (Collation and evidentiary scholarship on Guoyu). Taipei: Shangwu yinshuguan, 1969. ———. “Guoyu” “Zuozhuan” lunji Bd 38 AE (1 ati BE (Collected essays on Guoyu and Zuozhuan). Taipei: Dongsheng chuban shiye gongsi, 1970.

, Zhang Yongxin 4 7 #&. Han yuefu yanjiu i 4 fF Ht 9E (Research on the Han Music Bureau). Nanjing: Jiangsu guji chubanshe, 1992. Zhang, Zhenhua. Chinesische und europdische Rhetorik: Ein Vergleich in Grundziigen (Chinese and European rhetoric: a comparison of essential features). Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1991. Zhanguoce WY [A] 8 (Stratagems of the Warring States). Shanghai: Shanghai guji

chubanshe, 1978.

Zhao Guangxian #8 36 B&. “Zuozhuan bianzhuan kao” (7 (%) ita #2 & (An inquiry into the compilation of Zuozhuan). 2 pts. Zhongguo lishi wenxian yanjiu jikan 1980, no. I! 135-53; 1980, no. 2: 45-58.

470 Works Cited Zhao Shengqun #8 4E FF. “Zuozhuan jishi buhe shifalun” « 7B) 7BAA KH YW; afi (Narration in Zuozhuan does not accord with scribal method). Wenjiao ziliao 1998, no. 3: 110-19, 136.

| Zhao Zhiyang #8 fil] by. “Zuozhuan Ji Zha guanyue youguan wenti di taolun” 7 (# 45 KL BRO 7 OBA PG) a AY BT ff (Discussion of problems relating to Ji Zha’s viewing of a musical performance in Zuozhuan). Zhonghua wenbua fuxing yuekan 18, no. 3 (1985): 9-20.

Zhen Dexiu IB (# 7. Wenzhang zhengzong X = IE Fe (Correct lineage of essays). SKQS, vol. 1355.

Zheng Junhua # 4 #é. “Lie lun Zuozhuan chengshu niandai di youguan wenti” H§

am (7 /(—) oh SAR @ fe fel ee (A brief discussion of problems relating to the compilation date of Zuozhuan). Wenxue yichan 1984, no. I: 15-23. Zheng Liangshu # Fb fi}. Zhujian boshu lunwenji (7 fj FA & at SC FE (Collected essays on bamboo strips and silk writings). Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1982. Zhou Ciji i] KF. “Zuozhuan” zakao Fe (8 HE FS (Various researches on Zuozhuan).

Taipei: Wenjin chubanshe, 1966. ,

Zhu Tingxian Fi £E Bk. “Shangshu” yanjiu ja) # tt FC (Researches on Shangshu). Taipei: Taiwan shangwu yinshuguan, 1987. Zhu Weide Fe HE 1. “Zuozhuan ju, duan jian di yinhan” «(7 {#) a) ~ Be fal Ay ke & (Hidden implications between lines and sections in Zuozhuan). Hengyang shizhuan xuebao (shehui kexue) 1996, no. 2: 34-37.

Zhu Yizun 4 ## Et. Jingyi kao KE FEF (Critique of classical studies). 8 vols. 1755. Reprinted—Taipei: Taiwan Zhonghua shuju, 1979.

Chinese Character List

ai bianfeng #2 Jal aiji x2 “Biantong zhuan” #4 388 (4 an 3#2“Biaoji” An Bielu §l|Zé# 3C |

ba #8 Bin BaF! bingzi Ay

“Bigong” fzj &

ba /\ Jal bo (A ({ & baifeng 4 “Bo Qin” baijia zhi yu BAX HZ a8 Bo Xia (4 FR

“Ban” RX Bo Yangfu {9 hg

bao ¥#i Bo Yi{A # Bao Si #8 WJ Bo Zong {4 A

bei 4g bohei G & Beigong Wenzi 4b Sf Boyou {A 8

“Beishan” JE LL “Bozhou” #4 benshi AX 33 Bozhou Li {4 }h| £2 bi (necessary) buanren NA bi (stubborn) {8 bu bei ben 4 4 AS Bi 2h bu bian 4y #3 Bi Wan #2 bu huang gichu 4. 3& EF a

bian #2¢ bu jing AV iti | Bian He -* Al bu ke 4 BJ

472 Chinese Character List

bu li A. #4 Chunhuo #8

bu xia 7S Fy Chungiu # #k

bu xiao AN = Chungiu fanlu £ &k 5 Fe

| Chungiu shiyu # ®k SS a8

cai FF | Chungiu Zuoshi zhuan shilei benmo Cai Mo #& & BK FE ER (SS FB ARR

“Caifan” ZR “Chushuo” fig a

“Caiwei’ 7 Ax ci BY

caizhang 5R ciling 47

Cao Gui 2 gl ciming eff ff Cao Mo #8 # Cisui YK fe “Chanding zhi ming” # Hit Z #4 Cui Shi # 3

Chang Hong #2 5/, Cui Shu @ iit

changchu & 4K Cui Zhu £ tf “Changdi” i f# cuohua $8 = changlie zhi shi & # Z-E

chaocuo #4 ## Dajitd#c . che Dachen X fz

chen (the fitting) #4 “Dadong” XK FR

Chen [if , “Dagao” X iti Chen Chengzi BR AF Dahuo * 2

Chen Feng hR7/G dajing K #8

chen shi gijun & HA “Daliie’ XK fig chen wen zhi — fil Z “Daming” 7% HA

cheng #8 Dan Zhu I Bj Cheng Tang hse “Dang” “Chengong” ET. dao 38 Chengpu 3k 4 “Daqu’ X |i

chi 3# A Chiair Didaren 9% 3k dashi K # | “Chixiao” §8 5B , “Daxu” K FF

Chong (person) = “Daxue” K

Chong (state) “Daya” K Fe

Chong’er Hi dazhe 3##

chu 4] de (obtain) 4} Chu #4 de (virtue, power) (# chu hai KR Deng Xi 5h #7

Chu Ni #8 : deyi 1 5%

Chuan (terrace name) jt deyin # FF

Chuci 48 BY di

Chinese Character List 473

Di 3k Duke Ping of Song F247 Di Ku 7 Duke Qing of Jin & 68 7

dian #8 Duke Qing of Qi FE tH ZS dianzhui 2b Duke Shang of Song R #7 ding Hit Duke Wen of Jin GX“ Dong # Duke Wen of Liu I] 3¢ ZS Dong Hu #4 Duke Wen of Zhu 4 3¢ ZS

“Dongshan” § [1 Duke Wu of Wey 4@ 3 ZS

du fE Duke Xian of Jin & RK ZS

Du Yuft fa Duke Xian of Wey 48 ik Zs

duanlan chaobao [ff te BA Duke Xiang of QiF#F RA

dui 4f Duke Xiang of Shan = 38 7 Dui 4% Duke Xiang of Song RHA Duke Cheng of Jin & A ZS Duke Xiang of Wey {@ 38 2

Duke Dao of Jin | [7 Duke Xiang of Zheng &f 38 7+ Duke Ding of Jin & 7E 2 Duke Xiao of Qi F474 Duke Ding of Liu 4] 7 Duke Yin of Zhu 4h 3 4s Duke Ding of Wey {@f EZ , Duke Zhao of Song FAA ZS

Duke Huan of Qi #% #8 7 Duke Zhuang of Qi 7# HF 7 Duke Huan of Wey {fj #8 Zs Duke Zhuang of Wey 4 HF ZS Duke Huan of Zheng #f fH 7 duo gaoyu meici & & HR Se BF

Duke Hui of Jin G BZ Duo Jiao $2 tf

Duke Jian of Zheng &f fij ZS “Duofang” 4

Duke Jing of Jin G2 Duoshi wei $2 FX fx

Duke Jing of Qi 74 7 “Duoshi” 4 + Duke Jing of Shan i i 7S

Duke Jing of Song 7 Emperor Wu of Han 7 3h Duke Li of Zheng #8 JB 7 er wen _. Duke Ling of Chen [i #7

Duke Ling of Jin 3 #7 fa (norms)

Duke Ling of Qi 7% # "Fa ke” {X fi] Duke Mu of Qin 3 #8 2 fan (hedge) #§ Duke Mu of Shan = #74 fan (in all cases)

Duke of Bo 4% Fan 78

Duke of Feng 54 7 Fan Gai 78 Duke of Shao 7 4% Fan Hui yu & Duke of She # 7 Fan Li yt #&

Duke of Zhou [A] ZS , Fan Ning 70

Duke Ping of Jin @ +47 Fan Xuanzi vg Bf

Duke Ping of Qi 7+ 7 Fang 5

474 Chinese Character List

Fang Bao Fy @& “Genggui’” Be 3 Fang Zongcheng Fy 5 ak Gengyang 4% bf

fanli SL Fl) Gengzong ft 3 fanshe [x Sf gong (bow) F fei 4c gong (respectfulness) 4 “Fei Guoyu” FF Ed a4 Gong Liu 7 3]

“Feixiang’ JF 74 “Gong Meng” 73 a

Fen Mao #} 3 Gongfu Wenbo 73 20 3¢ {fH

feng /al Gonggong #£ T.

Feng Gongsun Youshan 7 f& 4 LL Feng Lihua (5 4 Bi Gongsun Youxing 73 KF

Feng Yuanjun (7 A Gongyang zhuan 7\ =F {8

“Fengbao” SK fR Gouzhi Bq x

fu (ax) gu (blind musician) fu (ax-pattern) fifi gu (drum) &%

fu (blessings) 4% gu (grain) #z fu (double-bow pattern) fix gu (precedent) # Fu Chen & fe Gu Jiegang fed #5 il)

Fu Qian fi x Gu Yanwu fed ZR

fudu nashu & 2h Ab gu zhi zhi Fy XZ. fil

fukua Fs | guaci £} # Fuxi {h 4 guan ES fuxin fi +[) Guan Shefu #4 #yf 2 fushi duanzhang fit a Est guai |

Guan Zhong *& {#

gan (dare) AY “Guanju” [if] BE “Ganmao” -F f% guanzhi #4 if “Gantang” Ff 3 gugong Hx Hk

Ganxi #7 ¥4 gui fi gao # Guliang zhuan 3& R (¥ Gao (place) #f “Guming” [eA a

Gao Shiqi (& =k 2} Gun ff% “Gao Yao zhi xing” 5 Mi Z Ft Guo $f Gaoxin /& 34 “Guo Qin lun” 34 4 #9

Gaoyang Guo Rong #58 ge HK “Guofeng” fq [al Gelu @ # Guoyu [Bq 3%

Gen gushi FF geng G3] “Gushi zhi ji ex op Z. kc

“Geng Zhu” #f FE Guwen ci leizuan 7h XC BY 4H

Chinese Character List 475

Guwen guanjian cy SC Ba BE Hua Hai # ¥% Guwen guanzhi Gy XC #H It Hua Ou 3 #%

Guwen shiyi 4 XC # “Huan” *H Guwen yuexuan Ty SC) 88 huang

guwen oy ‘Ml Huan Tan Kal i

han {i , Huang Ze i Han 7% Huangchi 7

Huang Guofu & [Bq 3¢

Han Fei #2 JE huangdi & Han Hu 22 Huangdi i Ty

Han Jue Hi |x “Huanghuang zhe hua” & 5 4 #2

Han Qi 8 cd “Huangniao” Han Xichou &# [i= 2 “Huangyi” BR

Han Xuanzi & Bf Huangzhong i $#

Han Yu && Aa Huanlong 3 #2 “Hanguang” 7 jig huihe 3 #1]

Hann && hun & Hanshu % = hunde & (#

“Hanyi’” #4 2 huo (confusion) 3

Hanyuan #8 JR huo (fire)

hao uF. huo (obtain) 72

he (gathering) & Huo'an ping Chungiu sanzhuan BY FS

he (harmony) I at & EK = 18

“He Bo” J (H “Huojing” 2 “He shi” Al huoshizhe # B He Xun # 48 huoxing i #

hei huozheng ‘X F heng {ff huwo [fc hengjie fi Fz “Huye” 3) # heping Al] +4

hequ jay dH lijima Tadao & BAK Hong (river) 741,

Hong Ye tt ji (caltrop) &

“Hongfan” vit iG ji (minute) #4 Houji sé Ji (royal surname) 4G houbo {& (FJ Ji (tomb site) 7X

Hu Shi 4438 Ji Kangzi 4 Bt + Hu Yan JIE Ji Pingzi B “4 fF

hua # Ji Tan #8 dx Hua Du # & ji Wuzi & RS

476 Chinese Character List

Ji Zha BFL jiu de JUS

jak | “Jiu ge” FU aK Jia Kui 8 32 jiu gong JLT

Jia Yi Bi jufis Jia Yingpu & fe & - “Jiugao” 73 2%

Jia'ao WE HX | “Jiuxing” Fu Fl) jian (gradual) wf Jixia #8 F jian (see) & —— Jizi (of Wu) 2 -F-

“Jian'ai” #% Jizi (Shang minister) #

Jiang & ‘Jizui” Bt “Jiang Han” 77 7 , juz

Jiang Yuan 22 Wi ju jianshu #R Bit juan 4

Jiao Xun & 7G jujiu Be ng jiaohua Ff, jun A Jiashi zhuan HK FR “Jun Shi” #

Jie } junzi Af Jie (Xia tyrant) 4 “Juxia” Hi S&

jiayan shanyu $2 S&S = af “Junzhi” mR Jie zhi Tui ff Z #€

“Jienanshan” 6 Fj LL Kaizuka Shigeki Fa i pie fat

jiezhao #4 5H | Kamata Tadashi ## FA IF

Jilian 2 3 name) i | jin > , “Kang gao” Big a4 jiezhao ging jian 34 &H in Fh Kan (trigram and hexagram

Jin F Kang Shu Bi 4 jing (respect, reverence) 4 Kang Youwei ft 4 &

jing (warp-thread) 4% “Kaogong ji” 3 Tad

Jing #4 ke bi hu 8] 4% 32

Jing Jiang X Zé _ ke chang hu 8J 3 +f

jingcai ty #2 | ke yi A] RR

Jingchuan wenbian Ff || SC Ha King Cheng of Chu #8 pi £

jingnian & & King Cheng of Zhou Ja] BX “Jingnit” #8 4 King Ding of Zhou Ja] 7E Jingshi baijia zachao HE BA ACHE King Fuchai of Wu 2 ERE jingwei A f# King Gong of Chu #8 # =

“Jingzhi” # Z. King Goujian of Yue gk -E a) FS

“Jinteng” + King Helu of Wu 22. = fi

“Jinxue jie” x 2 fiZ King Hui of Chu 4 3

“Jiri” FA , King Hui of Qin 4 Bi

Chinese Character List 477

King Jiing of Zhou Ja] # le/yue ji SS ta King Jing of Zhou Jal @ =F le/yue zheng #4 [FE

King Kang of Chu 48 Bt li (effort, strength) 77 King Li of Zhou [A] J li (principles of composition) ff King Ling of Chu 2 % =F li (profit, benefit) fill King Ling of Zhou Ja] # li (ritual propriety) #2

King Mu of Zhou Ja] #8 Li (person) 32

King Wei of Chu 48 fk E Li (trigram and hexagram name) fff

King Wei of Qi 7 fa =E Li Ji 52 ah

King Wen of Chu 48 XE Li Shuchang 38 [FE & King Wen of Zhou Ja] 0 =E Li Tao 4 #@

King Wu of Zhou /&] gE liye 3 tH King Xiang of Wei 3 38 = Liangfu §

King Xiang of Zhou J#] 38 Liangqiu Ju 2 Fr ie King Xiaocheng of Zhao #8 # AX Lieniizhuan ¥\| x (8

King You of Zhou Ja] #4 =F “Liezu” ¥4 44

King Zhao of Chu 4 #4 = Liji #8 aC King Zhaoxiang of Qin 4 Ad 38 E liltie [7] HS King Zhuang of Chu #8 #£ “Lilun” 43 74

Kong Qiu FL Ff. lin ie

Kongzi Lf Lin Yaosou Fk 23 &3

“Kongzi shijia” $l $ th 2 ling (musician) {8/4

Kuai iil Linghu 49 4 Kuaiji shanfang wenxu @& FS LL “Lingtai” #2 & ,

MS lingwen 45 fx

Kucheng Shu 7 pk AX lingyin 4+ # ,

name) ti | Liu #0 | Kunsheng 2 #i 7 Liu Dakui 4 XK Bie

| Kun (trigram and hexagram “Lisao” Bit Ba

Kunwu § = lin de #4

Lai (state) #8 , ji liuNR fu 7S At | | “Lai” 4 liu Liu Fenglu 31 5& ik

Lang garden Bf | a liu ni 7X ,

“Langba” fi Bx liu qi7\ 5A ,

lao 4 Liu Shipei 3!) ii 53 le er bu huang 44 ff] 7. Sit , liu shun 7* Il |

E> RAG Liu Xin BI ih le/yue Liu Xizai Bi BE RY , | le er bu yin, ai er bu shang # jf} 7% Liu Xiang 3] [Al

478 Chinese Character List

Liu Zhiji Bl 40% Miaojue gujin Rb #8 Eh S

Liu Zongyuan #5 IC Min Mafu fe 4c

liyan $5 “Min yuxiaozi” Bq /|\

“Lizheng” V7 EX ming (bright) 8A “Lichi” #58 ming (command, decree) Afi

long #é mingde Hy (#

lu (bribe) B& _“Minggui” HA 5

Lu & mingui BX Be Lu Chun f# mingwang zhi zhi 49 -E Z fill

Lu Deming [i (284 Mo Di & | Lu Hao f# ¥& Moufu gf 4¢

la 7 Mount Liang # ||| Lii Wang & & Mozi 3s Li Xiang & *4 Mu Jiang #3 &

Lia Zuqian = 48 # “Muyi zhuan” Bt (# & Luan Shu ## 3

Luan Ying # “Nanyan” #¢ 3

“Luming” #08 “Neichushuo” A {if it lun Neishi Xing A] fil lunshu 24 Fi nian &

“Luo gao” 7% a Ning Daozi 1 Lupu Gui [ya Ning Huizi 4 Bf “Lixing’ & Fl Ning Xi 8 & Ning Zhi 3 5a Ma Su & 5 Ning Zhuangzi § 7+

Man *## nishe 34 tig

manyi *f Be Niu 4 “Maochi’” > £8

maozei 7 HK Ousted Duke of Wey 4 tH 7 Marquis Wen of Jin @ X {&

mei 32 Pan Geng 4% Bt Meng Ke a #0] pi # Meng Wubo & {A Pi Zao #8 Kt Meng Xi i & pian fm Mei Xi Ak == pangyi 55 Yt

Meng Xianzi wi RK ping +7 | Meng Xizi th {# + pingdian #f #4

mengzhu 89 pinniu FU 4 Mengzi Fa Priest Tuo #0 ('E “Mian” ff Prince Chao =E - 3

Chinese Character List 479

Prince Dai =: + #7 rongrong id fk

Prince Qiji 2 fF HR rou 3 Prince Wei of Chu 4 73 + [Bl : ru (deign) | Prince Xian of Hejian 7A] [Hy fk =E ru (ritualist) (#

Prince Yingqi 7s f 38 7% Rui Liangfu A BK Prince Zha of Wu 42.73 -$ AL “Rulin liezhuan” (% # FI]

Prince Zhen 7. 3 Ruo'ao 4 Hx Pu 4

“Puqu zhi fa” (3 [i ZK san suo — Ff “Sanghu’” 3&

qi 5A sangjian zhi yue 38 [i] 2 & Qi (person) Sanglin 3% # Qi (state) 7% “Sangrou” 3& 3 gi tong + [Al Scribe An $ 33 gi wang hu HUF Scribe Bo ¥ {ff “Qi yu” £F az Scribe Mo # &

Qian #2 Scribe Yi #(&

“Qianzhi” Aff Scribe Zhao # €8

gibian ay % Shalu % He

Qii td shan 3 ging shangbi _- ft

Qing Feng fe $f Shangshu ja) = “Qingying” 7 HE shangtong/"Shangtong” fa} [Fl ginshou # Fk “Shangxian” [ej Bt “Qizhao” 4 #8 “Shao gao” 44 ati

qu (curve, melody) #4 “Shao min” 8 & | qu (take) HY shao yin > Qu Dao | Zi Shaohao “7 A% Qu Jian ft 2 Shaoling 43 be Quan Rong XA F#K Shen (region of Chu) FA

“Quanxue” #7 shen & | “Quechao” 85 & shen (spirit) 4H , gun # Shen (state) 32 Shen Hai FH &

rang 3 Shen Qinhan 7% $k #4 ren (human) | Shen Tao (ti ren (humaneness) {— Shen Wuyu FH ft = “Renjianshi” A faj tH “Shen Zuo” — AE

renwu =F 4 “Sheng” Fe

Rong # sheng ying xiangbao /fE #4 [RK

480 Chinese Character List

shengde BY {#4 , “Shiyue zhi jiao” + FA Z 26

“Shengmin” 4- Fe shou